life's lessons learned the hard way

peace… its been a while since i’ve updated, but that’s really due to a great number of things, from some games (late july/early august), to a shift to a new phase in life (moving, etc), to a bit of illness, so its been hard to find time to update till now.

i just got out of the hospital yesterday. to make a long story short, i went out with my friends to try this turkish restaurant - most of us ate this one side dish, and all of us who did got sick. my friends who got sick had to drive 800 miles home while they were sick, which is really horrible… i got sick pretty bad to the extent that i was hospitalized for a few days… i am still recovering now, but am feeling a lot better, al7amdulillah (thanks to God).

i guess i might want to say that the lesson i learned is to not eat food from outside at all… and while i know that probably won’t be possible to adhere to, at least i should be careful and avoid any sort of shadyish restaurants and stuff…

but one thing i did realize is that no matter what happens that one views as bad, there’s always something to be thankful for, even in the rough situations. so al7amdulillah. i am thankful.

anyway, that’s all the updates for now, probably will update later, insha’Allah (with God’s willing). by the way, keep an eye on the comments, jawwad and others are posting their own blogs under the comments of mine (hehe).

game stuff

i beat grandia 2… excellent game, i liked it… i also just started ffx. seems pretty cool so far..

i did have a tad bit of productivity despite the gaming though… i played around a bit with jpgraph, pretty nice for making graphs on the fly in php.

that’s about all for now though…

license, project done, etc

so the other day (tuesday to be exact), i went to get my license renewed, and ended up waiting in line for more than 4 hours! i learned (albeit a little too late) that one can renew their license online – but you have to apply at least 60 days before… i guess i’ll try to remember that for the future.

it was pretty cool though - i ran into one of the teachers from highschool, and was able to find out what all my other teachers did. i haven’t visited in a long time, maybe i will consider visiting sometime..

not much going on in this neighborhood… just finished the project webpage, making me officially done with the project! thank God! in case anyone’s actually interested, the webpage is here.

on sort of unrelatedly related terms, i still need to finish up this webpage at some point in time… that’s all for now.

project practically done!

peace. at last, i am done with the code for the project. i am almost done with the report, as soon as i finish it, i’ll post a page here with screenshots of the project in action and the code. (this is at my professor’s request, i am not a nerd, i wouldn’t have put it up here otherwise… err… i guess my writing code on my free time (the slippy game, for example) disproves that… oh well)… more updates soon (tm) [insha’Allah].

project update, etc

greets… i spent the majority of the weekend writing code for my project… seemingly, however, no matter how much i write, or no matter what i do, i always realize or discover that i forgot something else and have to go back and fix it or account for it… not to mention that some of the stuff just takes forever… bleh.

i came across some interesting stuff today while reading /. - the first is a story of a one year old pakistani baby who got an eye transplant. pretty amazing.

on a somewhat spiderman-ish note, this site (warning, contains spoilers) has a list of mistakes in the movie. i didn’t notice a good amount of these things…

finally, check out what an article published by msn (who, of course, is owned by microsoft) is saying about browsers - in summary: “use firefox, not internet explorer.”

spiderman 2...

… is an awesome movie.

an aim-less attempt...

effective tomorrow, july 1st, 2004, insha’Allah (with God’s willing) i am going to attempt to remain off aim. the reason: i have less than a month left for the end of the semester, and i need to finish up my project… otherwise, really bad things could happen.

so i suggest that if you actually read this site (or want to read it) that you bookmark it or memorize the address or something because you won’t be able to get it from my profile (unless of course i break down and log on, but i am hoping that won’t happen).

but yes, i will continue updating the blog throughout insha’Allah.

exhibit your rappin' rhymin' skills

based on the crazy slew of comments on the other posts, i came up with the idea of this thread…

basically, anyone who wants to participate should comment with a rap or rhyme of sorts, and ppl can reply back with their own raps and rhymes and yeah…

i just think it could be interesting… if people participate…

slippy now in early beta stage

greets! did some more work on slippy today. the game works and is totally playable. the things left to do are: 1. save the state and load it up when the program starts and ends, 2. add some menu items to allow someone to jump to levels they’ve beaten, reset levels, and give instructions on how to play, 3. test some more.

i’ve redid the graphics (well, i took the graphics from the ti86 version for the black and white one, and just added color for the color one). the problem is, when i embiggen the graphics, it ends up looking really bad (like the previous post’s screenshot).

the results…

due to the slew of questioning comments on the other one, i guess i should explain the game. slippy is a puzzle game in which you control slippy, a penguin. he’s trying to get a bunch of coins (well, i guess i should make the coins into fish but that means i have to make fish graphics…). in order to do so, he/she must move the blocks around. however, due to the slippery nature of the slippery slippy game and the arctic climate in which it takes place, once slippy pushes a box, it keeps moving until it either hits a solid wall (then it stops), or until it hits some ice, in which case it destroys the ice and magically disappears. so yeah, the objective is to get all the coins.

that’s all for now…

productivity in the wrong place?

greets… so rather than work on my school work like i should be doing, i got carried away messing around with palm programming… after finding a really nice palm programming tutorial, and downloading some open source examples (the boulderpalm source was really helpful) and finding my really old calculator stuff, i started to write slippy for the palm…

i got the first level to draw and revamped the graphics from the old one, although the coins, the penguin, and the non-solid ice need some work… if anyone wants to help me make graphics, email me or im me and let me know.