Month: January 2005

Defending Islam

“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

I couldn’t agree more.

Applying this to the case of Islam in the world, I think one of the things harming it these days is the number of clueless people who think they are qualified to defend it.

These people who go on and try to portray themselves as scholars of Islam when they basically don’t have the necessary background or knowledge for it are just making things worse everytime they open their mouths.

People should be really careful about the arguments they use, the sensitive points they touch upon and the details they try to get into because what started as them trying to defend a cause or a belief could turn into them doing the complete opposite.

It’s great that people are passionate about their religion and want to defend it, but standing up and talking for a religion is a great responsability and before they do that they should learn as much as they can about it and only talk about issues they have researched very well so they can be able to get into more detail, answer questions and deny false claims.

The same applies to every other cause or belief.
Believing isn’t enough. You have to know the history of it, the why, the when, the where, the circumstances, the details, everything to be able to strongly defend it and stand up for it.

Tunisia 2005 Handball World Championship

Handball World Championship 2005 - TunisiaThe Handball World Championship has been taking place in Tunisia ever since January 23rd.

Most of the matches are being held in the newly constructed Rades indoors stadium and in the Menzah indoors stadium.

The Tunisian team has been doing pretty great and tonight was their last match in the first round putting them first in their group after defeating Angola, Canada and Denmark, and tying with France and Greece.

I wish the Tunisian team the best of luck in the second round and hopefully they’ll go on doing a great job and improving their game more.
They’ve made us all very proud already.

I also love the logo they made for this championship. It’s really simple, straightforward and nice.

For more information on the championship, check out the official Tunisia 2005 Handball World Championship site.

Changing Stuff

For some time now I’ve been playing around with different elements in Subzero Blue, and I still plan to go on changing things (to the better, I hope).

Some of you have noticed the changes, some of you haven’t.
So just in case you’re among the people who haven’t, here’s what’s changed.

– I’ve added an About page with some info about me and the site. And for those who are interested, a picture of me.

– I’ve moved some main navigational elements to a new horizontal menu that I’ve created beneath the header.

– I’ve added the 5 most recent comments to the sidebar.

– I’ve added 4 random pictures pulled from my photolog to the sidebar.

– I’ve moved the Linklog to the sidebar and migrated it to a faster script.

– I’ve added a footer for the site and moved the information I feel belongs there to it.

– I’ve been playing around with some design elements here and there.

– I’ve been experimenting with some text ads and where to place them without annoying the readers. So, soon you’ll be seeing less ads in better places.

If you have any feedback or any suggestions, please do not hesitate to share them with me. I’d love to hear your ideas.

If I Were…

If I were a musical instrument, I’d be an acoustic guitar.
If I were a song, I’d be “Somewhere Over The Rainbow / What A Wonderful World” by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.
If I were a word, I’d be “Friend”.
If I were a colour, I’d be blue.
If I were a home, I’d be a country house.
If I were a place, I’d be a tropical island.
If I were a car, I’d be a 4×4.
If I were an animal, I’d be an eagle.
If I were a fruit, I’d be an apple.
If I were a blog, I’d be Subzero Blue.

PalestineBlogs

It’s always a delight to see a new pro-Palestine blog being born, and this time it comes in the form of PalestineBlogs.

This new blog is an effort by our friend Sabbah, and it will provide users with a comprehensive overview of Palestine’s current and previous issues; news clippings; reblog news; a debate forum and a lot more.

It seems that some invitations will be sent to some pro-Palestine bloggers to join the editing team, which I think is a really great idea.

So, good luck to PalestineBlogs.
You can always count on me to help in anyway that I can.

Reader’s Requests: The Answers

So, it’s finally Friday and it’s time for me to answer the questions and suggestions that I got over the past week.

So I’ll be answering the questions one by one in the order I got them.

Saoirse:
i want to know your full name:)
How old are you? how many brothers and sisters do you have?
How come you are the only one who gets to post threads?!!!
Who did you vote for in superstar2?(if anybody at all!)
What is your favourite tunisian plate?
How come your wife is so sweet??:)

 

Continue reading Reader’s Requests: The Answers

Man Begs Wife’s Forgiveness In $17,000 Ad

Hmmmm….

When five dozen roses didn’t work, an estranged husband took out a full-page $17,000 newspaper ad to ask his wife for forgiveness.

“Please believe the words in my letter, they are true and from my heart,” read the ad in Tuesday’s edition of The Florida Times-Union. “I can only hope you will give me the chance to prove my unending love for you. Life without you is empty and meaningless.”

Larry, who declined to give his last name, sent the $17,000 apology to Marianne, his wife of 17 years. She left him almost two weeks ago, he said.

Larry, who lives in Orlando, said his wife is staying with her parents near Jacksonville. But they blocked him from entering their gated community and she changed her cell phone number so he can’t contact her.

[Via: CNN]

Now, I know some people are gonna think this is so romantic, sweet and stuff. But I personally think it’s total madness!

This guy has obviously been watching way too many cheesy hollywood romance movies.

Jailed For Using A Nonstandard Browser

A Londonder made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx — a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others — on Sun’s Solaris operating system.

British Telecom, the site-operator, misread an access log and saw it as a non-standard browser not identifying it’s type and doing strange things. They decided that this “unusual” event in the system log indicated a hack-attempt, traced the user’s IP and had the police go in SWAT style to arrest the donor while he was having his lunch.

The man is out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR for BT and the Police.

I think this is very dumb of British Telecom. They should know better than that.

Anyway, there’s one more good reason to move to Firefox. Either you do or you risk being arrested and jailed 😛

[Via: Boing Boing]
[In The News: BBC News]

Google Video

Google have just launched a beta of one of their new services Google Video.

The service archives televised content transcripts and screenshots, and enables you to search through them.
It seems that soon they’ll also be providing video files of the shows.

For this test period, only a small amount of programming from a limited number of channels is included in the search results. But new content will be indexed daily and more channels will be added in the near future.

I think this is a cool and very interesting service, anyway I would also like to see Google expand it a bit further to include search of other video content lying around on the internet, like Yahoo’s video search.