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!!