Shayan Zadeh: Practical Entrepreneur

There is a new kid on the block. Block of social networks that is! Sagpaz.com is a social networking site built by and for Iranians around the globe. Here is my profile page. Feel free to join if you are interested in Iranian culture and/or want to join the next social phenomenon that is going to be blocked by Iran’s government pretty soon!

I have lived in Seattle for 4+ years now. During this period, many times friends have suggested day/weekend trips to Vancouver, Canada be it for just hanging out, concerts, good sushi, maybe even whale watching in Victoria! And my answer to all these suggestions has been

But I legally can’t join you!

Most of the time this assertion on my part results in perplexed facial expressions. They can’t believe it! They have every right to be surprised. After all it’s just 140 miles away. So, why can’t I go there?

Up until last May the US government was the blocker. I had the right to legally stay in US, work here (and of course pay taxes). But if I was to leave the country the ability to come back was in no way guaranteed. I had to apply for a new US visa and given the current friendly relationship between our two nations, that was a bet I didn’t want to take.

However, I finally got the blessing of USCIS last summer when they gave me an advanced parole allowing me to come and go as long as I play nice with the 2-hour interrogation everytime I crossed the border. I was psyched and my first trip was to go back home and visit my family.

But this change didn’t help my Vancouver cause! Why, you might ask. Because as an Iranian citizen who is not a US permanent resident yet, I need a tourist visa to visit Canada. So, I started investigating what is required to get this visa. The list was impressive! Even the US government didn’t need so many documents to give me a visa! [It took me over two weeks to gather all the documents required.]

On top of the getting all these documents together, I had to pay $130.00 for an application fee and wait 2-3 weeks for them to put me through a security screening (to give them credit, they do this much quicker than US government). And the icing on the cake was that you can’t make an appointment to apply for this visa! You have to physically show up on a week day between 8:00-10:00am. They will serve applicants during this time on a first-come-first-served basis. So, good luck!

As you might imagine all of this was weakening my super strong will to get a visa and visit the beautiful British Colombia. So, I still haven’t been to Vancouver.

But that all might change soon. I am planning to visit Montreal for this year’s Jazz Festival. So, I had enough incentive ($1000+ spent on airfare and accommodation sometimes gives me motivation) to get all my ducks in a row and apply for this visa. Now, I have to go back to the consulate on May 23rd and find out if I have been lucky enough to be granted a visa (aka: they have realized I am not a terrorist or something!). If all goes well, this summer I will visit Canada for the first time and a Vancouver visit will soon be in the cards as well.

A few days ago I was reading Seth Godin‘s All Marketers are Liars when I came across a simple exercise in one of the chapters. Basically he was trying to make a point that consumers make a lot of decisions (including buying decisions) in a split second from when you start telling them a story. The exercise in question showed you a couple of partial pictures similar to one you see on the left and asked the readers to think about the images conjured up in their mind. So, I am going to ask you all the same question. What are you thinking about right now?

why was this so interesting to me? Because reading the book reminded me of a logo I saw a couple of months ago when I was visiting Iran. The image you see here is taken out of a business card I got in Tehran. You can see the whole images after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Not that kind of audit (but it reminds me, I should get my taxes done soon!).

The other day I got a phone call from an HR representative at the certain tech company in Pacific Northwest that I work for! She wanted to make sure that I won’t freak out when she sends me the email she is about to send! I think she succeeded! I freaked out way before she sent that email. seriously, what was she thinking?

Anyways, she goes on to tell me that they have to do a technology access audit to comply with Federal regulations. Since I am a citizen of a certain beloved nation, Federal government wants to make sure I don’t have access to designated sets of technologies. It’s mainly concerned with cryptographic algorithms/source-code that by law cannot be exported to say, Iran! Mind you that the code for almost all of these technologies is readily available on the net. But you should remember how the legislator thinks about the internet in this country.

I don’t mind going through the audit, after all its using the hours my employer is going to pay for anyways. It’s like any other wasteful bureaucratic activity I have to go through that doesn’t accomplish much. Yes, it’s not pleasant to be singled out because of your origin, but this is Federal discrimination, so not much can be done about it except by going to the supreme court, which I am not ready for just yet!

I also don’t believe that my employer is mandated to do this audit. I think they are just covering their ass in case something goes wrong so instead of having to stand behind the little guy (that would be me) they can just say

Look! We asked him about it. He just lied to us

or something like that

Warning: This post has numerous references to Iranian Culture of the last 20 years. If you don’t know Farsi, the humor might be lost on you .

This morning my brother forwarded a moderately funny audio file! It is basically a mix of some of Grand Âyatollâh Seyyed Ali Khamene’i‘s (the current Supreme Leader of Iran) speeches with a farsi pop song! I found it entertaining.

I think we totally need a daily show style comedey show about what’s happening in Iran. The amount of humor left unused in the political/social speeches in Iran is unbelievable. Does anybody know of such a program? Anybody interested in working on one?

Photo: courtesy of پایگاه اطلاع رسانی جامع دفاع مقدس (GFDL).

One of the aspects of Iranian culture that I think is particularly well done, is its calendar. We use a solar calendar similar to Gregorian calendar, but we mark the start of our year with a very appropriate natural event: vernal equinox. The holiday marking this day is called Norouz (نوروز) which usually occurs on March 20th or 21th.

Today at 17:07pm PST, the equinox happened and our new year officially started (across the northern hemisphere of course). So, Happy New Year.

Photo: courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Seyyed Ebrahim Nabavi has been one of my favorite Iranian satirist since I started reading his daily column sotÅ«n-e panjom (Fifth Column) in the newspaper Jame’eh back in 98. These days he writes for news website Gooya and the online newspaper Rooz.

I have always wanted to be able to read his writings, but on my terms. These days, that means getting it as an RSS feed in my favorite RSS Reader. Fortunately, his current publisher, Rooz newspaper, provides an RSS feed. However, they don’t give you a feed only for Nabavi, so you have to click through all the articles to find his stuff. And that’s not what I wanted (I sound very demanding!)

Long story short, I whipped a scrapper together that looks at this page regularly and feeds me changes on this RSS feed. I thought some of you might find it useful and hence sharing it here.

One note though: I spend 25 minutes putting this thing together. So, it could be buggy. Let me know if you see any issues and I will try to fix them as time permits.

I was reading one of the popular financial newspapers while visiting Iran a couple of months ago. Among news flashes about the price of oil, futures of the steel and delisting of 20 some companies due to lack of clarity in their financial filings (some of them totally ignored this requirement for being listed in Tehran’s stock market) I found a very interesting piece of financial advice.

It was nothing novel. You have seen them everywhere. Financial planners usually suggest a “typical” portfolio based on different risk profiles and the local economic conditions. Financial press columnists make a living of explaining these profiles (and sometimes the logic behind them) whenever they can’t come up with anything else to talk about. Don’t get me wrong, I agree that there is value in these columns and this one particularly was eye-opening for me.

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During my recent trip to Iran I reconnected with a few old friends. One of them, Roozbeh Pournader is the CTO of a company called Sharif FarsiWeb, Inc which he also co-founded.

Sharif FarsiWeb Inc. owns a Linux distribution that has been completely localized into Farsi. And when I say completely, I mean it. The GUI (based on GNOME), OpenOffice suite, and the Firefox browser among others have been completely localized. Also, they have spent a lot of effort and time into incorporating the Iranian calender system into all these applications. I played with the distribution at their headquarters for a while and I was really impressed with their work.
Read the rest of this entry »

I will be visiting Iran during the month of September after six long years. I am sure during this time the computer industry in Iran (especially software and particularly web developement) has changed significantly. I would really like to get back in touch with the developer community in Iran. So, if you happen to be a developer living in Iran let me know (email) or leave a comment on this post with how I can reach you. I will try to figure out a way for us to meet while I am visiting home.

This will be a chance for us to exchange and rant about what is going on in two very different markets in the world and even maybe find way to collaborate. So, it is all goodness. Ping me.

If you are not a developer, but know developers please let them know