Instructions of the Student

Abu Bakrah reported , I heard Prophet (pbuh) saying:

“You should be a scholar, or a student , or a listener, or a lover of ’ilm and you should not be the fifth which makes you perish.

’Ata said Mis’ar said to me:You added a fifth point which we do not have.

The fifth point is: To hate ’Ilm and its people” -(at Tabarani;Al-Bazzar)

Just completed reading this book Instruction of the Student:The Method of Learning which has been in my watch list for some time, but due to the unavailability at Amazon, I placed an order from another online bookstore and received it last week .The book where the original Arabic version known as Ta’lim al-Muta’allim-Tariq at-Ta’allum was written by Imam Zarnuji and translated to English by G.E Von Grunebaum .

The book was divided into 13 chapters started with a foreword from the famous American Islamic scholar Hamza Yusuf .Full of beautiful poetry (OK I am NO expert in poetry but I imagined it would be beautiful IF I can read the original Arabic transcript + I understood Arabic!) about knowledge , Imam Zarnuji compiled the wisdom of Muslim scholars during his travel in many Islamic countries during the glorious day.Though the length of 64 pages can considered as a short book, the contents covered is enormous touched a wide subjects of seeking ilm — from adab, perserverance , the “real purpose” , relying to God, finding best time , improving memory and others.

Looking back, now I understand why at times I failed in striving to attain knowledge – a mental block? maybe barred in my understanding subjects learnt due to missing the [proper] methods of learning.

An article in SeekingIlm had a brief review about this book in a subject of improving brain function in seeking knowledge.Interesting!

About being ignorant

Upon reading a book on a flight back to Riyadh recently, I stopped to ponder the following quote from a Neil Postman book Technopoly.

Based on old adage (some attributed this to Mark Twain)

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail

And Neil Postman in his book extended it to :-

To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list .
To a man with a camera everything looks like an image.
To a man with a computer everything looks like data and to a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number.

A good friend of mine used to say .. to his manager he was just a name in Excel sheet!

Leo Lionni’s Book

One of Imran’s weekly homework is book reading -so 2 times a week ( I think!) he would come to one of us with a book and read it loud. For his age, the teacher always give an easy to read book with simple vocabularies. Its really amazing to see my son can actually “read” on his own now – I told him that one day I will start buying some comics on his favourite hero Spiderman comics if he continues to improve his reading skills.

One day he brought this thin book “A Colour of His Own” and ummi was impressed by the illustration and the story line. Ummi showed me and found out later that the author Leo Lionni also wrote other books which was given impressive recommendation at Amazon and won some awards too. So, I did my “usual” research and found out where to get it cheap (Ebay lah!!) and later ordered 10 of Leo Lionni for just USD9.99+ shipping.

Parents .. Check it out — the graphics was amazing , colourful but simple and the storyline always came with good morals.

Essays of Paul Graham

Have you heard about Paul Graham before?
You should!
Go visit his website and read his essays .

also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham
Quote
In 1995 Graham and Robert Morris founded Viaweb, the first Application service provider. Viaweb’s software (written largely in Common Lisp) let users make their own Internet stores. In the summer of 1998 Viaweb was sold to Yahoo! for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, valued at $49.6 million. [1] At Yahoo! the product became Yahoo! Store.Graham has an A.B. from Cornell and a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard, and studied painting at Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

He is the author of the book Hackers and Painters:Big Ideas of the Computers Age – you can read most of the contents (for free!) from the link above.

After reading some of his essays I am having a second thought about few things in my life:-
1. I should read/learn about history, philosophy other things that can enrich life. Darn! I used to memorised name of inventors (Baird, Newton, Wright&Co) and read Mohandas Karamchand Mahatma Gandhi (see I can write his full name without using Google!) , Nehru, when I was 9!

2. How I should love problems?.

3. Haha I am reading Freakonomics
now, the first ever book that I have ever bought with the title ended with “nomics” – Very freaky!

4. Start a startup? Wow! What a start!—berapa banyak start daa..

5. Find out why I screwed up at the university ?

6. I want to learn to write-my writing sucks!

Time Management for System Administrator

Being a big fan of O’Reilly’s books, I visited the website regularly looking for anything from open source articles,news and of course new titles.

I came across the above title and thinking of getting it from the recent International Book Fair at PWTC but sadly; to no avail—I couldn’t even find the distributor’s booth there! .
So, I placed an online order at MPH but was informed the very next day that it was out of stock and it will take 2-3 months if I were to pre-order the book. Not wanting to give up (yet), I went to Kinokuniya” and maybe it was my day, there was 1 copy of the book at the bookshelf.(I received the book later on Friday)

What so interesting about this time management book?
I have been a system/network engineer for almost 10 years (darn! Did I say 10?) now included was a 1 year fulltime system/network administrator work at Fibrecomm.
For those years, I have to admit what concerned me most (until recently) were purely technical —most of the books on my book shelves ranges from protocols, Cisco boxes, UNIX/Linux,certification, automations and securities. None of them were about time/project management (though I just bought Scott Berkun’s Art of Project Management today)—not that I totally neglected/ignored the importance of it, but there was NO book on the topic that could possibily relate (well enough and worth buying!) to the job that I am currently doing .
In this book Limoncelli shared ideas based on his years of experiences at Bell Labs as system administrator—things like how to handle interruptions, simple routines that helps, to-do lists, tools , documentations and my current favourite topic—Automation!

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