KAPCO at the Karachi Stock Exchange

Here goes...

Shaukat Aziz says economy climbing at a rate of more than 8%... The KSE 100 index today went up 255 points in a single day to close at 8000 points and whats more? The KSE in the last week made the highest ever points gain in the history of Pakistan. Investment is comming in like anything!

After PPL (Pakistan Petroleun), Bank AlFalah, OGDC (Oil and Gas Development Company) here goes KAPCO! The shares of Kot Adu Power Company (KAPCO) are being made public for a rate of Rs.30/share... The current open market rate is Rs.65.60/share and increasing... Thats over 100% profit for the same day investment!

Man the economy is going up like a rocket in the sky! For the next few months we have to be on the watch out for a steady increase in the Telecom, Oil, Gas, Banking and cement sector!

I think the KSE index will hit 10,000 points record...Best of luck Pakistan!

Updated 5th, March, 2005
Check the results of the KAPCO ballot at http://blog.yasirmemon.com/kapco1/kapco-ballotResults.zip

American Idol

What's the American Idol? Heard a lot about it.... never had the chance to actually sit down and watch it... But now Mr.Google has something to say...

If not for somethone else, I might start watching the American Idol because Google says its among the top 10 upcomming keywords for the week ending 21st Feb... Not a bad deal, huh?

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/weeks-feb05.html

btw desis somehow seem to be only talking abt the Indian Idol... lets see how the zeitgeist catches up on that just as it made "Ashwarya Rai" as the number 1 search query in January...

VoIP, Skype, Firebox VoIP Cyberphone

So do you happen to live in a developing country like Pakistan? Do you know how much your relatives living in the US, UK and elsewhere have to pay just to dial country codes like +92 on their phone set?

The developer's of Kazaa, Sharman Networks are behind the "Gratis VoIP technology". This is the same technology that runs behind "Skype" (as in hype) and has made millions of users since it was launched last year.

I have been using Skype for nearly an year now and have been pretty amazed at the smooth streams of voice even on low bandwidth (now this goes to the lame ISPs of Pakistan, imagine that!). I have hardly got any "blurps" in the hours conversations I have done with my friends and relatives living abroad.

So thats plain ol too limited to PC-PC, right? Isnt that just too lame?

How about having a phone that "RINGS" and the same phone using which you can dial numbers in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, France and nearly 10 more countries at the rate of 1.7 cents per minute! Now thats only 2.8 rupees a minute, sitting right here in Pakistan (or any other country ofcourse)...

Nothing in life is free - or is it? With Skype's gratis voice-over-IP (VoIP)
software taking the world by storm, Firebox.com, a UK-based gadgets site, has
teamed up with the company and a small handset manufacturer to release the
Firebox VoIP Cyberphone.

At the same time, Worldcall Broadband has accelerated its campaign towards making their users get a free phone service advertised by the name "FreePhone". FreePhone has international calls to any country in the world at the rate of Rs.15/minute and also runs using VoIP. Well, since they are even charging for even calls on FreePhone to FreePhone (on VoIP) I call this plain crap! The normal calling rates are not less than those offered by GoCDMA and PTCL... However they do give call time worth Rs.200 free every month...

I'm gonna rush now and get that Firebox VoIP Cyberphone!

In the meanwhile check this... and this...

Whats with you? The journey of an ITiot!

Once dreaming to be a part of one of the best International Universities like Standford, MIT or UC Berkeley; I couldnt resist all that new techie jargon passing my ears everyday. Later on realizing the bitter reality of not being anything close to the creatures found at those graduate schools I had to lower my expectations to a national level.

Now what a nation we were, absolutely tremendous.... I had a huge choice of Universities to choose from, after all I did want to be educated, didnt I?
So having this bug for computers and the knowing that its the IN thing these days I decided to take it up as my career. Now what about the University? Well lets see... I had this bucket full of universities to choose from

• Mehran University of Engineering and Technology (Naw, too near, mom is there... reject)
• Isra University, Hyderabad (Its got too many girls, and lame internet speeed... reject)
• Sindh University (The campus is too big, I might get lost in the political setup.... reject)
• Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology (Dont wana to wear uniforms! reject)
• NED University (They are too biased, should have more girls... reject)
• Karachi University (Campus too big, their girls have an attitude problem... reject)
• FAST-NU (Good campus, no one knows me, me knows no one, 50-50 larka larki [I mean their ratio]... Oops.. got a 59% in Inter... Goto hell! Reject)
  
• SZABIST (Accept... Shutup please!)

Somehow I managed to ditch the 1300 ITiots and got the honour of being thrown into SZABIST (Its a lame IT school in Pakistan who claim they are number 2 in asia - thanks to the liar: Mr.Bean) for a Bachelors in Computer Science (Baamushakat) . Well the years passed, and I felt bad for not being with Larry Page at Standford... I'm sure he missed me a lot, but I guess he just didnt have enough of luck in this life... Better luck next time larry!

Now it was Year 2001, musharaf was nice (I dont have any thing personal against him, only that he should change is glasses now, they are too old)... Well the time had to tick, and so it did... TICK... Everything else was nice too, .coms were having a lot of babies and I had a lot of fun with Commission Junction... Earned a plenty of bucks on Hyderabadiz.com with those "keen" ads from cj.com... Only that I just framed my cheques in my room as I didnt have a dollar account in those days!

Waaaam... Now what the hell was that? The IT Bug was hijacked by Osama Bin Laden...
The moron didnt know jack shit about flying bugs! He thought its like the same flys found in Afghanistan... I think he was in love with "The Bush" and wanted to land at his home... pagal kahin ka! (urdu)... He got Saddam busted and musharaf rich... I bet he himself is sitting in the caves playing lego with Mullah Omar... Chariyo safa ko! (sindhi) Wonder whats he planning now...

Khair, the classes started... Ragging wasnt much fun, the seniors were too lazy and scared... most of the ITiots I got in my class were pretty phools and some were fools and some were both and the remaining was Me...

Didnt learn too much in the first 3 semesters, but somehow enjoyed my 4th semester in which I made this P2P Application Real P2P... Basically it was a very lame application, but I enjoyed the process if making it... Internet Programming class was fun too! As I had struck a deal with the teacher (He was a good blabber I later realized) not to humilate him in his class in exchange for permission to watch Tom and Jerry till 9 am and come late to class...

Later on Assembly classes were fun, just that Abbas (our Assembly Teacher) drank too much in the class (water, what else?).... Sometime I felt like punching his water filled mouth... But since he was a bad guy I decided to let him go and save my self too... Still the moron gave me a B+... i was getting an A+... Safa ko chariyo ho bhersaan...

Then came the 5th semester, and so came the Aley! yes he was my hero and I his! Aley Imran Rizvi was my CS Project (Final Year Project) supervisor... I heard he worked on The Shaeheen and Ghauri Ballistic Missiled for Suparco... I wonder how he accepted the final year project idea for a water fountain which danced on music (aqualyzer).... Had a lot of fun making that project... Besides learning to dig rabbit holes and ignite light bulbs I for the first time had a chance to kill or be killed by electric shocks.... Argh!!! Those shocks made me crazy! it was fun too... Khair Aley was a nice person, miss him a lot... probably the best teacher I ever had...

Mr. Bean never wanted SZABIST to progress... I believe he was behind making Aley leave SZABIST... What a waste! I wonder what made Mr.Bean deny the SZABIST teams to go for the Softcom competition at GIK and the Procom 2005 at FAST... How do I reply my juniors who come up to me and say "What do we do now? We worked so hard for our projects, but we cant take them out of this jail"....
What a waste!

So the time passed, and I completed my 3 years at SZABIST... In this time I think I gave whatever I could to my fellow ITiots! I also learned a lot of things about this game of LIFE from my friends and so called not friends.... I learned about friendship, love, respect and when to know that you are being used... AlThough, I didnt get a lot in return from many... I knew when I was being praised for being used... But I prefered to act to be eligible for watching the show...

As the show proceeds, I got my degree on the 4th of February, 2005...
And here i stand... Yasir Suleman Memon, Bachelors of Computer Science... The experience was worth it! If it wasnt for this experience, I might not have learned the art of shutting the hell up and observing.... Seee but say not... Act but let know not....

For an objection is for those who like to think and find faults in them selves...

There is no such thing as pefection...

3GSM World Congress 2005

The four day 3GSM World Congress is scheduled to begin at Cannes, France from 14th February, 2005

The most exciting part of the whole setup is the number of people comming to france for business networking... The event like the previous year aims at bringing awareness for 3G and providing a platform for the international telecom companies to meet and also build social networks besides the ones they have been setting up at their homes...

With 2005 being looked at as the Telecom Year this was one event I didnt want to miss... You can follow the happenings at

http://www.3gsmworldcongress.com/2005/default.asp