So, they finally won the title beating Germany 2-0 this
morning. Ronaldo, the top scorer of the 2002 World Cup,
scored 2 goals in the 2nd half to grant Brazil the championship.
This was one of the greatest matches in the World Cup
finals history, the first time Brazil was playing against
Germany in the history of the World Cup and the amazing
fact was German's high attitude after they lost which
was pretty impressive.
As
we
said before, Brazil was logically supposed to win the cup.
So, who will be the winner of 2006 World Cup?
The picture shows how they managed to celebrate their
5th world cup, you can see
a
collection of teams plans in this tournament. (Don't
miss
Iran's!)
So, I left the beautiful state of California around 2:00PM
yesterday and entered another beautiful state 4 hours later:
Oregon.
Oregon, California's northern neighbor, has a lot of spectacular sights
(specially when you enter Oregon, 300 miles north of where I live). I
took some digital photos of
Lake Shasta,
the road,
and
Mt. Shasta
and put them online, not with a high quality one though... I have also
taken a number of photos with my other camera which will go online
after they're developed and scanned.
I had a great time last night with
Shahin, my good old friend,
the future CEO of
IBM (if he's not yet),
who is sitting right next to me, keeps instant messaging me and working on a
very important photoshop project right now... The
product will be available at
his
web site in a few minutes... For now, check out
our photos taken
this morning. As you can see, we've done a lot of outdoor activities
so far... :-)
Shahin's Project is done now..! This guy rocks!
Translation:
Shahin: Hey, wassup?
Ahmad (thinking): ..what a jerk.. can't you see i'm invisible!...
They're (and have been) two of the most successful countires in the
history of the World Cup. Their matches have always been quite
wonderful, but the amazing fact is both of them have participated
in all of the world cups (or at least most of them as far as I
know..) and the have never played against each other at any World Cup.
Brazil: They play by heart, they love the game. They have used all
their outfield players at the tournament and scored 16 goals, more
than all other teams so far. They'll play their third consecutive
world cup finals this year, in the last two, they have been defeated
by Italy and France respectively.
Germany: They play by brain rather than heart. They have scored in all
their matches and they have only lost two times this year, both
with a single goal. I loved the way they went to the finals by
consistent paces (1-0 wins, minimum fret!). They play their game,
no talks to the referee and they haven't been awarded even one
penalty in their last eleven world cup matches.
More Facts...
So, who do you think will win the finals? As said before, there's a high
chance that Brazil wins the whole cup
(
logical argument here),
but the Germans have been my hero since 1986. Brazilian coach said
Germany is a traditional, cold, calculating team, that's why they have an
enormous amount of respect for them.
Last but not least, here is a
collection of
soccer fans photos for your amusement.. Do not miss
this one!!
[Photo copyrighted by
Yahoo! Fifaworld Cup]
100 villages gone,
an exclusive photo essay published on
Iranian.com.
Help quake victims
and their families by donating money. Also, help them through
Red Cross Red Crescent.
More photos from Tehran24.
I was watching KRON4 Bay Area's new station a few minutes ago and they
reported that
it could be a sign of warmth between Iran and the U-S, it's a change, after
Mohammad Khatami, Iranian President said Iranian would accept American aid to
help it recover from a devastating earthquake that has killed 245 people. Guess
earthquake (a big one) might be one of the few things that possibly could heat up the diplomatic
ties and relations between Iran and the United States!
Iran is one of the world's most quake-prone regions. Since 1990, more than 41,000 people
have been killed in three major earthquakes there.
Hundreds of people were killed or injured as an earthquake and a series of aftershocks rocked northern
Iran Saturday, Iranian media reports said.
The National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado, said the quake's magnitude was 6.3.
I couldn't believe what I saw on
Blogdex. A bunch of
blogs in Farsi!!
Blogs like
this,
this,
this and
this!
You probably will see a bunch of Farsi characters which won't make
sense to you, however, they're pretty well designed (and full
of professional content..).
Sweeeeet! No offense, but don't we really rule the world?! :-)
There has been a lot of talks about the new linking pulicy of National
Public Radio:
Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited.
Please use this form to request permission to link to npr.org and its related sites.
They announced that policy was originally intended to maintain NPR.s commitment
to independent, noncommercial journalism.
Wired:
The fact that some folks still don't understand that if you don't want to be
linked you shouldn't be on the Web.
NPR, is one of the few radio stations I ever listen to while driving, and the
only station producing useful content (you may have seen some articles here regarding
their stuff). The new policy prevents webloggers put any link of any sort to
NPR web pages. The policy may have been in place as early as March 2002 or before,
but is just now facing the scrutiny of Web citizens as the number of links to NPR
grows through the bloggers community. On the other hand, Yahoo! and Google, two
of the most popular web portals use NPR material in their news pages, NPR's spokesmen
have said they have an underwriting relationship with Yahoo! but nothing was
said regarding the links coming from Google.
Who can monitor these links anyways? Do they have the resources to do that? A company
spending more than $122 million in 2000 and they want to dedicate resource to
monitor the links?!..
The children were lined up in the cafeteria of a Catholic elementary school
for lunch. At the head of the table was a large pile of apples.
The nun made a note, and posted on the apple tray, "Take only one. God is
watching."
Moving further along the lunch line, at the other end of the table was a
large pile of chocolate chip cookies.
A child had written a note, "Take all you want. God is watching the apples."
This is what I call
Microsoft,
a
Big Fat Copycat. The wealthiest software firm in the states
is planning to make more money by their next BIG innovation of
windows(tm), what they call
Longhorn. Longhorn is supposed
to be the world's most sophisticated software (a super windows),
which IF everything goes well, will be released after 2005. If
that happens, I guess the monopoly will go into a very different
phase, meaning that a lot of silicon valley firms such as
Oracle, AOL Time Warner, Sun, Sony wouldn't like since
Longhorn
will handle a lot of those functions which is currently handled
by those firms.
Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder and business brain is talking to
a lot of the employees directly these days and biz-planning their
newest product after he switched jobs three years ago with Steve
Ballmer (current CEO of Micro$oft) and became the Chief Software
Architect. He claims that he has never missed work or called in
sick in 27 years!! He's now working harder than ever, what does
he want? Money?
He has a lot of it..
Fame? Are you crazy?! Bigger company? You must be kidding me!!
So what does he really want? Apparently, work is fun for him.. He
loves what he does and believes in what he does. Or maybe he likes
to be challenged by open source and free software fans and show
us he's unbeatable?
Obviously, other big firm won't be sitting watching Longhorn
being developed at Microsoft.. It's a big project, but the team
believes in its feasibility, will they do that or grab the
ready code from somewhere? Lets wait and see.. Some of you guys
may already know that the original software for Microsoft's
well known OS, has been *bought* by Bill Gates in 1981 from
a rival Seattle programmer. This software was purchased for
$50,000 and later named MS/DOS. Another well known example you
may remember, was the court case in 1990, where Apple Computer
sued them claiming Microsoft has violated their UI patent for
windows look and feel. Is
Longhorn gonna go through the
same story? It will have MSN messenger, IIS and MSSQL to beat
Yahoo! and AOL messengers, and web server and database suit
of Sun and Oracle.. That's why I call them
Big Fat Copycat.
Latest News:
Peruvian lawmaker's effort could ban Microsoft on government computers
Here's a picture of a stamp recently found on an
envelope at Bin Ladan's house. This picture clearly
explains where Bin Laden got the idea from..
And, this phone conversation between George Bush and
Saddam Hussain is sent by one of the readers
in reply to
previously published conversation:
Saddam's Phone Call to President Bush on Sept. 11
Saddam: "President Bush, I would like to express my condolences to you. It
is a real tragedy - so many people, such great buildings. I want to
assure you we had nothing to do with that - it was not us."
Bush: "What? - What buildings? What people?"
Saddam: "Ummm...what time is it in America now?"
Bush: "It's 8:00 in the morning."
Saddam: "Ooops... Sorry I'll call you again in an hour. Bye."
The
Webby Awards yesterday annouced
the winners.
Here's a
list of nominees
and a
list of judges.
Presented by
The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences in
San Francisco,
The Webby Awards is the leading international honor for achievement in
technology and creativity.
Some of the well known Winners are:
Best Practices:
Google,
Commerce:
Amazon,
Finance:
Yahoo! Finance,
Humor:
The Onion,
News:
BBC News,
Radio:
BBC Radio 4,
Sports:
ESPN
In addition to them
Emode, the #1 destination
for
self discovery, an online service to know more about yourself won
the Rising Star award. The
top US property award went to
AOL
while
Yahoo! was chosen as the
top global property.
These awards were presented by Webby Awards and
Nielsen//NetRatings
for the first time.
Like last years, the winners were limited to
five word acceptance speeches.
The ones I liked:
"This is yours -- Google Users." by Google,
"Our stock is rising!"
by Amazon,
"Spielberg, give us a budget!" by Donnie Darko,
"Sex is complicated - we're easy."
by teenwire.com and
"Money Talks - we eavesdrop" by Center for Responsive Politics.
Here's a video
of how Google founders accepted the award last year. I couldn't find any fresh ones online...
Early in the morning, Saddam Hussein, calls up
George Bush and says, "George, I had a wonderful dream
last night. I dreamed I could see all of America and
on every large building there was a huge poster, and it
said 'Allah is God, God is Allah'." "That's such a
coincidence," says Bush, "because last night I had
a dream too. I could see all of Baghdad and on every
large building there, there was also a huge poster."
"Well what did it say?" asked Hussein. "I don't know,"
Bush replied, "I don't read Hebrew."
Fresh news:
Audiogalaxy, a popular Internet file-swapping service, agreed Monday to filter copyrighted works as part of a legal settlement with the recording industry.
Under the settlement, Audiogalaxy is required to obtain permission or consent from a songwriter, music publisher and/or recording company to use and share copyrighted works. In addition, Audiogalaxy has agreed to pay the music publishers and recording industry an undetermined amount of money based on Audiogalaxy's assets and interest in resolving the case quickly, according to the RIAA.
According to
download.com,
audiogalaxy has been downloaded 30 million times. Their
stastics show the highest download numbers on file sharing software.
Great news for the people who care about copyright and
protecting the value of music, ha? Obvously not for the
people like us!
Full story from CNET
Brazil last won the world cup in 1994.
Before that they won it in 1970.
Add 1970 and 1994, it equals 3964.
Argentina last won the world cup in 1986.
Before that they won it in 1978.
Add 1978 and 1986, it equals 3964.
Germany last won in 1990.
Before that they won in 1974.
Add 1990 and 1974, it equals 3964.
So going by this logic, the winner of the 2002 world cup is the same
as the 3964 - 2002 = 1962 world cup. The 1962 world cup was won by
Brazil.
Iranian fans have their own reason to rejoice :
Iran has never won the world cup so we'll probably win it in the year 3964.
I watched
Y Tu Mamá También
(And Your Mother Too) tonight. That was a harsh, modern and intelligent mixture
of friendship, life, sex and youth thoughts. [3.5/5]
Philosophy Test
An eccentric philosophy professor gave a one question final
exam after an entire semester dealing with a broad array of
topics.
The class was already seated and ready to go when the
professor picked up his chair, plopped it on his desk and
wrote on the board: "Using everything we have learned this
semester, prove that this chair does not exist."
Fingers flew, erasers erased, notebooks were filled in furious
fashion. Some students wrote over 30 pages in one hour
attempting to refute the existence of the chair.
One member of the class however, was up and finished in
less than a minute.
Weeks later when the grades were posted, the rest of the
group wondered how he could have gotten an A when he had
barely written anything at all.
They found his answer consisted of two words: "What chair?"
Congratulations to all Lakers fans for the 3rd consecutive
title! Yes, the Lakers, with the help of their
BIG man Shaquille
O'Neal and their young star Kobe Bryant won the title (and of
course, the wonderful 3 pointer by RObert Horry against the Kings
that saved the season for the Lakers), sweeping
the New Jersey Nets at their home.
Shaq was the MVP of the playoffs, he's so smart, giving the
trophy to all his playmates immidiately after he received
it (I really liked it), going to his grandfather and stepdad
after winning the title and talking about Jason Kid as the
real regular season MVP (wow, so smart in their court) are
some of the reasons he's my favorite player. He improved
his average to 34.2 points standing at the second place,
above Michael Jordan (33.6) and below Rick Barry (36.3). Another
interesting fact was 3 of Nets players commited 28 fouls on
Shaq in four games while he only had 7 fouls in those games.
Phil Jackson was probably the happiest man there, he
became the league's all-time leader in postseason coaching
victories with this sweep (156 wins) and now he's above
Pat Riley who has got 155. He now has 3 three-peats, two
with the Bulls and MJ, and now one with the Lakers and Shaq.
"I was sort of a great player that didn't have any championships.
Ever since I met Phil, now I have three."
-Shaquille O'Neal
[Photo copyrighted by
nba.com]
The wait is over. After regularly checking the availablity of
anvari.com, this domain was freed today, reregistered and redirected
to
www.anvari.org. It will be
available tomorrow morning I guess.
The previous owner of anvari.com was
namezero who registered
the domain name through
networksolutions
two years ago hoping to it at a higher price.
Welcome to
www.anvari.com.
Next mission: ahmad.com!
Here's a collection of
FIFA World Cup fans
from all the participant countries. Britney Spears is a fan of the states,
while Cameroon Diaz likes Cameroon, Natalia Iglesias is a Uruguay fan and
Penelope Cruz dies for Spain.
See the complete list
here.
Last night's matches were quite amazing, Germany beat Cameroon with 2 second-half
goals, Senegal scored three in the first half after beating France but
tied with Uruguay thanks to their 3 goals in the second half and Saudi
Arabia continued their losing strike losing to Ireland three to nothing.
But the most Important match was between France and Denmark where France
lost 2-0 to lose their hopes completely to win the trophy this year. Traditionally,
since 1984, every time France and Denmark played against each other, the
winner has gone to the end of the road to the championship. According this
interesting fact, will Denmark win the FIFA orld Cup 2002?
Bruno Buzzetto Presents:
An Dysducational Road Movie!
This cartoon requires flash and teaches you how
to drive through NO/YES sessions. I watched the
short movie 5 times, exploring new details each
time. The music is one of the brilliant
aspects of this short film.
My
picture of San Fransico and Berkeley
that was chosen as the picture of the month on
Powershot User,
got the highest ranking of the month (7.49/10) and was
selected as the
picture of the month of May, 2002. Morris Bennett Altman's picture
of the pigeon from New York City with 7.35 points stood
at the 2nd place while
Rose Colored Glasses",
a masterpiece
of Dolores Neilson from Bethany, Ct, followed them by
7.00 points.
A
thumbnail
of my
title winning picture
is now shown on the left menu of the powershot user's page.
A friend of mine sent me this list of
many of the Bay Area firms that received venture capital
financing between January 1 and March 31, 2002. The companies listed in that list
are not necessarily start-ups, they could have received funding from other
investors previously.
It seems that they're still putting a lot of money into telecomm/networking firms,
like
Polaris Networks which
received $55M and
Pluris, a manufacturer of
Internet backbone routers ($55M) while
Caspian Networks
is leading them all with $120M to build the next generation hardware for the
heart of the Internet.
Among Semiconductor businesses,
Silicon Access, a provider of chipsets
for Internet infrastructure, and
Barcelona Design,
online service provider of analog and mixed-signal circuit design appliations, received
$39M and $30M respectively to lead them all.
It seems that the future belongs to the Internet businesses (at least for the
next couple of years!). Or is it only bay area specific?!
Forwarded mail:
Shahkar,
a nice Farsi poem on
www.nabavioffline.com.
Turn on your speakers and enjoy!
(Thanks to Majid)
Does the title make sense to you? I doubt so, therefore,
here's the translation: Amin kills girls. A murdurer?
Fortunately no!
Amin is an old friend of mine, a Cisco guru, who has
traveled all the way to India to visit Cisco systems.
He's also a big fan of
Roger Waters.
Chatting with Amin, he sent me his photo a few minutes ago.
Here's his photo, just as a web-based test to see how many girls
kill themselves seeing that! :-)
Just added by Amin: He's going to Moscow in two months.
Wow! sounds cool, frequent traveler!
You're home, drinking your coffee and readying newspaper on a sunny
summer day. somebody calls you:
- Hi, I'm calling regarding the helicopter you just bought.. I was wondering
how you want to pay for it. I accept credit cards and personal checks.
- What?! Helicopter?
- Yes, you just bought my helicopter on ebay!!
Yes, this is the technology age, when all your financial transactions take
place electronically, through some simple clicks of your computer's mouse.
This 13 year old kid used his school's computer and the username and password of
his friend's mom to buy a helicopter and a
jet (and a couple of more things, a pick-up truck, motorbikes, etc..) for more than a
million dollars.
FBI announced cybercrime is a top 10 priority now, I think it also includes
credit card piracy and illegal online shopping, but not sure if a 13 year old boy
is subject to the new law. The boy hasn't been
charged. His head teacher says he's thinking about punishing him! :=)
Story on Ananova
Related Story on Techdirt
Remember I wrote about one of the bigguest online communities
in the world (
craigslist)
and their party we went to? So, they published some of the
photos
taken by their photographers on the web site. The interesting
thing was
a surprising photo of me and my friend Tekno
among all those pictures! (Thanks to
orangeexposure.com!)
Yes, the Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Kings in Sacramento to
be the Western Conference champion in 7th game of the conference
finals. The games was awesome, all last 6 games were close ones,
each team won 3. This was the first time in 20 years that the road team
wins the conference finals in the 7th game and the first time
it ever happened for the Lakers. Also, the first time game 7 of
the conference finals went to OT.
And why did they lose? Why did the game go to
OT? They missed basketball's most basic element: free throws (almost 50%),
and guess what, Shaq didn't miss them this time (11/15).
Shaq rules!
The amazing thing was the BIG tv draw of this match (2/3 higher
than the last year's comparable game). The game drew a 16.9 rating
with a 27 share in the nation's 53 largest markets, covering 65
percent of the country. The rating is the percentage of all homes with TVs,
whether or not they are in use. Share is the percentage of homes with TVs in use.
(
SF GATE)
(Photo from nba.com)
