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McEs, A Hacker Life
Friday, August 27, 2004
 Siamak Tazari

A couple weeks ago, a dear friend was visiting me. He was good old Siamak Tazari (photo below), on his way from Germany to Vancouver for a year of exchange program in UBC, just stopped in Toronto for the week of August 9th to August 16th. Although I just now Siamak for five years now, he's been one of the most influential people on me who's shaped almost all my current interests, all in just two years, many of them none of us ever noticed before. Here is a short list for now:
  1. He brought me (among others) to Web Programming classes tought by his father. That was where I first heard about HTTP, Apache, etc, which is, well, among the top of my expertise for a few years now.
  2. Then I wrote my first CGI program with him. It was a silly simple Delphi program, doing the old trick. We were both nation team member candidates in Young Scholars Club for IOI'2000. We installed Apache on my machine in our lab, and wrote this little Delphi CGI program. When people visited our page (at that time people around us didn't really knew about internet addresses. So didn't note that it's not a page on internet, but a local machine at all), it showed them 5 playing cards, asking them to choose one and say it's name, then click next. After clicking next, the CGI application was fired listing the five cards, and I, sitting in the same lab hearing them, would select the chosen card. Here you go, we had quite a lot of fun with this silly program! It took other students a week or so to find out what the whole trick is...
  3. Siamak helped me to buy my Pentium III computer, which was awefully good, and after I installed Linux, he told me how to recompile kernel to enable sound. I never managed to make the sound working on that system, but the kernel compilation remained in my mind.
  4. After I got interested in Pink Floyd music by watching Pink Floyd The Wall movie, Siamak gave me a CD full of Pink Floyd MP3 albums. That made me a Pink Floydist.
  5. Later after he left Iran to Germany, he turned to Bob Dylan, and sent me a CD full of Bob Dylan MP3 albums. That made me a Dylanist that still I am. He's an awesome Dylanist himself. I learn a lot from him. Moreover, when I became interested in Joan Baez, he told me to find and listen Diamonds and Rust. He even found a Dylan concert ticket for my second concert in Toronto remotely from Germany!
Well, that's it! You read the rest...

Siamak Tazari playing Visions of Johanna

So, in his trip to Toronto, we finally met after two years, had great fun together, and had some great Tequila. Siamak, I owe you so much. Thanks for your friendship.

Update: One more thing, people are typically amused by the fact that my hands have put marks on my laptop where they sit, two heart-shaped black parts on the gray body of the Vaio. No one else I knew seen with those on his laptop, until Siamak arrived, and he had the exactly same marks on his laptop too! Can you believe that?!

My Vaio laptop (a.k.a. McEs), showing the two heart-shaped marks

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