Pooya Karimian

Run into Shanbehzadeh Ensemble through a Farsi weblog [*], I thought I would share it with you. Saeid Shanbehzadeh (Farazoo) plays traditional music of Bushehr, a southern city of Iran. The following four clips are from their 2007 performance in New Zealand:

- Shanbehzadeh Ensemble
- more on youtube
- Farazoo blog

Today was Blog Action Day. Fifteen thousand blogs wrote about the environment. Lone Sysadmin wrote a thought provoking post in his blog: Paying Billions To Never See The Stars Again. Check it out.

Also this is old news but I just read about it. It is the story of a small-city in Iran where people are so much into star gazing that some nights they even turn off all the city lights. Read it here: Stargazing Bug Seizes the Imagination in Iran.

- Photos: A Town with a Passion for Astronomy

BBC Chinese reporter's story and photos of Iran:

- Article: Iran Overshadowed by the Bright Spot [Chinese]
- Photos: Street Memories [Chinese]
- Photos: Portraits [Chinese]
- Photos: Cultural History [Chinese]
- Photos: Black and White [Chinese]

Found via My Babbling Brain (In Persian).

Sundays are my email clean-up days. I use Fusemail’s own web-mail for normal daily email checking and every time I read an email that needs further attention, I will leave it as unread. Then in my free time, weekends mostly, I open Thunderbird, Sunbird, Firefox and Notepad. I use Thunderbird to read the mailing list emails in threaded-view and to find the unread mails. I use Sunbird to mark events in my calendar. In Firefox I look at the links and bookmark important ones. And in Notepad I write down the tasks that I should do but there’s no special deadline or something for them to go in calendar. I save that text file on my desktop. This way the number of unread email are dropped from 200-300 to less than 50.

I had lots of emails about pkLaunch (which has now been downloaded 1000+ times), which I was mostly forgetting to reply back. So I made a fancy Ajaxified commenting system that people can use to leave their comments and questions in the pkLaunch discussions. You can try it on a test page here. It still needs more polishing.

Guess what! I'm done with my course. yay! holidays begin... This could be the last course in my life. You can see some of the stuff I did for my course here:

- http://www.sfu.ca/~pkarimia/

That I'm not writing here every week like before does not necessarily mean that I'm busy, but lazier recently! At least I try to think about my hobby small projects.
After I released pkLaunch v0.5, a Firefox player for Yahoo music clips with support of higher quality feeds than IE, I paused developing that waiting for the new Greasemonkey extension to release. I’m receiving good feedbacks/suggestions from users these days.
CheckMail needs less than a day of putting together scripts in order to have a working version. My goal is to have a friendly interactive mail notification system as a web application. This is one the things that come out of scripts that I use for organizing myself.
Also I tested the first prototype of my map sharing app just to make sure it is possible to do it. It needs a complete rewrite but I’m sure it will be a useful thing. To say it simple, it will be an interactive instant map sharing system where people can browse and label a map together interactively. Isn’t it neat?

You can go check the new photos now.

As one of the geeks suggested sometime ago (I don't remember who he was), I put the dental floss near computer instead of washroom. Try it, it is not as good as snacks near computer, but it works!

I was sitting by the computer and the TV was on, as always, that I heard some chrips. I was wondering why they put this as the background sound on that very formal program! After searching for the source of chrips I found a very small cricket in the living room. He is so small that I can't believe he can sing in such a loud voice. I believe the buddy is still crawling around somewhere in the house and I wish at least he lets me sleep when I turn off the lights.

- The cricket's Sound
- Insect Sounds