Random Ruminations of My Mind

i’m not feeling very high today… my phone died last night. i paid $400 for a Treo 650, a nice PDA phone, touchscreen, palm OS, etc… and yesterday it died, after 4 good months. so sad. i should be the one to blame tho. here’s what happened:

I forgot to charge my phone the night before, so the battery was dead. Not knowing that, I took my phone to work yesterday and thereafter realized what the problem was. So when I was going home in the evening, I thought “hmm, maybe i should use the car charger to charge up my phone”… even though that very same car charger overheated itself (but not the phone) the last time i used it, i was stupid enough to plug it in again. This time, however, i wasn’t lucky because it seems now that whole charging circuitry is messed up. My phone doesn’t turn on. I tried every single reset method i found online, and still nothing.

So now I think i’m going to have to buy a new phone. The timing couldn’t have been better actually. Get this, my cell phone plan with fido ends March 10, 2007. So that’s like right around the corner. Fido has the worst phones out there. Rogers has some really nice phones like the Sony Ericsson w810i (pictured to the right). Its got a 2.0 MP camera and it syncs with Outlook too. FM Radio, MP3 player, and it looks really slick. Anyways, you might be thinking, ‘but wait, rehan, if you change your carrier from fido to rogers, you’re going to lose your number!’ On the contrary, starting March 14, 2007, cell phone numbers are TOTALLY portable from one carrier to another. So yeah, things couldn’t have worked out better. Well, if my phone was still alive, that would be nice, but whatever. To new beginnings! With a new phone, a new carrier, and a new cell phone plan!

So as most of you (or some at least) know, I went for Hajj this past year, during the winter break. I left on the 22nd of December and returned on January 9, 2007. It was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had in my life. Just standing in front of the Kaa’ba in Makkah, seeing it for the first time, there are no words to describe the emotions that overcame me. You see pictures of it all your life, you pray towards it 5 times a day, but standing in front of it, supplicating to Allah at his doorstep, its just indescribable. I would definitely recommend anyone to go as soon as they have the financial means, especially if you are in your 20s. This way you can truly enjoy the experiences that the Hajj has to offer.

So anyway, as you may have guessed, I took my cameras there also. And yes, i say cameras, plural. I took both my big, heavy SLR with a couple of lenses as well as my point and shoot camera. I probably should have only taken the p&s because there are no cameras allowed inside the mosques. Not really sure why. But a lot of people slipped a camera passed security. Many people also had cameras on their phones. So there were many people taking pictures of the kaa’ba. Admittedly, I also took some pictures with my p&s. I wish I had my SLR with me, because I think they would have come out really well. But my S1 did a decent job as well. I will be posting some of those pictures on my photo blog in the near future. BTW, the picture on the right was taken with my camera phone from the top floor of masjid al-haram in Makkah.

So back to work in a few days. Tuesday that is. Not looking forward to it. Need a little more vacation. Time to think, time to ponder, a little more time to ruminate. So much has happened over the past few days that I feel like I need a some time to reflect, introspect. Prioritize my life, if you will. I dunno…