Petals Around The Rose

Yesterday Farbod sent me a link to a game. The game is a basically a simple puzzle or a mind game. I will not describe the game because I think the page has done a very good job of describing it but I will tell you about my experience with it.

The moment Farbod sent me the link, I clicked on it and started playing. After about 20 minutes of trying I thought I'm really dumb and I told Farbod about it. He said that it is simple and that he figured it out in about 5-10 minutes. He also said that the page mentions that the smarter you are the longer it takes you to get it. I immediately disagreed and said that that can't be true! So I continued on feeling dumb and played the game again and again for another 20 minutes. Then Sanam came online and I gave her the link and she started playing too. After yet another 20 minutes Sanam messaged me that she has figured it out. At that point I realized that I've spent about an hour on the game and still can't figure it out. Considering the amount of time I had spent already I decided to save the link and come back to it later.

Tonight I came back to it and after playing about 5 minutes, I figured it out, so I guess that gives me a score of 65 minutes. Go ahead and play the game, if you find it, don't ruin it for others, but out of curiousity do leave your time as a comment here. Have fun:

http://crux.baker.edu/cdavis09/roses.html

Scores (in minutes):
Pooya 65
Farbod 10
Sanam 20
Sanaz 2

I personally do not think that this has much to do with your IQ level (and if it does, then I think the smarter you are the faster you get it), as the page describes it's really got to do with how differently people look at the world.

NOTE: If you haven't played the game yet, I suggest you read the comments AFTER you solve the puzzle because the comments might have spoilers in them.

Credit Is Given When Credit Is Due

As you can see the pictures for last night's party are up, thanks to Shaghayegh for sending me her camera's pictures, which I have included in the same album as my own. Arash & Farid have also given me their pictures from Arash's party which I will upload soon. Thanks guys.

House Cleaning!

I brought the site back up again. I hope that I've been able to fix all security holes even though you can never be too sure! I also migrated the 2003 and 2004 photos to another server which means now I have room for 2 more years of new pictures. Moving the old pictures has caused one small problem: you're required to enter the username/password twice when acesssing old pictures. I tried to fix it but it seems that with my current password authentication mechanism, it is difficult to get around it. Hopefully everything will be much smoother when I migrate to the new look which I think will come in the summer.

The pictures that I took at Arash's will come later tonight. Hopefully!
If you've taken pictures and you want me to put them up, please send them to my yahoo email. ChaX.

Hacked!

I don't know what to say! In a miraculous way barobax.net is being hacked! I have no clue how this is happening and it's probably one of the barobax, but he/she is smart! I'm wondering if we can settle this in a peaceful manner?! Please? :D

The image you see on the top keeps getting overwritten by someone. No matter how much I think, I can't figure out how this is happening. I don't know if it's a security breach in the site itself or in the computers that I use to update the site.

Don't know! Really!

Champions Leauge

Wow these games are damn exciting, Bomber like always will be showing these matches and it's honestly loads and loads of fun. The more we are the more fun it gets. Awesome games are on the way, Real Madrid, Juventus, Man United, Arsenal, AC Milan, and many more have matches in the next couple of days and tomorrow:

Juventus vs. Real Madrid

I'm definately watching that game! Let's get together at the Bomber!

Go Juventus!

Respect

Regarding my last post

This is regarding the image that I had inserted in my previous post. Firstly, I have high respect to all the viewers of my site, and truly I do take my audience into consideration and by no means I intend to offend them. However, I would like to sincerely make the following clarifications:

1- Obviously, this poster is not affiliated with ISAW or its executives at their formal positions.

2- Sarcasm (See point 7) usually contains material that is not always appealing to all audiences. However, considering the content that all of us are fully exposed to in our sorroundings, I don't believe that this one was bad. If you read Imprint which is the official student newspaper of the University of Waterloo you will find language and content that is way more offensive in comparison to this.

3- Barobax.net is a personal website and I am the sole author of it, which means that the content that is posted on my site goes only through my personal mind filter and I have no obligations in terms of the articles that appear in the blog. I treat the pictures section as an exception, see the next point.

4- I consider the pictures to be the property of the people who appear in them, which means that I take the responsibility to immediately remove the pictures of the people who do not their photos published on my site.

5- I consider myself to be fully Iranian and I have great respect and pride for our culture and traditions. I don't think that this has the smallest effect on any of our values.

6- I did not disclose the name (or gender) of the designer of the poster. Regardless of that, I think it is irrelevant.

7- If you didn't find it funny, that is ok, but I assure you that there are many of barobax who did find it funny.

8- If you think this is expressive of my personal ideology or "farhang" then be it, I believe that "nothing is sacred".

9- I am open to constructive criticism.

These Days

It's been a while since I've blogged about my daily tasks, so I might as well use this time which I had planned to dedicate to studdying to write about a couple of things that are happening around me.

It's now 5:14 PM, and I am sitting in the quiet study area of DC Library at a cubicle with my laptop (yes yes I have to show off, after all that's the main reason for owning one!). At 7:00 PM I have to write my algorithms mid-term which I have barely made any preparations for.

Sanam's at work now and the rest of barobax are either invisible, busy or away. But this afternoon I went to Shandiz for lunch with Hamed and Farbod. Hamed has bought a new mobile (or a cell-phone for my white-washed buddies) which means yet another Fido customer, yet another free conversation oppurtunity with my friends (thanks to Fido's beautiful free Fido-to-Fido anywhere across Canada plan) and yet another 20 bucks of referral reward for moi. Switch to Fido my friends as Fido is the answer to all your problems including but not limited to improper digestion and lack of partner.

These days are days of being busy with school and OS. Oh Yes, O.S. my friends is one subject within the Computer Science degree of UW that every CS student will remember throught his/her entire life. Nights of tracking page faults in the stinky labs of MC along with "سالهای دور از آب".

Winter is going strong, for the information of those of you who are in warm lands or are taking distance-ed courses. Oh yes, distance-ed, except that the distance is not quite a distance and the ed part is just to make it sound cool. Distance-web they call it nowadays where boring lectures have been transformed to the joyful animations of watching flash diagrams.

Norooz preparations are on the way, with only 1 month left to start of Spring ISAW is very well on track in times of its schedule. In fact the prototype for their New Year's poster has leaked out (thanks to my inside people) and is available for your viewing pleasure as you can see below.

I guess that I totally got you distracted by the poster so I'll leave you with your day dreams. Just quickly reminding you that tonight ISAW is showing "Bootik" at DC and also don't forget to vote YES for that dental plan cuz my bad tooth is killing me, voting YES means that I can finally extract this tooth for the price of 35 bucks! Oh YEAH!

Our Generation And Beyond...

I would say that the most important event in our generation is the "invention" of the Internet (1). Without any doubt, it has changed the way we live. From work and school to entertainment and leisure it has affected every single process, every single product, every single entity. To me it's an addiction. It is an essential part of my life. To me it is of equal worth as eating and sleeping. To me it is as frequent as a daily conversation with my friends. Journalists use it to send articles and pictures, singles use it to find life partners, companies use it to advertise, scientists use it for research, and people use it to listen to music, to communicate, to play and learn. Even for those poor people of our planet who cannot even afford a loaf of bread, Internet has helped to gather online donations from around the globe to ensure their survival. It is truly brilliant.

Within this awesome blessing lies a powerful tool that most of us take fore granted. If you haven't guessed yet, it is a search engine. If you call tissues Kleenex, then you probably call search engines Google. Google is the biggest and most popular Internet search engine in the whole world, with its daily use averaging at 200 million queries and its popularity at 80% it means that 80% of all searches go through this baby. Perhaps, it would be quite an offensive statement to call it a "baby". With an estimated 6000 microprocessors, 12000 IDE disk drives and over 100,000 GigaBytes of RAM at four sites in the United States, Google is able to process about 200 tera instructions per second. That capability is about a third of the fastest computer ever built on this planet. (2)

Without search engines we'd be lost, having nothing but an address bar to type in easy to remember addresses such as cnn.com or nasa.gov.

Enough of the facts and realistic issues, now let's jump into something more fictional. Imagine that the Internet and Google continue to advance at a pace comparable to one they have today. Then, probably not too long from now, in a time frame that falls within our lifetime Google would develop mechanisms to search human mind. And to make it even more abstract, imagine that the minds of all human beings are networked and accessible through one single Internet shortcut: www.google.com. At the occurrence of this event, my daughter would be sitting at the beach with her quantumbuddy in her hands exploring the mind of your son while he has limited his search to a local one: searching his dad's brain for the keyword: "porn". Soon enough my daughter will discover what a pervert both of you are and will put you in the blacklist altogether.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge" –Albert Einstein

(1) – That's what I think, for now.
(2) – Wikipedia

Surely, We Will Rest

A day will come when dust will cover our faces in the pictures. A day will come when life will cease to flutter. A day will come where the memories of our past will dance in sparkles of time. A day will come when we stare at the walls and see ourselves in them. Bits of sand fall down one by one. We move forward with the lives that we have built.

These days that we let pass by us so indifferently, will be the ones we cry for. These nights we spend over and over again will one day show up on our walls. Something inside us will hurt. Something inside us will break, over and over and over again. We shall feel bad for what we did. We shall cry to take things back.

These days pass, and others will come. But nothing will ever replace what we have now. Value what you have. Cherrish it. Love, for one day, you will rest forever, and forever will never end, but this day will. One day we will all rest in soil. One day, we will be forever gone. From memories, from hearts, from the face of the earth. Cherrish these days. Cherrish this day. Let every day you live, be the best day of your life.

Too busy!

School has kept me busy. Hopefully, by this weekend I will make room on the site and upload the sets of pictures that I am going to take by then.