Archive for October, 2009

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@ Iran: Shouts On The Rooftops….

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@ Iran: Ice Cream & Pizza!

Author: Aasemoon

29 Oct

Reporting from Iran again, have to start by saying that I’m still having loads of fun. 😉 I’ve so far had a chance to see around the city a bit, eat some very fine food and pack up some of my childhood stuff.

Something very special that I’ve had in the past few days [a large amount of it that is ;)], is Persian ice-cream. Well I’m not even going to try to describe what that is and what it tastes like… because there’s only 2 options: either you have or you will try it for yourself at some point, or you’ll miss out big time. =P Those huge pieces of frozen high concentration cream are just… heavenly.

I also had another very original Persian food called “Kabab Loghme”. Basically it’s bread wrapped kebab of a special sort, with some onion and herbs. And it tastes fantastic, I can tell you that. 😉

Also… we finally had a chance to have a dinner at Pantry pizzeria/restaurant. This would be Tehran’s oldest pizza place, and it serves very fine Italian pizza. Love it. I’m only somewhat disappointed to know that their Mexican food is no longer that great… But anyway it was a great night with TanTan, Mahyar, Yazdan, my cuz Pooneh and my mom. =)

Thanks to TanTan and Yazdan I’ve had a rather extensive tour of Tehran streets up to now, specially since Yazdan managed to give us a nice evening ride around some of the more central + old areas of the city. I also spent a very delightful + fun evening with TanTan’s family, they’re just amazing! =)

Tomorrow the Roshd international short film festival starts.. and fortunately I already have a number of guest tickets for me and a bunch of friends. We’re planning to see Lynn’s short animation film which is being shown in the International films category. The only problem is, I have no idea when they’re going to show it as of yet! The festival is a week long, it’s starting tomorrow and the people in charge haven’t released the schedule yet. Amazing eh? Hopefully we’ll figure it out in time…

And I swear, I have indeed taken a large load of pictures. I simply haven’t had the time to select the best and upload them as of yet… but I will, soon, promise! =)

4 Comments

Filed under: Aasemoon, Art, Friends, Iran, Life, Thoughts, Travel

@ Iran: Visiting… visiting…..

Author: Aasemoon

23 Oct

Thanks to my fantastic friend TanTan, I’ve been seeing more of Tehran in the past few days. One of the more “outstanding” places she showed me so far, was the “Tandis” shopping mall in Tajrish street. Wellllll words sort of fail to describe what I saw in there… aside from the fact that it was proven to me that the Iranian government no longer has a problem with foreign brands opening branches in Iran, which was the positive side of things, I also saw a whole load of faces, hairs and make ups that I’m afraid I’d neither call nice nor even remotely stylish. My only description for what I saw would be “too much”. Hey, I’m all for funky fashion [you probably know that ;)], but I have this old school idea that “looking good” should be the operative phrase at the end.

Well, it looks to me like unfortunately due to the insane amount of pressure that the gov has put on people during the past 3 years, the goal has became to simply do something that defies the tight Islamic rules as much as possible, rather than looking good. And for the love of God, can somebody please explain to me the philosophy of the / eyebrows? I mean come on people, it’s sodding UGLY! So yeah… that’s what I’ve been seeing in the streets and the shopping malls… expensive brands and pretty ugly looks. =P

I have to mention though… it’s really quite a lot of fun doing the sight-seeing with TanTan and awesome friends. =) And I had quite a bit of laughs with TanTan in this small restaurant in Tandis… since basically everything that they had on their menu, they didn’t have in reality. =P I’ll post pictures soon….. Oh, and I felt near death at some point when I was near Tajrish street… I officially no longer can take Tehran’s polluted air… I was feeling so bloody sick…

1 Comment

Filed under: Aasemoon, Iran, Life, Tehran, Thoughts, Travel

@ Iran!

Author: Aasemoon

20 Oct

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but flying to Iran and getting through to the IK Airport happened quite smoothly and without any trouble. =) I mean the whole IK Airport experience was quite unusually easy… Our luggage arrived with no delay, and our hand luggage + suitcases where only put through the scanner, all together, and no one opened ANY of our luggage.. they didn’t even tell us to take out our electronics, just the notebooks! And we just simply walked through the sensor thang, and no one checked our clothing… in fact no one even looked us in the face during the whole process! We were out of the Airport in about half an hour after our arrival!!!!! I mean… heck, when was the last time that happened in Iran?? =) Very nice surprise there….

Then Mahyar came after us and drove us [and all our suitcases, oh yeah! ;)] home. It was such a wondrous experience seeing Tehran again after 6 years.. and arriving home broke me into tears. Thanks to our beloved friends, our apartment [yes, we’re actually staying in our own home this time..] actually looked quite livable since the very moment we arrived.

Up to this moment, I’ve mostly been doing 2 things:

– Having fun with our friends who are coming here back to back to see us + going out with TanTan,

– Taking my old “stuff” out of closets, huge packages and storage… making decisions as to what will be kept and what will be thrown away, and re-packing what I’ll be sending to Switzerland… And by “stuff” I mean… all sorts of things…. from drawings of the 2 year old me, to my Nintendo games… to old pictures… to letters… to…. oh God… this part has not been very easy, I can tell you that…..

So I haven’t done a lot of Tehran seeing as of yet, and there’s a large ton of my friends that I haven’t had the chance to visit yet… but will be doing that in the coming days, and possibly after a short visit to Shiraz. =)

Will be posting updates here on regular basis [well, as regular as possible in here!], and photos will follow soon. 😉

1 Comment

Filed under: Aasemoon, Friends, Iran, Life, Tehran, Thoughts

iRobot’s Soft Morphing Blob Bot Takes Its First Steps

Author: Aasemoon

13 Oct

Well this is just amazing! The possibilities of what can be done with this type of robot are infinite…

Apparently the blob design is about a year old… they have improved designs now that are a bit different, going towards the ability to include sensors… some are palms sized. This blew my mind….

0 Comments

Filed under: Amazing, Chemistry, Electronics, Engineering, Mechanics, Robotics, Technology

Update…

Author: Aasemoon

13 Oct

2 things..

I just rebuilt Verse’s edit toolbar entirely… the wiki syntax for using every single available tool on the Verse pages, can now be pasted to the page through the edit toolbar. I guess that makes the whole system much easier to use….

I have created a new music twine… this one is for Sleepthief. Check it out and add stuff if you like… =)

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Filed under: Music, Twine, Web Development, Website

Flying Home… Iran… Tehran…

Author: Aasemoon

12 Oct

With all the noise I’ve been making, I’m sure everyone here already knows what’s happening… yup, 4 days from now [on October 15] I’m taking a rather long trip home. I haven’t been there in so many years… and I miss everyone and everything dearly. This is very dreamy….

I’m already done with 95% of the packing. The only remaining items are ones that will be using till the last minutes… This whole thing happened quite suddenly and without much of a planning, which adds quite a bit to the whole excitement factor.

4 days left… only 4…. can hardly wait…. ahhhhh……..

2 Comments

Filed under: Aasemoon, Iran, Life, Travel, Weeee =D

Backpack Acquired!

Author: Aasemoon

12 Oct

So, after a whole lot of searching and being as horribly picky as I usually am about my gear, I finally found me the perfect backpack to have support for my notebook, as well as the rest of my rather massive load of stuff. And to my un-surprise, it turned out to be Swiss Gear. Love it!

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Filed under: Thoughts, Weeee =D

Verse News

Author: Aasemoon

10 Oct

I’ve been playing with some new options and extensions for Verse in the past few days.. and so far it looks like I’ve came up with a couple of useful new tools that I’m pretty satisfied with.

First of all, Verse pages now have a couple of “statistics” lines at the very bottom. There’s a list of contributors, and also a number of the times a page has been loaded, and the date of last edit on the page.

The edit pages now include a toolbar… exactly like the one Wikipedia has. Took a rather ugly hack on my template among other things… but it’s neat. You can use it to add some simple wiki syntax.

The video embedding tool can now embed more than just YouTube videos. A bunch of other services including Vimeo are also supported now.

I re-did the feed reader tool too, from the scratch. Now you can display both RSS and Atom feeds on the wiki pages, including the descriptions. And the way it shows up on the page can be customized too.

And of course my favorite new tool which is not even a real extension [it’s more of a template hack], is a very small and simple syntax that allows you to hide a section of the page, and show it with a click on a link. This is specially useful since sometimes a wiki page can get very very long, and if there are a ton of videos posted to a page for instance, it’s better if the entire content of the page doesn’t show up at once. I also did consider having a “next page” option… in fact that’s what I did first. But then that was too bloggie… and I wanted all the sections of the page to be there at the first look, and just hide the content. So this looks like the best solution, and works perfectly now. =)

There’s a ton of more new features.. and you can check out Verse’s help page for a more complete list of what tools are available now. 😉

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Filed under: Aasemoon, Coding, Technology, Web, Web Development, Website, Weeee =D

Vincent Van Gogh’s Letters

Author: Aasemoon

8 Oct

Well now this is pretty fantastic….

“902 surviving letters by Vincent van Gogh are to be published for the first time this week. Mostly written to the artist’s brother Theo, the letters offer personal insights which give lie to the idea that van Gogh was a “reckless and unreflective genius”.”