Archive for March, 2008

Happy Noruz and New Persian year!

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Noruz painting, Haft Seen

Hi everybody!

It is finally Noruz, the new year and new spring for we Iranians and Persians and whoever who celebrates the start of the life in nature around the world!

I wish everybody this new year and spring will be full of joy and happiness, and success.

Be Happy,

Paymaan.

Arthur C. Clarke dies at age 90.

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Arthur C. ClarkeWhile it is just the day before the new Persian year of 1387 and also spring, I get a bad news for Sci-Fi world and all space enthusiasts.  The very respected pioneer in Space, Radar, and Sci-Fi writings, Arthur Charles Clarke died at age 90 today morning.

I was always a fan of his, and while volunteer at project SETI, I could see how strong this man is, still help SETI sending emails to people to support the project in any form they can.

He was part of Radar development project, he was the man who worked on now called Clarke Orbits, actually making sending satellites to the sky possible.

His latest three wishes at his 90th birthday back in December 2007:  Extra Terrestrials be found some day, The civil war in Sri Lanka ends, and the world to go for cleaner sources of energy.

After a work on Great Barrier Reef, he moved to Indian Ocean and stayed in Sri Lanka till the end.  He also remained an scuba diving enthusiast; “I’m perfectly operational underwater,” he once said.

Peace be Upon him.  World very rarely gets men of such quality.

Yahoo! news article.

Washington Post Article.

Paymaan.

FireFox 3 is much faster than rivals!

Friday, March 14th, 2008

Recreated FireFox 3 logoJust read the news on the new Mozilla FireFox 3 Beta 4 and how it is faster than all rivals (3 times than IE7!!!), downloaded it as my first Beta of version 3. I guess soon V3 will be stable enough for all to upgrade, but in case you too are well confident in using the new Beta as I am, then try downloading it at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Enjoy using the world’s best and fastest Open Source web browser!

Paymaan.

What we need to know, to go Fishing?!

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Steelhead Trout

For some long time I had nothing in my brain at all, what about some overflow :) but today I really felt like writing, and I am going to start some basic discussions about fishing. Just keep in mind I am an amateur myself with absolutely no catches at least during the year 2007, So I am trying to give hints on what I already know, and what I have studied and learned through web, Chasse Et Peche channel, and hints I have learned from experts.Ok, Enough of scaring you of lack of my expertise, let’s see what things an average fisherman needs to start fishing. Consider you can catch fish using almost nothing other than your hands or a piece of wooden hook and a line, but we are not talking of survival skills, we are talking about some kind of average sport fishing.

Tools you need include basic fishing tackle, things like:

  • some kind of fishing rod, to be able to cast and handle your line and play/fight with fish.
  • fishing line, of any suitable form
  • hooks, again of a suitable form for our purpose
  • some kind of reel to hold your line, sometimes to help you fight fish as well
  • some bait to attract fish to bite the hook, normally fish food, lure, bread, etc. etc. but I have seen people catch huge pikes using AA batteries as bait!
  • Something to use as weight, to keep your hook underwater, in some types of fishings. These are normally lead or other metallic weights, but every other heavy enough thing would be ok. Sometimes bait is heavy enough, sometimes you need reverse weight, I mean something to bring the bait up, some kind of floating weight. You may even use your friend as bait and weight for catching huge fish :)
  • sometimes you need floats, these are tools to keep part of your line out of water, so the other part will stay on some specific depth of water.

Then you need some skills, some are more needed, some less, but be sure, the more you have these skills, it will be more professional, and it will be more fun!

  • First of all, it is much better to know the fish species you are trying to catch. Every kind of fish has its own habits, diet, feeding time, strategy etc. etc.
  • Ability to learn and tie some fishing knots. If you don’t know how to tie a hook to a line, your fish along your hook will escape easily. Even some kind of small fish are more powerful than knots you regularly know!
  • If you want to practice Catch and Release, you have to know how to handle that species of fish. Carp stay a lot more alive outside water than trout. and then Catfish does much longer than the others! If you do it wrong, even if you release the fish, it may die
  • Ability to choose suitable hook, rig, line, knot etc. for each species of fish, and to choose somehow what size of fish you plan to catch. Some fish have small mouthes, some have big ones (say Pikes, my favorite fish :) ). So you have to select the correct things.

So you see, while you can still put a hook on a line and put the line on a branch of tree and put a worm as bait on the hook and catch fish just like Pink Panther does, there are lot more to it. Every of those needs I mentioned have a huge variety to select from, and each are better for some specific fishings.

I will start to talk about them one by one in the following articles, and I hope you enjoy.
Paymaan.