The Fastest Thing
(Thursday, January 29 2004, 6:50 pm)
I heard this joke this morning and I HAD to share it:
They come up to four people, an American, an English man, a French man and a Persian and ask them "what is the fastest thing you know of?"
The American replies, "A thought is the fastest thing I know off, it just comes to your head". The English says a blink is the fastest thing he knows of, referring to the saying "The blink of an eye...". The French man says that when he hits the light switch, the light comes on right away, so turning on the light is the fastest thing he knows of. Then they ask the Persian guy. He takes a moment to think and replies "Diarrhia iz de fastest ting I know ov", they ask why? he says "Vell lust night I wazent feeling good and I run for the toilet. But, before I could TINK, BELINK, or TURN ON THE LIGHT, I had already shit my pants".
Hope you enjoyed that
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The Beard Dilemma
(Wednesday, January 28 2004, 11:55 pm)
Every morning I get up, look in the mirror, tell myself "I need to shave", then I remember the pain of shaving, and just walk away without shaving.
There are some major problems; First off, I shave against the grain (or some might call it, shaving upwards) which really hurts to start with, I also don’t use any sort of shaving cream, and every time I shave, the beard has grown so much from last time, that the razor is literally pulling out the hair rather than cutting it. Second problem is that when I don’t shave, I feel unclean, and it looks bad at work.
Well it would probably be much easier if I didn’t maintain my signature goatee. I would just shave the whole thing off and wouldn’t need to go around this extra piece of goatee, and if I just shave the whole thing off, well I will look too young! Damn. And that’s the dilemma.
Some mornings I get up and say F it, and shave the whole thing off, 2 minutes later, I regret doing it. but its too late, everyone tells me "What the hell did you do, why did you shave your goatee off". And if I don’t shave, everyone tells me "Maaan, you've gotta shave!". I'm stuck, I can't shave every morning, it’s just too hard, maybe I should just buy some shaving cream!
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My man Khosrow.
(Wednesday, January 28 2004, 3:05 am)
I believe all of you know Khosrow, pretty famous around school. Well I met him first year when I started university, my first friend and a true friend. We spend alot of time together throughout the years and I've learned alot from him. Even starting this site was alot of motivation from him, and I guess he was the first one in our small persian community to start his weblog website. Which brings me to the main point; As I said alot of you know him, but what you might not have known is that he has a website that is updated regularly at times and less frequently at other times (well he is a busy man). Take a look @ http://www.student.math.uwaterloo.ca/~kebrahim.
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University a Waste of Time?
(Friday, January 23 2004, 3:53 pm)
Four years of university and I am still trying to figure out what I’m doing here. Did university waste four years of my life, or did I waste it myself? Is it too late to recover, or is the last one year enough time to make some use of my time? I keep thinking I have the answers, but then there are more questions that come up as I think about my situation.
Here is the thing; I started university with the same incentive as everyone else who comes here. Made a lot of amazing friends, started a new life, and got ready to learn. Then it happened. Stress, long projects, and ongoing exams, no time to learn, just enough time to get through all of these projects and exams, and only a small time to actually put on myself and hang out with friends, to get rid of the stress.
As each year went by, I kept feeling I know less and less, because I keep cramming for exams, put all the information into my short term memory, and then forget them after the exam.
I’m sure you’re all reading this and saying, “so what’s new, I do this too”. Well I have come to the realization that as much as we find it amusing when we talk about it, we are doing the worse damage to ourselves possible. As each year goes by, we get introduced to new material that is dependent to the material from previous courses, and it becomes harder to understand what’s going on, we struggle to remember what we learned, too lazy to go back and review it, the cram again for the exams. We keep adding to our lack of knowledge and we know less and less, term after term.
So where does that leave me
I have two more terms left, with 12 courses, most of which are forth year, with no option to choose courses. I feel that I am extremely week math background and biggest of all, I haven’t specialized in anything. I just have some broad knowledge of everything and anything I know real well, I know it out of my own interest form outside of university. Yes, I can code, and can do it pretty well, but did I need to go to university for four years do learn that?
I kept telling myself that University wasted my time; I could have done so much more on my own outside of university. But now I have finally realized that University didn’t waste my time, I wasted my own time. We don’t have the motive to learn a lot of stuff on our own, university forces us to learn them. More importantly, I could have taken a subject of my interest, and specialized in that field. Taken these four years to learn much more about the field and become and expert in it.
I did choose digital hardware, ie. electronics as that field, I went into the digital hardware option, and tried to learn something, but with two terms left, and so many electronic courses left to learn along with so many other courses, I feel another 2 terms of “cramming and not learning” coming along.
I want to make use of my last two terms, I want to learn something. But the question remains, how do I take advantage of my remaining time? Do I drop out of digital hardware (where there are bad Profs and not much teaching going on) and try to specialize in another field of computer science? Or do I stay an extra term and specialize in the electronic field? So many other questions, smaller ones, that need to be answered before this, and not much time left to figure it all out.
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The Hafez Project, pre-alpha version
(Thursday, January 22 2004, 1:40 am)
You might have noticed on my projects page, I have posted "The Hafez Project" as coming soon. Well the project is in its pre-alpha stage (for those who dont know, that basically means, the bones of it is there now, but its not where close to what it is going to be).
So basically the idea of the project is to have a fully searchable online hafez. If you remember some verse of hafez, but you cant find which poem it was in, just search for the words you remember, and magic.
Also later on in the alpha stage (some time this week) I will be adding a word/meaning feature, where anyone can add meanings to words, and they will automatically become links of some sort. So while you're reading hafez on this site, and you dont know the meaning of one of the words, click on it and you will get the meaning. However this feature is based on the contribution of the public (idea similar to online encyclopedia wikipedia. You can find this pre-alpha version click here.
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162,000 Channel changes
(Sunday, January 18 2004, 1:55 am)
10 pm, I am so bored. We have now een sitting here in front of the TV for 15 hours. My roommate has been changing channels ever since and will not give up the remote. he is changing channels at a rate of 3 channels per second. thats over 162,000 channel changes over the past 15 hours. He wont even stop to take a peak at something to see if its good or not.
11pm, I am even more bored. Ready to pull out my hair. There is absoloutly nothing to do. Well there is a lot to do but one of my roommates is tooo "Koon goshad" and gives negative feedback to anything I say we should do.
1am, the roommate has given up the remote and gone to bed. I have finnaly control over the TV. Me and another roomate are sitting down watching "The devil's advocate". I know I have seen this movie, and I remember that I didnt like it, but I cannot remember why I didnt like it. The only way to find out is to watch it and see.
1:40 am, I no longer feel like finding out what was so crap about the movie, I leave my adventurous movie watching behind and head to bed. Another god given day gone completly to waste. I'll try to do something more usefull tommorow.
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Landless Like The Wind
(Wednesday, January 14 2004, 11:55 pm)
Siavash Ghomeishi came out with a new album called "Bi sarzamin tar az bad",
which probably translates to "Landless worse than the wind". I've been
enjoying listening to his songs for the past couple of years, and I really
enjoyed most of the songs on this new album.
As much as I'd like to support him, I still know for a fact that none of my
friends buy CDs anyways, and the fact that not much people visit this site,
I'd like to share the enjoyment.
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Walking In a Straight Line
(Tuesday, January 13 2004, 3:04 pm)
Have you ever paid attention to the way you walk? (Or may be to the way I walk).
I was walking home last night at around 11pm, streets were all empty, no one around, it was extremely quiet. You could hear some cars in the distance every now and then. No wind blowing through the trees and no birds to disturb the quietness.
With nothing much to do other than walk on this long, perfectly flat and straight road, I started unintentionally paying attention to the I walk, for some reason I always think about my walking when I walk. Seems like I cannot walk in a straight line; every couple of steps, one of my legs will step in front of the other one. Seems like every step is a couple of unnoticeable degrees off from a straight line and after a couple of step, these degrees accumulate and cause an undesirable over step of my right leg in front of the other to recover, and hence the left leg has to move a bit to the left, to keep a consistent distance between the two legs. After a couple of over steps, I reach the far left side of the side walk and have to recover by moving to the right a bit.
I'm not sure why this happens; maybe it happens because I am paying attention to it. It’s like the breathing problem that a lot of people have. Paying attention to the way you breathe. You will notice that after every couple of breaths you will become short of air and will have to gasp for more air, but when you're not paying attention to it you breathe fine.
In the end, I was not able to figure out which one it was, is there a problem with the way I walk, or is it that I'm always trying to walk in a straight line and hence am always thinking about it.
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Human Zoo
(Monday, January 12 2004, 10:57 pm)
Have you ever been to a zoo? How about a zoo where the animals were replaced with people, the cages were removed so that everyone was free to jump around anywhere they wanted. That’s where we went on Saturday.
Saturday morning we got up, rented a Chevy Trailblazer from Enterprise and headed out. After wasting a couple of hours in malls, we decided to go to San Jose Flea Market. We drove around for an hour, got lost in the crazy streets of San Jose, and finally arrived at the flea market. The parking lot was as big as Paramount Canada's Wonderland (setup in the same way as well) and was filled with thousands of cars. The scene was so crazy that many traffic officers were on the main street directing traffic.
Finally we found a parking spot (paid 5 freaking dollars), and headed towards the flea market. Maaaan, that place was a zoo filled with thousands of people, all from the most getto areas of around San Jose, all were either selling garbage, buying garbage, or going through garbage. Even one or two pieces of garbage that were interested me were pricey for the condition they were in. Flea market, a well deserved name for this place since everyone was going through each others garbage like monkeys eat fleas of each others skin.
This place has now been added to my “Places not to visit” list.
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FIRE!!!
(Thursday, January 08 2004, 1:14 pm)
Living in an empty house which only has a bed in it is pretty boring, so I spend most of my day at work, from 9am to 11pm. So yesterday I asked my boss (Keith) if I could take home a computer and he said it was fine as long as I build one from the scrap stuff they have jammed into a cupboard and then he pointed to a 17inch monitor and said take that aswell. So I started looking through the pile of motherboards and CPUs to find a decent one (work of "hazrate fil"), then with the help of one of my co-workers (Julio pronounced Hulio) who has a car I took the stuff home.
After trying to put it together without a screw driver (see picture) I plugged it in, "Systems Go". My roommate was watching carefully (hoping that it will work so we can play some games) as I pressed the ON button. The fan and the harddrive slowly came upto their full RPM, the monitor clicked into the ON position and its LED turned green, when all of a sudden smoke started coming out of the motherboard, I reached for the OFF button on the power supply when the motherboard caught on fire and started spreding to other parts off it. I paniced and started trying to blow out the fire. Since the motherboard was sitting next to my bed, my bed also caught on fire, and was spreding real fast. I had to think fast! So I jumped on the fire, stomach down and started rolling on it. No, actually after the stage of blowing out the fire on the motherboard, the fire was gone and I quickly turned off the power supply and that was the end of that.
So today, when I go home, I'm taking another motherboard, but this time I'm testing it at work first to make sure it works!
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Cruise around California with US airforce
(Tuesday, January 06 2004, 3:31 pm)
Saturday was probably the craziest day of my life, so much happened on just one day.
I got up around 5:30am on Saturday Jan 3rd 2004 and rushed to the airport to catch my 7:40am flight to California. Everyone had told me to get there like 3 hours early due to the US security checks and stuff specially that I am Persian. Yet I had only just woken up.
The Airport
I finally arrived at Terminal 3 of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. After a 10 minutes line-up to get my boarding pass they sent me to another line, US Custom’s Checkpoint. I said goodbye to my parents and joined the other 300 people that were lined up. It was now around 6:40 and from all the stories that I had heard of people being background checked for 3-4 hours, I hardly doubted that I will get to catch my plane. After another 20 minutes of line-up I found out that US citizens have a special line, a line with only 3 people in it. So I quickly took my stuff, got out of this line and joined the US citizen/pilots line (Yes pilots, I’m that special). Before you know it, in a matter of minutes, I was past all of this; my luggage had gone through all the x-rays and I was on my way to the gate B15 to catch my first flight to Phoenix, Arizona.
The Gate
After all the security I started looking for gate B15 down this extremely long corridor. I’m pretty sure that gate B15 was the furthest possible gate. So after I got to the gate, they started calling everyone row by row to board the plane. “Rows 6-12 may now board the plane” calls the lady on the paging system and so I line-up along with the rest of the people. Everything was going smoothly; the girl at the door of the gate had a big grin on her face, smiling at everyone and wishing them a pleasant flight. My turn came; she took my boarding pass, ripped it in half and said “Row 6, Seat D, Thank you for choosing America West Airlines”. I smiled; took my half of the boarding pass and started walking towards the plane door, happy that I was able to catch my flight when all of a sudden this lady jumps in front of me, asks me to step aside and points to a table where I should put down my bag. I’m thinking “damn these racist people” (as a note, I’m am a hundred percent positive that I was taken aside because I have black hair and dark skin, though it’s suppose to be a “random check”). So she starts going through my gym bag very carefully, and checks me with her handheld x-ray machine. Then she asked me to take off my shoes, so I’m like “Are you sure? My shoes smell very badly”, she just repeated her self with an angry voice saying “TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES”, and so she started ripping the inside of my shoes out, looking for a bomb or something. Finally after she was done, I was on the plane heading towards Phoenix.
Arrival at Santa Clara
Eight hours later, I’m at San Jose airport, started looking around for a taxi. So I ask and I get pointed to the taxi stop, find a taxi and get on. “Warburton Avenue Please” I ask the taxi driver. “Warburton Avenue, where the hell is that” says the taxi driver as he turns on the meter. I’m thinking why the hell is he turning on the meter, we haven’t even started moving yet. So he takes out his map, starts looking for the place, I tell him again “I’m heading to Greenpoint housing, its on Warburton in Santa Clara”. He kept on looking in the map, wasting my precious time (around US$0.50 a minute). So he finally finds it in the index, looks it up on the map, and starts moving the car. After many wrong turns we finally get there.
US Airforce
After 4 hours of waiting at the apartment door, my room mate gets here and we get into the apartment. We just sat around the apartment for a couple of hours, went out, ate Burger King and at around 9pm we got a knock at the door. Opened the door; its some guy that brought a bed for my roommate, he had bought a bed online, and asked for it to be delivered on Saturday. So we bring the bed inside; Juan (my roommate) pays him and he is about to leave when I ask him if he has another bed for sale. Turns out he had a futon, after a big bargain with him he says he will take us to his storage room to show us the bed. So we get into his truck and he started towards the storage room which is in another city close by (the cities around here are like Kitchener/Waterloo, they are all right next to each other). We finally get to this huge gate, just like in the movies when they are getting into military bases and stuff. I look around and see that there is actually a military sign next to the fence, and there is this stand with a key pad on it for pin code. He types in a pin code and the huge gate slides open. He slowly goes in, at this point I’m shitting my pants; “where the hell is he taking us” I ask myself. Turns out he is in the US Airforce going down to Kuwait for a mission and that’s why he is selling his stuff. So we get to his storage room, take out ALL of his stuff to get to the bed and a TV that we bought off him, and put everything back after we took out the futon and the TV. So we started towards home, opened the gate again, but this time, he starts taking a different route than the one we took to get there. Again I’m thinking what the hell. Turns out this time he wanted to give us a tour of the city. He started taking us through every major road and showing us restaurant by restaurant, telling us if its good or not. All of a sudden he started crying. “What the hell”. This time turns out the poor guy has to leave his kids and go way for a year, and that morning he had left the kids with their mother (he was divorced) and that’s why he was crying. After 1-2 hours of drive around we finally get home, as we put the futon and the TV into the house, he insisted that we call him tomorrow so we can go shopping for groceries (We didn’t).
So we got home, setup our bed, slept on it, took a deep breath, glad that we are still alive to see another day!
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