My first ds106 blog post! This is awesome! This past week has been somewhat not bad. It was tons of work but fun I would say. I got all of my social media accounts up and running well.

Youtube:

This video I talk about what I like a bit.

Twitter:

Can't wait to work with my fellow classmates in our ds106 class! A bit about me: a comedy person, love bball, guitar, and my family. #ds106

— Imran Ahmed (@iahmed16celtics) August 31, 2014

Flickr:

About a year ago, I started making stuff out of food with my “first invention”: An apple swan. So a swan made out of an apple. Pretty cool right? There’s more.

Another invention that I made was Strawberry Roses:

Here’s a family photo of with my family, relatives in Switzerland, and I when we were at Switzerland this past summer.

While in Switzerland, we took our own family photo following after the family photo.

My team that I coached won the championships in the 5/6th grade South division.

These are just couple photos of me usually practicing basketball everyday.

 

Soundcloud:

This song is one of my favorite songs because Chris Rene he was a nobody before but he believed from the start line at the X factor auditions that he could win the X factor and he finished 3rd place in the finals. At least he went to the finals which was a big thing. That’s what I like about him, he never stop believing it. This song was one of the best from all of his performances that I liked.

So just to say, a little bit more about me: I’m humorous, active, benevolent, humble, and smart guy. I love basketball, playing guitar, eating food, and spending time with my family because YOLO. Love my family especially my mom who’s been taking care of me since I was born. My parents sacrificed a lot for me so I want to be there to take care of them when I have too and spend time with them. Another fun fact from me which I showed in my youtube video, I was born in Switzerland and then we moved to California which is where the love of basketball for me began. The time I moved to California is where Shaq and Kobe helped the Lakers won 3 straight NBA titles so basically I moved to California in 1999. The bandwagon curse came to LA when Kobe and Shaq started winning championships. I just dislike being a bandwagon whenever a team has a high chance of winning the championship. So that’s when I started being a Celtics fan. The Boston Celtics team are a humble team and a believer. Doc Rivers: “Never stop believing it”. They always make good comebacks and when they have their ups and downs, the Celtics fan are always still cheering for them and that’s what I love about the Celtics culture. When I moved to Virginia in 2002 which I was thankful to escape from the bandwagon curse surrounding in LA, I started learning and how to play basketball. I improved each time in house league and my team in 8th grade went to the championship but lost by 4 points. I thought freshman year, we would win the championship but after the first few games I got out because of a serious concussion. I was out until my junior year but I decided not to play basketball and kept coaching which I started in 8th grade. It was fun. I kept coaching till my senior year. I won 2 championships in my 5 years of coaching. Another thing I like is playing my guitar. It’s quite relaxing when playing because it helps me to relax when I’m stressed out a bit.

After getting my account set up, linking my blog to the ds106 feed, and creating my own gravatar, I started watching the first nine episodes of The Wire and watching the discussions about it. This tv show was quite interesting to watch. I then started making my summarizations and thoughts about each episodes. Here are my thoughts about each episode of The Wire:

Episode 1:

In most tv cop shows, I thought this tv series was the best so far. Instead of like you know showing the good guys and bad guys, this tv series show mostly about who’s becoming more victorious than the other one on each side. After when the tv show started off with the first few minutes taking place in a trial of D’Angelo Barksdale, a young drug dealer, who was charged with murder. With detective McNulty witnessing the trial, I understood that the show would get more interesting. To me, it seemed usual that a witness would identify the guilty guy but then it struck me when another witness a security lady name Nakeesha Lyles changed her story by saying Barksdale wasn’t the man she saw. The jury returned with a result of a “not guilty” verdict. After detective McNulty witnessed the trial, it was clear that he would be more involved in this case.

It was understandable that D’Angelo’s uncle Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell have been one of the dangerous gangs around the area. McNulty believed that they are the reason why the security lady helped D’Angelo be free.

Detective McNulty complains about why no one is investigating about it. The judge saw detective McNulty watch the whole trial and he then calls McNulty to ask him why he came and then calls his deputy about it which led to McNulty to write a report about it and give it to him the first thing in the morning. To me, it seemed all of this was really not smart but you know this is a tv series, the show must go on. I liked how in the first episode at the end where Bubbles started giving information to Kima on the Barksdale Information so he can get revenge for the beating of Johnny. That’s what kept the show more interesting for me.

Episode 2:

In Episode 2 after watching and reading the discussion, I realized how much parallelism that McNulty and D’Angelo had in the episodes. Such as McNulty and his crew got their office which is located in the basement while D’Angelo was talking about the guy who invented chicken nuggets and probably sits down in his basement making nothing. The show kept getting interesting after when Kima and her crew went to take photos of Bubbles making some deals with the Barksdale organization and other people. Although one of my favorite scene in episode 2 is when all the cops in the basement was trying to figure things out, there were some gun shots and the reason it happened was one detective was showing another of a trick when using a gun.
The first episode made me a bit confused at first but then I understood but then the second episode made me confused. I started understooding better because with all the flashbacks that kept occuring. I do like detective McNulty though because even though he keeps cussing too much, he still keeps investigating and tries his best to figure out what’s the solution to the problem of the case.

Episode 3:
The character that is making somewhat The Wire better is Kima. Most tv cop shows always have as a lead character a man but in this one, Kima is making the difference. Her involvement and ideas are somewhat changing and making the fans of The Wire to like the show more.
Instead of her being like sweet and stuff to the bad criminals, she’s always the tough one out of all. Daniels on the other hand in the episode gets quite questionable in the episode because he did something which could harm the case and that is he ordered a drug bust. The next day that the police didn’t know, Omar stole the drugs where the police was going to take place. To go back to Kima for a minute, I wasn’t suprised on her getting herself involved in the fighting with the kid who hit the officer. An important scene to the episode that I thought I found was the chess game and D’Angelo was describing the pieces which related to reality a bit basically life. It gave an outside point of view in situations of how real things work.
Episode 4:
In Episode 4, there were some quite few funny scenes but some quite surprising scenes. One scene that I found surprising is Omar is gay. With two gay people now in the show, I feel like the two main gay people in the show will have a lot of comparable things throughtout the show.
I’m really not a big fan of the cast of The Wire showing gay couples to be perfectly normal as they are a straight couple. After finding out Omar is gay, it really is surprising but it really helps the show to be more interesting to watch. To be in this type of drug business like in The Wire, it shows you can survive when being masculine than being feminine. I think that’s one reason why they portrayed Kima as a gay person since she’s a cop. Well that’s my opinion and thought.
Episode 5:
In Episode 5, this episode showed a lot of surprising things. One thing I can say, it showed that they talked about Kima showing signs of sexism which it started occuring. It showed a lot of paralleism in this episode. Especially Omar kissing his lover which followed by McNulty kissing his male co-worker. I was quite surprised he kissed him but then I realized why which is the co-worker figured out the pager code used by the drug ring.
It showed that both groups are trying to prevent to stop Avon Barksdale and his drug ring. To me it was smart what the detective was doing the crossword puzzles in a couple episodes for now because it showed his desire to finish a puzzle which leads him breaking to the pager code.

Episode 6:
In Episode 6, this episode I believed that the theme occured the most was paranoia. Avon freaked out a lot when someone kept calling him over and over again. It’s quite amazing how one little thing can cause a big thing. It’s pretty clear why Avon has the reason to be worried, because he didn’t do anything and things are starting to get close around him.
Episode 7:
In Episode 7, I thought the themes for this one was seniority and power. Rawls showed how powerful he is by having someone spy on him to get his badge. He also tries to get help to build a case to get rid of McNulty. Also he corrected McNultys grammer mistake in order to impress Rhonda. Another interesting thing after Rhonda left the court is when McNulty called her Ronnie.
Episode 8:
In Episode 8, seniority was again another huge theme of this episode. Herc and Carter followed what Kima told them to do and didn’t questioned her. In this episode, it shows clearly that Wallace and McNulty are paralled. An example could be like both tried to help with their kids with something.
Episode 9:
In Episode 9, it showed how much police can be bad. An example was like when Herc and Carter was talking about pocketing some money for themselves. The money wasn’t actually with them, it was in the bag which showed after it ripped it feel down the wheel barrel. My favorite hobby and thing I love to do is play basketball and in this episode I love the scene of the basketball game.
The east and west side came to watch the basketball game especially the two cops did on their break. After the game, I thought it showed how truly Avon is aggressively during the interaction of Avon and Daniels had.