"If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people he gives it to."
- Old Irish Saying

Have you ever though why Bill Gates is wealthier than you? The short answer by Mike Maples is "Bill, is just smarter than anyone else. There are probably more smart people per square foot right here than anywhere else in the world, but Bill is just smarter."
Consider that he made this money in the 22 years or so since Microsoft was founded in 1975. If you presume that he has worked 14 hours a day on every business day of the year since then, that means he's been making money at a staggering half-million dollars per hour, *around $150 per second. Which means that if, on his way into the office, should he see or drop a $500 bill on the ground, it's just not worth his time to bend over and pick it up. He would make more just heading off to work. We're assuming about 4 seconds to bend down and pocket the bill. Of course he can afford to hire people to follow him and pick up any $500 bills he may drop. Not that he would, fortunately he doesn't quite think of his wealth or time this way. When I first calculated this, it was only a $20 bill, and then for some time it was a $100 bill. I remember speaking to him at a conference some years ago thinking, "$31 per second, $31 per second" as we talked. I didn't mention this. More...
He went to Stanford University a week ago for to give a speech for Stanford students. He definitly is one of the smartests...

It's funny, check out www.loser.com, it's the same as www.google.com and returns the same results [basically a cool hack ;)]. You're actually browsing Google without being notified through your browser's toolbar.
It's the same for:
www.gooogle.com
wwwgoogle.com
and many more sites!

USA:
Aerial photos snapped by camera-carrying pigeons, shoes embedded with a transmitter to spy on U.S. diplomats, and eyeglasses equipped with a lethal cyanide dose will be among 1,100 espionage artifacts displayed at the new International Spy Museum. (Full Story from Reuters).

Afghanistan:
Ariana Afghan Airlines tries to rebuild from scratch after U.S. bombing destroyed fleet. (Full Story from AP).

Nothing zaps the enjoyment of a live concert quite like the scourge of ringing cell phones. But that hasn't stopped composers from trying to turn this annoyance into the main event. You could say they write the songs that make the whole world ring--or wring its hands.

I heard the news on NPR a couple of days ago and found the idea very neat, however, the result could be sorta crappy :-)
Full Story...

Check out this page provided by Yahoo! to show the newest websites added to their system everyday. On April 18, 2002, they added http://www.anvari.org along with a bunch of other interesing sites to their Society and Culture category. For a limited time, it shows www.anvari.org with a little "NEW" flag next to that in that category. Yahoo! folks really read and review the websites, since they have some recently added information of the site in the description.
Viva Yahoo! They Rock! ;)

My work schedule has been pretty hectic for the past couple of days, let me quickly write a few lines, grab some dinner and get back to work.
Do you know what your Birthday Color is? I got this quote about myself through IM (which seems sorta true!):

You are attractive, and active. You never hide your feelings, and express everything thats inside. But can be selfish at times. You want to be noticed, and don't like to be treated un eqaully. You can brighten up people's day. You know what to say at the right time, and you have good sense of humour.

A lot of pepole know what their sign is, but do you know what your birthday color is? It's not necessarily your favorite color :-)

Here's a very cool photo of Tehran copyrighted by Tehran24.com guys, thanks to them. The traffic sign you see up there reads "Drive Within Lanes". Yes! Here's how we drive in Iran! :-)

And, another quick good night link before I go to bed:
This is Islam is an excellent combination of music and flash technology to introduce Islam to the world. Check it out and have a good night.

I had a pretty busy day today at work, just checked my e-mails, found a couple of considerable links. Among them, is the Female or Shemale test, take this test and see how good you are to guess the real gender of the people you see in the test!
Another funny link (which is actually not very irrelevent to this subject) is some photos of George Bush which I found very funny and artistic (not recommended for below 18!).

Today's basketball match between the LA Lakers and Portland Trail Blazers was a very exciting one, the Blazers ran away from the Lakers with a 128-120 victory in the 2nd overtime. The lakers were leading the games as long as I watched it (I missed the first part where the Blazers were leading and Scottie Pippen got rejected), but this guy Bonzi Wells played very well to beat the Lakers in a great long match. Rasheed Wallace scored a last second three pointer to tie the game in the forth quarter and Shaq scored a lot (but not enough) points and made 10 of his 13 free throws!

Come along on an Incredible Journey into the desert!
This is supposed to be a personality test based on Japanese Archetypes the desert represents a hardship. You have to choose which animal you want to sacrifice during the test. Check it out!

Before going to watch 'The Simpsons', let me quickly drop two flash links in here:

1. Windows RG Edition

2. The Funny Bunny

This is one of those big mistakes rarely happen: The secret list of potential suitors for Global Crossing (huge fiber optics company which went bankrupt a few months ago) was mistakenly exposed by an employee of a law firm that's serving as GC's counsel in backruptcy proceedings. He pushed the wrong button when he was sending an e-mail to the potential bidders and CCd the e-mail instead of BBCing that, so everybody could see the e-mail addresses of other bidders!
See NY Time's article: Names of potential Global Crossing bidders mistakenly revealed.
Thanks to my landlord, Murray, for taking out interesting NY Times articles for me :-)

Yes! They launched http://www.wehavethewayout.com/ to persuade unix users to switch to windows some weeks ago, but an "Error 403" authorization message started to appear since last week. It was revealed later that the site was running on a freebsd server (a unix box!) and apache web server! :-)

Full Story

El Rio is great place to listen to fabulos international music and have a good time on Friday nights. A combination of multicultural crowd, great DJs, a disco ball and a pool table makes it a very fun place to hear Latin/World and smoke in its great outdoor place which has a dazzling decor. If you live around the bay area and want to enjoy a diverse community, check it out at 3158 Mission St, San Francisco. (a word of warning)
That was for last night, and, today I went to Santa Clara to visit a group of friends, had a great time in one of the parks and learned a cool game :)

Google, the Internet's most powerful search engine finally started its monthly updated with a delay of 8 days. My site lost one PR point (so far) while most of the web sites suffer from the same situation. Google, itself, has gained almost half a point and exceeded the maximum PR. There should be a normalization any time, it's too early to say it's the final standing.
www.anvari.org will lose traffic if the situation doesn't change. It usually takes a couple of days for Google to settle... The only positive point is the search result for the word 'ahmad' which shows this web site in the 6th place, that means it rose 5 place comparing the the previous standing 11. That's the highest ranking since 1999 which was 7.
You probably cannot see the latest update for a few days, however, you can check them out at www2.google.com.
I'm out to swimming at Y now! Have a nice weekend!

This is an online solution to convert your images to HTML, the result is so incredible that you cannot believe it. Use it just for fun, not to create actual HTML :-) The result link I provided above shows you a picture of myself in HTML (it may look like a jpg).
Just as a friendly warning, it may take you a while to see the picture loaded (took 5 seconds for me through the T1 connection), the total size of the HTML is around a megabyte.

The market started the session off on a better noted (mixed) than the first two days of the week/quarter but it was unable to sustain any kind of momentum leaving the recent bearish trend dominant. Dow Jones and Nasdaq both lost 115.42 and 20.05 respectively as the stock market tumble due to the Mideast turmoil.
I heard in the news this morning that Worldcom Inc., the No. 2 U.S. long-distance and data service company is to cut 3,700 jobs in its data and Internet business (4%) and as you may know Swissair also ran out of cash and its last flights took off a couple of days ago (I still have an open ticket!).

SAN FRANCISCO (April 1, 2002 7:19 a.m. EST) - Apostolos Gerasoulis has a message for everyone who's been relying on Google as an online guide: It's time to move on.
After spending the past six months fine-tuning the technology, Gerasoulis and his development team in Piscataway, N.J., are rolling out a souped-up search engine called Teoma and taking aim at Google, widely regarded as the best way to find anything on the Web.
"We are the next generation in search," said Gerasoulis, a Rutgers University mathematics professor who has had Google in his sights since founding Teoma in 1999. "Google has reached its maturity."
The souped-up version of Teoma's site was launched at 8 p.m. EST Monday. I have been tracking the changes on their web site at http://www.teoma.com for a couple of months, they finally put on the final make-up on their site and launched it, although it's a crappy page in the text browsers. It may take a long time for them to beat up Google, it's worth a try though.
More...

Lisa Guernsey from the New York Times wrote an article titled As the web matures, fun is hard to find. Here is a part of my review on it posted in the Webmaster World's forum:
The web is "more fun" for the newcomers than people like "Glenn Davis". After search engines [mostly after Yahoo! and now Google], the nature of the web has been changed quite a lot. We used to "explore" and "surf" the web as our daily adventure to find new web sites through hyperlinks, notify friends of finding new sites and experience the "fun of surfing". Nowadays, the Information we need is just a click away using the sophisticated search algorithms and that's what Mr. Davis considers as the cause of losing our sence of wonder.

Here's the first few lines of the e-mail I received from SWISS today:

Dear Mr. Anvari,
SWISS officially took to the skies with the start of the summer timetable on March 31, which is valid from now until October 26. Print copies are available from our city and airport ticket offices or from your travel agent. To be sure you have the most up-to-date version of our flight schedule, we recommend that you download the timetable from our new website address: http://www.swiss.com. For maximum speed and convenience, you can also book your flight online, too.

Swissair simply ran out of cash and stopped flying yesterday. More information at Swissair.com.

An african-american guy called me when I was in my way to grab some lunch today.
- Hey!
- (I answered) What?
- You just dropped your bill!
- Where? (Looking to find $$ on the ground!)
- April Fool!
- You got me, man! :-)