On The Margins

Saturday February 09, 2008

[ Personal ] Proud of my better half

Working for non-profit organizations requires a special kind of dedication and personality. 

So, I'm really proud of my wife, Liana, for all her work at the Northern California Community Loan Fund (NCCLF) and for having played a key role in putting together NCCLF's 25th anniversary annual report.

If you have money you want to invest in local non-profits, including community art centers and low-income housing, NCCLF can be an excellent venue to look into.

2008-02-09 02:53:15.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
california community fund loans local non-profits

Monday September 17, 2007

[ Personal ] New Membership

As of last Friday, I joined the Prius club.

2007-09-17 13:58:29.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
autos technology transportation

Monday July 09, 2007

[ Personal ] Early July

This first week of July, I spent about three days in Vancouver Island, including the ferry trips. It was very warm and pleasant--a good place to relax and spend some vacation days. I know I should have used a few more days and explored the island some more towards its northern tip but I also had the ambition to drive the Oregon coastline and see some of its vast, although windy, public beaches.

2007-07-09 17:16:19.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
canada ferry island oregon travel us vancouver

Thursday March 08, 2007

[ Personal ] Shiraz, 2003

In July 2003, I visited Shiraz with my family on holidays. I've finally posted all the digital photos from that trip on my flickr gallery. I also have some video clips which I might venture to post on YouTube later.

In the meantime, you can watch this low-resolution video of my younger daughter (then five) running in the courtyard where we took the photograph above.

2007-03-08 22:03:04.0 -- Comments [4] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
art iran photos shiraz video

Tuesday January 30, 2007

[ Personal ] Falling for Flickr

First, I hit the limit on the number of albums and then the limit on the number of photographs that can be posted on Flickr's free service. So, now, I'm afraid I've fallen for the paid Flickr PRO service, and got myself a jUploader. Now, I'm busy uploading photographs starting from 2003, a year or so after I bought my first decent digital camera. For months, I resisted the upgrade from free to paid Flickr service. I planned to roll out a content server of my own but never found the time to do it or the right ISP for it where I could simply manage a piece of hardware housed someplace. (Fulup Ar Foll tells me such a service is readily available in France.) If I could host my own service, I would no longer have to depend on or pay Flickr anything for the service it offers. My main goal is to have the photos on some file system accessible by some HTTP server that can dish it out. This is not much to set up but just as I said, I've not found an ISP that provides a nice service where I can "own" the use of a piece of dedicated hardware, with unlimited download albeit on a fixed network bandwidth and some file backup service already provided. This way I can install and configure software as I wish and I don't have to store the hardware in my own home. So, yes, I finally signed up for a 1-year subscription to Flickr PRO and have started posting all these photographs that have been sitting in iPhoto library of an iMac at home. About 3 more years of photos are waiting to be posted. Some of these photos are from years ago.  Here, I have linked-in two photos from the batch I just uploaded from 2003. The details for the first photo, taken in the Astan-e Qods-e Razavi in Mashhad, Iran, can be found here.  I remember, when I took this photograph in the open courtyard, a mildly-spoken sermon was being delivered in a very simple Persian on how parents should care for their children. My wife, for whom Persian was a 3rd (or 4th?) language, still remembers easily following the Persian. The second photo captures the main wall of Gonbad-e Haruniyeh, a 14th century mausoleum, about whose origins there are many theories. The mausoleum is on the Tus-Mashhad road. I rememer finding it amazing how much cooler the inside of this 700-year-old building was when compared to the climate just outdoors. (Yes, the high ceilings and the design for air circulation has something to do with it. There might also be some underground water or spring.)

2007-01-30 22:58:33.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
pictures service web

[ Personal ] Gray Missing at Sea

Jim Gray, father of transaction processing systems and the inventor of the two-phase commit protocol, has gone missing in the Pacific, off the San Francisco Bay. See Francois Orsini's weblog entry on Gray. Charles Babcock of Information Week has also written a story about Gray.  As John Murrell notes in Good Morning Silicon Valley, Gray is very well-known in the Bay Area:

[He is] the first recipient of a doctorate degree from the University of California-Berkeley's computer-science department back in 1969, and recipient of the Turing Award, computing's Nobel, in 1998 for his body of work, which helped pave the way for automated-teller machines, computerized airline reservations and e-commerce.

We all hope he is safe and well.

2007-01-30 14:29:08.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
databases missing sea

Thursday December 21, 2006

[ Personal ] Tagged

Roberto Chinnici tagged me with "the five things you don't know about me meme" last night and now it is time for me to tag five bloggers of my own.

First, I should say that I made an attempt to find my tag ancestors.

Going six generations back from me, we get to Tim Bray. At 14th generation back, written only four days ago, we have the Green LA Girl, a champion consumer. At 16th generation, going back 6 days ago, we have someone getting tagged twice.

You can pursue this generational research on your own.

Now, here are five things about me you may not know:

1)    My first and second languages are Persian and Azeri dialect of Turkish.

English is only my third (and by extension, not my best) language. I still remember very clearly a time in my life when I knew or spoke no or very little English. My fourth language is Spanish and my fifth is German but of these two, I can only read and listen now. I speak them rather badly and only when I have absolutely no choice, e.g. when I have to talk to my four-year-old niece in Germany. I can also read and have a good understanding of Quranic Arabic although one can always make further improvements.

2)    I spent about 4 months in London when I was 14. I was registered in an English class near Tottenham Court Road station.

3)    My father was a founding partner in the largest advertising company active in Iran in the early 1960s and 1970s.

He helped found the company right before I was born. I left Iran for America when I had just turned 17 weeks after I had witnessed the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the installation of a provisional government. My father's advertising company was disbanded due to business losses after the revolution.

4)    I spent one year as a foreign scholar in the Heilongjiang province of China working for the Daqing Petroleum Institute in the town of Anda, very near the industrial city of Daqing. The closest major urban area was Harbin.

This was a wonderful year, and my wife and I made many good friends. During the winter months (-35 degrees), we ice-skated, visited friends and ate many types of delicious hot meals, and I had a chance to read Willard Quine's Mathematical Logic, Wallace Matson's History of Philosophy and Barbara Partee, Alice ter Meulen and Robert Wall's Mathematical Linguistics, among oher books. When we returned I was lucky to study classical Chinese philosophy at Berkeley with professor Kwong-loi Shun, who has since left Berkeley.

5)   I spent 17 years at various graduate schools obtaining advanced degrees in everything from engineering, to journalism, to management.

According to our common standards of the day, this seems like a waste of time, and perhaps, it was but so be it. Time past cannot be regained. That is the special thing about time, and there lies the asymmetry that it enjoys with respect to space. Hence, the focus of much of technology to make us mobile in space and the lack of attention to preservation, through time, of what matters.

In any case, during six of these years I had non-academic jobs at various corporations (building early web applications with DB connectivity, desiging satellite communications programming environments, prototyping platforms for submission and analysis of computational simulations for aircrafts, working as a lead on DARPA research projects, and then joining Java Software at Sun). The toughest technical topic at graduate school must have been Cohen's Forcing Theorem. Synhetic Organic Chemistry was probably the easiest (and funnest) topic in all the school work I ever did. It felt like playing chess.

Now, it is my turn to tag others.

I hereby tag Richard Veryard, Francois Orsini, Robin Wilton (who generously accepted a second tagging), Hinkmond Wong, Mohamed AbdelAziz, Rich Sharples, Bernt Johnsen and Richard Friedman.

2006-12-21 18:03:37.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
circle five tag

Monday September 18, 2006

[ Personal ] Sabalan Volcanic Lake

   

My wife, Liana, made it all the way to the volcanic crater lake on top of Mount Sabalan in July of 2005. We climbed the mountain together but she sped right past me in one of the middle ridges. We met and climbed the last ridge together.Her stamina and focus on the climb surprised several others who accompanied us. It was a tough trip starting at 5 am in Ardabil. There was a two hour car ride to the base station and a five hour climb to the summit. The picture, here, was taken at about 12 noon. The climb down the summit took a bit longer than the one up.

 

2006-09-18 00:16:26.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday August 10, 2006

[ Personal ] Heat Waves

There seems to be a new heat wave in the South Bay today, Thursday, August 10. (I'm afraid, the image below would be for the day you view this entry!) Times like this, some of us wish we were in Greenland.

I have been working from home since last night and had some Sun Database Technologies Group meetings early this morning followed by a Solaris all-hands. I had to step out to send some mail from the local post office just moments ago, and it was blazing hot.

2006-08-10 12:44:26.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Friday August 04, 2006

[ Personal ] Life Goes On -- Clams For Dinner

Life goes on.

This morning, I talked to my daughters both of whom are now abroad in Germany and in Iran.

For lunch break, instead of lunch, I played soccer with some Sun folks. This time I was lucky and produced a hat-trick (not a usual habit of mine) based on some amazing passes form my colleagues. Their passes were truly superb.

Tonight, compensating for a missed lunch, I used this recipe to make clams for dinner. 

Tomorrow, I will attend my wife's MBA graduation.

2006-08-04 21:17:04.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Tuesday July 25, 2006

[ Personal ] Different Perspective

I'm back in the Bay Area, the land of xDSL and wireless networking, if nothing else.

Living in a different culture, even if it is for a short duration of only a few weeks, casts a different light on life. One senses it best when one is going through the transitions and when one experiences the other culture as a true alternative for living.

Tolerance and ability to accept cultural variations as means for understanding fellow human beings librate us and disclose worlds and possibilities.

As I wrote earlier, "the late British philosopher, Bernard Williams, used to ask, how can we judge another culture or mode of living unless we can find ourselves in a position to consider it as a real alternative to our own?"

2006-07-25 12:50:40.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Saturday July 15, 2006

[ Personal ] Hiking on Mount Damavand

This Friday and Saturday, while my daughters spent time with my parents in Tehran, I joined some relatives for a hike on Mount Damavand.

We started with a drive from Tehran to the village of Reyneh, where we left the car at a station sponsored by Iranian Mountaneering Federation. (See DamavandIran for more on this mountaineering station in Reyneh.) The station is run by Mr. Reza Faramarzi who is also a physical education teacher at a Reyneh public school. The station is operated primarily in the summer time. Faramarzi has worked with the station for some 40 years. According to him, up to about 30 years ago, most attempts at Damavand's summit would start at the Reyneh station. The station offers a place to rest and acclamate before the Land Rover ride to Damavand's commonly used southern trail head.

On Friday, we took (an Iranian-made) Land Rover to Ghoosfand Sara (Sheep's Home) at the trail head.

We rented some mules there to take our larger bags forward and started our hike at about 10:30 am arriving at the shelter some 1200 meters higher at about 5 pm. The elevation at the shelter was 4215 meters. Someone in Tehran had recommended that I should try to hike some more 500 meters higher before returning to the shelter. I tried this but the sun began to set and I only could make it to about 4450 meters before returning to the shelter.

The night sleep at the shelter was not very pleasant. We were all very uncomfortable and unable to get enough sleep. We also had some trouble with the elevation and had left some of our food back in Tehran. At about 3 am, on Saturday, we decided that we would not make the attempt for the summit. In the morning, at about 8:30 am, we were ready to return to the trail head. We left our packs at the shelter for the mules to return to Ghoosfand Sara and loaded our day packs with more than enough food and water for the 1200 meter descent, which took us from 9 am to about 1:30 pm. Ghoosfand Sara has a very basic shelter where we waited a bit for our Land Rover ride to arrive. We then rode our car through Reyneh back to the Haraz highway to Tehran, arriving at 6 pm.

So, although we left the actual attempt at the summit (some 1400 meters further up from the shelter) for another day and returned on Saturday, the hike and the elevation experience (literally, the head aches) were well worth it.

Notes:

• For a detailed account of a climb and ski adventure from the top of Mount Damavand by Dusan Golubic and Matjaz Roter, see here.
• A description of Mount Damavand as a ski mountaineering objective can be found here.
  

2006-07-15 11:24:05.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
damavand hiking iran mountains

Saturday July 08, 2006

[ Personal ] Tochal was Tough

I often use a visit to Mount Tochal (about 4000 meters) to acclimate myself to height before climbing Sabalan (about 4800 meters).

This year, I'm still hoping to make an attempt on Damavand (some 5700 meters) in the next three or four days.

So, I decided to pay a visit to Mount Tochal yesterday. My older daughter had come along but was not feeling well and decided to return home form the foot of Tochal telecabin.

Tochal telecabin gives its riders a very steep, 45-minute trip to the seventh station. The hike to the top from the seventh station takes about 45 minutes at a slow pace. Downwards, from the peak to the 7th station, takes about 15 minutes.

This year, acclimation at Tochal was not as pleasant as what I remember from my earlier experience there. I would say an extra day in Tehran, for a possible hike to Darband's Pas-Ghalleh village would be a good prior height acclimation for Tochal.

I will try to go to Pas-Ghalleh tomorrow, prior to watching the World Cup final between Italy and France.

2006-07-08 13:01:10.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Tuesday July 04, 2006

[ Personal ] Back To Wiesbaden, and tomorrow, to Tehran

It is summer and time off for many of us who have kids.

After a lucky four day stay in beautiful Kalkan, Turkey, arranged in the last minute in order to visit my brother and his family who run an art shop there, my daughters and I have returned to Wiesbaden this afternoon, and tomorrow, we will be off to Tehran to visit my parents, and hopefully, to climb Damavand. (To the more travelled among you, it may seem odd that we have to travel the same distance twice more than we need to but let me just say that it has to do with luggage and hub logistics.)

As I started to write this entry in my other brother's apartment in Wiesbaden, I could hear the celebrating Italian fans drive their cars and hunk in the city streets. They rejoice as Italy beats Germany in the World Cup.  It is good to see this level of tolerance and congeniality among the citizens of Wiesbaden. (I just walked out for a moment to capture some of the sound and feel of this celebration on my Sony Cybershot.)

It was a tough game, and Italy had two very well-deserved goals in the last couple of minutes of the extra time (minutes 118 and 119). After the first goal, which had arrived so late in the game, it was natural for the German team to stage a last ditch attack which created an opening for the counter offensive which led to the last goal.

I'm also trying to upload some Sony Cybershot video pieces of the Italian celebration in Wiesbaden, and also a lunch we had with some friends in Islamlar, Turkey. For lunch at Islamlar, besides my brother and his wife, I would have to thank Ali Ihsan Bashguel. Thank you Ali.

2006-07-04 15:32:48.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Saturday April 15, 2006

[ Personal ] One more game canceled

It's been raining almost every day where we live, the playing fields are soggy, and games have been canceled in the last four weeks.

I'm involved in coaching my daughters' soccer teams.

Last night, I missed an e-mail message calling for help to mow the playing field for today's early morning game. I was helping my wife with some other volunteer work related to SJSU, where she is earning her MBA. I don't have a mower but I'm sure some of the parents would have been willing to help. So, another one of the girls soccer games in our region is canceled this morning.

All along I had my mobile phone with me but no one tried contacting me or send me an e-mail on it.

This story demonstrates a common problem when it comes to volunteer organizations even when they are equiped with all kinds of electronic and web-based "collaboration" tooling.

People still have to read e-mail and web pages although presence technologies can solve some of the more elementary problems like the one I ran into last night. (Many IM services already have rudimentary "presence" capabilities.)

In the final analysis, physical and dynamic "bottlenecks" cannot be eliminated even by super-fast, super-digitization, everywhere.

2006-04-15 08:48:26.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Wednesday March 15, 2006

[ Personal ] Chahar Shanbeh Soori

The first time I celebrated Chahar Shanbeh Soori in the U.S. was in March of 1979 in the mountains of upper Ojai, California. I had just arrived here with a good friend of mine from high school, and there were also a number of other Iranians who were attending Happy Valley School in upper Ojai. So, we got together, produced a request for the school administration and with the permission and attendance of the local fire department, and good use made of some dried palm leaves and tumbling grass, made some amazing Chahar Shanbeh Soori fires, and the fun of jumping right through the fire followed. Last night, while watching the Persian (Jam-e Jam) news from IRIB during dinner, it struck on me that it was indeed Chahar Shanbeh Soori again. I called some friends to find out whether any events were happening locally. They located a place in Mountain View, and asked whether I'd also take their daughter along. With my daughters, I had three girls in the car, and by the time we got there, there was some rain but the fires were still on, and the girls jumped through happily. One guy had brought some firecrackers, which are also a mainstay of the festivities. (The fire technology for this event could have been better, and safer. There is certainly some work that needs to be done in this area to make this annual event more fun.)

In the meantime, our guest (an 8-year-old) and my 8-year-old got together on the side of the festivities and quickly started a singing chorus of Persian songs. I was totally amazed. This was on their initative and they held a hat before them for people to chip in with quarters and dollars. They sang very well, to the amazement of the women who were quietly watching on the sidelines, but all they got was two dollar bills, both from me, which they returned after they were done with their fun.

Leaving Mountain View, we had a pot of fresh, fragrant sonbol in our hands for the haft seen.

Other links:

A slide show of Chahar Shanbeh Soori in Tehran. There may be others on Flickr.

2006-03-15 12:40:52.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Saturday March 04, 2006

[ Personal ] My Presence for IM

My presence for IM in various IM networks —

Try Trillian as a client!

Skype:

Yahoo:

2006-03-04 08:53:58.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Tuesday February 14, 2006

[ Personal ] Alborz High School

A high school friend who now works as a professor of Mathematics in southern California pointed me to some family photographs he has posted on his online album.

This compelled me to go through some recent photographs of my own family available online, and I found a few suitable ones to share with him.

These photographs were taken at Alborz High School, which we both attended in the mid 1970s and which we left in the closing year of 1970s as the Islamic Revolution was unfurling in Iran. My excursion on the campus last summer was the first one after 26 years.

This High School was first built by an American, a Mr. Jordan. In its early days, it used to be called the American College of Tehran. That was during the days of professor Lotfi Zadeh. When my friend and I attended it, it was named Alborz High School, and it fed the top technical universities and medical schools of the country. (There were few such universities at that time. Many more exist in today's Iran.) The photographs show my wife, our daughters and I taking a stroll through the Alborz High School campus. It is still as beautiful as it ever was and very much worth preserving. The day we walked the campus, on our vacation last summer, it was hosting a teachers' association debate on a topic that seemed to be related to educational reform.

My brother, who was visiting from Germany in anticipation of a German architectural tour of Iran, helped us get in. He and the school guard still remember each other!

2006-02-14 22:37:11.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Tuesday January 31, 2006

[ Personal ] 7 Years @ Sun

This week, I'm completing 7 years at Sun.

Recently, I found a sheet of paper that I'd filled with names and e-mails of other new hires on orientation day at Sun's Menlo Park campus. Scores of other new hires were participating in the orientation ceremony, and for about 20 minutes or so, we were asked to go around the room and talk to other people at random.

On the sheet, I have about a dozen names. One of the names that surprised me belongs to a person I have only more recently come to know and work with: Craig Russell, the inventor of JDO.

I don't have much time to reminisce on my time here but I've written a brief review at my java.net blog and an earlier entry here at blogs.sun.com, touching on some highlights of my work and life here and earlier.

2006-01-31 15:17:10.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday December 22, 2005

[ Personal ] Friends and Blogsphere

Last week, I finally had the good fortunte of meeting Robin Wilton, a colleague at Sun and one of the bloggers on blogs.sun.com who was visiting the Bay Area on a business trip. We have known each other through the reading of our blogs, a few exchanges of e-mail and some common areas of technical interest. Meeting in person, we had a chance to exchange some other ideas about our work and personal lives and find greater common ground. So, if we view blogs as correspondence, and they can be correspondence, I would say this is a classic case of correspondence leading to friendship. Always, having something already in common (like our work for Sun) can help establish a ground and context against the background of which, we can build greater common ground for friendship.

This is a season of traditional holidays, and holidays are a great time to think and remember friends and family (and after all, gifts are nothing but a way of remembering), and I thought it only wise to remember Robin's visit from the U.K. and the extra effort he made to meet me while he was here on his business schedule. Let's hope I have the good fortune of reciprocating this act of friendship next time I'm on business in Europe!

2005-12-22 04:43:54.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.