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Wednesday, July 06, 2005 ( 9:57 PM ) iggry Assalamu Alaikum I need to update my account! InshaAllah I will no longer be an IT worker, as come August my contract will end. I have accepted an assistantship at a local university, so I will return to the life of a struggling university student!! I am so excited for this opportunity and am greatly looking forward to it. It is impossible to describe how much Allah has blessed my life with this ability to transition. InshaAllah I will take that opportunity to start more consistantly publishing here. I feel like it will be much needed as I end up sorting through all sorts of changes. But for now, I am still an ex-IT worker turned ex-Islamic school teacher turned IT worker and have to pray Isha before I turn into a pumpkin. (I have an early bedtime!! ) # Tuesday, December 21, 2004 ( 11:03 PM ) iggry Assalamu Alaikum MashaAllah, It has been such a long time since I posted... I am still alive, and well. I was happily posting at work, and the following week the Security department had blocked all access to blogspot.com as a porn site! So ended my posting at work again. Sigh. Alhumdulillah, I am still working for a phone company, for almost 10 months now. I have moved into a more specialized area, which gives me more job security. To further divert myself, I am also still in the classroom teaching statistics. One night a week for 4 hours teaching isn't too bad, and I get the rest of the week as prep time. My heart is at school still, and I am starting to look for opportunities to go back and finish my degree. I am hoping this experience will help me get into a program with an teaching assistantship. InshaAllah... YAY!!! I passed my next belt test. Having a soon to be teenager, and with a blackbelt... I decided I better learn to keep up! So I signed up with his instructor and have worked my way to a green belt now in jui jitsu. I am graciously allowed into the advanced classes, and am learning some judo, karate, Brazilian Ju Jitsu, Fathery Ju Jitsu, Aikiedo, boxing, and some hooking (a type of wrestling, unfortunately, people who practice this style have been crassly labeled hookers). Just enough to employ the best technique for the situation... Our instructor, in traditional American form, is combining techniques from several styles, drilling us in each technique, and having us practice flow drills until it is second nature. He is more of a self defense instructor than a martial artist of any particular style. MashaAllah, my little one is growing to be a smart young man. (heh, he's only 18 months now, so InshaAllah he keeps on his straight path!). Sayang just called me over. She was brushing her teeth, and told him to stay out of the bathroom. When finished, somehow he had climbed into his crib and was tucking himself in! There are no nearby chairs, so we are both befuddled. I wish I could promise to keep posting, but will have to take this a little at a time... babies are just too fun to play with, and he has taken priority. I continue to remember many of you fondly, and will keep you in my prayers. # Friday, April 09, 2004 ( 11:18 AM ) iggry Assalamu alaikum Alhumdulilah, it is Friday!! It has been a long week... I didn't get all my preperation done for class on the weekend, so I was squeezing in time where ever I could find it. It made for a couple of late nights studying the material, so I was sleepy while teaching class. Not a fun experience... At my day job, a strike has been announced. All the employees will be reassigned to cover the work that the union employees usually do. Also, they will have to work 12 hour days, 7 days a week! I am sorta happy that I am a contractor. We get to man the offices, and pick up the workload of all the missing employees. InshaAllah, it will make my job more secure. I hope everything gets worked out, and back to business as usual quickly! Nothing new at home, our baby is growing so quickly! It is amazing how fast they get bigger. He is taking his first steps without holding on to someone. He has also decided that walking is better than crawling. He would rather walk around the edges of a room to get somewhere, than to crawl across the center of it :) Still he is so cute! My older kids get really excited to see him doing new things and growing, it is up-lifting for all of the family. I was disappointed with Friday Prayer last week. We had a different Iman, and he kept shouting. It was more like a political rally than a religious experience. Most of what he said was based on his opinions on recent news, with no religious application, and not that much support from Quran and Hadith. A politically motivated sermon has no place in the masjid, especially in light of this countries current events. Finally, he was shouting into the microphone that was adjusted for our usual quieter spoken imans, so the noise was often deafening. When someone causes a loss of hearing to get his opinion across then it is doing a dis-service to the community. # Friday, April 02, 2004 ( 10:59 AM ) iggry Assalamu Alaikum Alhumdulillah, I will get my poor little car back today with a nice new makeover! No more stinky dodge neon :) Also, my kids got back safely last night, and they had a good time. Class went well, eventhough I snowed a lot of people under, and finally it's FRIDAY!! (need I say more??) Anyway, some elaboration... My kids are on spring break, and so they spent 4 days in Chicago with their grandparents. They went to several museums, and were fascinated by the Museum of Natural History, along with the Science Museum. They got to stay in a hotel with a pool and go swimming every day. The hotel also had compliementary breakfast bar with a waffle machine. They loved adding stuff (nuts, chocolate or fruit) to their little portion of batter and making their own waffles. They had a good time and learned new things over spring break. My parents enjoyed their time running after two boys, and we enjoyed a quiet house with only baby to keep us busy. (which he does a very good job at!) Wheee!!! Class was fun. I got to do Binomial Distribution, Poisson Distribution and Hypergeometric Distribution and elaborate on how and when they are used. They were comfortable with Binomail and Poisson distribution, but when we got to hypergeometric; Many students had a pained lost and confused look on their face! The formula has 3 combinations amounting to 9 factorials and fractions in both the numerator and denominator. So I got to review factorials, and shortcuts to simplify, someone asked why a zero exponent meant the answer was one and I got to talk about the mathematical side of this class, my favorite part. For some reason when I offer to derive these nice beautiful formulas they start whimpering and crawling under the table?!? When I was hired, I was advised that this is a business class, and not a graduate statistics class so I should simplify the math and focus on the uses of statistics to managers, and not the actual proofs of the theorems. We did three examples of Hypergeometric distribution using state lotteries and potential winning combinations. Some of them were surprised to see the results when we started discussing the chances of winning (somewhere around 1 in 25 million). Woohoo! I got my book yesterday for teaching undergraduate statistics this summer! More books to read! # Wednesday, March 24, 2004 ( 9:05 AM ) iggry Assalamu Alaikum Wr. Wb. My car is finally in the shop being repaired after the accident. I made the appointment for monday, and they arranged for me to have a rental car. I showed up 5 minutes early, and waited around for almost a half hour but no rental car! So I head to work and call them explaining that I need a rental car or I can't drop my car off. They straighten out the rental car company and tell me they will make sure there is a car for me the next day. Tuesday, a guy meets me at the auto body shop at 7:05 and takes me to the rental car place and they give me a 2002 Dodge Neon (the car that smiles at you). Bleh, it is stinky! The people who rented it before me must have smoked like 2 packs a day in the car with the windows rolled up! After about 5 miles driving it my eyes were itchy and watering, and I was getting really congested! So these past two days, I have had the windows down when driving, and when the car is parked at home. It is slowly getting better. I want my old car back!! They estimate 9 business days before it is fixed, so I am counting down days now. YEA yesterday was Sayang's b'day, and i kept teasing her that she is the product of two consecutive primes years old. This may only happen 4 times in a person's lifetime if they are lucky! Aside from that, we didn't really do anything... We stopped celibrating birthdays after a Friday hutbah a few years ago. It was a fun Friday. Iman talked about how the Prophet (saw) didn't celibrate b'days and why we shouldn't do it now. Then right after prayer, I was talking to a couple of brothers, and some guy asked us to help him hang decorations on the walls. It room was starting to look festive and the buy pulls out this big "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" Sign! My friend and I look at each other and start laughing. We tried to gently tell him that today wasn't a good day to hang that sign up after the rousing sermon we just received. He looked confused, so we had to elaborate on the hutbah that was just given. I guess he wasn't paying too much attention, but he agreed not to hang up the sign. One week has past!!! My class last Thursday was wonderful! We whizzed through three chapters relating to why managers should know statistics, graphical representations, and elementary probability... It was (hopefully) review for most of the students, as most of them didn't have many questions. Alhumdulillah, I lived through my first day of teaching a graduate level class, and now I am getting excited about it. My free time has disappeared! I spend about an hour a night preparing for the class, reading the material, making notes and working out the homework to make sure that I have a very good understanding of what the question is asking, and how to solve it... I bet I'm doing more work than the students!! By the end of the class, I will have a good understanding of business statistics!! Well, work is going to get busier tomorrow, as the testing team will be testing 5 applications concurrently! It will be my first trial by fire! Hope everyone has a good day! # Wednesday, March 17, 2004 ( 4:24 PM ) iggry Assalamu alaikum Alhumdulillah, we bought a "new" car last saturday. It is actually a used car but it is new to us... Now poor sayang will not be stranded at home while I'm at work. She can take the kids out, go shopping, and all that wonderful stuff. Since I am about an hour away, we decided that it is safer for her to have transportation incase something serious happens, like me having to leave work to pick up a sick kid at school... Ha, now she gets that job :-) Argh, what have I done to myself. I start teaching tomorrow evening, and am nervous! I haven't taught people older than me before! InshaAllah, all will go well, and I can do a good job. I will be a graduate Business Statistics professor!?! It is still a scary thought... Tomorrow I get a day off! Take the car in to get repaired after the accident, take care of all the legal stuff in getting a new car such as license, insurance, safety inspections... Bleh, just give money away to get the governments permission to drive, how rude! Then, any extra time will be spent preparing for my lecture tomorrow. Sob, I got a ticket yesterday for driving too fast... I wasn't really driving too fast, but it is a wierd story. I take my kids to school, and there is this short cut through a rich neighborhood that a lot of people take. The speed limit has always been posted as 30mph. To discourage people from using the short-cut, the limit has been reduced to 20mph. I didn't see the new sign, and happily drove my usual 35mph, so I got stopped by a Mr. Police officer who told me the new speed limit, and gave me a speeding ticket. My beautiful perfect, mostly clean record is tarnished again! My last ticket was five years ago, when I was younger and more impulsive. Sigh # Thursday, March 11, 2004 ( 5:24 PM ) iggry Assalamu Alaikum, YEA, I got trained today in computer applications. I am still on a roller coaster emotionally, and need to sort my life out. I loved teaching at the school so much, and dearly miss my students. I am use to relating to them on a more childish level, which does not go well with a corporate environment. So now, I am finding that I have to grow up, and take work more seriously, and stop acting childish. I was one of three teachers who would play with the kids instead of being a spectator all the time and now I don't get recess any more. I have to get busy, and become more responsible again. Hey, I have another new job! Now I have two jobs to master!?! I am going to be the new Graduate Statistics "professors" at one of the universities around here. I can only put professor in quotes because I don't have a PhD yet, but hopefully this will help in my pursuit of it. I have to teach on Thursdays from 5:30 to 9:30pm, one class. If I do well, I will get more classes and more students, so i have been learning business statistics. But since class starts next thursday, i need to become more serious in my own studies so I can be ready to teach it. I am both excited, and scared, going from 8-13 year olds, to 25-35 year olds. I don't think extra recess will make them happy... I spoke to the friendly gentleman who hit me, and he is still doing OK. He has already contacted his insurance company and provided them with the details, so i still need to wait for the police report before anything else can be done... It is re-assuring that he is being responsive and helpful... I hope for the best for him even if he did try to run my poor lil' car over. # |
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