Satirewire,
one of my favorite humor sites of all times, gave
last laugh yesterday and stopped dishing out funny stories. Andrew
Marlatt (the best and the only employee of Satirewire)
announced
he'll quit working for Satirewire in a meeting with himself
yesterday. According to him, the site will still exist as an
archive but will not be updated anymore. Unlike everything else
on the site, this is not a joke.
"I've been producing SatireWire by myself for 159 Internet years
(2.67 Earth years), and in a staff meeting yesterday, I all agreed
it's time for me to move on," said Marlatt. "While the decision
was certainly difficult, the meeting was actually quite harmonious.
I brought doughnuts."
Some of my favorite stories on Satirewire:
The Axis of just as evil
Cisco actually makes things!
Interview with a Search Engine
Story on CNET
The cell phone freak has got a new phone! This little
Panasonic Allure
is my new toy. It seems to be the lightest cell phone in the states and the
second lightest phone in the world after Japan's popular
Sanyo according
to a survey from
CNET.
You can't believe how light it is unless you try it for yourself!
So, let's compare my old and new phones as
I did last time
when I bought the V60.
As you can see in the picture, V60 is smallar than Allure. They
both have voice memo, speed dial and voice dial. Allure is MUCH
lighter than v60 and other phones, has a built-in speaker phone
(so cool!),
better interface and different colors and pictures for the people
in phone book. Allure seems to have a better battery life but I
haven't tested it yet (since I charge v60 in the car sometimes,
I couldn't compare them).
As for the service, AT&T provides the new service on my new phone
and that is so far the only phone/service combination which works
at my place on the top of the hill! Great, ha?! AT&T doesn't provide
Internet access but I've got full Internet access, browser and
messengers through Verizon Wireless on the good old v60.
Ah, so tired after driving 3 hours today. I'm probably gonna
be pretty busy these days but will try to come here and write a
few lines when I get a chance.
The Chronicle:
students do not tend to read e-books as much as they read
textbooks. According to this research, they find navigating
through digial text "tedious". They are absolutely right, but
don't you think that the textbooks miss the handy dandy CTRL+F? :-)
Full story:
Students Complain About Devices for Reading E-Books, Study Finds
Take the
Google Quiz
and win a
Timbuk2 messenger bag sporting the Google logo and other wonderful Google-centric prizes. To enter, all you have to do is show your Google prowess by taking our Google Quiz.
The quiz consists of five fairly easy questions for you to answer and
hasn't been officially announced yet.
Apparently, yesterday's link was somehow broken. It is going to the
correct page now. (If something else is not missing again!)
You probably have noticed the little
"Reword My Page"
icon on my blog page:
This little sibling of Google
is getting more and more popular among the bloggers.
Here is what Reword says about itself (from the web site):
Reword is a free service to rephrase the web content. It uses
Babelfish
to translate English web pages to a second language,
then translate it back to English and outputs the result
to the browser.
[English Web Page] ===> Second Language ===> English
You will notice that the double-filtered document
is not identical to the original version. It may sometimes
look funny or in some rare cases meaningless.
Uses of Reword:
1. Authors of English web pages may use the service to write
'online translation friendly' articles/blogs. Online translation
services work best on a web page when an identical page is returned.
2. Online translation companies may use it to enhance their
translation algorithms by comparing two copies.
This is hilarious sometimes, the cool thing about "reword" is
it keeps rewording when you click the links on the reworded document and
you can keep browsing!
To try it: http://reword.toolset.org/
You can also add it to your site.
Two nights ago,
Ebi and Dariush, well-known Iranian singers came to my neighborhood to
perform together again. The concert was amazing, and a reasonable amount
of people attended such that the Greek Theatre was almost packed.
My good old pal, Shahin
and I along with Shadi and Jubine went to see them performing live and
listen to their memorable music. It was great to see other old friends there
as well.
See some exclusive pictures.
Yesterday was the day of San Francisco, China Town, Sushi, Irish Bank,
Guinness and the second event of Iranian.com.
[Photos]
Shappi Khorsandi's stand-up comedy was pretty cool, as well as
Shadi Ziaei's
music performance and
Hamid Rahmanian's short films.
One of the films, Shahrbanoo
was about the encounter of an American woman (Hamid's wife) with a
super-conservative Iranian family.
[Trailer].
The other one was named
Sir Alfred of Charles de Gaulle Airport
which was about an Iranian man who has be living in Charles de Gaulle Airport
in Paris for the past 12 years.
[Trailer].
I highly recommend seeing the trailers and if possible the short films themselves.
Remember
the post regarding davezilla?
Davezilla fans have come up with a great deal of support and surprised TOHO, Inc.
Check out Ericzilla with the news
and stuff related to the issue.
Is it GODZILLA?
brought to you by Quizilla
Magic 105.1 Morning Show,
a radio station in Ferndale, MI talked about
The Stella Awards for Lawsuits
and referenced to the related page on anvari.org
today in their program. A link is also provided to that page from their web site for
the listeners' convenience.
Seems the little dragon guy
we used to see on Dave Linabury's web site (Davezilla)
is about to bite the dust.
Toho Co., Ltd has asked Dave to remove the little dragon guy logo from his web site
claiming the ownership of all rights in and to the trademark and service mark GODZILLA
and its character (remember the
movie?).
The text of the C&D
implies that TOHO owns the rights to any word ending in the phrase "zilla".
So does it mean he's gonna give up and remove the logo and change the domain
name due to the resemblance of the logo to the actual godzilla and similiarity
of davezilla to godzilla?! It doesn't seem so!
Jeffrey Zeldman,
Dave Winer,
TechDirt and
The Register all have
articles about it. I for one am gonna keep
the 'little dragon guy' here.
Check out
the
history of Michael Jackson's face.
I also keep a gallery of
Michael's
disgusting pictures on this site if you want to check them
out as well.
ZDNet
reported today that a security hole in Google toolbar
allows hackers to get into users' PCs, read their files
and run their codes on their machines.
According to GreyMagic Software, a flaw in the Google Toolbar version 1.1.58 and earlier allows an attacker to embed code in any Web page that fools the toolbar into executing the attacker's commands. These commands can include altering the toolbar's parameters, which allows the attacker to hijack searches, alter the appearance of the toolbar or uninstall it completely. It also, more dangerously, allows the attacker to execute code on the user's PC.
And how to prevent that? If you use Google toolbar, just
click on the little Google logo at the left corner of the
toolbar and select "About Google toolbar...". If the version
you are using is 1.1.58 or lower,
download the new toolbar.
You may want to poke around with your older toolbar and
check the holes before installing the new version,
there are some detail instructions on
GreyMagic.com.
The newer version of the toolbar has a neat auto-update feature
which secures users from being attacked through the possible future holes.
The BBQ party went pretty well. As expected, around 20 people
came and had great food in a sunny day at our place. After
everybody left,
Tekno made a historical quote while we were
sitting talking with
Elvis:
E- I have this problem...
A- Yes, you should...
E- But it has been around for years and...
A- ...
E- ....
T- {listening}
A- .....
E- ......
A- .......
T- Ehem, {cough}, yes, remember that movie? As Mel Gibson
said, 'There are two types of people..'.. emmm.. I
actually forgot what those types were...
Went to Bean Hollow Beach with Pablo, Molly, Ken and
Christine. It was fun. A dead whale carcass was at the beach
so we had to move to another one. We made some salmon,
asparagus and good corn, and played freesbie there. That
place is so beautiful, give it a try if you get a chance.
It's 40 miles south of San Francisco, 30 miles north of Santa Cruz.
Too bad I had to come back early to prepare some stuff for
the BBQ tomorrow.. Too tired now, gotta go to bed..
The Iranian magazine has recently published
my latest article:
'
The Bigguest Injustice'.
"A recent study shows about 80 percent of Iranians who competed and were awarded in various international science olympiads are now either studying in the U.S. universities or employed at top positions by well known U.S. companies."
In memory of my wonderful devoted faithful grandma who
was a true believer. She passed away yesterday:
God saw you were getting tired,
And a cure was not to be.
So he put his arms around you,
And whispered, "Come to me."
With tearful eye we watched you,
And saw you pass away.
Although we loved you dearly,
We could not make you stay.
A golden heart stopped beating,
Hard working hands at rest.
God broke our hearts to prove to us,
He only takes the best.
Author Unknown
Latest news: Catherine Zeta-Jones has recently gained
a lot of weight (look at the picture, wow!). Now, she
and husband Michael Douglas who forced him to reject
the £20m advertisement deal by Victoria's Secret may
regret of refusing the biggest ever underwear advertising
offer!
But, don't freak out. She's not alone in this game,
see the
other fat celebrities
and their original photos!
HighWLAN: A Driving Wireless Network
And, I wrote about 802.11 wireless networks. I have used
linksys and my geeky roommate and I also have a D-Link at home;
they work well enough to play games, establish a voice chat session,
or even do video conferencing. The technology is almost new,
so it takes time for it to get mature.
This
network phreak
used the basic technology to talk to chat with the other geeks
and listen to their mp3s while they were all driving to
YAPC. It's worth reading
the whole story.
Here's what he said:
I was on a mission. Create the first documented case of 802.11b networking at 85, scratch that, 65 mph. The most important goal of this project was to create a usable, local network between multiple vehicles. This network had to support some form of communication between computers. I had four nuts, Meng, Schwern, David, and me. I just needed a good way to bolt them together.
This year's largest underground Inernet security
gahering on the planet is being held in Las Vegas
as I'm writing this here. The admission was $75
cash [no cr3dit c@rd], seems hackers do not trust
each other anymore!
DEF CON
phreaks envision the perfect world as:
"Computer networks would welcome curious exploration, all information would be openly shared, a lot of public toilets would be filled with concrete and no swimming pool would go unfilled with several blocks of dry ice."
There is a 802.11b wireless network this year; so everybody
can use the Internet, check out their own servers and
mess around with other's servers. There's also a ftp/web
server to be used as a file repository for the people who want
to share their photos they have taken at DEF CON and save
the bandwidth of the net connection.
Everything seems to be peaceful this year at DEF COM. Last year,
it was ended with the arrest of Russian programmer who
gave a talk on electronic book security and programmed
a software to remove the user restrictions on encrypted
Adobe e-books.
Speaking of network security and hacking, let me tell you about
this web site! It is
pretty scary and thought that you should know about
it... Now you can see anyone's drivers license on the
Internet, including your own. I just searched for mine
& there it was, picture & all. Check this out. It's
a great invasion of one's privacy.
Thanks to Parisa for sending the link.
Damn time zone difference; had to come to work at 7:00AM this morning! It has
its benefits though: extension of the day, additional daily web browsing time
and reading 6 day old unread e-mails!
Anyhow, I always loved sports photos and used to collect them. This time, the agility of the cameraman made another
photography masterpiece.
Is it a clown or a table tennis player?!
Check out this small flash game, it's so cool. :-)
In light of the rumors about
the decline of CISCO shares,
detention of WorldCom ex-CFO
and the
market's sharp skid today,
the future of US economy looks gloomier than before. US manufacturing experiences
its
seven months low
which jobless claims keep rising according to the news.
Today's Bill Schorr cartoon was about
Bush's plan for the economy.
A hilarious one for Bush fans!!
