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!
eid mubarak to all – may Allah accept our deeds during this month – ameen.
[The findings] indicated that marriage did not figure in nearly 55.8 million American family households, or 50.2 percent.
this is really sad.
in light of the previous post, i saw an amazing 7 minute astronomy video on youtube (or should i say ‘gootube‘?) talking about how tiny the earth really is.
these days, during ramadan, i’ve heard people quote a hadith several times that i hadn’t remembered hearing before that is really quite spectacular – the rough meaning based on what i remember is (i could have forgotten – i tried to find out which hadith book this came from but couldn’t find it, if someone can point me to where i’d really appreciate it), “the worldly heaven in comparison to the second heaven is like a ring in a desert, and the second heaven to the third is like a ring in a desert, and the third to the fourth is like a ring in a desert, and the fourth to the fifth is like a ring in a desert, and the fifth to the sixth is like a ring in a desert, and the sixth to the seventh is like a ring in a desert, and the seventh to the kursiy is like a ring in a desert, and the kursi to the 3arsh (or throne) of Allah (SWT) is like a ring in a desert.”
wsalams.
we are so small… reminds me of this verse (3:191)…
الذين يذكرون الله قياما وقعودا وعلى جنوبهم ويتفكرون في خلق السماوات والأرض ربنا ما خلقت هذا باطلا سبحانك
one of my friends told me about this nice nasheed video (islamic song) on youtube – interestingly enough, i saw it being played on tv while i was flipping through the channels the following day… and i made a youtube account so i can use the favorites list and added it as my first favorite on there 
by the way, who sings this, does he mean mishari rashid?
edit – i was going to put a direct embedding of the video here, but seems as though i have to jump through some hoops to get wordpress to do this. so the video link is here.
(translated into normal english, the title would read, “discovering the things that have happened and/or the news in places other than this weblog”).
so for the longest time, i’ve been using bloglines… a while back, i gave google reader a shot, but it was totally unusable. finally, a few days back, they released a new, much nicer version. so much so that i would say i easily prefer it to bloglines… the new google reader solves the main issue i have with bloglines – that once you’ve read the feeds, you can’t ever see them again and they’re gone forever. it also adds some nice new features (starring, and the public watchlist are really neat features). and the new ui is awesome…
so far, i only have two complaints about the new reader – first, it doesn’t refresh automatically (or does so after a very long time). this isn’t a big deal because there are firefox extensions to do this kind of thing. the second is a bit more problematic – the default refresh values for feeds seems to be way too long to me. this is fine for 99% of sites because they typically are not updated that frequently. however, for watching something like the fatwallet deals forum, the default rate doesn’t seem to cut it (bloglines also has some default, but i never really “noticed” it with fatwallet for example, whereas i found myself often wondering, “wait, no new deal postings?” while using google reader – which may also mean that bloglines also has this problem, i haven’t really done any real testing on this). recently, i’ve also subscribed to the del.icio.us hotlist and y! top news, which change pretty often.
so my solution to this problem is to handle those types of feeds with a combination of netvibes and my desktop rss reader (so if i miss them while i am at work during the day, i can see them when i go home). so for the time being, i’ll probably try to stick to using google reader. if you’re still using bloglines and haven’t tried google reader yet, i suggest you export your feeds from it and give google reader a try. even though there is no perfect rss web based reader yet, maybe one day there will be