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bye bye, Mana Beast

Roughly twelve years since the first time, and three years after starting to replay it, I beat Secret of Mana again. I wish the game could go on for longer. Poo.

did Buddhism go the faulty path?

Something struck me as odd this morning, and it might just have to do with my ignorance on the subject.

In today's Express, there was a blurb on some fifteen-year-old boy (Buddha Boy) who disappeared in March and just recently reappeared. Before then, he was famous for allegedly meditating for ten months without food and water. Many people thought he was the reincarnation of Buddha (which other monks who investigated decided he was not).

And that's what struck me: the belief that Buddha is reincarnated [each generation]. I was under the impression that Buddha was enlightened, and enlightenment meant breaking free of the cycle of reincarnation?

After his death, various scripts were canonized by way of religious scholarship (like Catholicism and hadith in Islam being two other prominent examples in my mind), and I'm guessing it was at this stage that the idea of 'angels' in Buddhism were introduced, which are beings who are enlightened but decide to stay on earth to help humans? Something like that.

I'm always perplexed that a certain way of thinking can take hold in any religion and somehow shape/enslave a vast majority of adherents, despite a line of reasoning that's contrary to what the original intentions were or seem to be. In the case of Catholicism and Islam, the fight over what God wants has a huge 'reward': namely, power. The fact that humans would even attempt to presume how to prescribe worship and give punishment on God's unspoken will is ridiculous, but as is the case with humans, there will always be those that work to manipulate for power. Religion or no religion.

Buddhism, as I see it, doesn't have any of the social, geographical, and political reach of Catholicism and Islam, so I'm wondering why mythology crept into Buddhist canon. To become more appealing to others?

Buddha reached nirvana, yet his followers have tainted Buddha's memory such that his soul hasn't yet achieved that peace. But it has – it's the basis for Buddhism. It's confusing and sad.

I wish Muhammad was back to set Islam right. It all went downhill with his death.

It's the same story in so many different ways. Everyone is just fighting to be right. Whatever.

a 360 christmas

This year's Christmas celebration has been eye-intensive. We got Mohammed Gears of War for Xbox 360 and Mohammed and I have been playing it on and off for a few hours. I've never been a big fan of first-person shooters (at least not to buy), but Gears of War has sucked me in. My only gripe is that I don't know the basis of the story and the action never seems to stop, so I don't know what I'm fighting towards (but we're apparently close to getting the sonic resonator installed).

Right now most people are watching some Iranian movie while I do some work. My teeth are dying to be brushed. Too much tea and soda.

I like not working too much. Sigh.

I can’t not post this

I can't stop watching either. (Update: taken down from YouTube. Available at NBC.)

One: cut a hole in a box

the bigger comedown

There's nothing more crushing to work than having your project – which you thought would open up everyone's eyes to your talents and open doors to more challenging roles, which you've spent so many hours on – tossed in the garbage by others in a matter of minutes.

skipping Atlantic City

There's an entry in draft mode that, unfortunately, won't see public light. The jokes I meant to tell in it just don't work in writing. You had to be there, as Aristotle once quipped. That's Aristotle Polly-Anderson, the famed street sleeper.

What am I saying. I'm exhausted, my eyes are exhausted, and I feel nauseous. Two out of those three would be a reason to generally not go into work. And yet…

I played bowling on a Wii yesterday at the holiday potluck (I also spent over three hours the night before baking a cake that maybe two or three people ate; it's delicious, btw). I want one. I especially want the boxing game. We (meaning me, Asma, and Mohammed) went to Dave & Buster's two weeks ago and there was a virtual boxing game with weighted gloves. Two games were so strenuous, but it was so fun. If I can do that at home I can shape up and not let my body waste away.

Asma and I are having foot problems. Mine was restarted after Saturday. Hers started this morning. I triggered something two or three years ago, because this happens every several weeks now. When insurance kicks in on December 31, I'm going to see the doctor for:

  • sleep issues (and any possible ties to my body's lack of response to caffeine and amphetamines)
  • potential stress fractures in both feet
  • I think those are the two major things

Crap coffee time.

summary of absence

If I could compress things in an easy-to-follow and detailed manner, I would. But perhaps the biggest reason for taking the site down in the first place is not having the time/space to rework it or give regular updates. The past few weeks have been the only stretch of relatively low work, hence the site coming back with 3–4 days of work.

I tried to start the redesign process in May (or was it April?), but that didn't happen. Part of the work involved a color palette, and the other part involved some tweaking the logo. The Illustrator file collected dust until last week, but when I got the motivation to get back into it, I took the color palette without any edits.

So what's new? Asma and I had our third anniversary last month! It's hard to believe three years have gone by that fast. And at the same time we feel like we've been together longer. There's a huge pile of missed outings and vacations I need to make good on, though. I am bad with that.

We also have three new additions to our family: Penelope and Proud Feather (parakeets) in March, and Mishti (chinchilla) in October. Penelope and Proud Feather are roughly a year old now, and Mishti is a tiny five months. She's an absolute sweetheart. She sleeps in the most ridiculously cute ways, and I'm wondering if that's just a baby thing, because I never see Shirin in those positions. She also lost a finger on Thanksgiving, but that's for another time.

My dad was in Bangladesh the first half of the year on a Fulbright scholarship, which was pretty awesome for him. My mom has been in Bangladesh since June, but she's coming back to the states today. In fact, she should be touching down in O'Hare in four-ish hours if things have gone well. My brother is going to Argentina for a year starting in February (study abroad) and will visit in a couple of weeks. I guess it hasn't sunk in that he'll be leaving for so long, but thinking about it is weird.

My in-laws are doing good. Asma's grandma and two aunts came from Iran last Tuesday. We all went to Atlantic City yesterday, which in a lot of ways was a waste of time and not a good idea [for me at least, because I was supposed to interview Reza Aslan yesterday and couldn't], but there were a few high points. That will be another post [today].

Work-wise, things are going alright. The CulturalConnect was just redesigned/relaunched in October and is over a year old. The 3–4 months that led up to that point were really stressful. But I'm now on my 'break' (which, since I don't have a backup, means I just need to make sure the magazines go out on time and fix any big problems). I'm interviewing a designer today, and if that works out that will be a fairly big burden off me.

AARP work has, until recently, been really slow/non-existent (the same situation I had last year which led me to quit). But I've taken on a project (rewriting and updating the project calendar we currently use in Ruby on Rails), and that's been keeping me happy, even if getting setup with and learning RoR was a painful experience.

Powhound.com is on the verge of launching. The project was started in November of 2005, and for various reasons is just now wrapping up. I am excited.

Binding my work in the last year has been my application framework (dubbed qkFrame), which got its experimental start with Powhound. That was a painful process as well, resulting in me burning myself out to get it in a working state while going through our cushion money because I wasn't being paid by the hour (i.e. – I got OCD with it and wasn't focused on finding regularly paying work). I ended up re-writing large portions of it prior partly during the TCC relaunch to make it more flexible and easy to manage. The current iteration is nice, but I've gotten some ideas from RoR to make the next significant update much better.

I've found that Rails is, on the whole, hype. Having worked with my own framework, it's hard to wrap my brain around the big picture of Rails, because I've built my own solution that does the same thing. In some ways, Rails is easier for people who've never really developed a cohesive application to get into that realm (but the installation process could literally waste several days of your life). Otherwise, I just don't see a significant advantage to it. Maybe other frameworks haven't been designed to be easy like that. I think qkFrame has the potential to be big for PHP.

And now there's today. I have a lot of posts I need to read through and tag [or hide, if it's too embarassing]; this will be an undertaking for the next few weeks.

Obviously, this is all just a view from space of the last eleven months. We still need a major vacation. Stories and details will come as they come to mind. Hope everyone has fared well in these times.

the long goodbye

Hi everyone, I'm back.