It's the time, again...

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Some pure music

I have many things to talk about, but not much time right now! I'll talk about all of them later! Tonight, I'm just in the mood to play a very... soul shaking music. Hopefully you must be listening to it by now! It is an Irianian theme, played by an instrument called "se-tar".

I should mention that I got this music from here.

Enjoy it!

*** Update 1/31/2006 *** My dear friend Ar... um... Semiadam mentions that it's played by "Tar", not "se-tar". I guess he maybe right, although I'm not sure. For now, it's "Tar"! Thanks Ar... um... Semiadam!!!

From comments:
semiadam said...
It's played by TAR, I think! the name is NOBAHAR, and the performer is BAHMAN BASHI

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Why are we here ??

I found a question today in YAHOO! Answers (Check it out! You can ask a question and get fast answers from real people! And you can answer other people's questions! COOL!) which got my attention! I started answering it and then I realized that I can put my arguments here. What do you think about this question (and my answer to it)?! Give your answers in comments!

Question: Why are we here ?? Mankind on earth ??

My answer:
From a scientific point of view, There should be a set of conditions all present to generate intelligent life. For example, there should be a star (sun) and a planet orbiting around it in a very specific distance to produce the correct temperature for the carbon molecules to be combined and produce more complex molecules (such as proteins and amino acids) and a lot of time (about 5 million years) for the evolution process to succeed so on... And a lot of chance! (What would have happened if that ape who had a genetic evolution, perhaps from a cosmic ray hitting his father's sperms, had died before mating? Then maybe the human beings were looking much different, or worse, intelligent life could have been postponed for another 2 million years, which by that time our sun could be much brighter, and the settings for intelligent life would exist no more! As you see, there is a LOT of fortunate random circumstances involved here). Scientists believe that only our planet earth has such a set of conditions satisfied. And since it had them, life should have started anyway.

Now you can ask is it possible that only planet earth has this specific set of conditions in the whole universe?! Good question, that many people are searching for answers for! Just search SETI in google.

Now, I believe that all of this great chain of conditions being satisfied is not random, and there should have been some cause to bring us into being. People call it God's will. Now if you ask why he made us, here and in the way that we are (humans), nobody exactly knows!!

But there is an answer provided in holy books. God says (as those books state) that he made us so that we know him, appreciate his creation and praise him.

At least this is what philosophers have figured out up to now (or better to say, what I have figured out from what they have figured out!)

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Oh, Good Old Reminiscences!

It's interesting how old memories can come back to you in a flash! So easily!

Let's start by saying that there is a certain project going on in our group which conducts some research on the reliability analysis of Symbian smartphones, such as many Nokia and Sony-Ericsson models. They have developed a resident program which after being installed on a smartphone, logs the occurrences of system crashes and their reported reasons. Anyway, these guys give 75$ to anyone who has such a handset and is willing to install this program on his/her handset. Now since I recently got one of these prepaid cell phones (which initially is cheap, but the cost of talking is really high! Even if someone calls me, I have to pay the full price! This is the land of capitalism my friend!), I went on ebay and searched for a cheap Symbian phone, and I found this nice Nokia 3660. Well, I previously had a 3650, and it was a good phone, so I ordered it immediately and it arrived yesterday. Fortunately the sim card from the crappy cheap phone worked in the new one (although I have not yet been able to setup the internet connectivity correctly). So, after I started it, the first logical move is to change the ringing tune from the default NOKIA tune to a different one (Don't we all do that as the first step?!).

Now here comes the magical moment!!! As I browsed through the different tunes, I remembered my old friends... All my friends whom I've loved. No, I'm not just talking about a girlfriend or two (although I mean that as well! LOL), I'm talking about ALL my friends! I miss all of them so much! The reason I was reminded of them all is that I used to set a ringing tone to each one of my close friends back then, and now as I browsed through the ringing tunes, I remembered them all!
To be honest, that time period which I had my 3650 handset was absolutely the best part of my life! Just after I was graduated from my undergrad and got accepted into the masters program... Not only I had my friends from undergrad, but I found a lot of wonderful new friends from an educational institute I worked in (called Perspolis), and then all the new friends from my M.S. University! And then some very special people... :D

Since I'm in such a romantic mode now, let me introduce you to a good site. I'm sure a fan of classical music, and Chopin's piano pieces are some of the best "romantic" musics. So, I found this website which has some of his piano pieces in midi format. I definitely recommend Fantasy, Heroic, IMPFANT, Polonaise, Revetude and Sonata2X . This last one is really impressive, slow beat but soul-moving! And don't forget the Winter wind etude, which is absolutely brilliant!

Today we started the first dance practice for "eid e norooz" ceremonies! You know, we try to keep our culture alive here. It's interesting that there are so many "second-generation" kids here who cannot talk in their "root" language, but are much more enthusiastic about the norooz ceremony that we are!!! Really interesting! Anyway, this year as my first year here, I'm going to participate in an "Armani" dance, which is very upbeat and kind of like Azeri dance. Fortunately for me, I had started to go to gym a couple of weeks ago! Otherwise I would have fainted today! (Oh, I'm so proud of myself now! :D )

Oh, By the way, the Tango is going on really good!

Last but not the least, the new semester has started, and I got 3 courses for this semester! It's not a wise move, I know! It's loads of work, and considering the research work I'm doing, it's going to be a nightmare! But, I'm more stubborn than this! I'll make it (hopefully)!

The picture you see here is some kind of an advertisemnt for a scarf my sister has woven lately! I guess I can be an advertisement star!!!

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Spam, Spam, and yet more Spam!

Before I start this post, I want to tell you that my weblog is now rss-enabled! What this means for you is that you no longer need to check my weblog once in a while to see if it's updated. Instead, it will come to you whenever it is updated! So, what you need to do is to click on the image on the right hand-side of this weblog (Sometimes this same image is already shown in the address bar above, look right now! If it's there, click it right now and you're done!). When in the new page, look at the address bar of your browser, you should see the same image there. Now click on this image and follow the instructions. In the Firefox browser, a bookmark icon is added (below the address bar). Whenever you click on it, a small menu opens there showing of there is any new posts here. That simple!

Note that for this to work, your browser needs to support rss. Firefox has this capability already (It's absolutely a gorgeous browser! Much much better than Microsoft's Internet Explorer! Download it, it's free!). For those who still use Microsoft's Internet Explorer, it doesn't support rss (yet, it is due for the next version), you can use stand-alone news readers. (Also there are many add-ins for both Internet Explorer and Firefox to make them manage rss feeds better.)

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I'm sure it's something you all have to face with in a daily manner. Spam emails fill our inbox folders and take a lot of our productive time to be deleted manually. Ofcoarse there are auto-filters such as the ones in yahoo email (junk folder) that do this chore manually, but they're not perfect either. Lot's of spam emails find their way to my inbox folder and sometimes important emails I'm waiting for end up being filtered!

Usually most of them are harmless advertisements, but today I got a very interesting one! It was from a firearms seller, who was advertising his grenades and guns! Ofcoarse they're legal in this country to possess, but I'm not such a guy to feel comfortable with a grenade in my drawer!

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I was always wondering why my freezer is always full of things I don't know... So earlier this night I went to check to see what stuff I have there... Well it was reasonable, 2 packs of meat, 4-5 packs of chicken, 3 packs of turkey, 27 packs of grinded meats, 7 packs of ... excuse me!!! 27 packs of grinded meat?! How did they end up there?! More important than that, what should I do with 27 packs of grinded meat?!! It seems that I have to eat grinded meat for the rest of this semester!

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I end this post with a picture of my cluttered desktop! The first person who finds my lost Algorithms textbook in this picture will win an Ipod!!!

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Getting used to light!

You know, maybe it's not such a bad thing! I'm getting used to it! The last time it happened was when I was in Brazil for a conference. It happened when I was eating my breakfast in the hotel's restaurant. I was really surprised! Now this time it occured while I was running on a treadmill today, in the gym. I didn't get that much surprised this time however! You see, I'm getting used to it.

So you wonder what am I talking about?! I'm talking about seeing the luminous and radiant face of the president on TV!!! (Come on, you know which president I'm talking about!). It's so common seeing his face on TV these days that I get to see him even while running at the gym!

Any way, now I'm home and am trying to work on a paper. There was a milonga tonight that I just canceled in the last minutes (i.e. 10 minutes ago!) and decided to stay home and work. Now I'm sitting here, with my beautiful glass of cranberry juice (which I admit resembles other things! Yet I assure you that it's only pure cranberry juice!) typing these lines! Here's a photo of this beautiful glass, enjoy!

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Don't sleep today!

I woke up today (yesterday?!) by a very loud thumping on the door, at exactly 9:40 in the morning! Having slept for only 5 hours, I jumped out of the bed and put on my jeans and opened the door only to find an old man standing at the door. It turned out that he was the pest-control agent of my apartment and wanted to do a routine job of pesticiding the apartment. Ok, back to the story... When I opened the door almost still sleeping and with my eyes almost closed, I asked him to enter and do his job. When he was entering and on his way to the kitchen, he looked at me in a strange way and said: "Did you know that it's 58 degrees out there?! You should not sleep in such a morning!". Oh God, now even the pest-control man tells me when to sleep and when not to!

To be honest, It was a nice weather for a winter day! I eventually went out with two of my friends to a nearby park and played football (or soccer, as they prefer!).

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This game is fantastic!

Remember the old days when we played "table soccer"?! Oh those days!

If you want to experience the thrill again, go this website and play their "miniball" game! It's absolutely fantastic, I guarantee it personally!

I again sleeped up to 1 PM! Thanks God for hollidays, but I have to get on schedule again since my classes are going to start in a week...

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An impudent nation?!

I must admit that coming from a culture where public nudity is not normal in any way, So I still have some problems here when I confront a nude person, specially when that nude person I see is a male! Let me tell you an exprerience I had today... So, I was going to the gym with a friend this evening. Upon our arrival in the men's locker room, I was suddenly confronted with an oriental boy covered only with... nothing! I guess I was stunned for a moment, just as my friend was, and then we tried not to react and went on changing our clothes. And the guy stood there shamelessly the whole time! Now I don't want to sound like a dogmatic person, but I have never seen such an act from guys who are from other nationalities. To worsen this situation, when our workout finished some 60 minutes later and we got back to the locker room, I found another oriental guy standing near our lockers. I joked to my friend that hopefully this oriental guy is not the same as the first one, so don't worry! We changed our clothes and when I kneeled down to fasten my shoelaces, I was suddenly confronted with this other guy's ... behind! Again fully naked!

So, I guess I'm allowed to derive a logical result here... Is their culture such different than ours or these two were just shameless samples?!

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An UN-Glourious day!!!

Ok, here I am again!
For the first time in my life I've been stood up! You know, it really doesn't feel OK, actually it sucks!

To be honest, I somehow guessed that it would happen this way! You know why?! Because I was arrested (sort of) earlier today! A really funny story! One of my friends called me this afternoon and we decided to go out to play badminton and do some jogging. So he came to pick me on his way, and he had his mom accompanying him. Any way, we went to some open field and my friend parked his car in the field, like a 100 feet away from the parking lot. We went out and jogged and talked and by the time we came back to leave, a police car arrived! There was some interrogations (fortunately not for me!) and we were finally free to go. Now here comes the interesting part. The cop told us that he got suspected because other than our car being parked into the field, my friend had come there to jog with his mother! He was thinking (as a genuine American would think) that being with one's mom is the last thing a 25 years old man would like to do, and that was his main reason of suspicion! Funny, huh?!

SO, I think I may have records with the local police now! great!
What do we learn here?! If you want to go jogging, take your girlfriend with you, not your mom!!! lol!

I guess I just didn't have a glourious day!

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I blog, thus I am!

void main (void)

{
       printf ("Hello World!\n");
}

> Hello World!

Yes, It's official! I finally decided to declare myself as a citizen of the virtual world! I'll blog, I'll blah and I'll Blah Blah Blah here! And perhaps will put some photos... and share my thoughts and concerns.

Hello World!

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If you feel interested in any of them and want to get the original file, please don't hesitate to email me!