if you see me yawn, start running

i was reminded today by the humanly alison m k of how i used to attack you humans for sport (mistake!). this usually happens when im bored and have nothing better to do. i mean you know im a vegetarian... so why would i attack humans? because its fun.

im warning you now so you dont complain later when i go usain bolt on you and rip you to pieces.

see more pictures of me here.

license plate ftw

wtf graphjam

not. cool.

khang doesnt play the guitar anymore and doesnt want to learn this song and that made me sad and so im posting it here

Be, the greatest man in history
The greatest man that you can be
Just be

Walk, walk out on the beach with me
Walk out in the sea with me
Just be

All of the time you show me your love
Sweet love
And oh, how you know
This sweet love

Nights, cold nights wrapped in ecstasy
Those times still perplexing be
They just be

All of the time you show me your love
Sweet love
And oh how you know
This sweet love

thank you alison :)
(download a longer, remixed version here)

"I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow."

"I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I'm listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It's worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them. I'm two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow's children..."

from a blog post here, translated by the NIAC.

yesterday at union square in san francisco

i was delighted to be among the few hundred in green, supporting the people back home. a rigged election, a suppressed voice, and really a slim chance to do much as more time goes by. people standing for what they believe, and all we can do from here all the way on the other side of the world is to let them know we care, we hear them, we see them, we follow them, and spread the knowledge.

i was talking to david yesterday about what is happening in iran, and how i am just completely addicted and glued to my laptop, following whats happening every minute. almost 7 years after i left tehran (it will exactly be 7 years on june 20th), i feel uneasy inside, like i dont know how it feels to be there. i feel... guilty somehow. maybe a part of it has to do with obama, and seeing when the people here want something so bad, and when they get together and put enough effort into it, they can elect a man like him. and how a similar effort in iran, in a situation that arguably is worse, doesnt give you nearly the same result. that after an unheard of 85 percent voter turnout, days of demonstration and rallies, tens dead and hundreds injured, there is still nothing for them, for us, to do but to wait around, be angry, be frustrated, be fearful of whats to come.

brew with a view and the fish hopper

anthony dwight dylan kelsey and i went to the monterey beer festival yesterday. it was a crowded house with a looooot of beer and three very impressive cover bands... it was basically a concert with free beer. who wouldnt be happy?
after getting our midday buzz, we headed over to the cannery row, where we enjoyed the gorgeous weather before ending up at the not so cheap fish hopper. i would say our little splurge was well worth it though.

two-faced sky

taken at 7:59 pm

you dont have to give up to let go

on saturday maria alison and i went to POP at cow palace in san francisco. i had the most amazing time dancing for 6 hours straight! it was exactly what i needed, not having been to a live show in so long, and not having been able to move off the couch for 6 weeks. it was perfect! if only i didnt have to be one leg the whole night...

it was an out-of-this-world experience being there with 20k+ people in the same arena, just being completely... free. the darkness, the lights, being with everyone, and yet completely alone.

have you ever had a realization listening to a song, even though you have listened to it a hundred times before, that it was written just for you? that you KNOW what its talking about? its all of a sudden on a whole another level, and you just sit there (or stand, in my case) completely swept off your feet...


that, and an amazing show, made deadmau5 the highlight of the night for me.

oh jimmy jimmy jimmy

on my honest ade cranberry lemonade bottle

it says,

The joy of lemonade goes all the way back to 2nd century Egypt, where a Persian poet named Nasir-i-Khusraw chronicled his travels - and his drinking habits.

if i had to guess where lemonade comes from, egypt would not have been my first guess...

me135 open house

yesterday was the open house for the me135 class at uc berkeley, which officially holds the title of "design of micro-processor based mechanical systems." having audited the class and at the same time helped with the teachings and demonstrations and all, i was proud to see almost all the projects working or very close to it. here are some of the highlights/my favorites from the demo day yesterday:


an automatic etch-a-sketch robot. the software grabs any image, digitizes it to different shades of gray, and using different line spacings, draws the image. quite impressive. although it still needed some work.




"ben" the automatic chess playing robot. this one exceeded a lot of the expectations because it was very well done. the bot can play itself, play a human, and repopulate the board. the software is also very well written, and the gui quite impressive. something i learned during the demo of this robot: en passant




"a.r.m.s." the automatic mail sorter. this one reads the labels on the mails, and sorts them into different bins. the idea was not original, however it worked very well.




"battle duckies!!" if you ever played war in 5th grade, this would be your dream toy. two players each sit on a separate computer, and are able to move their ducky around, and shoot the other players ducky. taking turns, they shoot the air soft gun by clicking a region of the opponents war zone, which only shows the parts that have already been clicked.




autonomous helicopter, "s.p.a.r.r.o.w." (yes, that actually stands for something, dont ask me what.) a work in progess, this one is a shared project between the eecs department and the me department. they were able to get the helicopter lift off autonomously, which is quite impressive. there is a lot of controls going into that, which is not easy to describe. you can just trust me on that one.




the future of laptop cases (and also other electronics), this ongoing research project aims to someday provide us with laptop charging cases, using piezoelectric material. so imagine walking around with your laptop in your backpack, and as youre doing that, your laptop is getting charged. cool eh?




"fire" the automatic fire extinguisher. this one uses infrared sensors to detect fire, go close to the fire using a holonomic drive (which is a system that allows the robot to move in any direction freely,) and shoot some sort of fire retardant. it was quite well done, and the holonomic drive was very impressive.




the automatic drink mixer. imagine youre at a bar. instead of having to go to the counter and dealing with crowds and bartenders, you can pull out your phone, and order your drink from a list of already available options, or make up your own drink. in a couple of minutes, you get a text message with a code, saying your order is ready. you go the counter, punch in your code, and get your drink! the machine also does all the mixing, no bartenders needed. i guess you dont need to tip anymore, do you?

jonathan seagull

for a long time now, every time i walk into a bookstore, i instantly start thinking about a book i read, or actually we were read to, i want to say when i was in 8th grade. don't ask me why in 8th grade we were being read to - its just that my middle school and high school experience is quite different from the others, mainly because i was in a "different" school. (actually you can ask me later, but i dont feel like getting into it now.) anyway, once every week all the students from the same grade gathered in a room, and i guess one time reading this book was on the schedule (and the guy who read it was very good at it too). but i never really gave it any thought beyond that, and ended up forgetting about my favorite read of almost 10 years ago, until yesterday.

somehow i was reminded of the book again, and this time i felt inspired to find it and read it again. i only remembered a few words from the book, and all in farsi anyway, so it took me a while to find it, since i didnt remember the name either. but after some research, i was happy to find it available at the barnes and noble closest to my work, and so on my way to class i picked it up.

it is a very short read - it only took me about an hour, and im a slow reader. but i just finished it and now i remember why it was burned into my young 14 year old brain.

here is the first passage from "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," by Richard Bach:

          It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea. A mile from shore a fishing boat chummed the water, and the word for Breakfast Flock flashed through the air, till a crowd of a thousand seagulls came to dodge and fight for bits of food. It was another busy day beginning.

          But way off alone, out by himself beyond boat and shore, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was practicing. A hundred feet in the sky he lowered his webbed feet, lifted his beak, and strained to hold a painful hard twisting curve through his wings. The curve meant that he would fly slowly, and now he slowed until the wind was a whisper in his face, until the ocean stood still beneath him. He narrowed his eyes in fierce concentration, held his breath, forced one... single... more... inch... of... curve.... Then his feathers ruffled, he stalled and fell.

          Seagulls, as you know, never falter, never stall. To stall in the air is for them disgrace and it is dishonor.

          But Jonathan Livingston Seagull, unashamed, stretching his wings again in that trembling hard curve - slowing, slowing, and stalling once more - was no ordinary bird.

playing for change

from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

no man fly in the house of mutombo

for those who are not familiar with dikembe mutombo or dont care for basketball much, here is a bit of a background. mutombo is a 42-year-old, 7-foot-2-inch basketball player who in a playoff game a couple days ago hurt his knee and had to get carried off the floor in a stretcher. the oregonian quotes dikembe:

I'm going to need surgery. For me, basketball is over. I cried so much about it when I was laying on the floor.

his basketball career is now over. he is basically a basketball and humanitarian legend, and has had a tremendous impact on the basketball court, where he is one of the best defenders and shot blockers of all time, and in the republic of congo, where he has invested millions to build the first modern hospital in 40 years. heres an excerpt from his wiki page:

A well-known humanitarian, Mutombo started the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation to improve living conditions in his native Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997. His efforts earned him the NBA's humanitarian award in 2001. For his feats, The Sporting News named him as one of the "Good Guys in Sports" in 1999 and 2000, and in 1999, he was elected as one of 20 winners of the President's Service Awards, the nation's highest honor for volunteer service. In 2004, he also participated in the Basketball Without Borders NBA program, where NBA stars like Shawn Bradley, Malik Rose and DeSagana Diop toured Africa to spread the word about basketball and to improve the infrastructure. He also paid for uniforms and expenses for the Zaire women's basketball team during the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta. Mutombo is a spokesman for the international relief agency, CARE (relief) and is the first Youth Emissary for the United Nations Development Program.

In honor of his humanitarianism, Mutombo was invited to President George W. Bush's 2007 State of the Union Address and was referred to as a "son of the Congo" by the President in his speech, Mutombo later said, "My heart was full of joy. I didn't know the President was going to say such great remarks."

also announced yesterday, mutombo became the only player to win the j. walter kennedy award twice.

this morning, as i was sipping on my morning coffee before heading to work, i came across this post on truehoop. it got me thinking, how is it that this man, a basketball player who i have never met once in my life, who all i know about is from reading articles about him and watching him on tv, can have such an impact on me personally. it made me tremendously sad to see him get carted off the floor, and it makes me really sad that hes not going to be playing anymore. its like i have some sort of an emotional attachment to him, and i dont even know his full name. (found here: Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacque Wamutombo.) i felt i needed to do my part for him, and so i decided to share his story here. and it makes me even more sad, because my friend pete had the chance to get his signature a couple of weeks ago at a warriors - rockets game, but he elected not to.

on a more humorous note, if there is one link in this post you should click on, its this one: the history of the finger wag. here are a couple of excerpts:

At just age 4 in the summer of 1970 in the sweltering heat of a Zairian summer, Dikembe first wagged his finger, a day that will go down as the day sports taunting was invented. He wasn’t sure what he was doing at the time, unaware that this move would become his trademark and forever change sports. He was just mimicking his mother, who was scorning him for playfully hitting one of his brothers. Dikembe would continue this throughout his childhood, laughing gleefully whenever he was punished with this gesture from his mother.

...

Dikembe utilized the Wag off the court as well. During his freshman season, the infamous Sex Mutombo incident went down. What incident? Mutombo allegedly entered a Georgetown bar and when people turned to look at him he yelled, “Who wants to sex Mutombo?” What most don’t know about this story is that as ladies approached him during the night, Deke gave a stern Finger Wag to any hefty girl who approached, stating “No fat chicks sex Mutombo.”

UPDATE: hes now officially retired from basketball.

to theme or not to theme

ive been spending the last couple of days trying to figure out if i need a theme for this blog, and if so what it should be. as much as i like it when i stumble across a random blog and from the looks and description of it can tell immediately whether its worth my time or not, i have decided that what i share here is mostly for me (and close friends) and i really dont expect to have any other audience. therefore i dont think its necessary to be so clear cut regarding what i write about. i like the idea of having the flow of posts here evolve into what it eventually becomes, maybe somehow mapping the evolution of my perception of ideas and everyday issues (or atleast the part i am comfortable sharing.) i like to keep things informal, as i have always hated feeling pressured to write and update. this is my playground. i do whateva i waant!!

so dont expect anything big, anything groundbreaking.

about a month ago maybe, when i was waiting at the student machine shop at the basement of the etcheverry hall for my turn to check out a mill, i came across this gem of a quote pinned to the side of a cabinet. i dont know if this sounds weird but i got this overwhelming sense of satisfaction, like holy crap thats so cool. and i still love it every time i look back at it, mostly because of how it felt the first time i saw it:

I'm glad I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I shall never have to do it again.

- mark twain

Testing...

from brevity. just so my first post is not a boring '1, 2, 3...' :D