Forwards.

Email forwards.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/images/Romanesco/
http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html

Reading.
Words Made Flesh - Piet Zwart
(which is getting very hard to focus on, hmph.)

Listening.
Foo Fighters
Dave Brubeck
Slint

Pics: Random

Photo Tour: Tongli, China.

Let Jane show you around this ancient town in China through her photographs.

Site


And do not forget to try her WOOGLE!!!!

Education of Mr. Bangladesh

I have been thinking for quite a few thoughtwaves about the education we receive. Is it apt? Is it successful? Is it responsible for anything we do in life later? Does it contribute anything? Does it make us better people? Does it, or should it define us as a society?

And thus i am now on a quest (online) to look for material on the theories, methods and focuses of the educational systems of the world. I have a hunch we are missing a few elements. Also what we learn in school and what we are taught at home should also tally, in case some one tells us at home that do what you have to do in school to get the grades ... you dont have to follow it in real life. Should schools teach us to be responsible people? to be aware, socially, morally and ethically?

Too many questions for now. Everyone out there is free to email me or put in the comment box here (if you are a current blogger.com blogger) your thoughts, especially if you are from Bangladesh, I would like to know what your thoughts are about the pros and cons of our educational system? Email is at gmail.com, and the username is 'parthib'.

Something Awful

Here.

Net Art: Chain Story

We have started our second Art Workshop, and its on Net Art. Alberto arranged a very fun and vibrant first day as always, beginning with an introduction to the world of net-art, many links and categorized to
Art On The net
Art Through The Net
Art Of The Net.

Now again we are being made to do something for ourselves in groups along these lines. Ivan, Valeria and I are a team this time and we played with the idea of Chain Stories in emails, kinda like Chain letters, along with a phony "..forward this to 10 people or you die" sort of ending (I am saying phony cause some of those actually work! :p). Then we decided to start a story on a blog site, and hand the username and password of the site in the site itself so that people can log in and write their portion of the story. The starting is totally different (a person waking up in a strange place after a possible accident at sea) to the title we gave it (And the music played on).
And so far there have been 3 continuations i think... pretty good. We have been trying to get the links circulated among friends and family so that people are gathered for collaboration.

So the link to that blog is this HISTORISKS
There you can read the story so far... :) and to contribute... Go to Blogcity
and login -
Username: historisks
Password: historias
(included on the main page of the blog, in the About Me section).

Go there and put your imagination and creativity to work, no rules, plus u can link images to use as illustrations. Just one warning, refresh the story first to see if someone already updated anything before you are posting.... Enjoy.

the, Rubaiat Imam has invited you to open a Google mail account

I've been using Gmail and thought you might like to try it out. Here's
an invitation to create an account.

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Rubaiat Imam has invited you to open a free Gmail account.

To accept this invitation and register for your account, visit
http://mail.google.com/mail/a-feacb0c5e3-8874b30da0-e89096b5d5

Once you create your account, Rubaiat Imam will be notified with
your new email address so you can stay in touch with Gmail!

If you haven't already heard about Gmail, it's a new search-based webmail
service that offers:

- Over 2,500 megabytes (two gigabytes) of free storage
- Built-in Google search that instantly finds any message you want
- Automatic arrangement of messages and related replies into
"conversations"
- Text ads and related pages that are relevant to the content of your
messages

Gmail is still in an early stage of development. But if you set up an
account, you'll be able to keep it even after we make Gmail more
widely available. We might also ask for your comments and suggestions
periodically and we appreciate your help in making Gmail even better.

Thanks,

The Gmail Team

To learn more about Gmail before registering, visit:
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/benefits.html

(If clicking the URLs in this message does not work, copy and paste them
into the address bar of your browser).

For Great Photos: Rifat of Chittagong

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Follow this Link

Pics: Under The Bridge

Pic Treat: Minis

Report Cards for the Ministers

I must commend The Daily Star for their new series which is the Report Card for the Ministers, so that all their activites of the past four years are put into perspective... and I hope they read it too!

http://www.thedailystar.net/

Culture Night / Kultur Natta?

Last night was 'Culture Night' in Gothenburg. all museums had free entrance and there were many public performances going on in different places, being performed by people of many countries, including Sweden of course. The library was also busy with films being shown in their auditorium, and them selling their old books and magazines for 10 - 20 Kr. Their were music being performed inside the library as well!

Here are some photos (courtesy of Jing Li):

This is outside the art museum in Gotaplatsen (pronouce Yotaplattsen), there was a nice stage with live bands, people gathered around it dancing and having fun.

A close up of one of the bands there.

This is an art piece that was on display inside the library known as the Stads Bibliotek.

This is where the band played inside the library.

More on Happiness!

"Psychologists have different answers on the criteria for happiness. According to one study, happy people share several characteristics (Myers & Diener, 1996; Myers 2000; Diener & Seligman, 2002):
*Happy people have high self-esteem. A positive view of oneself makes all the difference.
* Happy people have a firm sense of control. They are masters of their destiny rather than helpless pawns in the game of life.
* Happy individuals are optimistic. This quality enables them to persevere at tasks and achieve better results. In addition they enjoy better health (Peterson, 2000).
* Happy people enjoy company. They are usually extroverted and have close relationships."

An Article from the Star Weekend Magazine

Gross National Happiness

Watched a doumentary on tv about Bhutan one day. Its one country that held on to their tradition and culture very strongly and repelled influence and technology for the longest time. But now with the media floodgates opened, the change has already started to take place. Its youth is catching on being 'modern' or 'hip', nightclubs are opening up etc. etc.

What is interesting is that they didn't used the term GDP in their economic measurements, instead used GNH, which means Gross National Happiness! Hmmm, measuring happiness is of course a whole new issue... Anyway, the country is very interesting, mostly buddhist, check out this article in found for more researched information:

Article

Pavement Art.

I probably put this link up before.. but since i was sending it to some other people ... thought i'd put it up here too...

Julian Beever

Oh well.. whatever... nevermind...

so i started to listening to Nirvana again... taking my mind through the path of memories back to the day... smells like teen spirit... but its the wrong smell at the wrong time... hahha.

as for life.
hmm.... i am caught between projects. nothing seems to be moving. been fiddling around with JMusic for a while, and when i am working at home i feel the need for the internet to dig up some help - resources, tutorials ...whatever... and when i am in campus and i have the internet .. the pc slows up (2.2GHz and 512RAM.. wtf?), hangs, i get sidetracked to blogs, forums and whatnot that has nothing to do with my projects whatsoever! F O S U C.. i eman... focus of course! :p

i havn't touched my guitar for eternities it seems... and i haven't dared hook up the guitar processor in this one month ... the fear that it too will start giving me trouble. hmmm... pessimisssst is me.

plus on the bus i had the sinister thought of taking all the money i have and start a tour of europe till i am financially drained and have only so much to take me home.. then go home and beg my old company to take me back... that way i will have had a European holiday (oohlala)! And become a very poor man. Which is gonna happen anyway soon.. should be thinking of looking for some kind of way to earn some.

ihatecomputers

We started looking into 'Pubilc Interventions' in our art workshop, this week, and we went into a little of the work done by artists with this idea such as Polish artist Krystof Wodizcko (sorry for all mispellings of other people's names), Jeff Walls or Sophie Calle. And then came an assignment onto ourselves to stage our own public intervention!

So we hauled our asses into what is probably the most public area of Gothenburg, called Aveny (i think, the geography of this city is still not so clear to me) where there a soo many pubs, so many shops, and also a library, museum, theatre and a huge statue (pronounced the 'Poseidon', a Greek god, possibly of the sea). So we had to get a feel of the place, get inspired and come up with ideas for a public intervention.

I looked around a bit and got this idea for a very destructive exhibit. I decided to call it simply 'I hate computers'. I tend to get aggravated by the computers sudden misbehaviors... like hanging while doing something important, unexpected error messages, and of course there are the incidents recently with my laptop which is causing me a lot of pain and cost a lot of money. I think that might have triggered this line of thought. So, the idea was to gather some old computers and to put them in this very public space and invite people passing by to come and vent their rage (if they ever felt any) on these machines. Swedish people are very reserved (publicly at least) with their emotions of rage and anger, and this would be also interesting to see if they would do it or not. To test people's appetitte for destruction.


Getting the machines was the major problem of the day of the exhibition. We were supposed to be able to walk to a store room behind our block and see lots of computer components waiting to be taken away and destroyed. But as luck would have it, that place was cleared away two weeks ago, and never to be used to store junk computers again. We got the computers later tho from another campus, and Ivan, Anand and I had a merry tough time carrying them to the place where we would do our little thing.

Then we found a corner behind the massive statue of Poseidon which we liked, and put up our sign by the wall which said "I HATE COMPUTERS" (which weren't attached to the wall with any adhesive, and would get blown away by the breeze!). People noticed this sign, some would stop and see and some would just glance at it while going their own way.

Surprisingly, people took part in it. We tried explaining to them what we were doing and why, and some of them bought it... they had felt the anger at some point and they came forward to destroy the pieces. We had two casings/towers, two monitors (one a Dell, and another a very classic small Mc), and a scanner. One guy climbed up on a tower and the Dell and smashed the other tower into the scanner.

Contradictory to the concept of hating computers, the most enthusiasm was shown by this girl who said 'I looove cooomputers' and she tried to convince us to give the small 'cute' monitor or even the bulky Dell monitors to her! But later, it turned out that she had the biggest appetite for destruction! She tried to crack the Dell's screen with the heel of her boots while her other friends kept it steady. Then two of them climbed up to a higher point to throw the monitor down from there! You can see that from the picture to the left. She did not stop there. She started inviting other people to have a try at this! And we did not even ask her to help us! We thank her a lot, since her inviting in Swedish probably did more than our invitations. An old lady stopped by on the invitation of Alberto (the one who is conducting the workshop) to give a mild kick to one the things. An old businessman had none of it. According to him, his machine never misbehaves and he never gets angry! Which is good of course, i think. :)

Here are pictures of the damage:

Listening to....

Trilok Gurtu.

And I recommend it to the whole world:

Website

Friday Night Sessions

A bunch of us from the class have been taken in with Eva's idea of staying overnight in our block to do this one-night-projects. Anything small and novel enough to do in one night. Later we came up with ideas to learn some skills overnight from others in the group... for example, learning video editing, using Reason (software for making music), greek dancing (?!??!?!!), etc.

And for the first night, Greek Dancing was selected!



Greek Dances.
---------------

We learnt two types of greek dances overnight... and they were really difficult to follow... and really tough on the lungs and muscles that have remained so away from real workouts for soo long. It was almost as tiring as playing soccer.





The one with the red halo is our instructor "El Greco" Fanouris (i had some trouble at first learning his name... but i see the rhythm of it now).

Cinnamon Bun Day

Apparently, next tuesday is 'Cinnamon Bun Day' in Sweden!

Check this out...

http://www.kanelbullensdag.se/

...When just day before i had one too many of cinnamon bread... and then apples with cinnamon...

Laptop is back home!

Hmmm... i don want to be too happy and jinx anything further... lets just say its back home kickiing ass ... lets see how it goes... (fingers crossed)