I have lost count how many times I have told people that “going to a shooting range and renting a gun when you have a non-immigrant visa (F-1, H1B, TN) is a bad idea.” To avoid having to find the material over and over, I will post it here and start sending the link. I […]
Category Archives: life
Occupation Changes in San Francisco
San Francisco is going through a face change, where people are being evicted to make room for the new workers. There is demand for finding residence in SF, while many many regulations restrict construction of new residences. Since tech giants (Google, Apple, Facebook) started to offer shuttle services to their employees for a better commute between […]
Some Diversity Comparisons In and Out of Tech Industry
Diversity in Silicon Valley has been topic of much discussion recently. There is no need to look at the statistics to know tech industry is suffering (severely) from lack of diversity. To fulfill my curiosity, I decided to add up the numbers from some random companies I was interested in. The results for both gender and […]
Iranian Identity and Issue of Flags
When you are from middle east, everything has a political flavor to it. And when you try to get people together and represent all, all these small differences suddenly erupt! I was in New York this week and was able to attend the annual “Persian Parade” event in Manhattan. It was definitely something of interest […]
Censoring Iranians: different intentions, same results
As I had noted before, average internet user in Iran faces a good amount of censorship. Some of it comes from internal agencies in Iran who”judge” what is appropriate and what is inappropriate for Iranians. And sometimes it is the websites and companies deciding that Iranians should not have the privilege of accessing certain information of software. […]
what did you do in your Ph.D. again?
Recently I was asked to provide an overview of what I did through my Ph.D. in UTD. Although my research work is mostly wireless networking, I realized the “embedded systems” topic fits my development expertise the best. I will repeat that summary here too. My experience with programming embedded systems can be divided into two […]
Finals week in Austin
Nice view 🙂 Thank goodness I don’t have exams anymore.
Google: Engineers vs. Brand Loyalty
Almost a month ago Google changed its Google Reader product by removing one of its core features: social sharing. This feature allowed you to share items you had read in Reader with your ‘friends’ in Reader community. You could also follow them, comment on their items and so on. Since your comments and notes were […]
My Experience Buying A New Car
Recently I spent some time shopping for a new car. A dear friend of mine, Ahmad, recommended some good internet resources. These helped me find out how good was each deal that I got. He also helped me with some different issues in financing and mechanical/design things. I will try to briefly explain the steps […]
26 Channels, 26 Years
One of my lab-colleague friends Ryan created 15 images for our Ember Zigbee devices to run on all the channels up to 26. We jokingly attributed it to my 26th birthday today, as well as an April 1st joke. Anyways, I prefer to regard it as my birthday cake and its candles 🙂 Here is […]