Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, though I am woefully behind in catching-up on my Planet Fedora feed, I do sometimes uncover gems in these old posts. One such post includes a link to a TED talk by Ken Robinson, “Do schools kill creativity?“. I found the video to be both enlightening as well as entertaining, as he brings to his presentation some very light-hearted humor.
I should be cautious by saying I do not necessarily agree with all of his points 100%, but that is rarely the case with anyone. I believe most of what he says is, at the very least, beneficial food for thought, especially for anyone that has an interest in education of any kind.
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
michael.dehaan (his spelling, not mine!) posted something that you can take or leave (I don’t want to start a flame war on my own blog):
michaeldehaan.net | Popularity Contests Are So Junior High School.
But what is intriguing are the ideas that develop in the comments. Please take some time and read those first, and then come back here. 
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Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Well, my wife & I have decided, both mutually and with the guidance of istikhaarah, that we’re going to discontinue our participation with DiscoverULife for the time being. We both stayed in for exactly one month, which was always intended to be an evaluation period. As it turns out, given our current situation in terms of finances, schedules, and sheer difficulties due to our physical separation, we felt discontinuing for the time-being to be the best option. Alhamdulillaah.
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Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
When Muhammad Alshareef started his DiscoverU program, I honestly was not very interested. In fact, in one of his early marketing e-mails, I informed him of my dislike for the manner he was approaching, because it was so much like other self-help or marketing programs. It was, more-or-less, off my radar for quite some time.
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I’ve really been thinking about it a lot lately, and now I’m close to the point of certainty that the near future of the Internet will include the merger of the two dot-com giants, Yahoo! & Google. All that’s left, in my eyes, other than some business paperwork and antitrust litigation, is choosing the name - Yahoogle! or Goohoo!. Continue Reading »
In my usual banter with one of my coworkers today, I said the following line, which seemed to make a lot more sense at the time than it did in hindsight:
Life is a lot easier when you consider it a figment of your imagination…
Later on in the day, in a discussion regarding the opening of a position for a PHP developer on the Moodle team, after inquiring about the danger of living in Australia, the very same coworker uttered the following memorable statement:
World’s deadliest anything lives in Australia…
I won’t mention where the conversation went to after this…
While chatting with a good friend on MSN about a particular forums post, I uttered the following phrase which I found to be very enlightened (and such modesty!):
I was really surprised that their obliviousness would be so obvious…
For background on this quote, the viewer is encouraged to read the entire thread. The quote above was definitely not meant to be offensive in anyway. I just thought the combination of the two ob* words to be rather humorous.
With much appreciation to Andrei (I make it sound like we’re on a first name basis) and his linkblog, I would very much like to share with you the reason I was laughing hysterically at work today. Reminds me of the hype about duck-and-cover in case of a nuclear holocaust.
I say, if you see a flash or a mushroom cloud, you’d be better off reciting the shahaadah than following these techniques which are frequently considered to be ineffective. Alhamdulillaah their effectiveness hasn’t been tested yet, though, and, in shaa Allaah, never will be. Let’s just hope they remain tools for spreading paranoia, fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) and never enter into practical usage.
I’m sure many others have already editorized about the issue, Anti-userism is a constant & growing problem facing consumers & users the world over. What I mean by anti-userism is the trait that software, hardware, & service companies have of putting the user or consumer last when it comes to priorities, in particular, in relation to their bottom line. Continue Reading »
I came across a quote that I just had to share. It was first referenced in a comment to a Slashdot story about a suspected spammer’s technique of “untraining” spam filters by sending “normal” text. The wikiquote page has some interesting variations, of which I found the following to be the most quaint:
You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity
How frequently true this is…
