To write about any simple thing or subject matter, we surely need an idea. If you don’t have an idea about what you want to write, how can you possibly write a full-fledged essay? The result is you will find yourself with two or three lines, but does that make an essay?

Idea - The Nightmare Of Writing!

But the biggest problem which GP essay candidates or any essay writing students face, is actually “how to acquire ideas“. The latter seems to be a daunting task since writing is not like other subjects where success depends upon assimilation of a certain number of facts, theories and the application of principles.

GP Essay Writing Or Essays Go A Step Ahead..

Essay writing transcends the requirement of other subjects by going a step further; it tests the total equipment of the student - his intelligence, his manners, his taste, his common sense, his personal experiences, his observation and his character. Infact, that’s the beauty of GP Essays. It makes you discover yourself and your abilities.

My GP (General Paper) classes have contributed a lot in discovering myself and some hidden skills. Of course, I was just like you, hating to write an essay. But a GP class, is completely different from our common english language class. Unless and until you grasp the true meaning of the purpose of a GP class, you will not really go in the right attitude and direction which contribute a lot to the future of how you will write.

Acquiring Ideas - 3 Steps Only!

1) STEP 1 - Reading

Reading is the most essential means of gaining knowledge. You could argue that listening might be above reading to increase your awareness, you might be right to a lesser extent, why? Just think for a moment, does listening contribute to help you write good english and gain vocabulary? The answer is “no“. When you read you see how words are written and that’s crucial from a proper grammatical point of view.
Reading will help you in two fold:
a) Increase your knowledge (to gain ideas)
b) Increase your vocabulary (to convey your ideas with the right words)

Nowadays, reading opportunities has never been so easy and comfortable. The computer/internet world allows you to read from anywhere and about anything you want. It’s like you are having the whole world’s library in your hand and in “one click”. So, make the most out of it my friend!

Now, you need to be selective in what you read. Spending hours and hours reading a lengthy gossip, for instance, is not desirable. Read quality stuff as opposed to quantity. Some points to note:
i) Always have a good dictionary handy and each time to you stumble across a new word, look for its meaning and write it down. (I recommend the concise Oxford Dictionary)
ii) Read about stuffs that pleases you, but provided you select quality material.
iii) Read a good newspaper from your locality and keep updated. (For example in Mauritius, I recommend ‘News On Sunday’ to all students)
iv) Read to increase your awareness and vocabulary, don’t rush to read a lot of pages like it’s a race.
v) Read with your soul. Put in effort, interest and will. Else you are wasting your time

2) STEP 2 - Observation

What I mean by observation and what you should understand is: observation means ‘to look carefully and diligently for the sole aim of discovering and noting anything that can help you in writing and gaining ideas‘. An active and intelligent mind is always on the lookout since there is something to be learned in everything, however simple it is! You should develop a creative mind. An artist always has this philosophy: “Beauty is found even in ugliness“. Same applies to your observation, you just need to view things at the right angle and with the right frame of mind.

3) STEP 3 - Ask Questions

The most stupid thing to do is to remain an ignorant. In classes, there are so many students who don’t ask questions, either they are shy or they are not interested at all. This is a big mistake. You are compromising the growth of your own knowledge.

Ask questions and challenge answers whenever you feel there is any bias or you have a better answer - that’s how you will progress!

Throughout history, people who have been most famous for their wisdom, have been those who asked questions and sought for answers in all its angle.

Writing The GP Essay

Here’s a list of my previously written article on Writing and GP Essays:
=> Writing the GP Essay - Write to convince!
=> Method For Presentation Of Topics
=> Words You Need To have In A Story Or Essay

For Bloggers

If you are a blogger, you should read this article: Wonderful Blogging Ideas - How To Breed Them In Your Garden?

I just noticed the following message on Entrecard’s main page:

There was a fire at our datacenter resulting in the failure of some of our systems, our database server appears to be offline still, we’re working on it and we’re really sorry about the issues at this time. more information arriving shortly.

Update: The outage is pretty serious, you can read more about the datacenter fire at ThePlanet forums. They’ve got teams of people there and they’re working through the night. We have no ETA at this time, very sorry.

I rushed on ThePlanet forums and the matter sounds a bit serious, here’s some quote of the recent news:

Today at approximately 5:45 p.m., a transformer in our H1 data center in Houston caught fire, thus requiring us to take down all generators as instructed by the fire department. All servers are down.

We are working with the fire department, with our facilities staff on site, to assess the situation.

To keep you updated, we will send messages every 15 minutes in Orbit and here in our forum.

From Doug Erwin:
This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.

We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.

There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.

I am sorry that this accident has occurred and I apologize for the impact.

More teams from The Planet are coming along with more contractors from key vendors for electrical and facilities to help get H1 online. At this time, DNS infrastructure continues to propagate. ServerCommand servers are installed, but the teams are making sure all networking is intact and ready. In the meantime, please call our support lines for any issues. Additional support techs are available.

At this time, we do not have an updated Estimated Time to repair. Please continue following this thread for updates.

—–
Urvish Vashi
Director, Product Management
The Planet

For more news, visit the ThePlanet forums

Let’s hope everything gets back to normal soon and Entrecard comes back.

UPDATED: Entrecard is now back :)

Last night (24th May 2008), Dima Bilan, representing Russia, won the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest.

The ranking of the 25 countries:

1) Russia with 272 points
2) Ukraine with 230 points
3) Greece with 218 points
4) Armenia with 199 points
5) Norway with 182 points
6) Serbia with 218 points
7) Turkey with 218 points
Azerbaijan with 132 points
9) Israel with 124 points
10) Bosnia Herzegovina with 110 points
11) Georgia with 83 points
12) Latvia with 83 points
13) Portugal with 69 points
14) Iceland with 64 points
15) Denmark with 60 points
16) Spain with 55 points
17) Albania with 55 points
18) Sweden with 83 points
19) France with 47 points
20) Romania with 45 points
21) Croatia with 44 points
22) Finland with 35 points
23) Germany with 14 points
24) Poland with 14 points
25) United Kingdom with 14 points

Was There An Apparent Biasness Towards United Kingdom?

United Kingdom finished last with only a miserable 14 points. UK was represented by Andy Abraham with his song Even If - which was surely worth more than 14 points.
It is said that some degree of “bias voting” were made, with many former Soviet states awarding Russia the maximum 12 points during the voting process.

“I think it’s tremendously disappointing from the point of view of the United Kingdom,” said Sir Terry Wogan (commentator on the competition for the BBC since the 1970s)
“Andy Abraham gave, I think, the performance of his life with a song that certainly deserved far more points than it got… When you look at the points that Spain got, that Bosnia-Herzegovina got – some really ridiculous songs“, he added.

Anyway, here’s a clip of the song which won Russia the award:

Eurovision Song Contest 2008 - Russia Wins!

YouTube Direktvideo link

The feature that most of us have been so willing to have, is finally here. The possibility to add more than one blog to a single account has just been announced by Entrecard.

This feature should have already been here since day 1. Having to make another account per blog, was really a stupid thing if they at least took time to get things right from the beginning.

Anyway, this feature is here at last, so enjoy!

Entrecard Official E-Book

EC has also just released their so called official E-book and it’s free to download it - Click Here!

Read More on Entrecard Blog..

Recommended Reading:

=> EntreCard As A Niche Discovery Tool ?

It’s been so long that I see and hear Twitter, Twitter and Twitter. It seems like everyone has been twittered since its arrival. So i decided to give Twitter a go - Follow Me!.

What Twitter is

- A micro blogging system, you can only write a maximum of 140 charactors with no formatting. It’s just plain text messages, like an SMS.
- A place to let others know “what you are doing“. You can update others on anything you want, or about things you are doing in real time.
- Modes of interaction with Twitter can be done in several ways:
1) Your mobile phones
2) Gtalk
3) 3rd Party Twitter clients
4) Facebook Apps
5) Other apps created by so called “Twitter Fans”..etc

The Creator Of Twitter Are Smart Guys

At first, I thought Twitter was just another piece of crap. But as I tried to understand it, I saw some incredible ingenuity behind it. It has been devised with much thoughts and it will produce a great impact in the marketing world and the alikes. It is a platform nourishing and growing potential clients for financial gains, just as facebook (who is already a big honeycomb for advertisers). And there are so many other things which will amaze us very soon as the community grows, trust me on that! Hats-off to the creators.. There’s so many good lessons to learn from Twitter.

Twitter Better Than Facebook

I will say that the “technology” and the “philosophy” behind Twitter excels that of facebook in many ways. We will not explore all these facets in this article, but may be in a future posts soon..
Twitter does only one thing, it just asks you a simple question “What are you doing?“. And this question is enough to create an addiction and an urge of communication from people.
One thing which strikes me is that, Twitter has documented cleanly and openly its API. This is a tremendous thing. Meaning along with it, anyone truely interested with working closely with Twitter, will benefit along the surge, as it goes..

How Does Twitter Work

You just need to be followed and to follow. The “Follow Me” means that anyone “following” you, will see your updates and messages. And in turn you can see their updates by following them. It’s basically a one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many relationship which can develop. Another thing is that, unlike an email, you will not be bogged down with spams, junks or any such things. You just select who to follow and when not too..etc. If you want to follow, it’s cool, if you don’t want to follow no one will urge you.. Just Chill!

How Is Wakish Doing On Twitter

For the time being, I don’t have anything planned as to how Twitter can benefit or help me. But so far, I see most people posting updates of their blogs, some doing sales, advertising while others just updating their “followers” about their real life actions.

But one thing is for sure, don’t sell on Twitter! It’s not meant for this as far as I have observed the interface and the aim behind. If you are going to sell, good bye to your audience!

Follow me on Twitter, and I will be very happy to follow you as well. Let’s see how things will turn out

Some Of The Best Videos I Found Concerning Twitter:

Twitter on CBS News

YouTube Direktvideo link

Thirty Day Challenge - The Tao Of Twitter

YouTube Direktvideo link

What Are Your Experiences And Opinion?

Are you already using Twitter? What is your point of view and experiences?
Will be fun to hear yours..

This bike is known as the Uno Bike and has been invented and created by the 18 year old canadian, Ben Gulak. It is said that this electical bike has been conceived from lessons learned from Segway device, but implemented in cooler package.

Brief Infos About The Bike:
=> Has two wheels, side-by-side, and uses gyroscopic technology to stay upright
=> The wheels are independently operated making turning much more precise
=> Moves in the direction the rider leans (the more you lean, the faster you go)
=> To move backward, just lean back on the seat to tilt it backwards
=> Hits a top speed of 25 mph in its current configuration
=> Has a weight of 58kg
=> Has a range of 2.5 hours once it is charged from the mains
=> No controls except for an On-Off switch (so simple as that!)

 ”[..] it is designed for the commute to work through busy towns” says Gulak. “ I believe this could be electrical alternative to the car. I’m just looking for an investor to help me get it into production [..]”

Ben Gulak also claims that his innovative bike would help beat pollution and the design was inspired from a visit to China in 2006 - “The smog was so thick, we never saw the sun,” he said.

My Point Of View

Well, this is amazingly wonderful and this guy is a very talented engineer. He will surely prove his worth and his new bike in the incoming years. The idea and philosophy behind is great. It takes guts, trust and faith in our creative and talented, out-of-the-box, mind to come forward to show our thoughts. And those who can make it, will succeed undeniably!

Uno Bike Resembles Jeremy’s Bike In Code Lyoko?

Some of you might say that this bike should definetly have a connection with Jeremy Belpois’ virtual bike, from the famous Code Lyoko.
I end here with a trailer of Code Lyoko with Jeremy’s Uno Bike (you will see it precisely at 2mins,09secs in the video)

YouTube Direktvideo link

Google announces, today Tuesday 6th May 2008, that AdSense for search is now powered by Custom Search. This means a lot new enhancements and boost for those using and earning a from AdSense for search.

The integration of Custom Search into AdSense for search, will allow you to take advantage of (Custom Search Engine) CSE’s most popular features as listed below:

=> Site Search
=> Improved indexing of your pages
=> Vertical search
=> Tuning search results and ads with keywords
=> Selecting ad location
=> Quick and easy updates

Here’s a video to help you understand things:

YouTube Direktvideo link

For a complete detail and explanation, head on to the AdSense blog.

Good luck with your Adsense earnings!

Today, Tuesday 6th May 2008, Opera released the first alpha (alpha 1) of their new web developer tool, named as Opera Dragonfly. This tool is a competing one to Firefox’s Firebug.

Features:

=> Support for Dragonfly in Opera 9.5 beta 2
=> Reach breaking point step by step
=> Redefine your style.
=> Spot your errors
=> Debug the DOM
=> Development for JavaScript debugger and CSS/DOM inspector (Screenshots and more info here!) http://dev.opera.com/tools/
=> Debug your phone or TV
=> Think open and free
=> Always up to date

Future Enhancements for Alpha 2:

=> Improved handling of threads in the JavaScript debugger
=> Inline CSS editing
=> Infrastructure for localization
=> Improved remote debugging

For a complete detail and explanation, head on Opera’s main site for precise news from the developers: Opera Dragonfly on the prowl!

Opera browser 12-year history

Here’s a small vid to give you a picture of Opera’s history and journey till now..

YouTube Direktvideo link

I will soon try both of these softwares and give you my pe rsonal opinion and possibly with my own video or screenshots.. Till then, happy reading and testing!

Today I share with you three prayers from three different great, wise personalities. These prayers seem to be simple, but if you take some time to meditate on them, you will see that there are so many wise hidden meanings in them.

- Sioux Indian Prayer -

“Great Spirit, help me never to judge another until I have walked in his moccasins for two weeks”

- Rabia al-Adawiyyaa -

“O God! If I worship Thee for fear of Hell, send me to Hell; and if I worship Thee in hopes of Paradise, withhold Paradise from me; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, then withhold not from me the Eternal Beauty”

- Sir Alex Paterson -

“O God, help us to be masters of ourselves that we may be servants of others”

Voice Your Perspectives?
Please feel free to contribute your part..

Also while we are at it, Jirel from Positve N Success, recently had a discussion on Believe in God or not and why? You might want to check it out since Prayers and God are always related

What’s Next?

=> Knowledge - An Important Word In All Important Inspirational Words Of Important People
=> Secret to your success! Do you have a vision of who you are & who you want to be ?

I recently read a thoughful and insightful article on Problogger where Darren Rowse explains: “A Secret to Blogging Success - Build Upon What You Build“.

I was very touched by this article. It is something which is so simple and effective and which we fail to take time to think about. Not because we are not sensible, but due to the fact that we are so taken by the pace of our life and objectives. It often takes the advice of someone else to revive your motivations, aspirations and to rise stronger.

What I read on Problogger, kept hitting my mind this weekend. It is something which I need to focus more on because I tend to do so many things at the same time; I blog, I code, I design, I read, I work..etc, etc. But at times I think I just fail to build upon what I have already built. So I want to say a BIG thanks to Darren for this “push“.

While Darren applies this technique for blogging, I believe this is very fruitful if you also apply it to any of your daily challenging nitty gritty.

And I’m sure you too might benefit from what Darren said and that’s why I wanted to draw this article to your attention - you’ll thank me later!

Have a nice week!

Suggested Reading:

=> Bloggers Should Polish Their Old Posts - Old Is Gold!
=> Content Is King, But The Queen Remains Uniqueness! - (Blogging)
=> Enhance Your Blog Posts With Line Jump And Page Jump
=> EntreCard As A Niche Discovery Tool ?
=> Wonderful Blogging Ideas - How To Maximize And Boost Your Ideas? => PART 4 (Final)