.farshid sedghi’s personal blog.

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…

Very glad to see this finally happen…from a post on Yahoo!Search, we learn that as of today when we search for images on Yahoo!, results will include images from Flickr, aka eyes of the World. My default image search engine is now Yahoo!…

iPhone will be out in a few days at 6pm locally. I am not impressed with it nor with what I am reading in reviews. I love my iPod, so don’t get me wrong but Apple is an expert in not telling the full story on their products. Examples:

Joel writes (and I agree): “Apple is and always has been severely dishonest in all their advertising when it comes to performance. This is the company that spent years telling us that the PowerPC was faster than Intel, only, suddenly, to change their claims midsentence without an explanation when reality caught up with them, in a scene almost exactly like the scene in 1984: “Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy.”

This is the company that’s about to release the iPhone on a slow, last-generation data network but is running TV ads that have edited out all downloads and waiting time that network entails.”

Further, iPhone will require an iTunes account before you can use it (I understand it for the iPod part of the phone but for the entire phone I don’t understand) but you will only find this piece of info left out and only found in the fine print of things. And while we are at it, here is another piece of info that might be interesting that I read about Apple’s control tactics.

Anyways, with increasing demand on my current phone (which I love) and the fact that 2.5 years have passed and it is starting to show clear signs of usage (including dents after many drops and some buttons not working), it finally died on me a couple of days ago, so i was forced to quickly get a new phone. The result became the HTC Hermes/AT&T 8525 (yep AT&T bought Cingular back) and I absolutely love it. It is a little on the bulky side but the advantages by far outweigh the the bulkiness. I also found a list of good apps to put on it, (and I also got the phone free which was a bonus). This purchase was not really planned and I had my eye on another phone that is coming later this year as well as a couple of other unannounced phones that I am excited about, but I am very happy with my new phone and would highly recommend it to anyone who wants something in between a laptop and a phone.

This is not that new, but a very handy free service. Go over to GrandCentral.com to see the demo or read this NYT article on it to understand it better.

Ever wanted to have a free phone number and voice mail service in USA? Or say you live here and every time that you are asked to give out your number (shopping, applications, selling stuff), you don’t want to give out your real home number? Then you can get a free number and voicemail (that can send your voicemails over email etc). Then go to aimphoneline.com and sign up. Skype has this feature and calls it SkypeIn, but it’s not free.

My sister sent me a link today to one of the 10 conversations recorded in the documentary called Dah (Ten in Farsi) which I have been wanting to see. The documentary as described in Wikipedia:

In 2002, Kiarostami directed Ten, revealing an unusual method of filmmaking and abandoning many scriptwriting conventions. Kiarostami focuses on the socio-political landscape of Iran, and the images are seen through the eyes of one woman as she drives through the streets of Tehran over a period of several days. Her journey is composed of ten conversations with various passengers, including her sister, a hitchhiking prostitute and a jilted bride, as well as her demanding young son. This style of filmmaking was praised by a number of professional film critics such as A. O. Scott in The New York Times, who wrote that Kiarostami, “in addition to being perhaps the most internationally admired Iranian filmmaker of the past decade, is also among the world masters of automotive cinema…He understands the automobile as a place of reflection, observation and, above all, talk.”

But to the point. Seeing this scene (despite the movie being a docudrama) at first may seem surprising how the mother treats his son as an adult (as well as how the adult like the son behaves), but it reminded me how quickly you are forced to grow up in many parts of the world and in a sense you don’t experience a classically defined childhood. It was also interesting that I was taken back by this dynamics shown in the scene, whereas I am not sure if that would have been the case if I had not grown up in places where being treated as a child during childhood is a must. Or maybe it happened because I am about to become a dad and this is not the dynamics I wish to have with my daughter (that’s right, we will be having a girl).

Nonetheless, I don’t think its either or. Children definitely need to enjoy their childhood and at the same time they don’t always need to nor want to be treated as children. I love this quote from Abdul-Baha which really summarizes it all so wonderfully:

While the children are yet in their infancy feed them from the breast of heavenly grace, foster them in the cradle of all excellence, rear them in the embrace of bounty. Give them the advantage of every useful kind of knowledge. Let them share in every new and rare and wondrous craft and art. Bring them up to work and strive, and accustom them to hardship. Teach them to dedicate their lives to matters of great import, and inspire them to undertake studies that will benefit mankind. Selections From the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá pp128-129

Title says it all…instructions can be found here

As I was eating lunch today, once again I couldn’t stop thinking about the huge amount of trash this country (U.S.) produces. Not to say that every other country is better, but it absolutely amazes me how every single paper or plastic plate, bowl or utensil here is so solid and sturdy that you could put it through the dish washer and no harm would be done to them. How can these things be called single use kitchenware?

An add to this that the concept of recycling here is a joke. Growing up in Scandinavia, I am used to separating recycle material very carefully and deposit them in separate stations. you have to separate brown paper from white, colored glass from clear, different types of plastic and a lot of people also have compost. Here in the States, we you toss everything that is supposed to be recycled in one giant bin, and there is no proof that all of this gets recycled (even if they wanted to, they would have to separate things first), and when talking to people about recycle, you can tell that overwhelming majority have no clue about what can or can’t be recycled. people think for instance a pizza box can be recycled, even if it has left over pizza or cheese stuck to it, or that styrofoam can be recycled and so on…

And while i am on the topic, the amount of absolute unnecessary wrapping and packing pretty much anything you buy comes with really is tragic to see. All (mostly) because of marketability of the products

It breaks my heart to see this much waste on a daily basis everywhere I look….

Google has taken one more step towards providing a personalized search engine. You can now have a customized search engine (CSE) to only search the sites you want results from including customizing look and feel and a lot more so you can include it within your own site. You can also invite others to contribute to your CSE.

Now, what I want is meshup of this CSE offer from Google and what Lijit offers.

With sites like facebook.com and myspace.com taking over the Internet it makes it easier for people to keep in touch by leaving messages on each others “Walls” (facebook). What I notice is also that while this Web 2.0 concept is taking over, it makes it harder to be an outsider, by not having an account or just having a standalone blog of your own on the Internet.

As an example, my wife, sisters, brother and lots of friends all have facebook or myspace accounts. While almost not a week goes by without receiving invites to facebook or similar sites and despite verbal attempts of convincing me to join this movement from my wife and sisters, I am very content with just having a blog that I have full control over. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with these sites and while I am sure there are some valuable content being generated through this crowd sourcing, it does not really attract me since it a) does not give me full control over what I can do on it and being a techie I like being able to poke around things as much as I want to and b) being on such sites in my experience you also end up engaging in a lot of (semi addictive) frivolous activities, e.g. graffiti a friend’s wall or virtually poke each other, (which I am sure is fun, but I just don’t have the time for it).

So the question becomes, do you ignore the wisdom of these crowds and stay outside or do you go with if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them? While not joining these sites may not make me as visible or accessible to friends and other contacts who would like to get updates on my life and in turn also not give me access to theirs, some of which can be friends from a very long time ago that you wonder what they are up to these days, I think there is a middle ground and example of that can be another site like LinkedIn.com. That site may not be as ‘cool’ or happening as other fun social sites, but it gets the job done for me.

Or maybe take a more old-fashioned approach, find out their email or phone number and call/write them to get updates, but I guess in today’s world that can be a little passé, or better put, in a world where we travel a lot and its so easy to stay in touch through the Internet, we tend to have a large circle of contacts around the globe and we don’t necessarily have the time or are not that interested to do one on one emails/calls with them and are just content with coming across whatever they broadcast to the world about their lives.

If I had to complain about one thing why I avoid IE7 and prefer Firefox it would be because of its way of handling tabs. I want to open new tabs when I type in a new URL, or open a bookmark, I want it opened in a new tab. Further I miss not having built in spell check like firefox. It goes of course beyond that, but these were my top two pains which made me choose FireFox. Just came across a link for IE7Pro which takes many steps towards coming close to FireFox (in my opinion at least). See screen shots below [via Public Sector Developer]

I have previously written on the wonderful service that Callwave provides. Now, they have a widget for iGoogle so you can access your voicemail box directly from the web. love it.

Most of time I share about fun stuff/sites that apply only to US, so here is one for my Swedish peops. Hot off the press: Google maps now fully covers Sweden, including routing, local info such as restaurants, banks etc. Here is an example that was not possible until today. As I understand it, all info comes from the yellow pages site among others.

For those who regularly search on one particular term using many different websites, sputtr.com should be useful.

Update: Notes on final decision can be read here

Update: The Pentax K10D is now in the race too as I have discovered that it is a bit of undiscovered gem among DSLRs. On the other hand D40X is out and so is D200. D40X out because it simply is a D80 wanna-be and in a sense this article summarizes why I decided to drop it. D200 I dropped because in a nutshell the only difference between D80 and D200 is that D200 is sealed against dust. Not enough to make me want to pay the price differance.

For a few years now I have had my eye on a DSLR, and the time for buying one has come. I have narrowed it down to to Nikon as the brand I like the most. Now, its down to two models (D200 is a little out of my price range) and for the life of me, I can’t get a straight answer either way. The search is still ongoing so feel free to chime in if you have any thoughts. So far this is the best summary I have found.