As with every Ramadan, I love the nightly lectures. This year, I’ve become quite fond of a young man named Ammar Nakshawani. He is a self-taught student of knowledge who delivers powerful and touching lectures filled with pearls of wisdom.

You can listen to his current lectures here.

Also, for other dynamite lecturers and scholars, see this site.

There’s all kinds of reasons why this might be a bad idea, but hopefully, if Google stays true to their roots, it will just be healthy competition.

The new Google web browser called Google Chrome, is currently available for download for Windows and will soon (we are told) be available for Linux and Mac OS X.

What could possibly go wrong you ask? Think Internet Explorer and ActiveX back in the 90s. When you already dictate a big chunk of the web, providing the browser to view can become a self-serving activity. Imagine opening Firefox and navigating to the new Google Music site (not saying there really is or will be one) and you get a nice little message stating, “We’re sorry, but this website is only viewable with Google Chrome 2.0 or later.”

As I mentioned, however, Google tends to be more open than that, but stranger things have happened. By the way, the new browser engine is based on Webkit, which is based on KHTML, which comes from KDE, which is free and open source software.

For whatever reason, during Ramadan, I tend to have more vivid dreams. In some cases I even become lucid, whereas that normally does not happen. I have no training in lucid dreaming, although I have desired it on occasion (and then chickened out).

This morning, my alarm clock did not go off or was not loud enough for me to hear. At that time, I was having a dream that a boy was supposed to come and wake me up, but he was absent that day (yes, as if I lived in a school). When I realized that, I fumbled around looking for my clock only to realize that I had missed suhoor.

Momements later, I realized, “Wait! I’m dreaming!” Then, as I gradually became conscious, I said to myself, “And it’s happening in real life!”

I woke up and reached for my clock to discover that I still had about 30 minutes to eat suhoor. Allahu Akbar.

I pray that all Muslims around the world have a Ramadan filled with blessings and good deeds.

Here is my formal greeting card to all of you.

Shake your wanny fanny funky song funky song

Shake your wanny fanny fu-unky song!

I’ll give a prize to the first person who can comment with the show where that song originated.

If you’re a person on the go but don’t want to get behind on your Ramadan Qur’an reading, there are a few free sites that offer audio recitation along with English translation.

Islamway radio

Qur’anEnglish.com

MP3 Qur’an Online

Any of these can be downloaded, installed on an MP3 player, or burned to several CDs.

If you have the money, there are also many Islamic bookstores that sell complete CD sets of Qur’an recitation in arabic with english translation. They run anywhere from $150 to $200. You can also buy DVD sets with added features.

Well, I started a new job at a new school, and that is part of the reason why I have not been blogging much. The other reason is that I’m just a bad blogger. Shame on me!

Today I’m blogging on my new EeePC (more on that later).

Also, Ramadan is right around the corner — truly excited about that. I just pray my health will be better than it has in the past few Ramadans. I suppose that’s a sign that I’m getting old.

Anyway, back to this job. It’s a great school with a brand new building. The Library (media center) is huge with nice wooden shelves, soft new carpeting, plush lounge chairs, built-in media devices, including a projector on the ceiling, HP computers, as well as macbook laptops. The entire school is wireless as well. And my office, don’t even get me started. It’s large, complete with a refrigerator, sink, and a microwave.

I have large windows overlooking a green field and a forest near the river. I’m still getting adjusted, and that has taken more of my time than usual.

There are many issues to blog about, so expect to hear more from me soon, insha’Allah.

This is from the Islamic Information Center:

July 29, 2008

In a recent interview, Ayatollah Fadlallah, one of Lebanon’s chief theologians, stated that any notions of strife between Shi’ites and Sunnis was untrue. Most Muslims value unity, and simply need some sort of motivation to work together said Fadlallah, suggesting a large scale collaborative project. He admitted that there were elements in the Arab community who wanted to promote discord, but that they were the extreme minority and did not represent Islamic views. For more information, please click here.

There are already articles on the web discussing the release of KDE 4.1 in the past tense, yet a quick look at the KDE website indicates that it has not yet been released to the public. Furthermore, the KDE techbase already has an article for any naysayers who might complain about new features (or lack of old ones) after installing it. This article beats them to the punch and tells them exactly what to expect and whether, if they don’t like what they should expect, they should stick with KDE 3.5.x.

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not criticizing the new propaganda machine at work. If anything, I think it’s brilliant and well played. I’ve been using the release candidate of 4.1, and I can tell you that it is phenomenal and will live up to the hype. It won’t please everyone, but it is revolutionary for desktop computing. There is nothing else like it on the market, not from Microsoft, not from Apple, not from Sun, and not even from Gnome.

Just some excerpts from a great article:

But is Barack taking his own advice? For he pledges to shift two U.S. combat brigades, 10,000 troops, out of Iraq and into Afghanistan, raising Americanforces in that country from 33,000 to 43,000.

For, without any visible strategy for victory, Barack is recommending thesame course LBJ took after the death of JFK. Johnson bombed North Vietnam in 1964, landed Marines in 1965 and built U.S. forces from 16,000 advisers on Nov. 22, 1963, to 525,000 troops in January of 1969.

The Soviet Union, whose 115,000-man army in Afghanistan reached more than twice the size of U.S.-NATO forces, even with the Obama surge, went home defeated in 1988. The Soviet Empire did not survive that humiliation.

Obama – and John McCain, who has endorsed the build-up – should, before committing any more combat brigades, explain how and when this war ends in an American victory. For as of today, the Afghan war resembles Vietnam far more than Iraq ever did.