Well rejoice cuz the answer is within this paragraph.
Pay your bill and the error will disappear.

ETHOS

noun - The characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as seen in its beliefs and aspirations.

I’ve been sort of pondering over what the Nepali ethos primarily represents. And its hard. Hard because

1. I don’t live in Nepal right now and to subjectively speculate the values of a community from which I am an estranged member of, leads to a lot of dead ends as I do not have any referential material to turn to for research. If I were in Nepal, I could get much more facts, through either latent observation or direct interrogation.

2. A LOT of Nepalis don’t live in Nepal anymore. These days we are spread across the globe, and while our country may be geographically a tiny region on the map, our diaspora has weaved this huge web from each corner of the world, emanating radially from our country. This, in effect, changes individual’s outlooks, their perspective, their very definitions of what constitutes the morally acceptable or the unacceptable.

3. Even considering the number of non-residential Nepalis toiling away under the foreign sun, it is not that significant when looking at the masses that live outside of Kathmandu valley, all living similar lifestyles which has a massive impact when considering something aggregate as the ethos of Nepal. To understand this, is to be part of that mass, and from my chair here in bright-lit California, I am totally outside of this circle, and unaware of the gravity of that situation. So I hope you will pardon my dilettantish efforts to speak about them.

But I’ve set out to quench my thirst: What defines us? It’s a cliche-at-first type of question which when you contemplate inside your head as you goto bed, opens up a pandora’s box which prevents you from falling asleep. A lot of personal questions arise: questions relating to patriotism, to family values, lifelong morals, goals and ambitions, and ultimately, ‘why am i here’, at which point you are wide eyed and staring straight up at the ceiling, oblivious that its showing 3:00 AM on your bedside clock. But I digress.

What defines us? Nepali bhaneko ke ho? Is it -

a) Being able to speak Nepali?

b) the face that we come from that geographical patch of mountainous land between India and China?

c) the food that we eat?

c) that we are tied together in spirit by …..

What?

There is obviously something that binds us together that when we are walking down foreign streets lost in our own limbo of oblivions and overhear someone speaking in our maitri-bhasha that our curiosity is perked a little bit. Even in the busy streets of Jackson Heights, New York City where there are literally thousands of people of all different nationalities speaking in their own language, or English, but out of this constant buzz of sounds you will pick up that of a Nepali guy talking on his cell phone. You become conscious of his presence even if you don’t acknowledge it.

You can live for 20 years in the United States and be, as our bhaiya neighbors have coined, a coconut – brown on the outside, white on the inside – but when you look at the news and a hint of Nepal flashes by, you will focus full attention on that article.

Something to think about tonight when you sleep. Who are you? How are you related to being a Nepali? And if you find your answers, don’t forget to share here.

Cheers.

Now I don’t know much about gift cards, but what I had in mind was that I would redeem my dollars online at the app store and start giving all my friends with iPads and iPhones a gift each from the App Store. A noble idea indeed since some of the higher priced iPad apps can cost you as much as $20.

But unfortunately, I was not able to do that as I found out the hard way that Apple Store Gift Cards cannot be redeemed at the App Store, nor can it be redeemed at the iTunes Store. Which was a pain in the ass because I thought I could use it to purchase anything online. This kinda broke my plans down a bit.

So what I tried to do was use my gift card to buy another gift card (Xzibit would be proud). But that didnt happen either because using ur Apple Store Credit, you cannot buy electronic gift cards What that means is, you buy the card and it comes in the mail 5 days later, and by then, the proverbial turkey would have become cold.

So the solution? Drive back to the Apple store and buy a gift card in the store itself.

Good looking out Apple.

I haven’t had the computer for 3 hours and already managed to crash it.

Hoping that it was just a freak incident, I power it off and notice, at the same time, that the mini is considerably hot. Being used to laptops, I assumed that this too was nothing to get alarmed at. So I pushed the on button on the mini and after 10 seconds get the same message on the screen.

The good part about this error message is that OS X will re-open any app that you had open. Safari recovers with the tabs that were already in place, iTunes with the playlist it was playing from, etcetera.

Nothing happens for another couple of hours when boom, it goes off again. This time I’m getting worried. When the crash happened, I did have a bunch of things going on like transferring files from my hard-drive, updating OS X, downloading packages, tormenting like a maniac, importing songs into iTunes while playing it, importing my huge photo library into iPhoto, and so forth.

I’ve never really had a problem with multitasking before. If things start getting heavy for the processor, apps get unresponsive, and usually killing them off works, but this problem was just bugging the hell out of me, especially since it was literally brand new!

So I decide that the OS must have shut down because something was overheating the processor. Googling for a good monitor, I chanced upon this wonderful widget called iStat Nano (There’s a Pro version as well, but I liked the minimalistic approach of Nano) which gave me the stats that I needed.

Keeping an eye on that, I got back to settling in on my new computer, doing the importing thing again. And then it happened. The CPU temp was on the rise. I check fan speed and its well over 4k rpm. 100% use of both threads of both CPUs on my i5. So to avoid an imminent shutdown/meltdown, I started quitting apps one by one. Turns out the culprit was iPhoto.

If you import a big collection of pictures in the most recent version of iPhoto (9.2.1 628) it starts going haywire after a while and munches up your CPU. That’s not really supposed to happen, as I thought programmers would put in like a software circuit breaker or something that, if things start going wrong, the program crashes gracefully.

In my case it fell entirely short of grace.

iTunes can handle importing a lot of files at once  so when temperature on CPU started to hike up, I’d shutdown iPhoto and it’d idle back to normal whilst all the other programs are doing their processor intensive jobs without a hitch.

I have the iPhoto preferences set to ‘save a copy on import’ so maybe that accounts to something, or even everything.

Venting in the crash report box made me realize what a fool I was so am doing that on my blog instead.

Ciao!

So we have a circle of 8 people, and back then popularity of free unlimited text plans were slowly rising so that kinda let to making things easier. Initially, we were tweeting using SMS. Also, back then since there weren’t as much users as there are now (200 million registered), sending a tweet was synonymous to sending a text and you got a text message the MINUTE one of your friends updated his/her tweet. It worked kind of like an insta-email list, except no emails.

As you can guess, things got out of hand pretty soon. Since I was the one who “dragged their asses” into using a technology that they were not in the slightest bit interested, at first, blame fell down on me for “disturbing their peace” because of past-midnight tweets from their circle. Little were they aware of that in the settings page you could disable notifications during a certain time period, presumably when you are fast asleep!

By introducing my friends to this new “wave of subconciousness” I did not change their lives forever. If anything, they might have even been a tad bit irritated by my constant nagging to use the damn service. There I was, sitting down, twiddling my thumbs because my ignorant friends weren’t in the mood to entertain me with tidbits of their asinine day pranks! But by 2008, when people started graduating and drifting apart, the tweeting picked up steam. I was ecstatic! And right around that time too I bought my first smartphone, the T-Mobile G1. Also I remember that was the time when Twitter broke mainstream by permeating the news channel and what followed after is now history.

So what happens when a group of friends, too lazy to email each other, forget about calling, want to stay in touch?

1. You text message. Texting is the epitome of our generation. We are the texters!
2. Use this fancy new thing/technology called twitter. Spend some time LEARNING how to use the damn thing.

We went with #2 because again, texting each one individually kinda sounds like the lazy man’s bane. And all of a sudden, my dream just blossomed! No more did I have to nag people to tweet *something*! They all complied of their own accord. It did take one and a half years to get the wheels in motion, but it did happen. Suddenly this “stream of conciousness” created as a result of my circle doing their job of tweeting mundane and seemingly useless tidbits of information, came into existence. I could step back and take a look at the bigger picture (meaning all my friends list instead of just tweets of one) and start noticing trends.

Lesson to be learnt – You HAVE to allow people enough time to learn new technology.

My flaw is I’m impatient. Back in 2007, I really wanted everyone to jump on the bandwagon, but my friends circle was a very diverse group ranging from graphic artists to bookworms to marketing folks to wine connoisseurs. The mistake I made was that they would be AS open to embracing new technology as I was. Obviously time proved me wrong. But a valuable lesson lies here and that is you have to wait for people to be genuinely interested in doing something. Or paraphrasing blunty: I can’t force my friends to do stuff. That would be some form of slavery I guess!

Similarly, coming back to the real world, I now have a much wider perspective of my life, and have collected experiences (good and bad) which I can look back when decision making time comes. Also similarly, my appetite to push people to do things that I deeply believe in is STILL going strong. Just recently I’ve been possessed to work on this blog, gather people round, to once again create this “stream of consciousness” which is very similar to the one that I mentioned in my previous anecdote.

This “stream” takes its sweet time to start flowing. But once it becomes a river, you can transport a lot of goods downstream on your ships of thought. In another post I will talk about the benefits of having such a collective consciousness, but for now want to mention that each country strives by being self-aware. We are not, mainly because we are so spread out. That does not mean we are deprived of that privilege. Being self-aware means we make informed decisions on matters of national importance, protect our own from harm, invest for our kids and their future, and choose to live judiciously.

Goodnight.

The closest to good I’ve been on is probably sajha.com but then its deteriorating really fast these days. So what does this mean for us, Nepali citizens?

Let me show you my hypothesis, which we can then attack or defend in according debate.

Wikipedia states that our population is roughly around 29.3 million, and out of that our diaspora consists of:

So in essence 20% of our populace live abroad. 20% who have access to uninterrupted electricity, hot water, and most importantly, the internet. I would like to further my assumptions to include that out of this 20% the majority of people fall under 40 years of age. In fact, if you were to ask me to guess the median age, I’d say 27.

So it’s mostly young, strong people trying to make a stand outside the country. Why? Thats an issue of enormous debate potential which we will definitely hold later on, but for now, lets continue this one.

That being, no good Nepali sites yet. If were such a hypothetical site to exist, we would have potential to reach at the very least 3 million unique visitors. Here’s a list of top sites in Nepal. ekantipur.com barely makes it to the last of the top ten!

What about Sajha.com? I don’t know how accurate their user counters are but on any given day they usually have between 100 – 300 users online. Their total userbase is around 50,000 and that is INCLUDING people who make more than two nicknames. I will put up their unique visitors info when I get it.

So where are the remaining 4.5 million going? And we haven’t even counted the 700,000 internet users in Nepal. What’s happening?

I blame it on lack of a good decent website to promote a bonding community. Sajha is around ONLY because there is no other site that offers what it offers. A UNIQUE place made SPECIALLY for Nepali’s to “hang out”. The attempts that I see at making a website are either cheap rip offs, or half assed work which is launched utterly unprofessionally. Why are we so hesitant to invest in this new technology wave on which the rest of the world has gone far up ahead?

It could be that we aren’t literate enough and just have to wait it out, but this potential for uniting 6 million people across the webs of the internet spells millions of possibilities of idea exchange and might even prove to be a last bastion of hope in helping our ailing country!

I propose that we start collaborating on building a website which will be regarded as The Central Pillar when it comes to issues regarding any of the Nepali citizens; diaspora or otherwise. That is my hypothesis, that by bundling the straying 6 million, we can regenerate and rebuild our country however way we want to.

The first step is always discussion, then comes planning, then implementation, and finally maintenance.

I just hope we dont have to resort to porn to get those 5 million together!

P.S – Please dont leave me a comment saying such and such Nepali website is “good”. I’m sure they are. Unless you send me a link to a website which has at least  500,000 daily visitors, it still wont matter because my main point is that we are missing a lot of clout.