Mehrdad's space: Other stuff

Tuesday, Jan 01, 2008!

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 20:34:44 GMT

It's already 2008 here!
I wish you a great new year!

Happy new year!

Since February...

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:23:46 GMT

Not having blogged for a while, I was doing many other stuff. Many things happened in the last month that I'd like to mention here in this post:

Near a month ago, my laptop died. The detailed story:

One night, I ran a simple script to download and install updates for my Ubuntu Linux and shut the system down automatically (due to low connection bandwidth available, I do these kind of things at night). When I woke up, the system was off as expected. I picked it up and went to the university. I tried to turn it on there. Nothing happened. I came back home, opened up the whole system. I couldn't fix it myself. Since in Iran, there's no HP service center due to US restrictions, I had to bring it to a third party for fixing. After 1 week they told me the problem is related to the main chipset of the system (Intel 915GM) which is a BGA (ball grid array) chip that we can't replace; and we couldn't find the mainboard off the shelves; so we're sorry that we couldn't fix it. By the way, my financial situation is not good and I had a project to be done. Therefore, I bought a hard disk box to use my laptop's hard disk as an external drive to finish my projects on my brother's desktop PC. In less than a couple of weeks, its mainboard died too and the service center didn't accept new orders since they'll be closed for a couple of weeks. I called up my dad and asked him to bring his PC from his office for me but he should have done stuff with it and couldn't do that immediately. Nevertheless, he brought it on the next day. Finally, I asked my dad to lend me a couple grands to buy a laptop. And a couple of days ago, I bought a nice, stylish, sexy and powerful Sony VAIO SZ440N11 featuring Windows Vista Business pre-installed. It's a nice machine weighing at 4lbs.

Now, I don't have any money left in my pocket! And I should finish my projects as soon as possible to pay back my debts.

Another bad thing:

There's only 22 hours left for me to be able to get out of this country easily. After that, I can't easily go anywhere abroad due to military service requirement in Iran

Today is the last day of the Persian year, and tomorrow is new year's celebration. Happy new year!

New cell phone

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 14:00:47 GMT

I have to buy a new handset, any suggestions? By the way, here the mobile system is GSM (plain GSM!, I don't know whether GPRS is available or not, but even if it's available, the price would be so high here!)

I strongly prefer a device with Microsoft Windows Mobile OS, as I'm gonna program it the way I want. I hate Symbian OS, and I've heard tha Symbian SDK SUCKS! (I'm sure no one can produce development products as good as Microsoft)

The price tag should be than $300. The mobile networks in Iran are definitely TERRIBLE. No special feature is supported, so I won't pay more for many unsupported features.

One of the candidates is "i-mate SP3 (also look at the "SP3i" version);" if you have any ideas about it, please keep me informed.

Please let your suggestions come ASAP. I should buy one soon.

Thanks.

Planning for the future

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 16:41:17 GMT

I'm so bored of everything and I can't code. I just wanted to type something. I thought it's good to post on blog about my plans of the future. My long-term plan has always been going to the US, and I've based my life on the plan of becoming successful in the US. But the biggest problem is reaching there itself. I don't like to talk about them here, just if you don't know, it's too hard for a Persian boy who doesn't have any relatives there and is going to be 18 to get out of this country. In fact I'm figuring out ways to study at a university abroad. Today I heard that Iran Education Assessment Organization (The organization that administers all the important official exams in Iran) announcement about registering for the first TOEFL iBT test in Iran which is scheduled on September 15, 2006. I'm not sure if I'm ready to take the test but it's good to know that the exam is available here. In fact, one of the biggest problems is that in Iran, boys older than 18 years old have to complete about 2 years of something called "military service" (It has so many other names!) And they are not allowed to exit the country without completing it (except on a very few circumstances) and for me, this problem will occur after March 20, 2007. Therefore The best is to exit the country before this date. I'll try to figure this out but there is a high probability that this plan fail. If I couldn't do this until then, I won't try hard until I achieve a degree (probably in Computer Science) here. After that I'll do anything to escape! Absolutely anything! Currently, what I'll do is to wait for the results of university entrance exams (called "konkoor" here, it seems to be derived from "conquer") and after that I should go to university (I still don't know that which university I'll be admitted for, but probably it will be Sharif University (I don't know when they copied "... of Technology" from MIT, these fools really think that they can be compared with MIT?!) or University of Tehran) on September 23 (probably).

I'm also developing architecture and coding several applications, a Persian blogging Web site, and a favorites management Web site core library, for a guy who already administers a popular Web site, an accounting application for my dad, LiveVive, a single sign-in, personalization, e-mail account and services for Web site and blog owners (and yes, and the idea of this project is largely derived from it; but our goals are largely different and in first phase, it's localized to be Persian-only, but I do have plans to adapt it for international audience). No, I haven't forgotten DevCT Web site (for those who don't know, it was going to be a community Web site for developers, IT professionals, and other people in the computer industry) DevCT is currently suspended until we have time to rewrite it in Web 2.0 and of course, figure out how to support it financially. I can't talk about an accurate timeframe, but if everything goes well, and we start the project soon, we have probably released a beta before March (I don't promise anything, don't kill me as you did that time!)

I also plan to go to Dubai, UAE again to take the upgrade exams to achieve Microsoft Certified Professional Developer: Enterprise Applications Developer credential in a near future.

OK, this post has become too long! If you have any suggestions, comments, or anything else, just leave a message in comments section or send me an email.

School, Bye Bye!

Sun, 28 May 2006 06:29:52 GMT

Today is a very special day for me. I'm going to take the last exam and finish school for ever! It'll finish in about an hour! After 10 years... Hooray!

In The Beginning...

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 15:02:28 GMT

Hi Everyone!

This is my first post in this blog. Actually this is the beginning of my blogging world!

I have never made any other posts because I hated blogging! But now I've changed my mind!

Today is St. Valentine's Day, but this has nothing special for me!

Let's start with the thing that made me happy today, my invitation to the Windows Live Mail Beta by Ellie Powers-Boyle, Program Manager in Windows Live Mail team. In fact, Windows Live Mail is a wonderful product and I'm very happy to use it, Thanks Ellie for your invitation.

Let's thank Microsoft and MSN Spaces team and anyone who made blogging here possible.

Enough for the first time!

I'll be back,

Mehrdad