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two new cats

less than a week after sufi left the residence, she was replaced with two cats, whom my brother decided to name “peach” and “mango” – not quite sure why.

picture of new cats

i guess that’s all for now…

webmail, etc

argh, yesterday was quite a day. first off, i deleted all the numbers on my palm pilot accidently (i hard resetted the palm, and thought that when i sync it, the program would send the contacts and calendar info back to the palm… but i was mistaken). so after spending time and restoring an old backup and updating it, i then proceeded to accidently delete my entire mp3 collection. argh.

patrick o’leary from gt was nice enough to give me a gmail invite. its pretty cool, i think i am going to start using it. here is a screenshot:

gmail screenshot

interestingly enough, yahoo raised everyone’s quota to 100 mb too… i wonder where that leaves hotmail with its nice, generous, 3 mb storage.

update: i just saw this on slashdot, there’s also an indian company that’s giving out free 1 gb email accounts.

sufi is gone, beat ff9

greets. no more sufi cat for us, we decided to give it away because its deaf and it walks kinda funny too. go figure.

i beat ff9! awesome game! i guess i can finally try to be productive and do the school work that i’ve been putting off.

that’s all for now…

new sufi on the block

sufi

we got a cat! i think my little brother and i have unanimously decided to name him sufi.

update - its actually a “she,” not a he.

get some jeans at the mall

a picture is worth a thousand words… shopping at the mall

el road trip

peace and greetings all. so over the break, mansoor and i went on a road trip up north. we stopped in the suberbs of penn, dc, and virginia. here is a list of interesting things we came across…

a short movie of our trip i got a canon powershot digital camera about a month back, and i was finally able to use it. i made a short movie of us driving at night. note the effect that the street lights have on the movie. (and yes, i realized (after the fact), that there is no way you could have a flash running while taking a movie clip, but i mean some kind of lighting is nice… then again, its a camera, not a camcorder..)

you can get the movie here (~5 mb).

the highway system what we came to find pretty quickly is that the highway system in georgia is surprisingly good - all the exits are numbered and labeled. in other states, its just like, “exit” - there is no concept of exit numbers. oh and it doesn’t help that every other exit has the same name…

interesting signs we came across some of the most random signs. “speed limit enforced by aircraft” was one of the random ones. another was one describing fines, and the fine for a criminal offense was $200, but the fine for a traffic offense was $500. its nice to know that speeding is a worse crime than any criminal offense…

the wawa so many wawa and sunaco gas stations up north, especially in philly. and within the wawa stations are like delis and stuff, its pretty neat.

the wawa station

mansoor at the wawa station

the gas prices … remain outrageous.

gas prices

uber desi we came across a really fancy halal desi resteraunt that does catering even. they even had their own van. and their prices were pretty expensive relative to the desi resteraunts in atlanta.

desi village van

an islamic center in penn we went to check out one of the islamic centers in penn. it was around 3:00 in the afternoon and it was… well, closed.

islamic center sign

islamic center

washington d.c. its amazing how you go through a few side streets and you find yourself in another state. we visited bubba in d.c and went and ate at the food factory in virginia. we also got to see bilal ahmed too.

the “roundabout” some weird alternative to the 4 way traffic light. in bubba’s words, “devastating.”

the day after tomorrow awesome movie. critics don’t know anything about movies, they should be banned from rating them. excellent movie. if you haven’t seen it, go see it!

i guess that’s all for now. peace!

highway insanity, heros

greets… today, i was heading towards tech around 11:30 am, and as soon as i got off the highway, i saw a whole bunch of traffic. i thought to myself, “odd, its way past morning rush hour” - and while i was still on the ramp, i saw all these people u-turning off the highway and back up the ramp… so i did the same and took the highway from a few exits down by cumberland. i later found out that there was a man threatening to jump off the windy hill bridge, and i guess he did :-/ its pretty sad… God doesn’t give anyone more than they can handle and tolerate…

anyway, on a less solemn note, i’ve been kind of wondering… or i guess realizing… we all know that in most movies, games, etc, the hero has to win - if the hero dies, then its just bad. so i am wondering why… i guess this question is triggered in my head by man on fire, and perhaps just general thought on rpg games… especially if the character buildup is really good and you feel like you know the character, i guess the main hero dying is a bad thing. i personally think so anyway… but as some rappers would say, “its sad cuz the bad guys always die.”

apple, brittney, and wealth

greets all. so yes, i guess as one of my respected friends pointed out, i need new entries to get more interesting responses… maybe… just maybe… i’ll try posting semi-controversial things and see what happens…

anyhow, you can learn quite a bit of random stuff from tv… i was flipping through the channels and learned two interesting facts. first, i learned about this interesting trend of celebrities naming their children weird names… one actress named her daughter “apple” – i ran a google search, and i found out that names get much weirder than that – there’s a couple who named their son “pilot inspektor,” and there’s also a couple who named their son “audio science,” and yet another couple who named their son “moon unit.” based on this trend, i guess when i have a child, i’ll look around the house and the first thing i see is what i’ll name my child after… i do have to say though, one of the actors, rob morrow, named his daughter tu, making her name tu morrow… i think that’s pretty neat.

the other interesting observation was about brittney spears - she’s got a lot of money (masha’Allah) - she’s got some nice sports cars and she gives her parents uber expensive cars for any major occaision…. plus she owns a bunch of really nice properties around the states. i think it said she’s worth like $50 million….

so what i am wondering is… all she does (with all due respect) is come up with lyrics and sing. i can sing too, can i make this much money? anyone willing to buy a plotting album if i make one?

on a more realistic note though; i don’t know why; maybe this is a weakness on my part, but when i saw how rich she is just by writing songs and singing, it made me want to make it big too – not so i can spend my life partying and buying cars and stuff, but so i can do something to make my life worth while - something that leaves a mark on this world and makes a difference…

it would be very superficial of me if i fail to realize the fact that any money and wealth accumulated here in this life will go away and won’t accompany us to our graves when we die – life is short and i realize this, and i also realize that this life is a test and that we’ll be accountable for what we do. but realistically speaking, a lot of the cool humanitarian project ideas a person comes up with are not really easy to accomplish without a large capital. and sometimes, fundraising just gets in the way and is a waste of time…

i guess at the same time, it is very difficult because wealth can be a source of fitnah. and while some of our great predecessors were very wealthy and remained at a state of uber piousity, we don’t really compare to them…

i would say in summary that regardless; the ultimate goal is the same: to change the world to a better place, to help people lead happier lives, and to do all of this purely for the sake of Allah, awaiting no reward from anyone but Him. if Allah allows us to accomplish this, regardless of the means (be it great amounts of wealth, great amounts of knowledge, or even a simple idea), that’s all that matters.

the weather is crazy hot

need i say more?

babar's wedding pics, p-p-p-powerbook, etc

greets. not much going on, i beat ff6, now on to ff8… anyways… mansoor just got a shieldhost account too, and put his wedding pictures up! you can find them at mansoorbabar.com.

if you want to read something pretty funny (at least look at the pictures if you don’t want to read it), check this out - the story of the P-P-P-Powerbook.

today i also fixed the rendering of the site in internet explorer. okay, that’s all for now. oh and thanks to mansoor for leaving the first comment on my page :)