Saturday, January 30, 2010
New LOST Trailer! <3

Oh my GOD I looooooooooove the new LOST trailer for season 6! It's ingenious....

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Thursday, January 28, 2010
USB Floppy Drive! =P

Yes, you may laugh at me all you want... but here's my latest eBay adventure. =P I incidentally came across possibly one of the last survivors of the floppy disk era, a 9 year old external [USB] Microtech floppy drive that has somehow been sitting  in it's box somewhere waiting.. getting bored... not being used...! =P 

Well you see, I still have a load of my old floppy drives in some really nice colours [ ;) ], containing old games, a heck of a lot of code [yeah like code I wrote when I was 9!], graphics, and all sorts of other odd and even things. And obviously none of my notebooks have a floppy drive. And somehow, I have this nostalgic feeling towards floppy disks / drives... =D Well, lets just say that I really had to have it. ;) Here it is:

DSC05430[2]
My Microtech floppy drive connected to my notebook.. [and those are the different colours that the lead can have [there's like 15 or so of them.. =))))] ...

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Wednesday, January 27, 2010
IEEE Spectrum: Augmented Reality Robots Take Flight

Ok, I want one of these.... =P

"The AR Drone is one of the first consumer products to combine robotics with augmented reality. The quad-rotor vehicle carries two cameras and can stream video to an iPhone via Wi-Fi. On the phone, the live video is overlaid with flight controls and additional graphics for a variety of games."

IEEE Spectrum: Augmented Reality Robots Take Flight

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Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Iranian Hackers & Baidu??!

So this is pretty bizarre to me! How exactly does this make any sense? At first, these folks disabled Twitter which has turned into a major communication tool in Iran [and so it's understandable why they want it gone!], and then they mess with Baidu, which is a major Chinese search engine. And of course the Iranian government has no problems with China. So what? Are these guys are just going about it randomly now??

"Hackers calling themselves the "Iranian Cyber Army" paralysed China's biggest search engine this morning, sparking a bizarre online battle as Chinese hackers apparently retaliated by targeting Iranian sites. Last month the group attacked Twitter, which has been used by Iranian opposition supporters. But Beijing and Tehran are allies and it was not immediately obvious why hackers targeted Baidu, which commands over 60% of the search market in China."

Iranian' hackers paralyse Chinese search engine Baidu | Technology | guardian.co.uk

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Saturday, January 23, 2010
LUVED Sherlock Holmes! =D

Can't believe I forgot to write about this! Last week I finally went to see the Sherlock Holmes movie, in Burlington with my cuz. I have to mention here first that I've read every single Holmes book out there, and I've seen the TV series. To be honest, I wasn't the biggest fan of the older movies / TV series, because the way Holmes was pictured in those, was not really much like the image that the books gave me. The details in the books that is, very small details.

Paying attention to the hints here and there in the books about Holmes' personal characteristics, I always had the feeling that he should be this bad-arse character somehow, and somewhat melancholy. So, obviously I enjoyed seeing a lot of just that in the movie. I think that's how Holmes should be "made"! LUUUVVVEEDDD IT! =D

Also, for obvious reasons, I really think that there will be sequels. ;)

HolmesWatsonPoster

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I Think I'm In Luv # 2

After months and months and even more months of waiting, I finally found the perfect little companion for my beloved blue VAIO notebook. So I introduce to you, the royal indigo VAIO, from Sony's signature collection [yet again!]. =D

A combination of an 8GB SDRAM, a 3.06GHz processor, a 500 GB HDD, the NVIDIA GeForce GT230M GPU [512MB VRAM], HDMI output, Blur-ray read and write drive & etc, makes this little dude exactly what I need. There are tons and tons of really kool features to play with, including the "web button". It's basically a quick web access button. When the system is shut down, if you want to quickly access the web without booting Windows, you just press this web button and a stand alone web browser boots. It's pretty darn awesome, and very useful to me. What's very interesting is that it's very thin and light. Oh, and it looks great sitting beside my blue VAIO. =P

And then of course there's Win7. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I LUUUUVVVV it! Microsoft has finally created an OS which makes me not think about switching to Apple anymore, and I'm not saying that lightly. It works, and it looks great. YAAAAY! =D

I also have to mention that I really like the new Sony notebook backpacks... ;)

VAIOz Luv Me! =)) [& No, this is not a a set up.... it actually happened. The blues are mine, the pink is my mom's, the black is my cousin's.]

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Friday, January 22, 2010
TED Video: Eric Lewis

This, truly blew my mind. I'll post more on Verse.

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Winduino II

This is really kool. I mean REALLY REALLY. Based on the ancient Aeolian harp, and made out of Adruino BT Bluetooth board, this little instrument plays with wind. Oh, and it's solar powered. More info can be found here.  

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Thursday, January 21, 2010
Microsoft: Courier? HP Slate?

microsoft_courier_gizmodo

So a few months ago, I saw this article on Gizmodo about Microsoft supposed new and  fancy tablet, and I have to admit I really liked what I saw. Then recently, at CES 2010, Steve Ballmer went on the stage to display the HP Slate with Win7 on it. Very cool, but certainly nothing like the Courier, or at least the Courier idea.

HPSlate Looking around the web, I've seen a lot of disappointment articles and comments saying that MS just killed Courier with the HP Slate... on the other hand, as I said, they 2 have nothing to do with each other, and I've read / heard a lot of people saying that Courier is still going to happen. So now the question is, who's right? Did MS kill courier, or not? Ideas anyone? Info anyone? =P

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Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Fringe: Charlie Francis - UNDEAD?? HELLO???!!!

Ok... ummm... is it just me imagining things, or did Charlie Francis actually just come back from the dead??? Huh??

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Charlie get killed by a shape-shifter? And wasn't this shape-shifter later shot by Olivia Dunham, causing her to go through a rough psycho period, which hopefully ended with help of Sam Weiss? So... if all of that isn't just a fragment of my imagination, then how on earth did Charlie Francis just show up on the 11th episode of season 2, following a case, just like nothing has happened?

In fact this episode looked like a lot of things haven't happened... I get the feeling that we're simply not looking at the same universe! There were other inconsistencies in the past too, for instance how Olivia ended up in the middle of a car crash after she came back from the other universe... a crash that had never even started. She parked her car, went to see Nina Sharp, Nina didn't show up, and then Olivia was led to the elevator to the other universe... there simply never was an accident, so how did she end up in the middle of an accident that never started???

Given all the inconsistencies, I think that we're seeing events from different universes, like that episode where Olivia was seeing pieces and parts of events from different universes. In any case, something really weird is happening.... and that's the whole fun about Fringe, isn't it? =D

I have to say unlike SGU, Fringe is going on strong... very interesting, very very kool. =)  Can't wait to see what happens next... and how Charlie just reappeared out of thin air....  

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Sepeed - Verse

267px-DSC04007[1] Just created a page for the art works of a good friend of mine. Check it out! =)

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Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Bye Bye Twine =(((( [Hello Diigo?]

Since I seem to be on a roll with writing disappointment logs, I may as well write about my biggest online disappointment of late. I can't believe I'm saying this, but it really is the end of Twine. =( And this time it's for good....

Since the April of last year, I pretty much disconnected myself from Twine. I still used certain aspects of Twine for storing my data, but just that. Unfortunately at that point not only the most important features of Twine were no longer working, but the RN had officially terminated all our feedback channels, showing clearly how much they no longer cared about improving on the original idea of what Twine.com was supposed to be. I think it was obvious... from that time that things were not going to go the way they originally were supposed to, that Twine was never going to become what it was promised to be. I just didn't want to believe it.... I was waiting and hoping for Twine 2.0 to actually work!

Well guess what. During the 2.5 months that I was in Iran, the news has been published that Twine 2.0 is going to be just a semantic search engine. Everything else is gone. The social / interest network, bookmarking, twines..... everything is going to be GONE. Just... just like that. Well, you can imagine my disappointment.... Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. x(

I'm still not a 100% sure what they're going to be doing with our content stored on Twine. There's talk of APIs.... ah well. Honestly, I don't believe there's any hopes of Twine.com every becoming something successful anymore. Why? Well... when Twine started to come to existence, it had a few points going for it. It was a new and great idea, and there weren't all these competitors doing a better job of it out there. It hadn't yet disappointed the entire www, and it had a bunch of people like "us" willing to spend that kind of time, effort and energy for making it better. And now, well, it has neither. Between Google, Bing and a gzillion other search engines many of them pretty interesting, Twine is going to be lost.

Hmmmm... I don't care anymore anyway. The way I see it, Twine was simply never about what I thought it was about anyway.....

Well cheers to us though. =) I mean the friends I've been lucky enough to gain through this whole Twine deal. This is the only thing that makes it all worth. Twine can disappear for all I care. I have kept my connections.... And of course there's always other means of collecting and sharing our interests. And right now, it's called Diigo. I've started giving Diigo a try now... and so far I'm VERY impressed. I'm going to wait and see how things go with that.... I'll write more about it once I develop a more thorough view of it. =)

And now, lets forget about Twine.... =P

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. =))

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Monday, January 11, 2010
SGU? Hmmmmmmm

sgu_cast

Umm... no. Yeah. I have to start by saying NOOO. Big NOOOO. God, just what are these folks doing? We're so used to Stargate being this larger than life complex intriguing epic plots, and that's what we like about it! Now of course there needs to be evolution, there needs to be change... but then there's "change" and there's "mess up". And so far, SGU has been the ladder. None of my big time Stargate fan friends seem to like this one at all up to now.

So far, SGU has only been a bunch of extremely shallow people doing extremely useless things. All the time. What bothers me even more, is that the general plot and the big picture is in fact VERY interesting. People who are not supposed to be doing this, further from home than any human has every been... this could be SOO full of events. But it's NOT! And I think it's mainly due to how un-interesting the characters are. So far, I only find 3 of the main character interesting [sometimes!]:
- Dr. Rush - Cause he uses his brain
- Eli Wallace - Cause he sometimes uses his brain
- Camiile Wray - Cause she started drawing the boat

As for the rest of them, I find them completely and utterly vain.

So that's all I have to say, so far it's been a big disappointment. The 9th episode is the last one I've seen so far, and now they've left my favorite character, Dr. Rush, on the surface of some planet and left him there to die.... but he's alive, and that may go to interesting places. It would be "nice" to see my favorite character turning into the big anti-hero....we'll just have to wait and see. I really hope things start picking up....

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Sunday, January 10, 2010
The KLM Nightmare!

The Royal Dutch Airline. Supposed to be a good one. If like me, you travel from the North America to the Middle East [or even Europe] a lot, you’re probably quite familiar with the airline, given that it’s usually easy to find tickets for any time of the year. But honestly, I think my trip to Iran and back, was probably my last KLM experience EVER. I’ve had it with them. The flights always end up nightmare-ish, and there hasn’t been a single time when I’ve been in and out of the Shiphol Airport [Amsterdam] without some sort of a horror story.

Coming back from Iran, as I wrote in the last post, I was in pretty rough shape. I was really hoping for a painless trip, which unfortunately is exactly the opposite of what I had. The flight from Tehran to Amsterdam wasn’t “that” bad, just the usual hassle with the terribly tightly placed seats of KLM. In the Shiphol Airport [aka the bane of my existence] as usual we checked the info boards for our flight time and gate a few times, last of which was about 30 minutes before we headed to the gate.

When we arrived to the gate, the check in line was pretty huge, as expected for that time of the year. SO we stood in the line. First the security checked our boarding passes and passports, and then we entered the 2 kilometer line for having our hand luggage checked. As usual for this bloody airport, they had us empty our backpacks on their checking tables, take off our jackets, earphones, …, all the way down to my boots. The point is, we were in that bloody line for nearly an hour and a half. So then came the final security check before boarding… and that’s when the officer gives us this weird look:
- “Oh uhmm… says here you’re going to Toronto?”
- “Well yes?!”
- “But… but that’s not possible, we’re going to Washington!!”
- “Exactly WHAT are you talking about??”
- “The gate was changed!”

So, well, my eyes went round. Apparently the gate had changed while we were standing in the bloody line [we have a habit of going early!] and NO ONE had made an announcement. Worse than that, the bloody security had CHECKED OUR BOARDING PASSES AND LET US IN!!!!! We ran back to the new gate, but the flight had already left, and NO ONE HAD CALLED OUR NAMES OUT. Imagine that. I mean how incompetent can people be??

Given my past experiences with the bloody airport and the sodding airline, I knew what we needed to do then. We went to the transfer desk, and I had to explain to the less than smart people in charge how they had messed up. They said that there was another plane leaving for TO about 4 hours later, and they’re going to put us on the waiting list for that flight. Of course since it was holidays time, it was quite possible we’d not be able to get on that plane. So then I asked them what we were supposed to do if we can’t get in that plane, and they said we may have to think about a hotel.. ah well, my tiredness mixed with full annoyance and the gas poisoning left me no patience for staying at a hotel for God knows how long… we really had to get on that plane. I was thinking to myself, that quite possibly, I’ll have to start shouting at them like the last time [about which I will write next!], for them to understand the mess they’ve made and put us on the next plane….

Anyway… we were in that airport for nearly 7 hours, after which we finally did get on that next plane. That is of course, after repeating the bloody irritating process of getting checked. The entire trip was about a good 20 hours. When we arrived to Toronto, I was only 10% conscious. Ah well, at least we arrived…

But hey, the back to Iran trip wasn’t even my worst experience with KLM. I had one even worse than that. =P A couple of years ago, when I was going to Switzerland for the Christmas holidays, my plane from Toronto to Zurich was stuck on the ground for more than 7 hours, with the passengers actually sitting in it! Supposedly it was due to the bad weather, except all other flights from other airlines left with no trouble… The 7 hour delay of course resulted in me missing my flight from Amsterdam to Zurich. Me, and everyone else on the plane! So it was a real mess. First I had to walk the length of the Shiphol Airport 50 times back and forth to find out where I should go and who I should talk to, in order to get myself on another plane. And once I got there, it looked like they had NO idea what they were going to do with the crowd of irritated people standing in front of them. What’s funny is that there was NO talk of putting us in a hotel or something, and since again it was crowded and all seats in all planes were fully booked, they seemed to not even have any hopes of getting us to hour destinations any time soon.

Finally I lost it. I was tired, irritated and annoyed as hell. And of course worried about what was going to happen to my luggage. So the next person who gave me the impression that they simply didn’t know what they were talking about, got me shouting. Yeah, that doesn’t happen very often…. I had to scream at them, in order to get them to put me in the next flight and send me to Zurich. My entire trip was more than 24 hours… yeah, fun!

A rather odd coincidence was that there was this old Polish lady with me on the plane to Amsterdam, and when I was flying back from Amsterdam to Toronto I saw her again, she was on the same plane… again! What are the chances of that anyway? Well, she told me that there were people from the Toronto to Amsterdam flight that I was on, who actually got stuck in the bloody Shiphol airport for days, before they were put on a plane to anywhere or given a hotel room to. Very uncool eh?

So that’s what KLM is like. Their security people often shout and scream at you if you so much as look at them wrong, their stewards and stewardesses often won’t bring you a sodding  glass of water even after you ask for it 5 times, their seats are soooo tightly arranged that won’t let you an easy breath, and their food is just… well… I’m not even going to start with that….

Even though I don’t like bashing and badmouthing… I had to write this. Actually a couple of my friends suggested I should do so too.. I guess I’m hoping it’ll save someone some trouble, if they read this and not go for KLM. =)

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Sunday, January 03, 2010
Back From Iran….

So I've been back from Iran for a few days now... and I'm already missing everyone and everything. I've taken more than 6000 photos during the whole trip, and I'm currently busy with selecting the best of them to post to my gallery. So hopefully you'll start seeing the first groups of it appear over there soon enough...

My trip back was a horrible one, and that's putting it very very lightly. =)) The bloody KLM airline put me in a world of trouble again [I'll write the whole story in my next post, about KLM! =P], and that was only after I was already gas poisoned on my trip to Tehran's I.K. Airport. The cab I was on, together with another 50 cars or so, were stuck for nearly 3 hours in between 2 groups of people going the religious "Moharram" mourning demonstrations… at least that's what it was supposed to be [but it was in face everything BUT!]. So now imagine Tehran's level of air pollution that nowadays is enough to give you some serous headache and nausea if you're not used to it, combined with the smoke of burnt "stuff", and other sorts of "unknown" gasses…. for 3 straight hours. I was nearly dead when I finally got to the airport, and the exact same way when I finally arrived to Toronto after a trip that was much longer than it was supposed to be thanks to the horrible KLM. Oh well… had some Vodka, fell asleep and was all better the morning after. Though it took a few days for me to feel like myself again….

On the good side of things, well, New Year is always fun! =D

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Ahoo "Aasemoon" Pirsoleimani, 1998-2014