September Ends

EEEK! It’s already the end of September!

Slow month in many ways, this one. I’m not even halfway through Julian Comstock. Just like Axis and Spin previously, Robert Charles Wilson needs quite a bit warming up to. Meanwhile, there is also Common Wealth, which should be around here somewhere and, oh, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

No good movies at the cinema too, which I haven’t decided whether a good or a bad thing, or that it doesn’t matter. The last few days I have been having trouble sleeping so feel totally like a zombie at work and now my body is starting to ache. Mentioning zombie, I haven’t read World War Z too, and Anathem! AAARGH! Meanwhile, Amazon keeps sending me recommendations.

Comics

I am too lazy to actually write anything original, so here are two awesome comic strips:

Expect by kris wilson at deviantART


Creepy @ xkcd

Be cool!

Friday Thoughts

I
Our front gate is always open. There is a man who usually parks his van on our compound every Friday when he goes to the mosque. Even when there are other vehicles, he always somehow manages to squeeze in and park on the grass. We don’t know his name, but he wears a beard and robe and turban. Others who park their vehicles on our compound always acknowledge us with a salam, a smile, or even a nod, but never that man.

II
The prayer at the end of the official state sermon asks to “return our younger generation to the path of righteousness”. I don’t know if I still count as young, but it is not helpful to remind the younger generation every week that the rest of society (or at least the religious authorities) have fixed upon them a particular label. Old people stray too, just read the newspapers, so why only target young people? History, and all the mess we live with today, point to mistakes of the older generation. Perhaps we should pray for the sins of the older generation as well.

III
The sermon yesterday was delivered by someone I went to school with, though a few years senior. He is not an official imam – his father is – but Mak said that it wasn’t his first time, and I think that it’s really cool. Why should only older people be mosque officials and lead prayers? I delivered the Friday sermon once in college myself and it wasn’t a big deal at all.

Selamat Hari Raya!

The contractor finally left on Friday. He will return after Raya to install my brother’s shower screen and rewire/replace the fuse box, at least. That left us with just one and a half days (!) to clean the house up and make it presentable for Raya.
“Will we get the house ready in time?” asked Mak.
“Of course” I said. There really was no other way around it. We just had to get it done by any means necessary. It took us all the way to Raya morning – we finally stopped at about 5.30 a.m. – but we did it. PHEWW!

So lesson definitely learned: never to have house renovation close to a major festival, unless you don’t intend to celebrate it or plan to be somewhere else.

Another important lesson relearned is the amount of junk we accumulated over the years. Mostly they were various plastic containers that came as free gifts, old souvenirs, and other miscellaneous broken and old stuff never used or not used for a long time and unlikely to be used in the future. God knows why we kept them in the first place.

Semester Break

Semester break officially begins on Monday September 14, but since at the kulliyyah we don’t have regular classes on Friday, today is effectively the last day of this half of the semester.

I am having a mid-semester test at the moment. Thankfully, it is a presentation lab, so I have this computer in front of me. Otherwise, I’d be staring at the wall for one hour and a half. There is this student right in front of me whose mobile phone buzzed a few times already. Every time she’ll look at me with an embarrassed look and mouth an apology. Why can’t she just switch the phone off? I just can’t be bothered to ask her out loud. I usually leave my mobile phone at the office when I come to class myself.

Supervising a test can be a little fun, just a little. I can see the faces of the students as they go through the questions. Students do not realize that from the front of the class, or in the case presentation lab, I can see everything and everyone. Of course, everyone is busy concentrating on the test now, but during normal classes I can see them whisper and giggle with one another, text on the phone, scribble aimlessly at the margin of the textbook, steal a snack, etc. At the moment, a female student is tapping her head perhaps trying to memorize something, while a male student on my far left sits back looking like he’s about to cry.

I have never seen a student actually cry during a test before, but I think I’d like to, just once.

By the way, this new blogger post editor does need some getting used to.

Wired Update

There were a few times last week when my notebook got very, very slow. I was afraid that it was due to a virus infection. Since I’ve been using seminar rooms this semester the antivirus program has been screaming out alerts for viruses, Trojan horses, or worms it detects every time I plug in the flash drive after a class. Seminar room computers are full of nasty malicious software. Thankfully, repeated full scans of the notebook showed no infection – or at least none that trusty ol’ McAfee was able to detect. The CPU were running at 100 percent. The good news is that it’s gone now; the notebook is back to its usual zippy state and the problem hasn’t returned for days. The bad news, however, is that I haven’t been able to figure out the exact cause(s) of the problem, so it may well reoccur.

Then, I found that I could not add any more files onto my staff webhosting account. A quick check of the university’s ICT guidelines and procedures confirmed my suspicion – I’ve maxed out on my 30MB allocated storage. No doubt it’s all those colourful presentation files. But then, 30MB nowadays is so small when we have flash drives with many times more space. A call to the ITD helpline to ask for a bigger space got me transferred to a line that rang and rang and was never picked up. I gave up, and now migrating my files onto Google Docs instead.

Loving the look

This weekend, I consolidated all my email accounts so I can access them all through Gmail. Last week, we couldn’t access the university email system even over the local network. Funny, right? It did the chocolate cookie trick – there one minute, not there the next. They said that the network was under a DDOS attack. Whatever.

__________
UPDATE: Today, up to noon September 8, I cannot even open my staff website, at work!

Ramadan 1430

This year’s Ramadan is different here at our home in that we are going through it – so far, at least – without a kitchen. The renovation work is still on-going, so much for the contractor’s earlier promise that everything will be done by Ramadan. In fairness, however, the work being done has gone significantly beyond the simple bathroom renovation we started with, and everything is almost done now.

We rarely went to the Ramadan bazaar in the previous years. Breaking fast, iftar, was little different from our usual daily dinner. “We should eat less during the fasting month, not more,” my father used to say. Father would insist on breaking fast with dates, but otherwise mother would cook the usual dishes, and for drinks we would have hot tea. There were times when I wished that we’d have more, well, “special” food on the table like “everyone else” but by the time we finished eating I’d realize that had there were more food we wouldn’t be able to finish them all anyway. Besides, it’s hard to go for tarawih when you are so full.

This time around, however, we’ve been having takeout food from the Ramadan bazaar and various fast-food joints on a daily basis. I don’t think that I have missed hot home-cooked food more. Even when I was in Boston, I cooked my own food almost every day.