Adventures of Mr.Behi

The world is talking. Are you listening?

Link: Global Voices Online has been on my bookmark toolbar since it started. It is by far, one of the most awesome websites for getting first hand information from blogs all around the world. The credit for sure goes to the dedicated translators and blog diggers in local communities who contribute to this project. I hope more and more people get to read the GV at least as much as they browse regular news website. The GV has also a translated version in Persian but I do not see many readers among the Persian blogging community talking about it. Maybe because it is fairly new. Honestly, Iranian blogging community is into Iranian matters way too much. They should really listen up to other societies. This is a page to open, a breakfast for world citizens :) let's listen or at least pretend to listen is better to remain deaf.

Mr.Behi; Turned two and is moving

Without me realising, Adventures of Mr.Behi passed its second birthday. Two years blogging, moments, thoughts, imagination and so many wonderful people I got to know. Blogging is a fantastic thing to do and the joy of reading old posts are not less than writing new ones.

I became heavily engaged in the final days of November in Tripoli that I just remembered that I missed the birthday when I was in the plain heading for Dubai. That flight seemed like endless and I was travelling in a formal suite and shoes (did not find time to change after my final presentation in a forum and headed straight to the airport). I also had to wait seven hours in Dubai transit hall. I always end up in the book and computer section of the duty free shop where I found this book...Imagine me reading with my coffee getting cold beside me and my head falling on my shoulders every now and them (no sleep in around 48 hours).

Oh, before I forget, Flying from Tripoli airport was a fun for itself...This airport that used to be deserted during UN embargo times, is as busy as it gets with many flights heading to Europe and elsewhere but it is still very analogue in all aspects. There were a couple of company VIPs with me in the flight hence our personnel department kindly took the burden of standing in the passport control line and through someone there who apparently knew one of ours, we got all of our passports stamped but there were more...one person to check your passport before the first x-ray machine, then one person tears your boarding pass and the other next to him ticks your name off the list. Just before stepping into the plane, there are another two checking the passports...not enough Indians indeed for this many chiefs!

Anyway, my time in Tripoli was fantastic, Q4 of 2006 will be remembered well in my life as I got my promotion, got this trip to Libya and now I am officially moved there...my company is moving me to work in Libya and I guess I will be there till no less that two years. That is an  exciting news, I will be close to many places I have never been and business in Libya is booming for my company and it is good to be there. I had so much fun finding a place to live and am so busy now back in Iran trying to sort out my stuff.

And the winner is...GV

Link: Global Voices Online  won Knight-Batten awards for innovations in Journalism. Very well deserved! I doubt if anything more innovative than that is happening! Global voices is now a fantastic snapshot of ideas all around the world gathered from individual voices. Congratulations to all of those who made this step change in the way world can listen to voices...The world is talking, are you listening!

Iranian Bloggers

I linked to many cartoons by Nikahang Kowsar in this blog. He is an Iranian journalist who had to flee to Canada because he was accused here for a one of his cartoon that was said to be about one of the hard line clerics. His Persian Blog is one of the most frequently updated ones. It is easy not to read it for some days and face more than 60 unread posts. (Link to the below cartoon)

Window to the past

I added a kind of window to the past over there within the left column. It is called "I wrote in 2005" and is simply a link to the posts that I sent in this blog during January 2005 and will be updated monthly. If you move your mouse over the text, for most of them there is a little tool tip box that shows my feelings or some explanation about that post. Unfortunately I was using Blogger at that time and when I moved to the current place, I lost all the comments that were posted between Nov 2004 and Fab 2005 which is a pity.

The "what is new column" on the right will have a sister soon as "What was new last year". This column was started from late February 2005 so wait till then. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for where I should places of these column in the blog to look nicer. I am not a designer and I need help.

Guide for anonymous blogging

Link: The Anoniblog; Guide for anonymous blogging

Guide for anonymous blogging. I think I have missed acting like an anonymous blogger according to this guide :-( One of its recommendations is that I shall not talk about places I go or my lifestyle. Well, I have done so. What else I can blog about anyway? Mr,Behi means places he visits, people he meets and things he sees. Those high-tech internet gurues over there, have a question: when you use Gmail or other services that have secure connection, can the ISP track what you type or find out who you are?

One Year with Mr.Behi!

It was last year when after reading blogs for about a year or so, I decided to start my own. It was the time for a reunion with my thoughts again and "Mr.Behi" came into this world in this public nursery, weighting just 5Kbs. This poor little kid is still not able to be named after me and do not blame me, it is his own fault! He criticises powerful people so loud sometimes, that if he gets caught, it will be his poor father behind bars (no one will prosecute a one year old kid!).

For me, Mr.Behi was turned out to be very different from what I thought in the beginning. At first, the idea was to keep track of my life, my ideas and things happening around me but because I had to leave Mr.Behi by himself when I was busy at work or home- sometimes for hours, days and even weeks- he became somehow self-motivated and in many occasions, I was surprised to discover him chatting with his new friends across the cyber-space. This little kid helped me to meet some great fellows in my e-neighbourhood. Some of them are so kind that they come and visit our place most of the times especially when Mr.Be hi says something new. By the way, we came to our new place (this blog) around February last year and we are so happy with it. Here we get a nice room service that worth the pay.

Adventures of Mr.Behi is my second home, where I can release my imagination and review my life. With my very little memory for the past, I take this for granted because Mr.Behi can tell me what I was thinking about in the past. Adventures of Mr.Behi is a record of my thoughts and ideas for the past year now. This is the only year that I can easily browse and enjoy. Something that makes this blog a better place than just a diary for me is the amazing collection of ideas Mr.Behi received as comments. Thanks to those who kindly left their memories here.

Adventures of Mr.Behi is a continuous story and I am sure it will become very exciting day by day. And the real excitement comes when you can look back and smile :-) even to the sad moments.

Iran and new assult on Cyberspaceَ

In Iran these days, you get more error messages when you surf the web saying that the site is not permitted to be viewed because of the order from the government. The new series of conspicuous activities for controlling the cyberspace is generating great negative reaction among Persian web gurus and bloggers. Most of the bloggers published this report by reporters without borders and found it informative enough to talk for itself. In summery, Iranian government is investing more and tries to be more efficient in controlling the Internet.

Apparently they appointed a company called Delta Global to make an integration in all filtering activities so that even before an ISP get the bandwidth, they can make sure it is clean from anything that is not praising the system. ISNA reports that they are using various European and US made software for the purpose. Well that is interesting! companies from the free world are helping our bytes to get into cage. I once heard the rumour that the Iranian telecomm is using cracked version of these products and that makes it even more funny while the result of all these is very regretting.

Mr.Behi and I did not find any official website for this Delta Global company to see what they are up to but whatever it is, this is not good to just wait and watch. Iranian voices are not papers to close, are not waves to disrupt, are not bytes to filter. Blogs proved that words now come not from political parties but from individuals. Each human is a unique experience of life, a pack of knowledge that has it's own interpretation. The government should be happy listening to these words but if they are fool enough that they think they should wipe out words to wipe out the ideas, hell to them but as long as humans are here, there are voices. Close it and there will be another way of making it heard soon enough.
Sorry for lecturing like this. I will cool back I promise :-)

A book to save our words

I have been browsing Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents and found it truly interesting. I personally liked technical information it provides about blogging anonymously and fighting filtering (which is choking us here in Iran) but also because of the interesting section on bloggers and their personal accounts in which Iranian blogs are also highlighted by a chapter written by Arash Sigarchi (Iranian journalist/bloggers who was sentenced to jail because of his words).

Glabal voices on-line held an IRC chat about this handbook that I sadly missed. Look at the script here.

Blogrolling filtered!

Iranian Telecom is famous for the filters it imposes over websites/weblogs that are containing what the government considers as "against morals of the society" or "against national security". This costly activity has already cost Iranian government many million dollars to become reality and there is a little care about the legitimacy of the reasoning that should be there behind the filtering of each URL that is swept away from the sight of Iranian web surfers.

Meanwhile, there are many social/political pages that are filtered just because they have something to say that brings bend in the eyebrow of the headmasters! yet sometimes when I hear news about recent filtered websites in the Persian blog-sphere, I can not create any logical link between my humble Gray cells and the minds of those who commit the filtering!

One of my such odd surprises came after I gathered that blogrolling.com is filtered in Iran after some days of fluctuation between availability and unavailability. So many bloggers are now complaining that why a tool such blogrolling should be unavailable? perhaps because it would make you aware that something is posted questioning the new president! Some bloggers now fear for Blogger to get filtered and with the popularity this free blogging service has among Iranians, that would be due to the huge decrease for the skyrocketing number of Persian blogs. I guess the idea of media censorship can only come from the culture that says: "If I am right and indeed I am, one that talks against me is wrong and should not be there to talk". Sweeping the URLs with political content and closing newspapers containing debates is like what kids do by hiding the broken glass in the closet pretending everything is safe an sound while everyone knows it is not and more than others, the kid himself!