people will just be people?

i am not one to criticize anyone as i have my own huge list of faults, but some actions of some people really really get on my nerves. i don’t understand the following categories of people:

1. the provincial people - those who are so set in their own thoughts and ideas (without any basis) and you can never ever convince them of anything besides what they think is true. the best example of this that i can think of is when people outside of america have this idea that america is “heaven on earth,” that life there is really easy, that people have money falling out of their pockets, and so on. they refuse to believe anything else. these people often miss out on seeing a great number of blessings that they have that people living in america lack for example.

2. the assumption makers - very similar to the above category, this set of people assume things based on what is visible without taking anything else into consideration. this is almost always related to money in some way… for example, someone hears that you got a job, and they automatically assume that you are “making the big bucks now.” or, someone walks into your apartment and sees almost no furniture there but sees a nice monitor or tv and says, “dang, you must be extremely rich.” why do people make these assumptions? if you try to correct these people, they refuse to believe you, even though in most cases, the people who say these things would have several fold more than the person they told the comment to (in terms of both finances and time worked), and so on. reality of the matter is, what is apparent isn’t necessarily what is true because people don’t know the situations of each other. so why do people say these kinds of things?

3. the nosy people… people who want to ask about everything, especially financial things when they have no business in doing so… “how much do you get paid?” – what business does anyone have asking that? or, “how much did you buy this or that or the other?” why do people ask these kinds of questions?

i could go on classifying these types of people, but i realized that there really is no need to, since they all share a common thread - a lack of content with their current situation and blessings. this leads many of them to not realize the great blessing they are in, and always try to look at ways in which others are better off than them financially.

i guess as imam siraj wahaj said about a year ago in a speech, that his mother used to always tell him, “people will just be people…” (it might have been, “people will always be people,” can’t remember anymore). so yeah… people will always be people…

better permalinks

now switched wordpress to use a more readable url format for permalinks rather than the classic ?p=### style urls. thanks abu hurayrah!

burning crusade beta

thanks to a friend from college (thanks dude), i got on the burning crusade beta. i transferred rad over and played some… looks uber promising, albeit rough around the edges, but i guess that’s why they’re not releasing it until mid january… man playing on a pvp server has a totally different feel than playing on an rp server :)

muslim feminist quran tafsir council!?

so i saw this article on y! news about muslim feminists in new york wanting to start a quran interpretation council - their goal being to break streotypes involving terrorism and women being oppressed in islam.

i don’t know why, but something strikes me as odd about this… “muslim feminists” might be the start of oddity - islam is the first religion that gave women rights and elevated women to a status that is many times higher than that of men. the examples are innumerable, but just one example is that one of the top narrators of ahadeeth who taught the great men of the ummah and whom many of the great scholars took their knowledge directly or indirectly was sayida 3a2isha (ra).

secondly, a “shura council of women to interpret the Quran?” – i mean what do they think this is, “everyone interpret the Quran the way they wish?” – its not about men and injustice as they claim it is - the great islamic universities are open to women just as they are for men - no one stopped any woman from studying islam at al Azhar or Madinah Unniversity and publishing great works on Islam if they want to…

so i don’t get it, how is a group of random women (which is what i think of when reading this article, of course i could be wrong…) simply going to decide that “men are unjust, we are going to make a council to interpret the Quran?”

i have no problem with women writing tafseer of Quran - as long as they are qualified to do so. however, a group of random women (or men for that matter) writing a tafseer? i think not…

does anyone else see this, or is it that perhaps i am reading too much into this article?

new boards and ps3 lines

i am/was kind of surprised to see a whole bunch of random people sitting in front of frys when i went there this morning. at first, because of their dress and appearance, i thought maybe they were homeless people or something sleeping in front of the store. later in the day when i saw the same scene at another store, i realized that these were the people sleeping in front of the store to get their hands on one of the first ps3s…

was pretty amazed to find out that most new intel boards only have 1 ide slot these days… i guess ide is a thing of the past now…

update - some interesting articles about this whole ps3 thing. and, the smashing of a ps3 in front of those who waited in line for so long just to get one…

WoW as a really bad paying job...

i was looking on ebay, where you can sell your WoW characters for an amount depending on the type of gear and money they have. so glancing at some of the previous auctions, rogues seem to go between $150 and $500, depending on how tweaked they are.

so guestimating rad to get ~$200 (i think that’s a safe guess based on his not-so-uber uberness), and estimating about 34 days of /played time on him, that’s 816 hours for about $200… which is less than a quarter per hour!!! in 1938, that was minimum wage (although that was equivalent of about $3.22 in 2005). but now, minimum wage is about $5.15, which means WoW pays less than 1/20th of the current US minimum wage.

now if we also take into account the $14.99/month fee for playing… then wow…

(source: wikipedia).

over 1k bookmarks

my del.icio.us account (and hence my myweb2 account) has reached over 1000 bookmarks… like whoa.

islamic advice from sheikh google

i saw this yesterday when i clicked on the gmail tab to read some new mail. click the image for a readable version of it.

and no, i haven’t custom added any rss feeds to gmail… it means, “know Allah’s marvelous/magnificent plan for your life…” thanks google!

عيد مبارك

eid mubarak to all - may Allah accept our deeds during this month - ameen.

2005 census: us marriage rates down

[The findings] indicated that marriage did not figure in nearly 55.8 million American family households, or 50.2 percent.

this is really sad.