a thought...

this past weekend, ustaz amr khaled visited us here in the bay area. he came to jum3ah at mca. it was really a surprise to me (i knew he was giving a talk the following day, but i didn’t know he’d come to jum3ah). i felt extremely happy when i saw him, and started thinking about what i would say if i could get to talk to him.

he gave a brief 1 or 2 minute talk in english - i was happy that he said our masjid was like a “hug” and that it felt different than any of the masajid he’d seen in europe. i think i had a smile on my face the whole time.

afterwards, i had the honor of shaking his hand, hugging him, and speaking one sentence to him and getting a reply back. i also tried to get someone to take a picture of me with him.

but after seeing the crowds of people rush him to say salams, get a picture with him, or even get an autograph in some cases, i stopped and asked myself a question…

if i was this excited about talking to amr khaled, wanted to find something memorable to say to him, wanted to tell all my friends that i talked to him and hugged him… what about on the day of judgment when we see the Prophet Muhammad (صلي الله عليه و سلم)?

on the y! messenger blog

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

google documents

i hate to say it, but i love google documents. i never thought i’d use it, but man, it has made my life a lot easier for so many things. the sharing feature is especially nifty (and probably accounts for 90+% of the reasons that i have to use it).

earthquake

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.

beat xenosaga, now back to WoW

finally, after several years, i beat xenosaga (i ordered it november 19th, 2004 - almost 3 years ago…). i just could never bring myself to finish it (then again, WoW did come out around that time in 2004) until today (finally).

and, while i hadn’t played WoW since 6/15, i’ve reactivated my account. no, not addiction, just boredom, that and some of my work colleagues playing. but hey, what else do you do when you live thousands of miles from family? go figure.

eid mubarak, wordpress 2.3, etc

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.

quranicaudio.com redone!

keeping the seo statements from the previous post in mind, audio.islamicnetwork.com has become http://quranicaudio.com/ – it is now running on lighttpd (rather than apache - by the way, so far, i really like lighty masha’Allah) and al7amdulillah, so far, things look good.

quranicaudio.com is one of the web’s largest (if not the largest) collection of cd quality downloadable quran mp3s (and some oggs). check it out!

importance of seo

i never really used to think about the importance of seo until recently. i always figured that, “hey, these are just my sites, only my friends read them, or they spread by word of mouth, etc” and never bothered doing anything with it.

however, after actually taking some time to search for some of my sites, i realized how important seo is for attracting traffic and for “branding.” despite the suboptimal state of seo on this site, i must say that i have definitely gotten pretty lucky in this regard for this site [most of this has to be credited to wordpress]. on some of my other sites, however, i wasn’t so lucky…

so don’t make seo an afterthought or you may regret it later (just like me).

it's compiling!

source: xkcd.

nooooo! another WoW expansion! :/

today, during blizzcon, blizzard announced a new WoW expansion, “wrath of the lich king.” i haven’t played WoW in over 1.5 months now (i canceled my account and unsubscribed to wowinsider and other WoW rss feeds so i don’t get tempted, but… i don’t know anymore… :p) hopefully insha’Allah i’ll manage to stay strong :p