Rezaf Diary

Picasa for Mac

2009-05-15T04:44:00.000-05:00

I have been waiting literally for ages to organize my pictures. At one point I almost did it by using Picasa, but unfortunately it was only a few weeks before my transition to a Mac. Ever since, I have been trying to convince myself to change my picture storing habits from self-controlled folders to trusitng iPhoto to do the correct thing, but it never worked for me. I think I just need to have the control.

Any way, Picasa is finally available to macs. And it works quite well, especially since at its core Picasa is an image viewer, not an image organizer like iPhoto. By the way, I have the same problem with iTunes, I wish it could only monitor my music folders and show their contents, but that's a different story.

Anyway, hopefully this move will make emailing and Picasa-Web-Album-Sharing of my pictures much easier and hence pheasible. People who know me usually think my camera is a one way black hole, and even though my pictures are usually good (photography is one of my hobbies) they rarely get to see the final shots! Hopefully it won't be the case anymore.

To coelebrate this development, here's a picture of the sunrise in Galveston Island, Texas.

Enjoy!

Large Japanese soroban, belonged to John Nash.

2009-05-11T11:07:00.001-05:00

I found this soroban in an admin room. Now belonging to our university, it used to belong to John P. Nash.

Being impressed

2009-05-10T17:39:00.001-05:00

How technology has progressed! I'm on a conference call with two colleagues, sending SMS messages to another friend, taking a picture of my back yard and writing a blog post about it. All at the same time, from my cell phone. That's why I like to be in this industry. What you can only dream of one day will be accomplished in no time.

My motorcycle

2009-05-04T02:25:00.001-05:00

So here it is. Doesn't it look great?!

Let's hope it will provide me with countless hours of safe fun and excitement.

A post after a long hiatus

2009-05-04T02:07:00.001-05:00

Ok, here I am after a long delay. It's been hard to keep up with all the work. Well, I'll try to write more often. Anyway.

Today I rode on my motorcycle for the first time. What a pleasent rush of feelings! The wind, fast moving scenary around you, and the looming danger which requires you to be 100% aware of everything. Nice experience.

Well, yes, I had not mentioned it earlier. I did big a motorcycle a few days ago. And I'm so happy I did. I'll post some pics in my next post.

Software I cannot live without

2009-02-07T12:41:00.015-06:00

As a graduate student, there are a few software packages I cannot live without. They do an impressive job in organizing my tasks and projects, helping me in research and organizing my life in general.

They are also all Mac OS X applications. Some of them come pre-installed with a Mac, some you have to buy. Fortunately they are usually not expensive, and are really worth every dollar.

So, without further ado, here they are:

Apple Mail. Comes with Mac, integrated with everything else on the Mac. If you are a Mac user, you just "have" to setup Mail. I have set it up to connect to gmail servers using IMAP (DO NOT USE POP3, it is "inferior"!), and it works handsomely, almost like a poor man's exchange server! Also can read RSS feeds, which is invaluable.
iCal. Again a great application. Integrated with Mail. And everything else on Mac.
Preview. Great FAST application to work with PDFs and images.
Safari. I left firefox and became a safari user. It does have its quirks, but it has PDF viewing integrated at its core, and for a graduate student, nothing is more important.
OmniFocus. I "LOOOOOVE" this app! Cannot live without it. I got it as a gift from a friend (thanks Ellick!), but it is worth every single dollar. Gets your life organized. iCal is cool and everything, but it is only a calendar, and a calendar can go only so far. It is designed based on GTD (Getting Things Done) principles, and does a great job doing it.
Papers. Creates a catalog of papers you have downloaded on your computer. Great searching functionality. Costed me $25, and is worth it.
Microsoft Office 2008 suite. Well, I use them, and they do the job. They are clunky compared to other Mac apps, but with docx and pptx files being sent around (and virtually being the standard formats), there is no other choice. I've heard good things about the new iWork 09, but for now I'm sticking to MS Office. Costed me $50 with educational discount, and I'm generally happy with it. Note: Word, PowerPoint and Excel are the standard ones, but Entourage is also useful as a newsgroup reader. I don't use it for its mail and calendar functionalities, Apple Mail and iCal are better integrated.
MacTeX. Great app for LaTeX users. Comes with great front end apps like TeXShop, LaTexIT (Mathematical Expression editor), and of course the TeX engine.

So here you go. There are other features in the Mac OS X itself that make life easier for me, but that's a different story.

P.S. Apple Mail (in IMAP mode) works great with iPhone's Mail. Same with iCal, and OmniFocus.

I'm worth....

2008-04-04T19:01:00.001-05:00

<span> Powered By Adult Toy Shop

I dreamed of flying

2008-02-19T07:14:00.006-06:00

Last night I dreamed of flying. It was such an awesome dream, such a nice feeling. Indescribable!

Part of it was because of my flying apparatus in my dream. Think of it like a motorcycle. A Kawasaki ninja to be more precise. Something like this one:

(Image from www.pashnit.com, all copyrights belong to them)

But it had retractable wings, each like 3 feet, and that was it! It also had a strange-looking helmet built-in, which would automatically place on your head, and had some HUD (head-on-display) stuff in it. Think master chief helmet:

(Image from www.videogamesblogger.com, all copyrights belong to them)

Now here's the best part of it: I bought it (of course in my dream) for a little bit below $3000! Yep, dreams! I flied to somewhere in Britain, and such a fly it was!

Man, I have to go to a flying school now!

Strange plants

2007-10-23T13:30:00.000-05:00

Computer Graphics have come a long way. Just look at these plants. They look soooo real!

I have come back, to my senses.

2007-09-17T19:38:00.000-05:00

I'm a procrastinator. Here, I admitted it. I spend hours and hours reading about gaming industry's rumors and news instead of playing them (Yeah, that's retarded!) I spend even more hours reading news, to see what's happening on the face of our poor planet. I kill time watching pointless youtube videos.

So, I may have come back to my senses. How? Well, it was a coincident. I came across this funny video from Digg. Well, it's certain that you'll feel something wrong with it after laughing for a few seconds: It's so kiddish! I mean, I haven't done any type of these "funny" stuff for almost 15 years now!

BANG! Reality suddenly hit me hard. Here I am, in one of the top national graduate schools wasting my time watching teenager stuff, and wasting my time reading the damn comments!

NO MORE, I say. I've gotta quit this, as hard as it may be. And the best way to quit something is taking it away. But wait, I'm a research student, I need google at least twice an hour! Well, the answer is this: BLOCK the sites you know are time-hogs!

As great as sites like Digg, Youtube, Google news and Balatarin (Persian equivalent of Digg) are, they just consume TOOOOO much of my time, and hence are blocked. Well, I've set them to be accessible 1 hour per day. If anyone wants my modifications to Gina's hack (add a finish time to the view limit), please say so in comments.

I hope this solution can help me quit my addiction to cyberslacking!

P.S. The rule of tolerable ten looks promising too!

Google is filtered in Iran?!

2007-09-17T01:34:00.000-05:00

This may sound unbelievable, but in the latest round of filtering internet sites in Iran, google.com and many of its services have been filtered. The filtering is not limited to a single ISP, and users in many cities who use different ISPs are experiencing the same. Even Gmail is not left out, and many users cannot even access their email accounts.

Aside for almost every political Persian language site, many popular sites such as Wikipedia and youtube are also filtered in Iran.

If you can read Persian, you can go to this link on Balatarin.com (which is the Persian equivalent of Digg) and read the latest news about this problem.

wii have to go?!

2007-09-13T00:22:00.000-05:00

So I got a wii, in a moment of madness! Saw one at the local Walmart and grabbed it without even thinking. But, it has left me unimpressed.

See, there are not many games I'd be craving to play on Wii, unlike XBOX360 or even PS3. I'll put a list of the games I'd like to play here, partly to try to convince myslef not to put the wii on ebay!
The ones that I pretty much want to play are:

Metroid prime corruption (which 3 of my best pals got me for my birthday, God bless their souls!)
Resident Evil 4 wii edition
The legend of Zelda, twilight princess
Mercury Melt down revolution (not out yet)
soul calibur legends (not out yet)
Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party (dance with a pad AND wii-mote, not out yet)

2'nd tier games would be:

Super paper mario
Super mario world (virtual console)
The legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time (virtual console)
Super mario galaxy (not out yet)
Super smash Brawlz (not out yet)

3'rd tier ones:

Mayby Warioware?
Super Mario 64 (virtual console)
Sonix 3(Just because I couldn't get to play this as a kid!, virtual console)
Golden axe (brings back memories!, virtual console)
Mario kart 64 (virtual console)
resident evil: umbrela chronicle (On rail shooter, similar to the house of the dead? not out yet)
Loony tunes:ACME arsenal (not out yet)
Mortal combat: Armageddon (not out yet)

As you can see, there not much game for wii currenly that I crave, and for that matter even games who are supposed to be released in the coming months. I can easily get away with not playing the 3'rd tier games, and maybe with a bit of cursing I can ignore the second tier ones.

Well, maybe virtual console can make me keep it. Then again, I can subscribe to console classix and get many of those games much cheaper! Also, I'll get to play it on my laptop then, which frees me from bearing with never-ending rants of certain female family members, whining about a soap opera or something being played on the TV when I play the Wii!

Not sure yet, but I think it's a goner!

Apple store on iPhone day

2007-07-03T23:33:00.000-05:00

There has been so much haloo baloo about the iphone I'm not even going to start, and this post is not about it at all! You see, I went to buy a macbook on exactly that date, Friday June 29th (yeah baby!) So I go there while awaiting a huge mess and tired sales people. But what I saw positively surprised me! About 3~4 Apple sales people were clapping and congratulating people who would enter the store! WOW! Take a look for yourself:

By the way, this is my very first video ever uploaded on youtube! And of course yes, I made it with my macbook (took the footage with my cell phone, a palm treo).

Entering unknown waters

2007-03-08T17:04:00.000-06:00

So I've been suddenly pushed into the world of linux kernel hacking. I've been waiting for this for a long time now, but now that I'm struggling with some kernel and device driver books, I feel soo confused and lost! Well, I hope after being exposed for a longer period to this type of material, everything make sense at some point.

I just did the first step, I'm downloading the linux kernel source code right now. It is 50+ Megabytes of zipped information, which is really scary! OK, download completed, I'm off to new unexplored (for me) terrains!

My new cell will make me feel like a president

2007-02-19T22:16:00.000-06:00

I bought a new treo 680 cell phone on the president day, so I'll be feeling like a president from now on. I'm still waiting for my newly bought treo to come in a few days, but I've been using a Nokia smartphone for a 3 years now. With my Mp3 Player in a pocket and Palm Zire organizer in another (and the big chunky Nokia in a third) I felt like anybody excpet an executive!

So, how my treo is supposed to make me feel like a president? First of all it's going to eliminate three humps on my pants! With a leather case on my belt and my trousers finally fitting on me, I'll definitely LOOK more like an executive.

Then whenever I pull my treo out, I'll feel as exclusive as a president, cause I went through all the troubles to get an exclusive arctic white treo. Not a bland grey or silver, but the absolutely great looking white one!

Aside from aesthetics, I've been relying on my Palm to organize my life for a long time now (my first Palm was an m105 back in 2001, and I never felt OK with the Symbian. Stylus rocks!). I simply can't live without my calendar, and the occasional missing of an appointment due to my laziness (of finding in which pocket I've put my Palm) or bad luck (oops, I forgot to bring the Palm!) should totally vanish with my treo.

I'm going to set my three different email accounts to be popped automatically on my treo, so no more running back and forth between my office and seminar rooms. I'm still a (grad) student, and it would be nice if I can get my emails in the classrooms or seminars too.

Let's see, so many times I had to prepare a PowerPoint presentation in 20 minutes because a professor just decided to visit our group! Yep, treo can do that too! I write reports and papers a lot, so maybe the Microsoft word compatibility can help me sometimes, although I confess the cramped keyboard hinders fast typing. Well, we live in a world of compromises, right?!

Let's not forget about listening to 8 giga bytes of MP3 (treos now accept SDHC cards, and they're cheap!). No more Ipod! Oh, let's not forget the Nintendo emulator software! Mario, where are you?! (See, us Gen. Nintendo kids have to keep Mario near). Life of a president is not all about work after all, even a president needs some entertainment once in a while - ask Bill Clinton about it!

Oh, and let's not forget I can SSH into my home Linux server using pssh. This one rocks!

The fact that there are thousands of third party apps to choose from (for cheap of coarse!) and my ability to write Java programs for my treo is just the icing on the cake!

The cars I would like to get

2007-02-17T14:31:00.000-06:00

Acura TL or RL
Mercedes C280 luxuary or an E class
Lexus IS 350
Lexus GS 350
Audi A4
Cadillac CTS

BUT, I'm pretty happy about my Honda Accord, it's awesome!

Palm is screwing up its users

2007-02-13T15:42:00.000-06:00

Ok, I'm feeling angry and upset! I finally made up my mind to pay $400 and buy this new cell phone, Palm treo 680 in arctic white color (The second phone from right in this picture). I believe it's much more interesting than the bland graphite version (First one from left). I decided to go and buy it on Wednesday last week, and I checked the Palm website to make sure they have it. Yep, they had it.

Now, on Friday I took my credit card and went to their web store to buy what I've been craving for the last month. But,.... it's not there! To be more exact, they only had the graphite version up on their website! It turned out that Cingular has bought all color treo 680s for itself, and it seems that their deal gives the exclusive rights of color treo 680s to CIngular. So, Palm just decided to screw their customers who are not on Cingular, like me. Now my only option is the dull gray (graphite) one. BOOOH!

Listen Palm, I use T-mobile, and I was going to add $400 of my hard earned money to your pockets. NOT ANY MORE! Unless you give me an arctic treo 680, I'm not going to get one! Are you listening Palm?! You screw your loyal customers (I've been having Palm devices since 2001. This makes me a 6-year loyal Palm customer), YOU GET OUT OF BUSINESS!

Take a look at these photos too and see for yourself why I want the arctic color! (The two following pictures are copyrighted images taken from engadet website.)

Open loop vs closed loop control

2007-02-04T14:01:00.000-06:00

Do you ever wonder what the hell is a closed loop control system? How doews it differ from an open loop control system? If so, read on!

Theoretically, an open loop control system should be able to do whatever their closed loop counter parts do. All you need is a 100% accurate mathematical model of your system, and every other environmental factor which could affect the systems operation.

Ok, we want to control real stuff. In reality you can never model a system accurately 100% (it is just too hard!) , and it's even harder to account for environmental factors (or noise if you like). Thus you see a good amount of deviation from what you modeled in your real implementation.

How does a feedback control system work? It doesn't care about the internals of the system, just looks at it as a black box. It will look at the outputs of the system and will say: "hm... I'd like the output to be 10, but it is 8, so let's increase the input a bit. ok, now it's better, we're getting to 10... oh oh , we passed 10 and are now at 10.5, oh boy, let's decrease the input a bit. Ok, that's better, output is at 10 now, I'm done! But I'll keep an eye on the output in case an unknown noise comes in, in which case I can compensate for it by changing the input."

Now the problem with the feedback control is that since our systems are real (the tech word is causal) and our controller cannot foresee the future (DUH, we're talking about real world!) and moreover it doesn't know that much about the system internals and noise, We
will usually have overshoot (like the scenario I told you, i.e. we want 10, but for a short period we get 10.5) and oscillation (like 8...9...10...10.5...9.75...10.... unless you set your feedback controller to work really slow.

So to sum it up, open loop should work fine and beautifully, but only in your dreams! put an open loop controller before a real system, and you'll see deviations, which the controller cannot even correct. In real world we use feedback control systems all the time.

As an interesting side note, our brain controls our limbs in a feedback control system, which is set to overshoot and oscillate a bit for fast responses. Check it out: stretch your right arm, and then try to quickly bring your palm in front of your face, and stop it there. You'll surely see the overshoot and oscillation!

Odyssey of a good Bath.

2007-01-14T15:10:00.000-06:00

Bath (n.): process of soaking the body in water or some other aqueous matter such as mud, steam, or milk. The bath may have cleanliness or curative purposes, and it can have religious, mystical, or some other meaning. A bath is often used as a technique to temporarily reduce the symptoms of illness or pain of drug withdrawal.

Shower (n.): a bath in which water is showered on the body; also: the apparatus that provides a shower.

I have never been a big fan of bathing; I always took a quick shower. It is much faster to take a shower, and it fits well with my hectic lifestyle. So, yeah... Everything was fine until last week. I was quite tired, physically of course, after a Sunday picnic in which my buddies and I tried to play some of our childhood games. I came back home with my body tired and battered, so I thought: well, a hot bath would be your cure!

Well, not quite! The bath turned out to be a disaster! See I always take a shower; I never cared about how my bathtub's walls are filthy, because usually water never reaches that high anyway! Needless to say, the bath got filled with numerous small pieces of calcite (and other things which I'd like to think of them as calcite!). To make it worse, hot water ran out in the middle of my bath (I live in a small apartment with my own heating system, not a big central one). While the lower half of my body was warm, the upper half was freezing!

Okay, bad experience. So yesterday I scrubbed the whole bathtub and bought and installed a new shower curtain, and now the bath tub looks much cleaner. Not as white as I would like it to be (you know, like a new bath) but it's clean and white enough. I'm thinking of buying a rotary scrubbing power tool to make it cleaner. I still have the hot-water problem, which for now I remedied with a trick. I fill the tub with about an inch of hot water, lie down in the bath and turn the shower on, so that I get hot water raining on me! Again not as nice as I would like, but at least not a disaster anymore. Yet, my odyssey of a good bath continues...

White and Nerdy!

2007-01-01T23:48:00.000-06:00

You know that I sometimes think of myself as nerdy. If you don't remember me mentionin it, just look at my nerd score of 97 on the right hand column!

So, naturally I get delighted to see this clip by Al Yankovic.

Wow, this is awesome!

Waiting for my new car to come!

2006-12-31T21:21:00.000-06:00

Well, not exactly a new car, but my new car, and I'm so proud of it! I'll later announce to the whole world what it is, as soon as I have it under my name to be exact, but let me tell you that if it passes the mechanical inspections on next Wednesday, I'll be a proud owner of a .... um, wait for a few days!

Awesome act by Jerome Murat

2006-12-14T01:05:00.000-06:00

1. With no comments, just watch this awesome video!

jerome murat
Uploaded by segalier

2. Life sucks! In 7 hours I have an exam :(

SAMAND in Venezuela

2006-11-30T01:44:00.000-06:00

It seems that they have finally started manufacturing the Iranian SAMAND car in Venezuela, and it's interesting that their president is driving the car! wow!

Struggling with Ubuntu 6.06

2006-11-19T03:44:00.000-06:00

Thanks God it's the thanks giving break, otherwise I'd been so busted! I've been trying to install Ubuntu linux 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on a VIA Epia based mother board (with a 667 Mhz Eden fanless processor, sweeeet piece of technology!) with a 1 Giga byte compact flash card as its hard drive, and as such I had to use the server edition of Ubuntu (since the desktop version wouldn't event try to install unless you have more than 2 GB of free hard drive, and I intend to use this computer as a server anyway). The installation process gets finished painlessly, but then the installed system wouldn't boot. After showing the message: "uncompressing linux ... ready to boot", the system just freezes. Damn...
My (10-hours) online search resulted in believing that there is something wrong with the initrd initiating process. But before doing something as insane as downloading (gasp!) slackware linux, I came across a small post in a forum with a user with the same problem. Somebody had posted in reply that with installing the server edition from the alternative Ubuntu CD, the problem would be solved. So, right now I'm downloading it. I would be extremely happy (and yet totally quizzed) if it works.

I'll keep you in touch, now it's time for sleep!

Updated on 11/20/2006:
WooHoo! Ubuntu dapper drake server edition got installed. As I said earlier, the alternative CD should have been used. Now that's strange; well, not that much, it's kind of the common case in linux world. Even a very well polished linux distro like Ubuntu has these problems.
Any way, my new (fanless, dead quiet) server is running in a cardboard box! I'll post a picture of it in my next post.

Holy Moly! A Playstation 3 for 14,900! Wow!

2006-11-14T04:20:00.000-06:00

Wow, this is crazy! A Sony PS3 is sold on Ebay for $14,900. I have no more comments (I'm speechless!), here's the link from ebay.
(Well, the bidding may be fake though, just to sincrease the price...)

Animated history of the Iranian Empire

2006-11-06T03:49:00.000-06:00

What part of the world is Iran? What has been Iran?

Currently the official language of more than 110 million people is Pesian, which is the official language of three countries. iranian culture is spread among many people of middle east, even though they don't speak Persian.

To show some little piece of history, I've made this flash animation, which shows some of the borders of Iran in its long 5000 year history. It starts with Elamites, continues with Medians, Achaemenids, Parthians, Sassanids, a period of Islamic Caliphate (though in this period Iran was part of the bigger Islamic Empire), Safavids and finally the current Iran.

Although far from complete, this short history review shows the reason of the widespread Persian culture in the whole middle east.

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(As a side note, this is my very first 'flash' animation ever, so apologize me if it looks amateur. I've done it with a demo version of SwishMax, which is an awesome flash authoring package. I strongly recommend buying this software, which I also intend to do. For you college students, there is also a special discount of 80%, which is exactly the reason it became so appealing to me!)

I plan to make this flash animation much more complete in the future, perhaps with maps of other major empires. But until then, I'm happy with this one!

Programmers of the world, go learn Java!

2006-10-27T15:27:00.000-05:00

Java is for sissies, real programmers do C! Or for that matter, they prefer assembly! Perl is cool, Python is way more cooler! All the jobs today require MySQL and PHP...

These are all common wisdom, ain't them? Well my programmer friends, I've got news for you. NO, they're not!

This is a list of top 15 (ok, 14!) jobs that I compiled from job postings in a popular job posting website (http://www.dice.com/). I simply entered the name of some popular programming languages and wrote down the number of results returned. A total number of 86899 jobs were returned, which I sorted them and did the graph below.

Now this is interesting, isn't it? Who knew that Java has conquered commercial frontiers? PHP any one? NO, go learn simple scripting! Oh my God, people are still looking for COBOL programmers. More than PHP and Python. WOW!

So what should we learn here? That if you want to get into a programming job, if you know Java, C, .NET platforms and some simple scripting, then you're qualified for 60% of the companies. (and no, don't waste your time on PHP, Perl or Python).

Note that I'm not talking about how cool or powerful or even useful a language is. I'm talking about GETTING PAID doing programming.

Now where is my old Java textbook...?!

There is a new kid in town.

2006-10-15T04:53:00.000-05:00

Yes, There is a new kid in town, and it name is... Palm Treo 680.

Call me old fashioned if you want, but I'm still using a palm Zire 21, basically because it can go on weeks without recharging. But, recently I'm having a problem with my bulging pockets; You see, taking a palm, a Nokia 3650 (remember the old beast?) and an mp3 player has taken its toll on my pockets (Well, what do you expect, I'm a starving student, not a CEO! Well not yet!)

So, naturally when I hear a CHEAP palm treo, without an antenna is going to arrive soon, I'll jump in joy. BUT, if only it is cheap.
And by cheap I mean less than $200 cheap, without a plan. I have my GSM sim card from T-mobile, which I'm happy with, and I don't want to buy a (new) plan to change my phone.

All this said, this is a list of what I hope to be in this new phone:
1. low price.
2. long battery life, even if I listen to mp3 on it.
3. good mp3 playback quality.

The rest is already there. My favourite? GCC is already ported to palm (Geeks know what I mean!), and it supports Java. What else does a man want?! (Um... did I mention it needs to be cheap?!)

Oh by the way, I don't care about the VGA camera. It's all about the lens. the pictures coming out of 1.3 Mega pixel cameras are as bad as VGA ones. Well, for that matter, I also ditched my canon A520 for picture quality in favour of a Pentax DSLR. Any way, my advice is: Don't shoot pictures with cell phone cameras! You're just ruining the picture! Get a real digital camera (only my 2 cents).

Am I a geek, or a nerd?!

2006-10-02T10:42:00.000-05:00

In my last post I called myself a geek. Since then, I have come across a nerd test. Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm extremely proud to announce myself as:

3% scored higher (more nerdy), and
97% scored lower (less nerdy).

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:

All hail the monstrous nerd. You are by far the SUPREME NERD GOD!!!

Now, a question arises here, Am I a geek or a nerd (of supreme nerd god type)?! Well, after checking wikipedia, I believe I'm a nerd! Other sources may differ in defining nerds and geeks, but I'd rather stick to what wikipedia says (partly because I have an official nerd score now!).

Which country likes Chris de Burgh the most ?!

2006-10-02T00:33:00.000-05:00

As far as I can remember, I have always been a fan of Chris. He was the first artist in my childhood which I started to pay attention to his lyrics as well as the music, and I was totally mesmerized by his songs!

I just recently got a CD of him, and after listening to it for a while (oh man, isn't "Moonlight and Vodka" a touching one?) I thought I could take a look at his website. To make a long story short, I ended up in the fan section of his site, which is categorized by countries.

Now, you may already know what a geek I am! I felt curious to know which country has the largest number of fans, and with help of some quick and dirty perl scripts, I managed to gather the required info (I'm rather new at Perl, so it took me about an hour to write these scripts. But I'm improving!). Finally I fed the data to Microsoft Excel, and here are the results:

Now, the results turned out to be very interesting. Guess which country in the world has the most number of fans of Chris de Burgh? Ireland you say?! Not even close (Ireland is at rank 16, after Turkey, if only you count Ireland and Northern ireland together)! The first country in the list is Iran my friends!

A total of 5316 people are among his registered fans as of today (October 2nd, 2006), among which the top 10 countries are:

Now, these numbers don't count the Iranian fans who are in USA or Canada, but only people inside Iran. If you browse through his fans in USA or Canada however, you'll see many Iranian names, which I didn't consider for this study.

I wonder why it's like this; can anybody please provide me with some possible reasons?!

She is a hero!

2006-09-30T03:15:00.000-05:00

Yes, she is a hero, she is my hero. Anousheh Ansari is the first female space tourist, the first Iranian astrounat and a great source of pride for Iranians. She just came back from the international space station to earth after being 10 days in space, and I was happy to read news of her succesful trip back home(i.e. earth!). Well, now I'm going to try to make it to the next month's space expo in New Mexico, where she would be present. Let's see if I can make it.

Oh, by the way, I just returned from San Jose, where I demoed my project in a seminar, and it was a blast! I'm really happy about it, and feel quite energized now :)
(The only bad thing about the seminars in west coast is the BORING flight! 5~6 hours of travel is no fun at all!)

Abstract!

2006-09-10T22:12:00.000-05:00

This is the tallest monument in the world, from a different angle. The damn thing is 630 ft high!

Speaking of cheerleaders...

2006-08-26T17:07:00.000-05:00

Quad day

2006-08-26T16:56:00.000-05:00

we have a (probably old) custom here. Before each new fall semester starts, everyone will gather in the quad south of the Illini union, for a big recruitment event; almost all of the different groups in the campus set up a booth and give fliers to passerbies, and shout and ... it's a big, interesting mess!
And to top it all, the University music band performs in the end, while cheerleaders do their ... cheerleading!

Lotta's fountain in San Francisco

2006-08-21T10:15:00.000-05:00

Gift of Lotta Crabtree, 1875

This fountain was one of the few places that survived the 1906 earthquake, at which time it became a meeting place for people in search of their families.

This one's my favourite!

2006-08-18T14:09:00.000-05:00

I really like this one! (I only like it since I guess it is bad to fall in love with your own work!)

Lincoln the great

2006-08-16T13:52:00.000-05:00

This guy's the reason that there's no more slavery in US, and it is a big united country. Although lots of people died in the war he waged... As like many other things in world, there's a compromise, a tradeoff. You have to give in order to earn.
Any way, enjoy the thoughtful face of the infamous Lincoln!

Lincoln in wind

2006-08-14T18:28:00.000-05:00

As I was saying in my last post, US is a windy country. Strong winds that even shake statues...

The perfect land for flags!

2006-08-09T18:51:00.000-05:00

United states is the perfect land for flags! You see, there's so much wind blowing everywhere, that all the flags have a happy life in here. (And by the way, people really respect flags in here).

Some rocks beneath the Golden gate bridge

2006-08-08T00:57:00.000-05:00

Zidane the commando!

2006-08-03T07:35:00.000-05:00

It seems that Zizo has invented a new fighting technique! You rock man!

sharing files with VMWare

2006-08-02T09:10:00.000-05:00

I Recently installed VMWare on my machine to use linux while I'm on windows. Although I have linux installed on my laptop's hard disk in a dual boot setup (which took me a painful 24 hours to setup everything, including wireless driver installation), I've become a user of VMWare lately. That's because I can switch to using linux much faster, and the network connection is more robust. I used to be a cygwin user, and now I've dumped it in favor of linux on WMVare!

Any way, the first and biggest problem I faced using fedora core 5 on a VMWare session was the problem of file sharing between windows and WMWare. WMWare (at least its free player version) doesn't read host system's directories. No NTFS access (which a native linux installed as dual boot can do), no shared directory, nothing. I'm not sure, but they may have reserved it for their non-free versions.

Naturally I googled to find a solution. The most practical suggestion I found was to use a USB memory stick, since the VMWare player recognises memory sticks. Not a very elegant solution I should say. It worked, but was a pain in the A..!

So here's a suggestion that works like a charm: Download and install a free FTP server software on your windows machine. I used the GNU software FileZilla. After installing it, add a user account, with a username and password. You also need to set at least one directory as the FTP directory. Don't forget to give the user you just created Write and delete permission in addition to the default read permit.

You also need to know your computer's IP address (use windows' ipconfig command). Now in the linux session running in your WMWare, open a file browser (in my fedora setup, I can use "computer" or "home folder" icons, which actually launch the nautilus shell manager. There is a similar app in KDE which I don't remember its name now), and enter your computer's IP address in the address bar, which should be something like this: ftp://192.168.0.xxx

If everything is setup correctly, a pop up dialog box should ask your user name and password. Enter them, and ... presto! You have your designated FTP directory in VMWare, with full read and write access. Enjoy!

Ceiling of Nordstrom in SF

2006-08-01T17:56:00.000-05:00

This is a glass ceiling installed in the Market street's Nordstrom shop in San Francisco. The ship has a story behind it. As the story goes, during the great gold rush days some 150 years ago. As the ships would arrive, the crew would abandon the ship faster than the passengers to get theeir hands on some gold! Thus, there were lots and lots of "ghost ships" anchored around San Francisco bay.

The story says that one of these abandoned ships were modified and used as a store, which later transformed into the Nordstrom shop. So when they decided to get a shop in the city, they took some of the ship symbols to the new shop. The picture on the ceiling is kind of a reference to those old days.

Interesting story, isn't it?!

Fireworks

2006-07-31T03:06:00.000-05:00

I shot this one during the last 4th of July celebrations. We were lying down on the grass, watching the fireworks explode above our heads! Fortunately I had remembered to take my tripod, and my old point and shoot camera! Since the small camera couldn't shoot high ISO, the exposure time is long.

Perspective

2006-07-29T01:06:00.000-05:00

San Francisco, Powell/Market turntable

2006-07-28T00:12:00.000-05:00

Yes! They turn the whole thing manually! Isn't it amazing?!

The infamous San Francisco cable car

2006-07-28T00:07:00.000-05:00

The technology of these cable cars which run through San Francisco city dates back to 1870s. And it is still operational. Yes, still manually, as it was done 100 years ago. It's a really interesting experience. (Well, the ride isn't quiet or plush at all, but seeing the driver operate the car, engaging the cables and hand braking manually IS interesting!)

Dawn

2006-07-27T23:57:00.000-05:00

I took this photo at around 5 AM in the Milwaukee airport, on my way to the beautiful city of San Francisco.

The reflection of the airport lights reminds me how badly I need to get a polarizing filter!

The crap

2006-06-21T01:14:00.000-05:00

Gentlemen, the crap has literally been taken out of me!

In the middle of something

2006-05-07T23:44:00.000-05:00

I'm right in the middle of an exam now! Well, it's a take home exam... any way, enjoy today's photo.

Blossoms

2006-05-06T14:20:00.000-05:00

This is the final week of this semester. Lots of workload! Projects and exams. I can't wait for the next week...

(As always, just email me if you want the original photo file.)

Leaves

2006-05-05T19:16:00.000-05:00

Tree trunk

2006-05-04T20:49:00.000-05:00

(Note: if you're interested in any of these pics, just email me and I'll share the original file with you.)

Another photo

2006-05-04T02:54:00.000-05:00

Another photo... tell me how do you feel about this one.

Photos of spring

2006-04-27T23:19:00.000-05:00

After a 20-day period of inactivity, I still don't have much to say. Well, I have a lot... but, they'd better not be said for now...

Any way, I've shot some photos from my small town, just around my home. I hope you enjoy them; I feel they can show the spirit of spring.

(Click on the photos to see 800*600 format of them. If anyone is interested in larger format photos of these, just email me. I'll be happy to share them.)

Two photos

2006-04-07T00:10:00.000-05:00

These two photos were taken on "13 be dar" day, on a visit to the "early American museum". It was a good day...

Happy New Year!

2006-03-23T02:52:00.000-06:00

It's a new year, again... Day after day, month after month, Year after year, yet life goes on. Winter wipes green life out, spring breathes life into the earth again, yet life goes on. People come, people go, yet life goes on. This is the miracle of life, and its best evidence is the turn over of nature from winter to spring...

Norouz is a celebration of life, of love of life. It's a symbolism of life after death. And there is nothing more important than life.

Happy New Year! May this New Year be full of success and happiness!

And here is a poem from Ahmad Shamloo, one which I feel resonates with the spirit of spring...

دوستی گلدانی ست،

که نشسته ست در ایوان سحر.

و دمیده ست در او تازه گلی.

چهار فصلش همه سبز،

آشتی شاخه ی او،

عطری از عاطفه در او جاری ،

تارش از ململ عشق ، پودش از مخمل ابر.

سینه اش برکه ی باران بلور،

دامنش از شبنم پر گوهر.

بر لب هر برگش، نقشی از خنده ی شیرین بهار، از طراوت سرشار.

بشکند روزی اگر، ساقه ای از این گل سرخ، دل ما می شکند، دوستی می میرد.

آشتی ،می رود از خانه ی ما،می شود پای خزان باز به کاشانه ی ما .

What happened in San francisco

2006-03-16T19:58:00.000-06:00

I’m now sitting in the Oakland airport, which is the smaller airport in San Francisco, and since I’m bored to death I thought I’d write something! It’s now 4 hours and a half that I’m stuck here, and I have to stay here for another 2 hours before my flight departs here. Then it would only be the start of a long and boring over-night journey back to Champaign! It’s now 6:30 PM local time, and I shall be home 10 o’clock tomorrow morning. Well I shouldn’t nag that much; that’s what happens when you want to trip with as small expenses as possible. Any way, since I’m not connected to internet right now, I’ll post this stuff on the weblog tomorrow.

Interesting thing: I found an Iranian friend in this GSRC workshop. Since the workshop finished early today, my lab-mates and I departed due to different flight plans from different airports, I had no agenda for the day. Fortunately Kambiz (my new friend) told me that he and his lab-mates (which all study at UC-San diego) are planning to go to a Turkish restaurant, and then to the Oakland airport. Suffice it to say that the Turkish food was great, and I stuffed myself with those delicious meals! It was even better because it’s quite a bit of time now that I hadn’t filled myself as such!

One interesting aspect of the workshop was to meet this entire famous people. I met David Patterson, was introduced to Jacob Abraham, made a presentation to Jan Rabaey and got to know other people as well; I’m pretty happy about this. Hail to Illini!

I still need to make this superscalar processor work. I’ve made lots of effort during the past few months to make it work, and I’m almost there. But every time I feel it’s going to work this time, some design flaw or a bug pops up in my face, and I see all my hopes to finish this project fade away. I’m tough, but I’m really concerned that I may fail in this project. You know, it’s a kind of project that if you finish it, many wonderful things can happen, but these wonderful things can change into dreadful if you fail to finish it!

Have you ever heard of David Copperfield?! Yeah, I’m talking about the same guy who passed the great Chinese wall and many other things like that. Yes, David the magician! He’s going to have a show tomorrow night (tonight, because you’re supposed to read this tomorrow!) But I don’t think I’m going, its price is too high. I’d heard 8 bucks but a friend of mine who went to buy tickets told me that it’s 25$! I hope I don’t get upset later by my decision of not going to the show later, but … TWENTY FIVE BUCKS?!

OK, I’m going to stop here since:
1- You’re not going to read it if it’s if this post is longer than this, and
2- I’m tired!

Have fun, today and everyday!

...In Sanfrancisco...

2006-03-13T08:13:00.000-06:00

The party and the dance performances went great! I enjoyed that night a lot, I danced non-stop for 4 hours! I'm in a kind of hurry now, cause I'm flying to Berkeley, CA in an hour. When I get back, I'll hopefully post some photos of this trip too...

Wait for my return :D

And in a few hours... WE DANCE!

2006-03-11T17:57:00.000-06:00

Here it is! The New Year’s party and our dance performance! We all have practiced a lot during the last couple of months, and the dance's sharp and upbeat moves were a physical challenge to every one. Now here comes the performance of the century!

Hopefully my next post will have some photos of tonight's dance. Be patient!

The best thing about pears.

2006-03-05T23:24:00.000-06:00

When I was very young, I really didn't like pears. I always preferred apples to pears. This changed when I read the "Pinocchio" (Or I saw it in a cartoon first? I'm not sure...) There the blue fairy insisted that pinocchio should eat the entire pear, even the seeds. From then, I accepted the idea that pear is an edible fruit!

Any way, tonight I was eating a pear, and got to the conclusion that the blue fairy was almost right, even a pear's seeds can be tasty! Yet, there are two parts of the pear that at least I cannot eat, which are depicted in this photo. These parts almost wooden, and apart from termites, I don't think other creatures are supposed to eat them! Quite a novel discovery, don't you think so?!

Funny illness!

2006-02-25T00:52:00.000-06:00

It's a couple of weeks that I feel there is something wrong with my breathing... To be exact, I sometimes felt that I have to order my lungs to do the breathing! Of coarse they do their job even if I don't pay constant attention to them!

So, today I made an appointment with a doctor, and explained my problem with him. After conducting extensive examination, he concluded that it's probably something mental, as he thought my heart's sound is normal. By the way, he is a very talkative person, and he spent 15 minutes explaining to me why he thought that I'm all right!

Ok, after listening to a ton of different possible reasons, I was pretty convinced that I'm all right, and was ready to go, but now he didn't let me! He prescribed me to get an X-Ray of my chest and an EKG (Electrocardiogram, and don't ask me why it's written with a K, I don't know!). and while there, get an X-Ray of my head too.

Any way, after an hour of wandering in the clinic, and getting a couple of X-rays and EKG, The Doctor made sure that there is nothing wrong with me... He was deep thinking with himself when he suddenly saw my head's X-ray, and finally related my problem to mental pressure!!!

Well I don't know (Come on, look at the X-Ray! Do I look like someone who knows?!) But mental pressure seems to be a good reason to my unordinary breathing problem!

Life again!

2006-02-23T01:47:00.000-06:00

Wow! Tonight was great! After about 2 weeks of hard work and studying, finally I decided to stop working after 6 o'clock today, and enjoy one night. But the good things started from 5o'clock...

You see, I was sitting in a seminar, and while the speaker was talking about what he saw as the most important thing in the world (which naturally many of the audience disagreed with), I was feeling my hunger (!), and was thinking about what I can get to eat after the seminar. When the seminar finished, surprisingly for me, they asked us to go to another room where there was a reception with fruits and drinks!

After having some fruits, I went to my office (the seminar was in another building), I got really happy to see that there was another seminar in our own building and there was a reception over there, this time with meat-balls, cheese and crackers! Better yet, the guy responsible invited me to join the feast!

Ok, after these happy moments, I went to our Persian dance practice (didn't I tell you? We are going to have a dance performance in the nourooz!), and when finished to tango. It was a long time since the last time I went there, maybe 2 months. And it was fun!

Then again, the exams are coming! PANIC!

Guess who's my valentine?!

2006-02-14T22:39:00.000-06:00

You know, I believe in miracles! Really, I see them all around me, all the time. Let me tell you about one that I saw today. There is this girl in our network administration office, which I can't particularly say she's a happy person. In fact I seldom see her smile. (I am a nagging person about office tech stuff, and whenever something gets wrong I'll jump to that office, so it's no wonder I see those people a lot!)
So, today I saw her in the corridor walking out of the building, with a big smile, or I'd better say a grin! Stunned, I took a quick look at her and saw a red rose in her hand. Oh yes, of course! It's valentine's...

As for me, I happily spent all my time today with a smart creature, or at least it looked smart from the cover! Of course they say "don't judge a book by its cover", but well... in this case I have no choice!

Here's the picture of that special one I spent my valentine with!

Happy valentine everybody! I hope you were struck by the miracle!

Matrix PingPong?! Coooool!

2006-02-09T02:18:00.000-06:00

Wow, look at this! Just think about the creativity of these guys! These kind of stunt work isn't usual to see even in Hollywood films (There are a handful of movies now, but it's not everywhere yet!) I really enjoyed seeing this video! These guys are Japanese by the way, if you're wondering...

Note that this file is about 3.4 MB, so it may take a bit until it fully gets downloaded, but it's worth it.

By the way, you should know by now that I'm an avid fan of the firefox browser, but putting this video here showed me an incompatibility between Microsoft's media player and firefox. So, if you are seeing this page in internet explorer, you probably see it filling the whole media player window. On the other hand, if you use firefox, you are probably seeing a small video. Be kind and right click on it and set the zoom level to 200%!

Busy Days...

2006-02-08T01:29:00.000-06:00

These days I'm super-busy! There is meetings and seminars one afte another, and I still have 3 courses to attend! And all the homeworks! I'm trying hard, but it's tough!
I also have this project to finish. Actually I should have finished it by now, but it is stuck in its state for quite some time now. However I have promised myself (and my advisor!) that I'll finish it in less than a week! This translates to 16 hours per day work for the following days. phew!
Oh by the way, Leila (my sis) cooked a delicious stew (Gheyme) today, that I really enjoyed. Thanks!

A Del.ic.ious. Breakfast!

2006-02-04T03:12:00.000-06:00

One note before I start this post. I've added a feature to this blog. You can enter your email address in the proper box at the right hand column of this blog. After that, all the new posts in this weblog will be emailed to you automatically! (But don't forget to visit here and put comments!)

A couple of days ago, while I was still totally busy writing a paper, I woke up and decided to give myself a self boost by preparing a good breakfast! I searched in the fridge and found these turkey bacons which are made from white and dark turkey meat, hence the two different color stripes. (They are horrible when eaten raw, but when you fry them they become delicious!)

I put them in a pan and started frying them, then put two loafs of wheat bread in the toaster.

When they were toasted, I started to eat one of them with some sugar free strawberry preserves . By the time I had my first two bite, I realised that I have to add an egg to the bacons! You know, it is like some kind of tradition, eggs and bacons! It's like Pasta and meat sauce, or coffee and creamer; you can have them separately but no one wants to do that!

Any way, I added an egg to the bacons and while they were cooking, started the coffee maker. What's a good breakfast without a strong coffee?!

And finally, here we are! ENJOY!

Another indication of my philosophical mumbling!

2006-02-01T01:31:00.000-06:00

Well, I wrote this short article as a passing thought about God and universe. It came as an answer I wrote to a question on yahoo answers. Now I'm not claiming that these are all my own findings, but rather a summation of what I have read and studied earlier and my contemplations about these subjects. Also note that I'm not claiming that I'm 100% true about it, however this is what I believe for now.

The Question: "What came before God?"

My Answer:

Well, let me be honest here, before you go through all my mumblings; I'm tying to prove that after reaching a point in a string of reasoning, we as being human beings cannot continue…

OK, let's see.
Let's start with a definition of matter and time. I'll assume that we agree that you and me and everything that exists around us, our universe, or the whole world is made of matter. (I define matter as something which is comprised by atoms). Matter is subject to change, and in fact transformation is a property of matter. Now what’s the definition of change? The word “change” itself implies the existence of “time”. When we say that X (X being anything material, a table or a human) has changed from A to B, we imply that there was a time point T0 in which X was in state A, and another time point T1 in which X has changed into state B. So as we can see, MATTER and TIME are much interleaved abstracts.

What about SPACE? Space is where matter can exist. How about ENERGY? Energy is the ability to change the state of matters. What about us humans? We live in this world, we are made of matter and exist in space and all the rules of energy apply to us. We are part of this world anyway!

Conclusion 1: MATTER, TIME, SPACE and ENERGY are all interleaved concepts that apply, in fact govern our world.

Now another branch of reasoning: It is obvious to a logical mind that every thing which exists should have a cause, a creator. There cannot exist something material that had no creator. So if you start from anything material, let’s say your computer, and go back in the chain of creators. You can go back to through this chain, but you have to stop somewhere or else your reasoning will be caught in an infinite loop. There has to be a stop somewhere. Let’s call this entity as G.
Now, this creator G cannot be made of matter, because everything which is made of matter should have a creator. So, it’s logical that the first creator should NOT be made of matter. As such, none of the other terms of TIME, ENERGY and SPACE govern it or its actions. This creator G is what we call the God.

Conclusion 2: God is not bound by MATTER, TIME, SPACE and ENERGY.

So, now by using the first two conclusions, I can reason that your question is irrelevant in some way. MATTER, TIME, SPACE and ENERGY are all the foundations of our universe, and God created them. He is out of this bound.

To clear things up, let's think about the “big bang” theory. In a nutshell, it states that at first, TIME, ENERGY, MATTER and SPACE were unite, squashed together in a tiny tiny dot. Now they still don't know what was the condition of this pile of matter and energy and time at the very first moment of time (they believe it exploded in a BIG way), but scientists have good answers for what happened after about 1e-43 seconds (i.e. 0.0000.......001 seconds, the number of zeros being 42). From then, it's known. It’s also proven that the space HAS boundaries. See the reference to know more about it.

But what was there BEFORE the big bang?! We just know two things about it. First, as I reasoned above, God SHOULD have existed before, to create that small, condensed dot of TIME, ENERGY, MATTER and SPACE. Second, I (and for this matter nobody) cannot imagine what it was like before, because we are all part of this world, material. We cannot even imagine it; we are SO made of matter and time that we cannot think outside it. As an example, as I stated earlier, it is proven that the universe (hence the space) is bounded and it’s increasing for now, but a long time from now it will start decreasing. What IS outside the boundaries? Nothing! It even is not vacuum, there is nothing, not even time exist there! (Another good answer is that we don't know, and we'll never know, because we can't reach there and see). It is obvious that comprehending the meaning of “nothing” is very hard for us, thus strengthening my theory (that we cannot comprehend facts that are outside the bounds of MATTER).

The final conclusion: Time does not apply to God, it is his creation. As much as humankind can comprehend, God has existed before the creation of time. Beyond that, we cannot know and no human being can.

It's the time, again...

2006-01-31T19:39:00.000-06:00

Some pure music

2006-01-30T02:55:00.000-06:00

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

Why are we here ??

2006-01-25T23:24:00.000-06:00

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!)

Oh, Good Old Reminiscences!

2006-01-22T23:07:00.000-06:00

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!!!

Spam, Spam, and yet more Spam!

2006-01-16T22:53:00.000-06:00

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.)

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!

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!

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!!!

Getting used to light!

2006-01-14T21:07:00.000-06:00

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!

Don't sleep today!

2006-01-13T03:20:00.000-06:00

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!).

This game is fantastic!

2006-01-11T21:20:00.000-06:00

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...

An impudent nation?!

2006-01-10T22:18:00.000-06:00

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?!

An UN-Glourious day!!!

2006-01-07T21:05:00.000-06:00

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!

I blog, thus I am!

2006-01-03T03:31:00.000-06:00

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!