Final words of 06

The photo above was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, more than 4 billion miles in the distance. Having completed it primary mission, Voyager at that time was on its way out of the Solar System, on a trajectory of approximately 32 degrees above the plane of the Solar System. Ground Control issued a command for the distant space craft to turn around and, looking back, take photos of each of the planets it had visited. From Voyager's vast distance, the Earth was captured as a infinitesimal point of light (between the two white tick marks), actually smaller than a single pixel of the photo. The image was taken with a narrow angle camera lens, with the Sun quite close to the field of view. Quite by accident, the Earth was captured in one of the scattered light rays caused by taking the image at an angle so close to the Sun. [source]

When Carl Sagan saw the image above he was struck by how lonely, desolate, and unimportant our planet really is. The image moved Sagan very much and drove him to say the following during a lecture at Cornell.

"We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

I wanted to close the year 2006 with these wise and eye opening words. I just hope that people in power have such insight as Dr. Sagan.

To all readers and fellow bloggers, best wishes for the new year.

Lost the competition

A few weeks ago I received an email from the Dept of Mechanical Eng at school, announcing a logo design competition for the "The Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering." Being a person who's amused by logos, I decided to give the competition my best try.

I designed the logo in AutoCAD, and took it into Photoshop, and with my limited skills, and with a bit luck I got what you can see below. The yellow object is a classic caliper, the orange thing is a 6 axis robot, and the gear is obvious. Yellow and gold are the university colours.

Initial design in AutoCAD

After Photoshop

Today I got an email telling me my design was creative, and that it was a hard decision, blah blah blah, and that I lost the competition...

I'm curious to see what the winner's logo looks like.

In need of a better OS

So I got another email from Microsoft, telling me to try the new Windows Vista. My first reaction was to delete the message without even opening it. Microsoft hasn’t even perfected XP yet, why are they in such a rush to release another operating system, which will more than likely, have a ton of security issues, and a thousand updates…a day.

When I first got my computer XP took up just over one GB of space. Now after a few years of use, two service packs and a million security updates later, the size of XP has taken up half of my computer!!! I now need a hard drive for Windows alone. I even heard that Windows Vista needs an operating system for itself!

Now I know all the IT geeks reading this will say “Do you know how hard it is to design an OS?” But it’s also hard to design a plane, and I certainly hear of a lot more computer crashes. What I’m trying to say is that there are many consumer products out there that we have such high expectations for. No one will ever accept their brand new car, dishwasher, or furnace to break once a month. When a certain manufacturer starts making bad quality goods, we react by not buying their products, and the company will go downhill. On the other hand, when Microsoft comes out with their Vista, bloggers will write about how aesthetically pleasing the new OS is, and how multimedia friendly it is. We will hear about Vista on TV and Radio, and people will happily format their hard drives to install it. A month later we will start getting those annoying updates, and hear about the inherent security flaws in the operating system. By then it’s too late. All new PC’s will come with Vista installed, new software will proudly display the Vista compatible sticker, and the monopolization of the computer market will continue.

I think we deserve a better operating system. I can’t even begin to imagine the countless hours lost by people because their computer crashed, the memories that went down the drain because someone lost all their photos, and all those precious computer resources going to the operating system instead of useful applications.

technorati tags: windows, visa, OS, operating, system, microsoft

On the internet and vacation planning

Keeping with the Canadian “tradition” of going to a warm place in the middle of the winter, my friends and I decided to hit the Caribbean for the Christmas holidays. Also, keeping with the tradition of poor students, we waited until the last minute to look for good vacation deals. The process of looking into a Caribbean vacation showed me just how great the internet is as a source of information, not like this wasn’t already known to everybody reading this. Having said that, let me elaborate on how we used the internet to research our vacation.

While we were discussing our main reason behind going to the Caribbean, I mentioned “the ocean.” Since we were going in the winter I had to get confirmation if the water temperature was good enough for me to swim in. The internet quickly provided me with an answer. I was also able to pull out historical weather data from the past few years to see just how warm Cuba is in December.

To search for our vacation package, we used a few sites like selloffvacations.com, orbitz.ca, and the likes. We were able to pick and choose from tons of vacation spots and resorts. After narrowing down the playing field to two we had to look further into them to see where they’re located, what the food is like, etc. One of our choices was Club Amigo near Holguin, Cuba. Of course we looked up Holguin to see how big of a city it is and what kind of off resort entertainment it can offer. We then searched through Google Maps to see just what it looks like from above. After that we searched through tripadvisor.com for reviews by regular people who have been there recently. We learned that Club Amigo provides an amazing beach with OK food, and that it’s mainly a family destination. We then researched the exchange rate between Pesos and Dollars to estimate what it would cost to rent a car.

We then looked into Getaway Resort in Mexico. We learned that it was an 18 and above resort, where massive parties take place, and bed sheets have “perma-stains.” The beach there was horrible, and the staff was not very helpful. So we crossed that off the list. We did the same research for several other resorts only to find that most resorts at this time of the year are a family destination.

Almost giving up on our vacation hunt, I suggested we go to the mall to Flight Centre and see if they can help us pick something. It was Saturday, at 8:45 pm and we weren’t sure of the mall’s Christmas hours. Googling the hours told us we have 45 minutes to make it over there.

Long story short, the travel agent convinced us to visit South Beach, Florida instead of the Caribbean. We went home and went on hotels.ca. We pinpointed the exact hotel we wanted using the power of Google Maps and satellite imaging. We even confirmed the picture of the hotel pool by comparing the one on hotel.ca with the one on Google Maps. We then checked out nearby clubs, beaches, kayaking, etc. Having acquired all the information we were interested in we all agreed that South Beach offered it all. Good water, in a busy City, with the potential of lots of different activities. Now all we have to do is pack our bags and head down to Florida…. in about 2 weeks.

technorati tags: internet, vacation, caribbean, florida, south, beach, resort, google, maps,

While we're on the topic...

All my post ideas recently have been the quite serious, time consuming type. As much as I like to think I can organize my time well, it seems like I'm always sleeping late, getting up early (for work), and chugging through the day with the aid of the magic liquid that is Coffee..

That being said, here's a picture I took from the plane when we made a pit stop in Aleppo.... well...to re-mahrook.... if you will

technorati tags: arabic, funny, plane, picture, fuel