The Sea

If you think the above graph represents a map of a route or something similar, you are far from being right. This is the first pictorial representation of numbers which I developed in my head when I was 7, And this picture has since stuck in my head. A few years after I had pained this imaginary picture of numbers in my head, I started to develop a perception of how human life's timeline looks like, and not surprisingly, given how we measure our progress in life by a "age" number, I applied the same picture with one important amendment: I draw a glowing line connecting 20 to 30, highlighting the fact how the 3rd decade of every individual's lifespan glows in terms of energy, activities, health and even hotness. I had also the perception that this is the decade where we become "complete", like how a full moon and beyond that point, we start decaying.

Finding out why I developed such a picture and what characteristic of certain numbers  break the line remains a mystery for psychologists to discover, but I can only speculate that perhaps my frequent look at the clock hanging on the wall in our house which had 12 numbers might have been the cause of the first break point.

What made me document my imagination of age numbers today is the occasion of the 30th birthday for one of my good friend which is conveniently located over the holidays in the calendar year (Inspired by Persian calendar, I also have a pictorial illustration of how days, weeks, months, and seasons are located in a calendar sheet). I was first going to write something on her FB wall, just like how everyone else does, but for some very strange reason, I can only very reluctantly persuade myself to write a simple "happy bday" wish on a FB wall, especially if it is the 30th Bday and for a close friend. So I decided to instead, dedicate one of my rarely-written blog postings to her!:)

I would like to end this post by clarifying that, as a person who has made his best achievement post 30th bday, I no longer hold the belief that the 3rd decade of life is the "glowing" one, or at least not the only glowing one. While we have still not found a good cure to eliminate aging or at least slowing down the process of physically decaying after we have past a peak point sometime in our middle or late 20s (in my perception at least), most of us become more focused on a much less number of goals when we enter our 4rth decade of life. This concentration of efforts can help one to progress much faster toward achieving at least one of her goals.

Happy 30th Bday Derya! We should do the video clip recording when we meet next!

Parents

Mon and dad came back from the holy trip to Mecca. I just spoke to them on thr phone. It was a conference call: Malihe from Bandar, Mehdi with mom and dad at home and I was in my bed in 12 Yonge in Toronto. Was fun!

task list for this weekend

Here is the list of things I have to do:
1- Write to the Citizenship Canada
2- Prepare the presentation for panel discussion
3- Reply to video applicants
4- Prepare the HR survey
5- Finalize the list of upcoming conferences
6-Apply for US Visa appointment.

and in my hobby time do these only:
- Listen to Richard Feynman videos

I will get back to this later tonight to check off the things I was able to finish.

tabs and tasks

The number of open tabs in my 3 browser windows (Safari, Chrome and another Chrome ) is just growing every day. Every open tab in an open task.

The first tab in one of the Chrome's window is a half-written Email (some emails requires a lot of thoughts and I have to edit them too to make sure my English matches my title in the signature!). Another one is an open email that I have read and still undecided what I want to do with it. It is from Alex, the video contractor who has disappointed me with his email. He is just not the type of person I would like to work with. Anyways, this tab also contains a few chat windows, one contains some important tasks that I have to do, to some links I have to open = news tabs to be opened. One tab is a PayPal page, which reminds me of the 4 freelancers whose payment is overdue 4 days now. The last tab in this Chrome window is a news page which contains a few names of new Education startup and I can't convince myself closing it before I have checked out all the names in the article. There ate a couple of other news pages. Some of these are google alerts that I received over the past two days for the pages that contain some keywords I have defined in Google Alert. There are mainly our competitors that i would like to be updated about.

Next Chrome starts with my Calendar tab. It is open always so I won't forget the meetings which are not too many these days btw. But i also leave it open to check other people's calendar when I see them offline so I am aware whose is where. The next tab is a spreadsheet called "potential conferences". This is one of the most urgent things I have to do: Check out the website of contact the conferences, gather some info and decide if it is worth spending a few grants attending the conference or not. The next tab is a "support" ticket. A prof has complained that one of the interactive demos we made has a "serious" mistake: The Demo is called Titration and one of the labels is reading "base" instead of "acid". I have to respond and send that to Jordan to fix. Very easy one. Will definitely do after I finished this post right away. Next to it is our company blog. Shaya, our marketing manager has written a new post today. I read most of it, but there is one last paragraph which I don't remember why I did not finish reading. Most probably someone just called me during reading and when I came back, I found it lost among the open tabs. The tab next to it is again a google spreadsheet. this one has details of the freelancers work and I have to just check the cells randomly to make sure they are not reporting wrong data. They have more or less gained my trust by now, so, I don't really check the details of each list they have done. But still, I do random check every time so, i won't regret for trusting someone who has lots of opportunities to put in a few wrong numbers and get more payments. Next tab, is the homepage of a prof who is really involved in active learning and teaching, I have to call her or email her and ask if she would be interested to collaborate with us. I gave this task to our content developer up to yesterday but he was really not able to handle the responses that prof give and I found myself spending longer times explaining to him how to do this than if I were to do myself. So, that is the reason this tab is now added here. Next tab is our server console. It contains a quick report how our servers are doing and how many students are online in which courses etc. This one is really just for information and there is no task associated with it. I normally don't have this page open, except today when one of our Canadian server went down today for 10 min! It could be very disastrous as you can imagine! Anyways, I kept it open for the rest of today and was checking it from time to time so nothing crazy is happening. I actually just closed it now.

The third browser is Safari. There are two reasons I use two separate browsers: One, I open my work gmail in one, and open the personal gmail in the other. Second, when I want to test something in our technology, I log in to student account in one and prof account in the other. So, I have a student account open in one tab in Safari as well as my personal gmail. The next tab is a music steaming website that I listen from time to time during working when I have not forgotten to bring my headphones. In general Safari is not my favourite browser and the tabs here are fairly unimportant tabs that I won't check as often.

I was talking to Ken today about the organization. He asked me: Mohsen, your role is not clear to me exactly: What are you doing most of your days? " For a moment, I found myself having a hard time to explain what I am really doing in a day-to-day basis. Now that i have read this, I know better. The question is: Is this really what I want to do?

Happy Noruz 1391

Woke at at 5:50AM. gave ride to Linda to the rail station and came back to sleep. Hadn't slept very well at night. Mainly because of the conference call that Mike, Andrew and I had together the night before, and realizing how Andrew pushed me to drop my title.
A vey good day at work. Morning was spent on answering emails and helping people with their questions. Board meeting started at 1PM and lasted for two hours. The board meetings are becoming larger and larger. Not sure if they are becoming more productive if not less. Probably the best aspect of it is if they know someone who can help or propose some companies who can help (thu so far, vey few of those referrals and post-meeting follow ups have been materialized.
After board meeting, Mike left to SF to meet with VCs with Andrew. I met with Tim, one of the investors and advisor at Williams coffee for a 15 min chat. I really did not know what I was going to ask or talk about. I felt I don't want to show myself as someone who just complains all the time, so, decided to ask some general advise and questions about Tim's pas business experience and if he has gone though similar problems as we are going through now (that is, having to deal with politics than actually focusing on doing the business). Tim said it is very common and that I have to be frank and straightforward when speaking to Mike about my concerns. I guess that just confirmed what I was planning to do and made me more certain.

Had a meeting with Jordan about content course packs and then picked up Linda. Went shopping and then I started cooking Sabzi Polo ba Mahi. It took a while, and I realized i did not have tamrind (something which I never knew was necessary for cooking Mahi!). Looks like there are 100 different eclipse for making the same persian food when you google online. Wanted to make the 7-Sin, but turned out we had rad out of Apple. I just made a broken ugly version of 7-sin. I was planning to pain eggs and spend more times on it, but then stopped: Who cares really? Then I felt how some rituals survive from generation and generation without any change. I concluded that if any rituals survived for a long time with no modification, that must have served a good thing in the life of majority of the population. its hard to think what good things 7-Sin serves, but I know it doesn't harm anyone in the society. So, perhaps, for a rituals to pass through generation with no change, it just has to be harmless to any one including minorities in the society.

I think I should start writing in a dairy style in 1391. Lets see how much I can keep with tho resolution for my new year!
Happy Norouz

Innovation in Higher Ed

This article has elements of two of my favorite topics in one: 1-Higher Ed needs a serious shake in its current structure 2-fix the damn age-related diseases guys, if you open your eyes a bit wider to see just how serious this problem is!http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/39592/?p1=BI

The main reason lots of talented youth from oversees come to the states and stick to the higher education is not because they don't see the real world problems. It is because current policies do not allow investors to fund international entrepreneurs who have ideas and want to pursue it independently. Grad schools suck in talented youth from oversees without providing them with enough funding to pursue their own dreams in their research lab. Grad students often have to work on the problems imposed to them by their industry partner or senior supervisor. Most young innovators have no choice but to postpone pursuing their ideas after they can get their degree and secure they will not be kicked out of the country if they quit.

Average age of innovators

The average age of innovator is found to be 39! That sounds encouraging if you have spent your first 30 years to educate yourself to innovate afterward.
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/39591/

While I strongly agree that most college drop-outs young software CEOs have far less knowledge in science and complex problems than elders (who have spent years in research labs) do, I believe senior researchers can hardly innovate if they did not recruit fresh-minded young graduate students. While we need time to accumulate knowledge and become smarter by our failures to be able to solve complex problems in biomedical technologies, we don't have to get "aged". Perhaps our next innovation should be to develop technologies to keep our mind and body in its most productive state: a young one.