So here I am in a computer lab at DePaul University Lincoln Park campus. It’s Sunday, the weather is May-fabulous, and I apparently have two big exams coming up both tomorrow and the day after.

It is the Sunnah of mankind that during studying for midterms/finals, they find the most amazing things or have the most profound realizations, or feel the need to do things you never felt the need to do before. Why is that? Is it just our minds trying to get away from the dreadfulness of studying? Could be.

In any case, since I’m supposed to be studying and, well, I don’t want to, I’ll instead write a tribute to Mr. Ather Ali who is leaving tomorrow to the Carribean for some sort of graduate studies that people do over there. Read the rest »

Neat, huh? This picture was taken four years ago, in the spring of 2004. Can you guess how this was done?

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Accounting 350 this week was the same as usual, slow and unexciting. There I was stuck in a three hour night class, slightly bored and fiddling with my phone. All of that changed 48 minutes into the class when I received the following text message from a Muslim brother in another building on campus also in a night class.

From: Mofees
Bomb threat, my class
was just evacuated. Tell
ur teacher
6:48pm 4/21/08

At around 6:40pm, DePaul University began to evacuate its two downtown Chicago Loop campus buildings after receiving a phone call of a bomb threat. The building I was in was not amongst those officially evacuated, but people like myself began receiving text messages from friends with classes in the evacuated buildings about the bomb threat. All the while, my class was in the middle of presentations and there I was unsure of what to do.

Although our building wasn’t officially evacuating, I still thought that we should do so, just in case of any potential danger. I showed the text to the student next to me so as to ask him what to do. Read the rest »

Daddy brought home a Nintendo Wii from work and we were glad he was able to get a hold of one. As of this post’s date, April 2008, they’re still hard to get a hold of. But, alhumdulillah, one of Daddy’s fellow employee’s daughter works at Target and hooked it up (with a 10% discount, too).

Anywho, if you know me, I’m a stickler for audio/video. So before buying any game, controller, or even the internet browser, I had to get my hands on component cables for the Wii, much to Waasiq’s dismay.

Component cables are high quality video cables used for high quality video feeds. You know how for standard A/V cables you have one for video (yellow) and two for audio (white and red)? Well with component cables, you have three cables for video, giving you much higher quality.

So I figured component cables will cost around $40, and that’s something I’m down to pay for, even if we only have Wii Sports and one controller (geeks’ priorities, sorry!).

But before I ran to the closest Best Buy Read the rest »

One day while walking through the Loop of downtown Chicago, I saw something different from my everyday walk to school.

I noticed a No Parking sign that caught my eye, different from all the hundreds in the Loop. Something was clearly noticeable about it; a bright red sticker attached to its plain black painted pole. The sticker did its job of asking to be seen and drew me in for closer inspection.
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