Today my mom made one of my favourite dishes: Dal Gosht. It’s dal with meat, for those of you who don’t know. It goes great with rice and some salad. I’ve been eating too much almost daily nowadays, now that my mom is here to spoil me! And my weight is going up really really fast.

I’m getting confused and tense over the Qt/GTK+ programming issue. I still haven’t decided on which one to use and the fact that GNOME uses GTK only for it’s UI makes things even worse. I must choose something within the next few days. To that end, I spent a lot of time today looking at various web sites which document these toolkits as well as GNOME.

I finally met up with Siddiqi today! We went to Mosadia Plaza, which is another one of my birth places :)) That’s where I upgraded my computer from, and that is where Siddiqi might buy his next PC from. I introduced him to the guy there, and together we decided on his next PC. Modem update: After I got my modem to work in linux, it didn’t work in Windoze! Damn! So I had to remove it again and re-enable Plug and Pray. Then it worked in Windows but NOT in linux. I was about ready to pull my hair out. I decided to disable the Plug and Play feature on the motherboard using the BIOS and disabled PnP on the modem as well. Then, I deleted the COM2 port in Windows and restarted the computer. Somehow (I’m still not sure how or why) it worked and now my modem works in both OSes. That’s a good thing, since I don’t have much hair to begin with!

Whenever I go to Mosadia I am tempted by the smells in the air emanating from the Al Baik Broasted Chicken restaurant and from the Donut shops. Yes, everytime I go there I NEVER leave without eating a donut. They are always so soft and fresh. Even the guys at the computer shops expect me to come in at any moment with a donut in my hand (or my mouth)!

Later we went to the Megastar music store, where we looked around and I listened to Sarah McLachlan’s latest, Mirrorball. It is SO excellent! And Siddiqi wanted to buy the new Backstreet Boys, but we wanted to use his special member card, so we decided to wait until next time. He came to my new house then, and we got on the Internet looking for fonts for his project since he had forgotten to copy them. My mom made tea and brought some other stuff along with it. My good friends in Cyprus actually bought a cream/custard pie for me in Cyprus and sent it along with Siddiqi! That was really sweet of you, guys, I liked that a lot! I finally got my hands on the excellent Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. This book has won several awards for its excellence and it is one of the few eye-opening books in computer science today. Thank you very much, Darryl.

As I was writing this a while ago, my mom came and tried really hard to understand what I was doing. She tried to read what was on the screen but she couldn’t, so I had to explain to her what I was doing. When she found out that I was writing about what I ate today, she got really excited and shouted at the computer: Stew! Stew! Tell them I’ll make stew for you tomorrow. That was really sweet.