whats the plot

it's been a while since i last posted... i guess microblogging (twitter, brightkite, etc) have sort of gotten the majority of my posts, and i've neglected the blog.

the main reason i like the blog is it's interesting to look back and see what i was writing about n years ago.  it just serves as a good documentation.  twitter/brightkite do the job as well (esp with uploading pictures to brightkite on the go and tagging location), but the blog allows me to be less concise.

so yeah, perhaps i will resume the posts shortly (tm).

woot! egypt won the 2008 africa cup of nations! beautiful game, i only saw the last 20 minutes, but those were the 20 minutes that mattered. beautiful assist by zidane in a crazily intense moment, passing to abu trayka who scored incredible work of art!

i am not a big fan of sports, but this was one game i had to watch second cup win in a row, the last being against the ivory coast in 2006.

amazing... i came across people asking about islam on y! answers before, but never upon a muslim asking a question about islam on answers until right now. i was doing a search on google for "arabic tirmithi" and came up with several questions on y! answers, including this one about shopping du3a2s, asked on y! answers malaysia. even more interesting is the fact that there's a category for ramadan under holidays and it's full of questions by muslims (i mean, after all, it is y! answers malaysia, right? :)).

dang, i was being paid to make da3wa and i didn't even know it, al7amdulillah

i guess i may just be going through some weird phase in life, but here's what's on my mind this morning at 2:30 am...

1. for some things, right and wrong are undoubtedly clear. but for others, how do you really know? two extremely good people with two extremely good (albeit different) view points can really leave you in the middle, unsure of what the right answer is.
2. why is it so easy to hurt someone you care about accidentally?
3. why do people get carried away trying to live out the "american dream" (ie nice job, nice brick house with a white fence and a dog named spot?)
4. why is life so repetitive and cyclic?
5. why are we as humans so impatient?
6. why are we as humans always looking to be accepted by others?
7. why do we let what people say and think drive our actions and affect them so much?
8. "history repeats itself" - but sometimes it doesn't... or does it?
9. why is it that most of us are in much better shoes than so many people that we know, and yet we are still not happy?
10. how do you distinguish people being "politically correct" with you and people treating you with sincerity?
11. why do we try so hard to flaunt our accomplishments, yet at the same time rush to cover our weaknesses?
12. if one dies an unexpected death tomorrow, would they have done anything to make the world a better place? would anyone besides their close family notice or care?
13. why do the moments of happiness feel so short in comparison to the times of hardship?
14. why does life feel so hard at times?
15. how do you know who your real friends are?

before someone goes sheikh-style on me answering these questions, let me clarify one thing - i am not asking these questions from a religious perspective, i am just asking why we, as humans, feel this way about certain things.

maybe out of sheer boredom, or too many nerdy thoughts always going through my head, or just to find a good use for the domain, i've started a humorous (so claim those who read it) blog about youth and the problems they face in looking to get married (basically some of my theories about the whole marriage process).

you can check it out here.

update - i closed it down

my name was mentioned on the messenger blog in this post - check it out.

just experienced my first earthquake. i was pulling up at the parking lot of the masjid for isha, and i waited a second to shut the engine off and i was like "why is my car shaking like that?" -- i took my foot off the brake and my car was still shaking. i got out of the car, walked away from it, puzzled at the shaking (the whole time i thought it was the car, i didn't realize it was the ground).

i only realized after the salah when the sheikh started talking about a verse (3:143) and saying how we'd just experienced being saved from death, and then the man said that people should go home and be with their families. so i asked my friend and he told me it was an earthquake.

5.6 on the Richter scale - news here.

sort of late for this, but eid mubarak! just upgraded the blog to wordpress 2.3, i guess i'll have to look into going back and tagging some of the old posts at some point in the future (tm).

in unrelated news, one of my coworkers pointed out the applegeeks lite comic to me. one of the writers of this comic is muslim, and he had some pretty funny comics, especially around eid time. here's one for kicks:

source: applegeeks lite.

source: xkcd.

one of my coworkers sent me this today. pretty funny that they blatantly ripped off the images and such. on a similar note, it seems as though there's way too much red tape to go through in order to get something like this officially done.