whats the plot

platters!!!

this is my favorite zabihah place to eat in nyc. fawaad introduced me to it a while back, and i think that despite the fact that its quite far from where i live, i still go there pretty often. i went there this weekend, and i also saw the new 5th avenue apple store from outside, which definitely looks really cool!

actually, there’s one really interesting thing about platters which always strikes me as interesting – its on a corner with at least 2 other street vendors nearby (that you can see while standing in line at platters) — and although the food at those tastes very similar to that of platters, platters has all the customers and people whereas the other ones generally don’t. its like a sign of how Allah gives rizq to whomsoever He wills, such that two nearly identical places selling nearly identical food are there, one getting lots of customers and the other getting almost none…

iconv rocks. so often do i find this command really useful:
iconv -f original_encoding -t utf8 file > utf8_file

i’ve been using vim 7 beta for a while (which, by the way, was just released as vim 7 a day or so ago), but i never really realized how easy they’ve made it to look at arabic text files now (compared to what it used to be… there used to be an intricate setup process and a set of patches to run for vim 6x as documented by nadim on arabeyes. now, all you have to do is :set encoding=utf8 and :set arabic and you’re set.

you can see a screenshot here.