We’re back… with updates!

Yee Hawwwww!! Finally I managed to coerce a DSL provider to provide me with service and Salim’s World is back!

I know that life has been a meaningless waste of time without your daily dose of Salim’s World but you’ll be happy to know that I haven’t been idle in my downtime. Many additions and improvements have been made to the site:

  • The family tree has been updated (more pictures and more demographic info)
  • I did another billboard run
  • I fixed all of the photographs in the pictures section so that they are a reasonable size (not gigantic like they were before). They should download in a reasonable amount of time and not require you to scroll to see all of it
  • A bunch of other stuff which I can’t remember

Enjoy!

B1 Pilot

B1 BomberAnd now we once again turn our attention to people who lives are more interesting than our own…

On February 9, 2001, the junior Tyabji, Abizer, has just been selected to pilot the B-1 Bomber (info, movie (11.6MB), pictures 1, pictures 2). He will be stationed at Dyess Air Force Base, home of the 7th Bomb Wing, near Abilene, TX.

He continues to live every guys’ dream of driving expensive vehicles, really fast and using it to blow stuff up.

Uptime update

Well the technical difficulties have been overcome. It was not a viral problem as previously suspected, it was a "Windows crashed and didn’t come back so I blame Microsoft" problem. Anyways, we’re back…

Condoning stupidity

I’ve been doing some thinking about this and, as much as I want Al Gore to win the election, I just can’t stand by the suit to disqualify the ballots in south Florida because they were “confusing”. In the end, I just can’t condone stupidity. If the people who filled out the ballots were too dumb to realize that 2 holes would invalidate a ballot or they lacked the good sense to doublecheck their own ballots then should not be allowed to vote!

Manual recounts are a very reasonable reaction to an election this close however.

BUT, my coworkers and I have come to the conclusion that it is pretty silly to be splitting hairs over a couple hundred votes. We think that if the election is closer than (say) one one-hundredth of one percent (a 900 vote difference in a population of over 9 million), it should be declared a statistical draw and the votes either split down the middle or discarded.

Highways, East coast vs. West

There are 2 things about the highway system on the east coast that I wish California would emulate:

  1. East coasters number the exits. It is REALLY convenient, it lets you know if you are going in the right direction and how far you have to go
  2. East coasters mark all of their highways with directions (GA400 North and GA400
    South). In California we have this ridiculous notion that many are marked with
    landmarks – CA163 to Downtown and CA163 to Escondido (instead of south and north)

Gas Stations and Billboards

I'd like to pay, pump and bolt. Count on ShellI’ve been seeing this ad around at local San Francisco Shell gas stations for a while now. Maybe my mind is just especially warped, but this phrase does not remind me of getting gasoline. In fact every time I hear it, I think that this is what I would tell a hooker if I was in a hurry. Am I so wrong here…???

And while we’re on the topic… a while back I had been seeing ads on busses for a Lake Tahoe website – GoTahoe.com. The billboard said something to the effect of:

What are you doing this weekend?
GoTahoe.com.

Except that they didn’t write it like that, they wrote it like:

What are you doing this weekend?
gotahoe.com

which every time I looked at it, I saw "What are you doing this weekend? got-a-hoe?"