What's 13 Bedar (read: Sizdah Bedar)? It's the holiday celebrating the end of Nowrooz (Persian new year) on which everybody goes out to a park and spend a great day outdoors in the nature. It can be translated as "getting rid of thirteen" which traditionally is considered a number bringing the bad luck.
A ritual performed at the end of the picnic day is to throw away the Sabzeh from the Norooz Haft Seen table. The sabzeh is supposed to have collected all the sickness, pain and ill fate hiding on the path of the family throughout the coming year! Touching someone else's sabzeh on this thirteenth day or bringing it home is, therefore, not a good idea and may result in inviting their pain and hardship to oneself.
We packed a picnic and went to Lafayette Park with a bunch of (I would say, 500 at least) Iranian people, made Kabob and played Vasati in a very feastive and happy event.

Some of you guys asked me to write a review to compare V60 to T8160 in details. Here's a quick comparison:
:: T8160: Stronger body, less risk of losing (it's bigger), powerful backlight (I used it as a flashlight sometimes!), easier to open, longer lifetime of battery, interchangeable battery cover and capable of providing very high volume (powerful internal speaker)
:: V60: Tri band, Smaller, lighter, Voice dialing capability, bigger phone book storage, "2 way" test messaging system, voice note feature, personal calendar, more ring tones and cute external display featuring caller ID/Time/Alerts
Both have web browser, messaging, back-light, ...
For the guys asked about the actual size, just check out real photo, V60 is almost invisible in my hand as you can see, T8160 one is right on the keyboard.
Finally, if you want to have a cute phone with advanced features, get V60. If you want a phone that works "like a man" for you and lasts you more, get T8160 (if you can find one).

Trying some middle eastern food in Jessica's place last night was quite a "yummy" vegetarian experience :-) She made some Falafel and "fixed" sandwiches for us with Hummus, some Tahini and margarine. The tomatos and the amber ales [blink] I brought her definitly played an important role of making the meal more delicoius. ;-)
The good thing about last night's middle-eastern food was having hummus [ardeh] after a year or so. [YUM!]

Since "Blogging" is becoming more and more popular and there is some extra space here, it would be appropriate to write a quote from Albert Einstein:
"The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking."
If you want to take this quote serious or at least think about it, first take a look at a Picture of the guy whose quote it is. :-)

AT&T Broadband Internet provides me "very" fast Internet connection at home through cable. They provide high speed Internet access to 4 milloin subscribers in the bay area, however, they lack a competitive infrastructure after Excite@Home filed bankruptcy late September last year, so they took over providing Internet connection to their customers which has been done through a billion dollar contract with excite@home [See Excite@Home's Buildings in the picture I took in february after their bankrupcy resulting in the death of ATHM ticker symbol].
Anyways, I talked too much, the reason I'm posting regarding AT&T, is their quality of service which has become lower (neglect speed, it's still awesome). My Internet was disconnected from some strange reason, called customer service and they asked me to reset the modem. Alhamdulellah, I am connected again!

Remember my cell phone was broken, I got a replacement for it this morning, it looks pretty fancier than the other one, with much more functionality. It's a Motorola v60, so small (1.81 x 4.11 x 0.83 in³) and so light (3.4 oz), however, I would say the risk of breaking it is pretty higher than the old one.
Motorola v60 has got pretty good Reviews and it's expensive like other new phones (its price will definilty drop in a couple of weeks). I don't have any problems with this phone (yet!), except for the crappy Motorola style user interface, lots of keys making you confused and it takes time for you to figure out the functionality of each key navigating through the menus. Nokia, IMHO, is the world's leader in wireless devices UI design and implementation.
Two things I like about this new cell phone are: 1. It doesn't take much space in my pocket, 2. Caller ID is displayed on the little external display of the phone. It provides a pretty high voice quality as well as a very stylish and sleek look, a combination of sophesitication and elegance!

Went to SeaWorld in sunny San Diego yesterday. Yea, that was fun! The show I liked very much was The Shamu Adventure which was totally magnificent.
I highly recommend getting a yearly pass (called a Fun Card, Passport or something like that) and giving it a try. Once is necessary, but not enough. :-)

My Motorola T8160 I purchased 9 months ago from Verizon Wireless is broken. It was (and still is) a pretty good cell phone, I almost threw it 10 times (longest distance was 30 feet when I was jogging) and nothing happened to it. [Strong, ha?!]
Rightnow, the problem is that the light doesn't turn on once it's opened (the sensor is screwed), therefore, the call won't be eneded after its door is closed. I gonna change it to prevent any additional charges on my bill due to multi-hour calls!
Rest in peace dear cell phone, I bent your straight antenna into a curve (my pockets are too small, I agree with you!), I scratched your body and threw you many times, now it's time for you to rest. God bless ya! :-)

We joined a bunch of Iranian people living in the bay area at Julia Morgan Hall, 2640 College Avenue in Berkeley last night to watch the stand-up comedy featuring Payvand Khorsandi and Elham Jazab. They (and Saman, Iranian.com's cartoonist) did a great job, I'm not sure if the video/audio files of the show are available at The Iranian, the online magazine published by Jahanshah Javid.
The attendance couldn't stop laughing Where Elham Jazzab was talking like the people in Chicago or Iranian people. The part where she was mimicing Iranian girls was absolutely hilarious.
More information about the show.

Gulab Jamon is a pretty yummy indian dessert. I had it last night on one of the indian restaurants on Solano avenue (believe me, it's really worth trying, once you have it you can't go to an indian restaurant and not have it as the dessert). I'm planning to give it a try and make it at home if I can find "Sultanas" and "cardamon".
Tandjewberrymud! (What does it mean?)

Got a call from my roommate lisa this morning to go visit Showcase for Limits of Human-Machine Interaction at Sony Campus. Eric Paulos from UCBerkeley had a very cool presentation regarding his projects, I liked the Space Browsing helium blimp which was really cool and the world's first tele-robot whose concept was a robot controlled remotely, transmitting information gathered through a microphone and a camera to the one who was controlling it and giving the controller's basic features [e.g. sound, video] to the other party through the robot itself. The show was awesome, however, we got there an hour late and apparently missed half of the speeches. At the end, the cool show of two remotely controlled robots was performed on the campus. That was a combination of very simple technology and using salvaged stuff to make a working machine but it wasn't obeying some of the simple rules of "machines" such as being non-intrusive and non-disruptive. The funny thing happend at the end was the machine who was attacking the other one was caught up by a small still lamp (to my opinion, as the symbol of a peaceful object) and demolished. Quote of the night would be 'I have learned to live marginal and I like it' by Kevin Binkret, the SF based inventor, machinist, pyro-expressionist who talked about his works as the last lecturer. Additional information can be found at srl.org.

This new issues regarding the new phrase Google Bombing has been discussed on many blogs and new agencies recently. The concept is Google not only looks at the conent of your web page, but also looks at the 'Link Title' of the pages having a link to your site and counts them as your site's keywords. A quick example to understand this issue better would be having a bunch of links to http://www.anvari.org using this code <a href="http://www.anvari.org">The best of the best</a> which causes Google to return anvari.org while looking for 'The best of the best' while it's not the best of the best and it's not stated in the content of the web site. Some people have been misusing this feature to make fun of their friends without having access to their friends' web site only using the external links and this natrual behavior of Google's algorithm. This feature could be used as a personal propaganda tool which is pretty dangerous if it's not fought with.

I was watching Saturday Night Live on NBC last night, they were talking about Dara and Sara, famous Iranian dolls recently distributed in the market. They showed a photo of them with Iran's flag in the back and said if you take off the girl's clothes, the boy will throw stone at him.

Google Toolbar is now more efficient than ever. They added a new feature to help Folding@Home, a non-profit research project at Stanford University that is trying to understand the structure of proteins so they can develop better treatments for a number of illnesses. This feature allows your computer to send the result of processed data to Folding@Home as a way of distributed computing. The project is a sibling of SETI@Home, the world's largest distributed computing project based in the University of California, Berkeley.
I've been contributing to SETI@Home for a couple of years and highly recommend installing Google Toolbar to share the power of your CPU with scentific projects.

I received 5 CDs from Google with regards to their 1st Programming Contest today. Seems they had a ton of requests for CDs since they asked me some technical questions before sending the CDs out. The cool thing about it was the mail itself, my address wasn't printed on the envelope, it was written by hand! :-)