Civil war

"What we've got here is failure to communicate.

Some men you just can't reach...
So, you get what we had here last week,
which is the way he wants it!
Well, he gets it!
N' I don't like it any more than you men."

Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they've always done before

Look at the hate we're breeding
Look at the fear we're feeding
Look at the lives we're leading
The way we've always done before

My hands are tied
The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can't deny
And are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil wars

D'you wear a black armband
When they shot the man
Who said "Peace could last forever"
And in my first memories
They shot Kennedy
I went numb when I learned to see
So I never fell for Vietnam
We got the wall of D.C. to remind us all
That you can't trust freedom
When it's not in your hands
When everybody's fightin'
For their promised land

And
I don't need your civil war
It feeds the rich while it buries the poor
Your power hungry sellin' soldiers
In a human grocery store
Ain't that fresh
I don't need your civil war

Look at the shoes your filling
Look at the blood we're spilling
Look at the world we're killing
The way we've always done before

Look in the doubt we've wallowed
Look at the leaders we've followed
Look at the lies we've swallowed
And I don't want to hear no more

My hands are tied
For all I've seen has changed my mind
But still the wars go on as the years go by
With no love of God or human rights
'Cause all these dreams are swept aside
By bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide
And history bears the scars of our civil wars

"We practice selective annihilation of mayors
And government officials
For example to create a vacuum
Then we fill that vacuum
As popular war advances
Peace is closer"

I don't need your civil war
It feeds the rich while it buries the poor
Your power hungry sellin' soldiers
In a human grocery store
Ain't that fresh
And I don't need your civil war
I don't need your civil war
I don't need your civil war
Your power hungry sellin' soldiers
In a human grocery store
Ain't that fresh
I don't need your civil war
I don't need one more war

I don't need one more war
Whats so civil 'bout war anyway

[Guns N' Roses]

Cell Phone Camera

When cell phone camera was first introduced, I thought it is great combination. People always have their cell phone and perfect moment of photograph can happen any time. But I was kind of disappointed later when I found it was not as big deal as I thought. But I was never sure why is so. Is it lack of nice camera? or what? I was kind of impressed later on after iPhone 4 when Flickr declared their most popular camera is no longer a real camera rather a smart phone. It was the moment when my prediction became reality. But I had a kind of idea that people would take picture more often but that in my view did not happen yet. Maybe, not all people like to takes picture of the beautiful moments they see. 

If anybody still not sure why camera phone so fun, here is a cause. Taking camera to a toilet is not my kind of thing but some toilets are really interesting. Have you ever found a toilet you wished to share with your friends? Yes, this is the time cell phone camera becomes handy :)

Blogger app

I just realized there is a blogger app exists for iPhone! At last google decided to release an app for iPhone. The very first thing that refrain me using that app is lack of horizontal keyboard. Ooops! There is no horizontal keyboard at all! If you rotate your phone 90 degree nothing happens! I am using iPhone 3GS. I don't know whether because of my model or the app was build that way. But regardless of that it is shame to such goof from Google. I expected better than that.

I am not sure but the environment does not look like it made for long post. I think they made it for tiny posts.

Other than that everything look good to me. I liked the minimalist approach. I absolutely love the orange color, although I am not big fan of orange, it goes pretty well with blogger. I have not published picture or other media yet. Let's try a picture:

I am not sure how it works yet. It looks like I have to publish the post to have a look at it.

Game day

Game day is a big part of Norman culture. Those of you still not sure why it is a big deal, I give a tentative idea.  The total population of Norman is approximately 110,000 and the football stadium we have at OU has capacity of 82,00 and it is always full in all games. Equal number of people do tailgate party around OU. That doubles the total city population. There is a big impact of that and Norman needs a great deal of preparation for that. Game day is sort of a festival. One thing I learned in my life, a festival is nothing without the community.  No matter how big the reason behind the festival, it is the community that brings a festival alive. So it's a big deal for Norman residents. I found it as an opportunity to try some street photography, so here are the photographs from last game day.

Sooner Tailgate

Norman street food! I have never seen this is in a regular day

Sooner fans

Gay Lord Stadium

Sooner spirit

Sooners!

One day they will cheer for Sooners

Little Sooners

Sooner legend

Pixie story! once again!!!

She was in my dream today! How long it gonna take to let her go? I guess some faces are so pretty to go away. I never tried to forget her, I never tried to remember her either. She was just there. She was so real in my dream I could even feel her breath. Huh! why she is still there? Do I still have some feelings for her? Do I still feel her? I have a wife now! Do I love my wife? I never thought that. I get the idea that love is a fool's game. I don't believe in love anymore. All I believe in life. Then, why did I wake up at 7 AM in the morning and blogging about pixie then? Pixie was my destiny! At least I believed so :( and now I am here, so far from everything. Sometimes I feel like I lost my way, I am confused and I don't know what I am doing. I am doing so many things to make my life. I think somewhere something is missing, a big part of my life, what is it? 

I was told a famous quote that marry the one who loves you, not whom you love; I did so and now I am here blogging at 7 AM in the morning. What a destiny! I guess this is not all that fun. It hurts, it sucks as well. My wife! Yes she is nice, she is an wonderful lady, she loves me a lot. I am the one who is faking love. I think I lost the sense of love long time back, or maybe I never had it at all. I am just a messed up kid in the town. I should never have a family. I should never have friends. I am a loner! 

Thinking about friends, I used to think why I don't have so many friends from my school? I used to think, probably it is because I changed schools too much, this is not true. I have the realization that I can't keep friends. I have created an enormous gap between me and some of my best friends these days. Why am I doing this? I just don't know how to keep them. I am such a loser. Interestingly I was talking to mom last week and she was saying my dad doesn't have lot of friends either. I think this is my gene! Huh gene! I wish if it could brought something different for me! Life is never what I want for me. 

Thinking about family, I pretty much messed up with the family as well. I married to a girl without taking concerns of any of my friends and family and interestingly I don't love her either. So my family is not all that happy. On the top of that I went crazy on my father last week and the situation become gloomy and ugly now. Mom stopped telling things. 

Am I messing up everything pixie? Why is that? Am I overestimated me? But there is no such thing overestimation in my life. I love to push me even harder? Am I really doing Something worth doing! I feel tired! I think I should go back to sleep, or I should take a shower. I am not one of those who are always in love with their past, I love to explore my future; but sometimes I still miss some pretty faces. Some pretty faces are hunting me down. Sometimes I feel like something still left inside me for pixie, something very unusual, the love of my life. Or she fucked me up so badly, I still cannot forget her. She is the one, she is my pixie.

New York City

At last I decided to write something about my last trip to New York City (NYC). New York City, many times it is called the financial capital of the world. New York City in my eyes is all about people and structures. Probably you would see people from all over the world in same place. The beauty of such diversity was so striking I was puzzled. People are beautiful. Later, I learn from wiki that almost more than 800 languages are spoken in New York City! 800 hundred languages! I did not even know that many languages exist!

Almost first thing anyone notices is business. Literally everyone is running, later in our (me & my friends) trip we realized, we are running as well (probably conditional reflex)! I feel like everyone is busy and they don't have a second to waste. The business of people was drastically striking. I have heard people of big cities are busy but I had no idea this is what they called business. In my eyes they are not busy they are racing with time. This is insanity.

The diversity! There is nothing to talk about diversity of NYC. Every second person is different. If you stand on a busy intersection, and look at the people waiting to cross the street, you would probably see hundred different people from hundred different places and no one has time to pay attention to the next person. Business could be a good ingredient for peaceful coexistence of such extremely diverse population. Now I know what diversity means.

NYC is a city of skyscrapers. It is a small city in terms of land but it is the largest one in terms of population. The only way to accommodate is grow upward, that's what they did. NYC grew upward. Gigantic structures are representing the glory of NYC.  Many times it is really difficult to look at the top of the buildings, they are simply not clearly visible. I tried my best to capture the people and structures of NYC in my poor camera. I shared some them here.

 

New York City in my eyes

Street photography!

I have been editing some street photographs from our last New York trip. This is first time I tries some street photography. It is fun, it is absolute fun. I mean taking pictures is okay but post processing was super interesting. There are people in the photographs, they have real emotions and my job is to pop them out. I had no idea it would so much fun. Sometimes I spend hours on one character; more interestingly I found myself talking with them! Some of the character has such as great impact you just cannot go away. I am super novice on street photography and I had no idea it is so much fun. Usually I got strong emotion in one out of thousand; but the thing is that picture is mind blowing. I just can look at that picture and spend entire day talking with them.

Few strong characters have so much to tell, creating artificial lighting to make them louder and stronger is absolute fun. You can literally talk to them. I think I am loving it. Now I need to learn how to take better photographs on the street, so that I don't have to throw away thousands. Here is one of my favorites,

She has all her thoughts in her mind while walking toward work. Well, it's a made up story but don't you think the story goes pretty well with the photographs. That's the beauty of street photography. You can tell whatever you want to tell. Your job is to make the characters strong enough to tell whatever you want them to tell.

Philadelphia, once again!

Philadelphia again! This time it is a whole different story. We were planning for New York tour and all of a sudden we realized that flying to Philadelphia is comparatively cheaper than flying to New York; and it was just two hours road trip from Philadelphia to New York. So we extend our excursion by one day and made a plan to spend some time in Philadelphia. Last time I could not spend time to enjoy the urban beauty. Yes, Philadelphia is a nice city and we loved it. More specifically we loved it more than New York. If I have to choice to choose between New York and Philadelphia, the choice is obvious. I love Philadelphia. If I am asked to describe Philadelphia is one sentence, I would say "where history meets present." Philadelphia is actually one of those city where I always wanted to visit. It is the city of brotherly love, yes you can feel it in Philadelphia. You would not feel alienated there.

Philadelphia is full of history. History of American independence. History of great people who shared the vision of a great country. History is so much of Philadelphia that sometimes it is difficult to separate the history from present. They (people of Philadelphia) have the tendency to do things that can blend with history seamlessly. I was  even more amazed by the design of the city. Somehow the city hall can be seen from many different places with entirely different kinds of view. Hope we could spend more time there. I took lots of pictures and most of them are crap. I had to delete most of them and the rest are not good either but at least they will testify our expedition.

The City of Brotherly Love

SSDBM, 2011

I just came from a conference, SSDBM 2011. It was my first conference and it was interesting. I have couple of observations

1. Most people don't pay attention to what other people are saying.
2. Famous professors have extremely good presentation skill and they can really make anything interesting out of nothing.
3. Presentation skill can suppress technical skill.
4. Most people pay attention to the talks of famous professors or those are the only talks worth/ understandable paying attention. It is hard to say which one comes first, chicken? or egg?
5. Mostly conference is boring.
6. I didn't understand any word of it, even though it was related to my subject.
7. Discussion session before the talks was pretty interesting but mostly inconclusive.
8. Socializing is a big part of a conference.

It is a growing concern that the quality of research is going down although the quantity of published papers going up. However, I belief and most people agreed on, the quantity of quality research is almost same. Thus in my view a new problem is emerging; which is finding the good stuff out of myriad of trashes. Some people are concern whether the quantity of trashes would contaminate the overall quality of research? Since the resources (money, brain, etc) are limited and huge portion of it is becoming busy of producing trashes, it is very likely this situation might affect the overall quality. But in my view, the excessive trashes are due to excessive money in this area. Because of enormous amount of money, many con people are moving toward this direction and finding their place among the real scientists. When the money would go scarce, the fight will be tough and only good research would survive, may be! I am assuming the people who are distributing the money are well capable of judging the quality of research. Anyway, more people than not would agree there is a unhealthy situation going on here and it badly requires some kind remodeling.

Regarding the conference, I think they can play a very good role in the area of scientific research, at least in the field of computer science. This is because, computer science is fast growing area of research and to compete the speed of computer science an interesting trend has developed. In computer science nobody is bothered about publishing into a journal (I mean not as serious as other area). Most computer scientists prefer conferences because of fast reviewing process. So in computer science a conference is as important as journal in other area; however the reviewing processes of many conferences are not as good as journals. So here comes an inconsistency and to fill the gap conference should really change their way of operation! One change could be if the conference audience feels like any of the presented work should be modified, the conference should have flexibility to do that. 

Anyway, is it really good idea to say so much just after attending one conference. Well I may not attend many conference but I definitely read a whole lot of paper and I can tell how crappy they are. I believe, even without attending any conference one can tell what I am saying. Anyway, enough about the conference. The good part of the story is, this year SSDBM held in Portland and it was a nice city. In fact it is different from any US cities I have ever been. I took a whole lot of pictures and here are some of them.

Portland is a really nice city and people are very friendly. I don't know why but lot homeless people roam around Portland. Most amazing part is roadside food shops! wow! feels like Dhaka! Me loved it! Its top class transportation makes it really one of the must visit places in US. I am not sure about winter weather but summer weather is not all that bad. 

I'm gonna research !?

Some PhD comics posts are hard not to share