Omidreza Mirsayafi 1981-2009

Posted: March 21st, 2009 | Author: | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

Omidreza Mirsayafi
He was my age. I’m not sure what he studied, and what he did to make a living. But on his time off he was a blogger, and criticized Iranian society and government openly. Last year he was sentenced to two years in prison for “insulting the authorities”. And now he is dead. Just before the new Iranian year. Many bloggers are lamenting his loss: here, here, and here and here’s an English language post. And the interview with Omidreza’s lawyer is here.


Kamkar Ensemble in Montreal

Posted: February 21st, 2009 | Author: | Tags: , , | 1 Comment »

A fantastic concert, took me to another world! I took some video (poor quality):

And here’s a an older video of them I found on YouTube


Balatarin is back!

Posted: February 5th, 2009 | Author: | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »

Balatarin ( Farsi: بالاترین ) is a farsi website dedicated to social information sharing and link aggregation. This site is much like digg but mostly for the Iranian internet sphere. (wikipedia article)

A couple of days ago, the site was hacked (most likely their DNS or the registrar info) and suddenly the importance of this site to Iranian internet users became quite apparent.

Well, the good news is that the site owners have now gained control of the site. It will come back soon, but in the meantime here’s the message on the front page:

balatarin is back