Just a follow up to this image. It's a pity that the reds and the greens are pretty muted in the picture.

Just something I took today. Never came out that well - maybe I should have played about with some settings, but I was in a sort of rush.

There is also another accompanying image.

Photo of a blue minaret from Muscat, Oman.

This photo is taken and uploaded to Flickr by Lars under Creative commons BY SA 2.0 licence, and was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under the same terms.

Just reading a post from Islam in Europe that showed up on The Revival's Aggregator about Christmas becoming multicultural. Quoted from there:

In the Netherlands, the Christian Democratic party (CDA) is upset that municipalities are removing the Christian cross from Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas), in order to make him 'multi-ethnic' and a 'universal figure'.

Here's the thing - I doubt whether many muslims - or people of other faiths - care that christmas has links to christians/christianity.

I doubt any people of other faiths* will be offended if it remains linked christians.

This was taken from a small hillock near uhud - in the left of the picture you can see the graveyard of uhud where approximately 70 Sahabah are burried.

The green dome and minaret from the Prophet (saw)'s mosque.

I think I took this from the front of the mosque.

When I went to umrah a couple of years ago, I went to the cave where the Prophet used to meditate before the first revelation.

Naturally, what interested me the most was the monkeys.

(The cave of hira was immediately to my left.)

I managed to get an offer for Windows 7 Professional for £30 (as a download only version - it is available to all people who are "students" or teachers or have access to an email address ending in .sch.uk or .ac.uk and a few others too) and since my Vista installation was both slow and the install of Vista Service Pack two was constantly failing, I thought it would be a good offer to waste the money. I did and this post is being written from Windows 7 Professional.

Just imagine you have an illness and you are confronted by not one, but two doctors.

The first one after examination confirms your illness and gives you a bottle of pills - take one a day.

The second one then tells you to take twice the dosage.

You have two expert opinions here, so what do you do? One may be enough... but if it isn't, surely there is no harm in taking two? If there was, the second would not have prescribed that (I am assuming no malice and also no incompetence). So you take two, you get better.

The medication of the second doctor worked. News spreads, everyone starts taking two tablets instead of one. The same also happens for other medications.

Time for an uncoordinated brain fart. let's see where this goes. I am not even sure the title is right, but then again, having failure in there may become accurate...

Here goes the conundrum: People like success. People are human. Humans are prone to failure.

Pretty simple really. Added complications to that are that while there is a chance that success may breed happiness, failure on the other hand will almost definitely breed misery.

None of the above really matters. Onto engineering for failure.

When engineers work on something, they spend a large amount of time on structures and the majority of that again may be for things that are not used as they will be there to cover the possibilities leading to failure.