aShademan

May 27, 2005

{life.personal} Long Awaited Journey

Exteremely happy to see my sister and his husband after 20 months, I will have better things to do than posting on my greenish crib for a few days. I will be back mid next week. They will arrive tonight.

Enjoy your weekend and if you happen to read this from the States, enjoy your extra long weekend. Adios!

May 25, 2005

{life.entertainment} Everyone's favorite lioness

The lioness has been reunited with her cub, and all is right in the jungle.

I finally got to see it. Why am I admitting here that I am a boring loser that doesn't catch the movie right when it's released? Anyways ... Unlike many that criticized vol.2 is nothing compared to vol.1, I tended to like the character cooking a lot in it. There are also lots of terrific dialogues in the script.

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May 23, 2005

{life.everyday} First time uncle?

It feels strange to know that in a few months I will be an uncle, a "DAEI" not an "AMOU" :-) This intrigues me to feel strange about the strange feeling of becoming a dad one day. Those of you who are uncles or aunts, did you have similar strange feelings?

May 20, 2005

{life.thoughts} Not that I am lost or ...

Originally written on Feb. 19, 2005 on my other blog-like.

I have had these dreams a couple of weeks after entering my new life in Canada. Blasts from the past. The place where it happens is usually not familiar. I can only distinguish if it is somewhere in Iran or somewhere in Canada. People are my friends and family and some others that I have no idea how they enter my dream. Needless to say, the theme is something around being homesick.

Such strange dreams come to me in two occasions: when I have freed my mind from the daily struggles, and when I am desperately under some stress.

When I think it over, probably the number of dreams that includes returning home without telling anybody has the largest hits. Often I experience a situation where everybody is busy and don't have time to see spend time with me. Like the dream that I had the other night. I was back home, just to find out that my family was on vacation in our Sanandaj apartment. And then, I go there and I don't find them (or before getting there I woke up).

Today, I was working in the lab from early morning. In fact, I have been working a lot since Monday. After a long day, I was incoherent to work on the manuscript and decided to take a short break. Well, short was it not. It was a 4 hour "nap" leaning on the office chairs. I should get a minor degree in making office facilities comfortable for a long sleep! When I woke up, I remembered a foggy outdoor event. Ali Abdi was there. Shervin was there. Vahid was there. And many others that I don't remember right now. I don't even remember what we were up to. Probably, some picnic or something. And again, I am bombarded with thoughts. Am I meant to be here?

May 19, 2005

{life.smily} Arina


Arina Posted by Hello

Arina Posted by Hello

These are photos of Arina, my cousin's cute pie with her two tiny teeth. I haven't seen her for a lifetime, neither have I seen my cousin and her hubby for a almost two years now. I have missed you guys.

May 12, 2005

{conversation.nonsense} Q & A

Q: What is your research interest?
A: Robot vision or so people call it.

Q: Robots can’t yet see?
A: No. They are as blind as most of us. They do what they are told. They are dumb and greasy as well.

Q: Do you want to add vision to a dumb greasy blind object? How about adding thinking ability or intelligence? They would see but they won’t know what that is. Am I right?
A: Yes, you are. My concentration is on the vision. Other people are working on AI, but we all know we are missing an important dimension. We all know that our simplistic minds are far away from reverse engineering a human being (artificially and not biologically). I think many dimensions are missing. You can’t show the 3D position of a point on a plane. If you think you are smarter than I thought and you want to use perspective then try visualizing a 73D point on a plane. That’s why we can’t see what we are missing. We don’t know the dimensions of thought. Vision is a much simpler problem compared to thought. At least simplifications of a lens model work in --

Q: Err, excuse me. Did you tell me that you saw an optometrist the other day for your eye problem?
A: You interrupted me! Yes and he said that I had been working more than I should in front of these devilish monitors and I might even lose my eyesight if I continued to abuse my eyes.

Q: I am completely confused now. Do you want to sacrifice your eyes to add an eye (or two eyes) to a dumb monocular (or binocular) robot? It does not make any sense.
A: Nothing makes sense in this world. Do you realize that you have wasted your time and more importantly have irritated your precious eyes by reading this nonsense? By the way, why do people call you Q? I know why I am called A.

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May 11, 2005

{poetry.amateur} Nonsense verse

Let all the travelers settle,
Let all the old fools think,
Let all the hungry people eat,
Let all the thirsty drink,
Let all the holy wars end now,
Let all the blues be pink,

Let all the white sharks sleep,
Let all the amateur poems shrink,

Let all the old barriers fall,
Let all the innocent blink,
Let all the gravity reverse,
Let all the red roses stink,
Let all the elders live longer,
Let all the blind lovers think.

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May 06, 2005

{life.ideas}

When a pile of clothes is begging the washing machine to slowly tear their fabric apart out of misery,

When a fridge is filled with nothing but a rotten apple and some cold air,

When I am desperate for a decent whole some of hours to sleep,

I know that the weekend has arrived.

May 03, 2005

{cyber.blog} Worth the time

According to kvkhjstlklye on his Not Exactly (not exactly what?), "there is an enchanted new piece from the rambler:" Anarchistically Random Babblings. Definitely worth the time.

{quotes} Teamwork

"The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say 'I.' And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say 'I.' They don't think 'I.' They think 'we'; they think 'team.' They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but 'we' gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done."
Peter Drucker


I have attached this quote to my formal email signature after having one of those boring and stressful lab meetings a few weeks ago, where everyone was deliberately criticizing the others' capability of working in team. Typical Iranian mentality. I've done it since I believe that indirect speech works better sometimes.

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May 02, 2005

{self.ideas} Four posts a week

I won't post on weekends. Yes, you heard me. It is supposed to be the two days off. I am even thinking that I may only post four posts a week and take the weblog to a farther future as it is said that working four days a week is more fruitful than five days.

Experience has it that if you are too obsessed with an idea, you will bust it sooner or later. This can be true for a job oportunity, a relationship at its infancy, or in my case the excitement of expressing yourself through a blog! If you settle down and know what you are doing, you will be doing it for a longer time. It can be doing research, regular 9-5 jobs, arts, or whatever else you do. One should live a balanced life. And balance is not realizable if one works nonestop. The long-term achievements are greater in case of a balanced life. You may wonder why you should listen to a workoholic on not working 5 days a week but rather 4. The answer is clear, you always learn the good from the evil. In fact, if there were no good, evil could not even be defined. One more point here is this I am not the same workoholic person you used to know, the one who didn't go to the gym for a whole semester. I have changed. In fact, I change everyday. In a good way.