Archive: 200211

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 Weekend Fun

Here is some of the links I collected during the past week. I'm just quickly putting them online since I hardly use the Internet here in Chicago. I'll write more when I return to California. Thanks to Houmi for provding the super fast Internet connection tonight!

Can you strip that girl? Don't click if you are at work and your speakers are on!

Best inventions of 2002.

Soccer fans: How good can you control the ball? (Roo paayi!)

Sneezing contest in Japan! Click for movies. :-)

Michael Jackson at a Persian party

Sat Nov 30, 2002   (11:17 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 To Realize...

To realize the value of ten years:Ask a newly divorced couple. To realize the value of four years: Ask a graduate. To realize the value of one week: Ask an editor of a weekly news paper...

Read More... (Thanks, Mojgan)

Tue Nov 26, 2002   (06:35 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Photos of Negar's Birthday and Pool

Just finished uploading some photos of Negar's Birthday and Pool Night in Sunnyvale (taken by Eangelica).

Mon Nov 25, 2002   (11:55 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Weekend Fun

Oh, I have a busy day ahead. Came to work today to finish some of my unfinished tasks. Thank you all folks for the links. Smile! :-)

The Ultimate Censorship!

The new PDA keyboard rocks because it rolls!

I wish we had one of these Heineken Machines at work!

Golf Wars Episode II Poster: Coming Soon! (Thanks, Mahsa)

US youth can't find Iraq! [From CNN, thanks to Angela]

New Airport Security: Open and move your mouse around! [Thanks to Shahin]

ABC: Invisible burglar arrested in Iran! :-)

Sat Nov 23, 2002   (01:02 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 GooglePeople

After Googlism, the service which enables people to get their answers to their "who is...", "what is..." questions and Smart Engine, the service that answers the multiple choice questions, it's GooglePeople's turn to demostrate the power of google.

GooglePeople shows that with simple, yet effective, text mining techniques, answers to specific questions can be extracted from the vast Google data repository.

Just type your question like "Who was the 23rd president of the United States?" and it will give you the correct answer. Pretty smart!

Also, I noticed this Random Pesonal Picture Finder which uses google! Just rename your digital photos after you take them!

Thu Nov 21, 2002   (06:45 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Hoax photo or not?

Hoax photo or not?

A friend of mine sent these pictures of George Bush looking through his binoculars without uncapping them and another one in which he is reading a book upside down. You probably have seen these photos which have been circulating around the Internet for the past few days. I found them funny, as you did.

Browsing the most popular links on blogdex, I found a Hoax Photo Test web site which contains a bunch of those strange forwarded pictures. Always wondering whether or not they were hoax, took the test. According to the web site, the picture of Bush reading upside down is a hoax.

I was reading a book named What's so Funny by my previous landlord, Murray S. Davis yesterday and I think one of the jokes (or maybe a true story) is related to this subject.

Once, the Nixons were staying at a hotel in Chicago when a fire alarm went off in the middle of the night. Hundreds of guests, including Richard and Pat Nixon, were headed into the lobby. Once Nixon realized that it was a false alarm, he and his wife headed for the elevator to return to their room.
- "Just a minute," said the hotel's security chief. "Everyone stays in the lobby until we get the 'all clear' signal from the Fire Personel."
- "I'm the vice president," Nixon said.
- "Oh," the security chief said. "Sorry. Go right ahead to your room then."
Nixon pressed the elevator button, and the security chief had second thoughts.
- "Vice president?" he asked himslef. "Wait a moment, vice president of what?"
- "Of the United States of America," Nixon answered.
- "Get back out here," the security chief said. "I thought you were a vice president of the hotel." :-)

Tue Nov 19, 2002   (05:59 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 What's your favorite drink?

Before you order a drink in public, you should read this!

Seven New York City bartenders were asked if they could nail a woman's personality based ON what she drinks. Though interviewed separately, they concurred on almost all counts. The result:

Drink: Beer Personality: Causal, low-maintenance; down to earth. Your Approach: Challenge her to a game of pool.

Drink: Mixed Drinks Personality: Older, more refined, high maintenance, has very picky taste; knows EXACTLY what she wants. Your Approach: You won't have to approach her. If she's interested, she'll send YOU a drink.

Read More...

Women: Read it! There is also a section for men there! Thanks to Mojgan for the personality guide!

Mon Nov 18, 2002   (09:58 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Weekend Fun!

Last night was so fun being with Berkeley friends Tekno and Elvis and south bay friends Eangelica and Serina enjoying Jeff's great live music in Sunnyvale.

Yes, the wait is over! Cool links ar here:

Page not found or 404 porn not found? [blogdex]

Plump? or Bump? Try to guess which ones of these women are pregnant!

Big Maze

Optical Illusions. My favorite: Movement Illusion

This californian guy wants to collect 1 million AOL promotional CDs and sends them back to AOL headquarters! Send him yours if you have any. Stop AOL

If you drink a lot of beer, you probably can answer Beer Quiz!

Cool halloween custome! (Paental guidance required!)

Omar Al Zabir Portal looks like a new version of windows and is one of the greatest things ever on the web! Loved it!

Teetering [Link from Reza Nezhadsoleyman]

Gonna go play basketball with Brien and his folks. Have a good weekend!

Sat Nov 16, 2002   (02:52 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz pictures

Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz pictures

Finally put up some photos from my trips to Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. I can't believe it took me two weeks to organize and upload them...

Pictures of Old Tap (taken in Santa Barbara) and this reflection (taken in Capitola) are my favorites as well as the Mexican Chocolate Ice cream picture.

Didn't take that long to take my revenge from Gagic tonight after losing the Tennis match to him 2-0 two nights ago. I creamed him in pool, just to be even! See you in court next week, man! :-)

Wed Nov 13, 2002   (11:54 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Send Your Name to Mars

Send Your Name to Mars

In 2003, twin Mars Rovers will be launched towards the Red Planet. Once on the surface, the Rovers will be able to travel significant distances and use several instruments to help scientists determine the climate and water history in Mars' present and past.

Type in your name and send it to Mars. Once you have done this you will receive a "Success" page where you will be able to print a commemorative certificate and bookmark it for later viewing. All the names collected will be recorded onto a small DVD disk that will be attached to the lander that will travel to the surface of Mars.

Hurry! This ends Nov. 15. Image from Nasa.gov.

Mon Nov 11, 2002   (10:54 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Weekend Fun

Alright, I'm gonna put a lot of cool link this weekend since I was out of town last weekend and didn't write any weekly links. Enjoy, and as always, have a nice rest of the weekend!

Industorious Clock: Your computer time in flash

Evil Clown Generator: Make your own evil clown! [From blogdex]

The Mummy Maker: Try to make a mummy without any mistakes! [From G-7 BBS]

This is what I *Really* want: A talking Homer Simpsons Beer Opener (No, really, what else do you need in life beside the Simpsons and some beer?). And this one is what I really hate to see: 304 Firbidden Thong! [From Attu]

Soccer match ended 149-0!!

GameButton Arcade: Javascript games using HTML buttons!

Singing Horses [Flash, through Nasim]

The "f" word is no longer offensive in Australia!

Sat Nov 9, 2002   (03:34 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Generating Hope

Dr. Mohammad Ala has written an article titled Generating Hope in response to my previous article about brain drain.

Both articles are published on The Iranian.

Thu Nov 7, 2002   (06:04 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Pocket PC Conference

Pocket PC Conference

Went to the pocket PC conference today at Microsoft campus in Mountain view. The guy who was talking about software development on Pocket PC was pretty confident and showed some exceptional demos of his simple programs.

I have never been a fan of Microsoft products, however, their new technology (the whole dot net thingy) looks pretty cool. Basically, a lot of dot net classes are useable in Pocket PC codes, i.e. sharing the same classes to create dialogue boxes, buttons, doing mathematical stuff or database access! Interesting, eh?

Second seminar was mostly about the whole UML and how it integrates with visio to build the business model and generate custom code. Pretty introductory.

But the third guy from Microsoft was so technical and had great things to talk about! You can find his powerpoint presentations on their web site (which doesn't work right now, frontpage crap). Seems these guys are now doing some real work to beat Java's ass up.

These guys really know how to talk and they are totally influenced by Microsoft mentality of being #1 in the market. At one point, he was talking about their new technologies and how it made programming expereince much easier and he mentioned the usability of the method. He quickly added: "as long as you are on the Windows platform". Not a surprising phrase from a M$ employee!

The sweetest part of the event was of course the MSDN DVD-ROMs and other promotional stuff! Go Microsoft! Gotta run, the Simpsons is starting in a few minutes!

Tue Nov 5, 2002   (10:58 AM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Google, finally updated.

Yesterday morning around 10:00AM, Google started updating its index and populating the new results onto www2 and www3 servers.

Anvari.org seems to be "a little" (5%) bumped down in the search results for its keywords. PR seems to be still the same. Not very satisfied with the update this time, but obviously less than the guys who sued google for bumping them down in the search results!

I was reading this article about how people really lose/gain money (I'm talking about *a lot of* money) when they get listed/delisted on google or their ranking changes for any reason. Google drives much more traffic than other search engines although it has less market share than them so far.

Google index has been updated automatically and the page ranks are determined by their PageRank (tm) algorithm, however, there always has been some manual edits, excluding controversial sites which happened last week, penalizing searchking a few days ago and deleting offensive sites which they get notified about every now and then. According to Google Terms of Service, would consider on a case-by-case basis requests to remove the link to that site from its indices. However, if the operator of the site does not take steps to prevent it, the automatic facilities used to create the indices are likely to find that site and index it again in a relatively short amount of time.

As a google fan, I think its power may shoot Google in the foot. Why? Did you hear the story of the company that was #4 in the result page for a certain query and lost the business by 30% when it was removed from the index?! Being listed and top-ranked in Google index has become more and more important specially since a month ago when Yahoo! also switched to Google index for its category results.

Google does not have enough people to answer the desperate webmaster's e-mail, whose web site has been dropped or disappeared from the index without any notice or explanations. The "could" make the index dirty, google spam (like what happened a few weeks ago with all the search result pages indexed) and a huge amount of information (keywords) which could only be used to drive traffic from google to keep the business alive. It not only makes it difficult for them to grab and organize the data, but makes the web experience more commercial and confusing.

I'm gonna be in Santa Barbara/Santa Cruz tomorrow. Will be back next week.

Fri Nov 1, 2002   (02:53 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

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