featuring technology tips and music recommendations with a personal touch

How does one do Bon Jovi a justifiable review in one post? That’s what I started asking myself when I got to writing this post, where I’m bringing you the first single from Bon Jovi’s 10 studio album, Lost Highway.

The good thing about Bon Jovi though is that you don’t need to introduce him to anyone, since they’re most likely been to one of his 2500 concerts in over 50 countries world-wide, bought one of his 10 studio albums which sold 125 million copies all around the world, or simply heard one of his hit singles being played on radio. So let’s skip the introductions and get right down to it.

Lost Highway is album with a haunting set of 12 new and original sounding songs, is a stunning, multi-layered look into the nature of love and life in all its glory. It focuses on the light that love brings. The first single on this album, Lost Highway, is spectacular song to say the least, both in terms of meaning and melody.

In my rearview mirror
My life is getting clearer

I finally found my way
Said goodbye to yesterday

I’m turning 25 in a month, and I couldn’t possibly find better words to describe my life so far than these simple meaningful words. I’ve done a lot of growing up since my college graduation and I still have a lot more to do, but the amount of change that I’ve gone through seems gigantic in retrospect.

Don’t know where I’m going
But I know where I’ve been
I’m afraid of going back again
So I drive (drive drive)

I do know where I’m going, or at least what I want from life. But I don’t know what life has in store for me. Nobody does. So we just go about "driving" this "lost highway" and hope we get to that nice little town we’ve always dreamed of living in.

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It’s been quite some time since my last music post, so I thought I’d liven up things over the next couple of weeks with exclusive recommended top hits from the top albums in 2007.

First up on my list, the one and mighty Bruce Springsteen with a hit song from his latest 2007 album, You’ll Be Comin’ Down. To be fair, I said "one" and "mighty" even I haven’t really followed Bruce’s music in the past or even knew of his wide open popularity in the U.S and around the globe. But I came across this album called Magic one day and since I heard his name a lot, I thought I’d give it a try.

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In in my last post about perfectionism, I’ve ended up posing a question: what makes an accomplished perfectionist? In other words, how does one balance the act of accomplishment with a strive for perfection? It’s a pretty thin line if you ask me, and in this post, I’m going to shed light on some of the techniques you can use to achieve that.

Accomplished perfectionism is the fusion of two separate genes: those that empower a person to get things done as quickly and efficiently as possible, and those that compels him or her to do their best possible job on these things.

To illustrate, take a look at the following phrases which are more likely to be said or thought by a carrier of each of these two genes:

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Are you a perfectionist? You know, are you the type of person who seeks completeness and flawlessness in every project and every single task you do? Do you obsess about the smallest of details, often times to the point of exhaustion? And does that often lead you to miss important deadlines, because “good” is simply just not “good enough”, at least for you?

If you’re anything like me, then you’ll resonate with symptoms of what’s called perfectionism. Being a perfectionist at work and college is something I’ve been very proud of, despite not being fully aware of it. Everybody I came to deal with including my boss and colleagues was impressed by the level of sophistication and professionalism I’d go about completing my tasks.

This, of course, also had its toll on me most of time. Long working hours in the office (by choice) trying to get that deliverable up to my standards and still meeting that deadline was the norm for me.

Then a couple of days ago I came across an article that was like a revelation. It made me realize that now I’m at this point in my career life where I have to make serious changes to my work habits if I want to be an accomplished person. This post is me trying to analyze that change and hopefully helping fellow perfectionists along the way.

I’m pretty sure you are probably wondering now: why is being a perfectionist something you would want to change? How does it ruin one’s professional life? Doesn’t it make you, I don’t know.. better than the others?

If you think about it (or have experienced it yourself) then you’d probably agree with me on this: perfectionism can get in the way of accomplishment. Well, at least a certain kind of perfectionism.

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I realized something a couple of days ago by reading an article that came as a sort of a wake-up call for me: being productive doesn’t necessarily make you an accomplished person!

I will elaborate on that so it makes little more sense to you:

There’s a common phrase I use quite often (especially at work) to describe the thing where you pretend to do something by acting as if you were really doing it, but never actually getting it done. It’s called going through the motions.

It amazes me how often we find ourselves inadvertently going through the motions of achieving things, doing everything we know we’re supposed or told to do, but eventually not reaching the finish line, or reaching it a bit too late.

I wasn’t aware of how guilty I am of this until I started my current job a couple of years ago and started to learn about the environment and work culture. Two years down the road, I’ve realized that what we actually do here at the company is far from trying to get projects done. We obsess very little about end results and a lot more about methodologies, frameworks, work policies, clearing our responsibilities and basically just getting the ball on to the other side.

Make no mistake, we do like to feel accomplished, and we’re actually getting paid to do so. But we’re lousy at that, and you know why? Because we think that by going through the motions of working on various projects, clearing many seemingly important tasks, being all productive and punctual, we’re bound to drive projects to the finish line. The only problem is, we usually don’t. Our projects carry on for years (I’m not exaggerating!). So what is it we’re doing wrong? Or to put it in a more general way:

How does going through the motions of accomplishing things not help us accomplish them?

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You know the kind of album that’s so good you listen to back to back without skipping a single song, the kind that only comes once or twice a year to remind you that such damn good music and lyrics aren’t long lost nowadays. Well folks, I’m really excited to bring you one today, courtesy of the fabulous Vanessa Carlton.

She’s an American pop singer, songwriter, and pianist best known for the single “A Thousand Miles” from her debut album, Be Not Nobody (2002). Since then, she’s been on and off with albums that achieved mild commercial success. Well, that’s until October 2007, when she released her third studio album, titled Heroes and Thieves. This is the album I’m bringing you today, and it’s the album I think you will simply fall in love with!

Heroes and Thieves sees Vanessa departing from the Goth-influenced darker stuff she was once loved for in her previous albums. Instead, she has now embraced a more romance-inspired, piano-driven mainstream classic pop that is simply brilliant. A lot of improvements are very apparent in this album. The lyrics are very connective and well-related to people of her generation, and she focuses mainly on just love songs instead of overrated “hater songs” we get so many these days.

My favorite song on the album is the second one, Hands On Me. A beautiful song with a catchy arrangement and heart-warming lyrics.

Another great song (actually it’s Vanessa’s favorite from the album) is called Home. A decent song that really captures the elusive meaning of really being “home”.

In the album’s title song, Heroes and Thieves, Vanessa says it’s a song about assessing, to put it in a dramatic way, the Heroes and Thieves in your life. It is about her personal evolution, and her deciding how she wants to lead her life and the people with whom she wants to share it.

A lot of more fabulous songs in this albums are just a click away, so go ahead and enjoy it. I highly recommend purchasing this album to show Vanessa how much you appreciate her efforts of putting together not just a collection of songs, but a body of work!

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Welcome to the latest incarnation of Alaeddin’s Blog!

It’s been almost a week since I took the old site down and started working on it. Since this is a major redesign of the old version, taking it down was necessary to maintain consistency between my local and remote version, so I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.

This is a snapshot of the old version, which suffered from many problems:

I’ve worked hard on designing this new new version. I spent a couple of days picking out a nice-looking theme from the hundreds of available WordPress themes out there. Then I spent about a week tweaking the theme’s guts until I got something out of it that lives up to my standards and everything I’ve learned about blogging, SEO and web usability so far.

In short, I’ve focused on few key points when tweaking this theme:

1. Clear, simple and contextual navigation.
2. Separation of different topics since my blog is quite diverse in nature.
3. Bringing the content forth and make it easy to read and scan.
4. Increase the stickiness of the blog (see point 1) and make it easy to subscribe.
5. Increase the loading speed of the pages.

It’s really been a wonderful (although a bit tiring) experience to unleash the developer in me and let him work out some PHP, XHTML, and CSS magic. Of course, let’s not forget WordPress, the greatest open-source blogging platform ever made.

Having said that, I’m dying now to find out what you guys have to say about my new (vs. old) blog design. Don’t hesitate to be constructively critical, I’ve been known to be one so I naturally expect it from other people. It may also help to know this is still a work in progress so I’m not really emotionally attached to it (OK, maybe just a little bit).

Looking forward to your comments and feedback.

Facebook is a wonderful social network. I’d even go as far as saying it’s one of a kind. In less than 2 months, I’ve gone from being indifferent, to trying and hating it, to giving it a second shot and actually falling in love with it, until finally I became obsessed with it and started spreading the word about it in my social circles.

So given this newfound obsession with Facebook, how can we, if not cure it, find a way to make it worthwhile?

I had this simple idea a while ago which was: why not we actually use Facebook for what it was intended? That is, why not use Facebook to maintain and grow our relationships with the people we care about?

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