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Yet another acrylics painting. I've posted all the painting pictures on flickr (I always wanted to try out their service). Click Here for the Slide Show.

The 'Life' Train

Our world is like a train with an endless track
It passes by fast like a shooting star
It passes the mountains of hopes and valleys of sorrow
On its way into a foggy meadow

Why with so much speed?
The passengers are between two stops: birth and death
Each passenger occupies time with a different endeavor
Some are sad because they have a middle seat
Some are happily chatting with neighbors

Some enlightened ones stare out of the window and wonder
About the fate of the train
About the previous passengers
About love -- a ray of light in the blinding darkness
About our "hearts" -- though full of thousands of defeats and losses it holds on to dreams

Where am I going on this train? What will become of me?
Deep in my thoughts suddenly I hear the whistle of the train
Warning me of my arrival...

I wrote this poem on Sunday It was inspired from a poem by Feraydoun Moshiri (it's not a direct translation as I last read it a year or two ago).

Our home internet is much faster!

For the last month, our comcast connection at home has been really bad. I finally did a little poking around as a last attempt before switching to another provider. It turned out that the download speed was ok, but the DNS lookups were in the order of seconds -- sometimes as bad as 5-10 seconds; it probably was faster to call a 411 like service to resolve the IP address.

So I switched from Comcast's DNS servers to Level3's servers (4.2.2.1 - 4.2.2.6). It's now resolving in the expected ms range. Thank you Level3.

Slope Day

Slope day is a big tradition at Cornell. It's held on the last day of classes in the spring. People join together on the big slope on campus and drink a lot all afternoon. A ton of alumni come back and even a lot of non-Cornellians come too. It always gets a little crazy. And at least when I was there, they never checked IDs (for readers in other countries: there is a rule in the US that nobody under 21 can buy alcohol and it's seriously enforced -- at least for the most part).

This year, however, Cornell is limiting the event to only current students. I've also heard that they ID students. This is all pretty sad.

The only bright side is that Snoop Dog will be there: http://www.slopeday.cornell.edu. Also see my earlier post on how drinking makes you smarter.

MIT is holding a time traveller's convention

I always argue that time travel (at least to the past) is impossible; otherwise, someone from the future would come back to visit.

Well, MIT is hoping for just that. They have organized a convention hoping that someone from the future will show up!

I hope they find someone. In the meantime, I'm going to work on figuring out a way to slow down my own time travel. I'm getting tired of this 1sec/sec speed. I also don't understand why our minds are so limited that they only remember the past and not the future, but I guess it makes living more fun.