.farshid sedghi’s personal blog.

ABC primetime had a very interesting and moving segment tonight. It was a social experiment taking place in a bakery. A Muslim woman (ABC’s actor) dressed with a head dress wanted to buy something and the clerk (also ABC’s actor) was refusing her on the grounds that she was a terrorist, non-american and was being insulting. Here is the interesting part as they did experiment several times: 22 customers said nothing, 6 sided with the clerk and 13 stepped up and defended the customer.

As I watching this, it certainly saddened me to see ignorance and/or indifference when a human being is treated that way. It also reminded of a more tragic fact. In this case, let’s assume the by standers were apathetic or sided with the clerk because of ignorance and understood all Muslims to be terrorists because of the actions of a few rotten eggs. At least they had ignorance or being misinformed to blame it on.

What about all the Baha’is in Iran who have been and are being terrorized in countless ways? How can recognition of mankind to be one and wanting to unite all the people and races of the world possibly be used as a reason for persecution, imprisoning and killing? Further, how can this be justified to systematically vilify and subject innocent children to cruel treatment??

At least when I grew up in Iran, the government just expelled me from primary school (for being a Baha’i) and that was the end of it, rather than now humiliating and ostracizing in different ways before expelling.

Make no mistake, this is not prejudice. This is certainly not ignorance. This is nothing other than systematic attempts to eliminate human rights, and force people to stop believing in oneness of mankind, oneness of God and oneness of religion.

I am big fan NPR radio for multiple reasons, mainly its news is international, as apposed to all other news here in the States which is extremely city/neighborhood/state and nation focused. Further, they have a few good programs, such as Marketplace which this week is covering the Middle East this week.

Pretty funny video

On potentials of nano tech

A funny self-depicting video about Bill Gate’s last day at work starring Bill himself and many celebrities…

In this day and age who wants to go to a photo store to take passport pictures? Take as many digital ones as you want and then use this guide to turn them into passport size and print away…

In our family we abandoned the paper calendar a while back in favor of an online one. This way you can access it from anywhere…this greasemonkey script gives you a integrated view of google calendar within Gmail. It applies only to FireFox and before doing anything you need to install the greasemonkey add-on to firefox.

And here is a guide if you have switched from PC to Mac….for faster acclimatization.

I was refreshing my mind about API design and wanted to see if there were any good resources online apart from the book that I have. Came across the following 3 hour lecture on how to design APIs which pretty much covers one of the better books I have read on API design. The presenter is the co-author of Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries which I found to be good and useful book.

Some useful tools can be found here…and here is the list to replace built-in tools in XP[via Lifehacker]

A 30 minute interestingvideo on how your eyes actually work viewing a webpage/site. Mostly aimed at web designers and SEO people. Still, I learned a lot…

Can be found here…

It really baffles me that the leader of a nation can deny facts in front of the rest of the world and everyone just laughs it off. As an example, when Iranian president visited Columbia university he made several denials that made the audience explode in laughter, yet none of these denials are joking matters. And yet another example of these denials that certainly cannot be blamed on his ignorance of lack of knowledge is the standard answer he gives on why the Baha’is of Iran are denied their basic human rights.

These are very deliberate denials. And Iran’s regime knows that no one will stand up to them on the question of minorities in Iran. Why? Because there are bigger issues that they get away with, so this one is a walk in the park, and that is why the president himself can outright lie and deny facts and get away with it.

Putting that aside, the question in mind today is what level of hatred, ignorance or whatever you want to call it does it take when you put so much energy into even destroying the Baha’is’ cemetery which is located somewhere very remote and desolate. And what have these Baha’is done that generates such a level hatred? They believe in oneness of mankind, oneness of religion, universal peace, elimination of poverty and many principles similar to these I just mentioned.

For those of you who have an unusual name for the country you live in, or your name is simply not international enough, I am sure you can relate to this little dilemma: You pick up the phone to make a reservation at a restaurant for dinner with your friends. It’s a simple task, you dial the number, say hello, ask for a table for x number of people at a certain hour and thats that. max 30 seconds needed. But in my case that never would be the case. After saying my name, they ask me to repeat it three times, then we go into spelling it…and since “d” and “b” and some other letters sound familiar, you now have to go into F as in frank/foxtrot, a as in apple/alpha…

so 5 minutes later I have successfully managed to reserve a table for dinner. Well a couple of years ago I decided no more of this, so my resturaunt/starbucks/general waiting line name became Bob Heart. Think that solved the problem? Oh yes! However, once every three months, when I order coffee at a coffee shop and they ask for a name to call when its ready, I get the question sometime: “You don’t look like a Bob. You sure your name is Bob?”..to which I respond, would you like to spell my real name instead?

Over two months into being a dad, I thought I would jolt down some of the experiences before new ones make the initial memories fade away (mostly due to lack of sleep). People ask how it feels, and regardless of how hard I attempt, I feel I am short of words to describe it.

The closest description I have come to, that most can relate to is going through, what I call, pink-clouds-period of falling in love: Nothing else matters, you walk around with smirk on your face, you don’t need food, sleep or drink. You are in a constant wonderful high and each time you hold your baby or see her face, your heart just melts away and you are washed over by a giant wave of joy. Every little movement or sound she makes is the cutest thing you have ever heard and as a bonus her occasional (reflex) smile puts you over those pink clouds.

Simultaneous to these feelings, there is a sense overwhelming feeling that you can’t help being reminded about constantly, mainly the great responsibility you have for this soul’s well being and development. The well being part being a walk in the park in comparison to the development part. I am far from having perfected my own flaws and character and yet here she is and it is a reality that can be overwhelming. And of course, I can’t get away with do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do.

The start of this journey is a happy one as at least for me, fundamentally, it comes down to knowing the purpose of life before you start focusing on smaller puzzle pieces. It makes it a little easier to align the rest of your actions in accordance to this objective or at aspire and try to.

Once in a while you see something that really warms your heart:

This clip is from an audition of Britain Got Talent show (something similar to the “Idol” shows across the globe)…Watch and I would be shocked if you don’t find it interesting to say the least…

Title says it all and here is a review…

Saw this small segment on the Baha’i Faith earlier tonight on NBC…

Faith in America: Diversity and division

graball.com is useful for those of you who are not satisfied with sticking to one search engine, or simply want to compare search results across the big players.

It also has toolbar you can install.

This documentary was shown on South African TV recently it seems…

I learned about HDRI technique a while back, but did not really bother to experiment with it as I didn’t have a DSLR camera (you can do it with a point and shoot camera too, but I figured I would just wait and get a DSLR). Anyways, I thought I would give it a try now that I have a DSLR and looked around and found two different tutorials (the authors disagree with each others ways strongly).

I know some of the friends HDR work on Flickr and you can get very nice results.

• Ryan McGinnis’s Tutorial
• Peter Carr’s Tutorial

Will post results of my experiments once I get around to it.

I’m sure anyone who has to share photos to a wider circle on a semi-regular basis realizes that emailing them is not the best option. So in my circle, I know most people use one of the three ways of sharing, namely: 1) Flickr, 2)Picasaweb or 3)Kodakgallery. I have gone back and forth a lot and been very torn between these three for several reasons, here is why:

Kodakgallery (used to be oFoto.com) - While allowing unlimited space and traffic free of charge and very easy to drag and drop pictures and create albums, it is fairly limited and doesn’t allow much for tagging and frankly doesn’t have a cool sideshow feature. And you can only see the pics in one size only. In terms of uploading, you can either drag the pics you want from your file system in original size (takes long time) or resize them to being smaller and then drag and drop (also not the fastest or most efficient way in today’s web world).

Picasaweb - Wonderful site which is really an extension of the Picasa photo organizer application (free from Google). So its very easy to select a bunch of pics from within Picasa desktop, and then create an album and have it uploaded to your picasaweb site (in original or reduced sizes). You can choose to share your albums with the public or exclusively with a small circle of family/friends (which is also supported by the two other services). So no complaints here except that you only have 1 gig of free space and if you want more space, you have to pay a yearly fee depending on how much extra space you want (e.g. 6 gig = $20/year). One feature that I really do like is the fact that; say someone has sent you a picasaweb album link and I want to download all these pictures and includes them among all my other neatly organized pictures within Picasa desktop tool. No problem, just hit download and it will get downloaded and organized with the rest of your photos.

Flickr - Probably the most popular choice by a lot of people. Comes in two flavors: free accounts (i.e. you have unlimited space, but limited amount of traffic upload/month) or pro (i.e. $24-25ish/year without any limits on space or traffic and mind you a lot of my friends have this). Again wonderful site with a lot of good features. Also provides a few different way to upload pictures, yet none of them I found to be as easy, powerful and straight forward as Picasa’s solution.

So what do I do? Well, why choose one over the other when I can have all three? Here is what I did. I have a free account on all three services (but have pretty much stopped using Kodak since I find working with the other two more smooth), which means limited monthly traffic on Flickr and limited space on Picasaweb. And since I wanted to be able to export to both flickr and picasaweb equally easy, I found this solution for getting pictures uploaded to Flickr from within Picasa desktop tool (one tip, make sure you have Java installed on your machine before installing the rest).

So now, for more artistic pictures that I want online for a long while ahead, I upload them to Flickr and the everyday life pictures from different events that family and friends want to see I upload to Picasaweb. This way, my flickr account continues to have a manageable monthly traffic (i.e stay within my limits), while I can enjoy the no space limit on it. And on my picasaweb account, over time I can delete very old albums on it to make space for new ones if need be.

Then go to skydrive.live.com. Seems like the beta is finally open to public.

See link

Update: I stand corrected as Anne-Marie tells us how to make international calls with paying local rates (or free if you don’t pay for local calls)…read the first comment on this post. Thanks Anne-Marie!

Previously, I wrote a post about all the different ways I use to talk (voice) with friends and family. Pretty much all of them involved having access to a computer in one way or another. Here is one that doesn’t need you using a PC at all. In essence it is comparable to using calling cards but much more straight forward.

On Rebtel.com you sign up, then give the number you want to call, the site then gives you a (permanent) local number and whenever you call that number, it calls the international number. Benefit : Don’t have to keep track and punch in calling card codes (or program them), most local calls are free these days. Drawback: you still have to pay a international rate (which is very cheap) by charging your account, so no free lunch.

Took my new Nikon D80 for a spin during sea fair this weekend…here are some of the results…

Seafair - August 2007

After much deliberation and research, I have come to decide that Nikon D80 will be the better camera for my needs. Yes, I pay almost $300 more for it in comparison to D40X, but the list of small extra features that D80 has adds up to this verdict. Now, here is another good tip that I came along in my independent investigation for truth: there are a bunch of good lens kits out there, most typical being 18-135mm. In order to avoid having too many lenses to haul around everywhere I take the camera, I will probably get a prime lens (probably 50mm) for portraits and casual everyday stuff and either a 18-135mm or a 18-200mm lens to cover the whole range. Oh yea, and add to that a polarizer filter.

Reasons for not getting the other two cameras: Pentax K10D - Needs to much configuration for simple casual every day shooting. Sometimes I want my DSLR to just take casual pics without too much fiddling. Nikon D200 - The price was just not right.

My main source for research: imaging-resource

PS. I just noticed the number of visitors to this blog increased by a factor of 5 (who would have thought)…and top search terms that led to this blog:

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Came across an interesting post from Scott Hanselman on how you can migrate an entire family to Google apps.

You can now get a link to map when you call the free 411 service from Google. See the link

Useful for future reference…

Walking to my car after work today, a surreal rainbow was right above me, so I pulled out my new phone and took a picture and although it’s not anywhere close to how amazing it was in real life, it still gives a hint…

Title says it all. I found a couple of useful extensions here…