Be Unreasonable - Aydin Mirzaee’s Take on the World.

I Received this letter from the University of Ottawa with regards to “Project Hero.” Project Hero will wave tuition fees and 1st year dorm costs for children whose parents were killed while serving for the Canadian Military. I’m impressed with the initiative. Here is the letter:

Despite an overcast sky, summer is here and that means summer vacation. I will take a break and resume my snap-shot emails in mid-August. However, I wanted to take this opportunity to wish you a wonderful summer. Thank you to all for your excellent work and for your tireless efforts that contribute each day to the success of our university.

Some of you may have read a story in the newspaper this morning about the University of Ottawa being the very first university to participate in Project Hero. The idea behind this initiative, spearheaded by alumnus Kevin Reed, is for Canadian universities to offer free tuition for children of Canadian military parents killed in action. The University will also waive on-campus residence fees for the first year of undergraduate studies. I’m proud to say that everyone at the University of Ottawa embraced the idea with enthusiasm. The tuition waiver will begin in September 2009.

It’s the least we can do to ease some of the worries that may plague those who put their lives at risk for our country every day. For more information, I invite you to read the news release.

Have a great summer and happy Canada Day!

Allan Rock

President and Vice-Chancellor

Today we heard of the news that pop icon Michael Jackson died of Cardiac Arrest. The news was shocking since he was only 50 years of age at the time of his passing. He was definitely one of the most famous people alive during his time and it goes to show that you never know what’s coming, even if you are an icon with millions of fans out there. Hearing stories like this really gets you thinking about life and your loved ones. Amelia Burr once said “Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.” With that said, it’s important that we all do what we love and enjoy it to the fullest while we can.

I could’ve sworn that I had always been able to view DOCX and DOC files as HTML files in Gmail… Here is an article from LifeHacker that talks about the feature being there: http://lifehacker.com/5078197/convert-office-2007-docx-files-in-gmail-google

Over the past few days, I’ve been getting a gmail error that says: “The attachment cannot be viewed as HTML. Download the attachment to view it in its original format.” Weird. Admittedly, I haven’t tried this on any browser other than Chrome…

Anyone else experiencing this?

Aydin.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) was developed by the United States Department of Defence and is now managed by the US Air Force and is readily available for anyone to use free of charge. Yes, free of charge. As a matter of fact, just about anyone could buy a GPS receiver and build a primitive navigation system to tell them where they are in the world (especially with cool services such as Google Maps that have an API). Did you know, for example, that when you buy a handheld GPS navigation system that you don’t have to pay a monthly/yearly fee to continue to make use of the Global Positioning System that the US Air Force so kindly maintains? Interesting indeed.

I have a Blackberry Curve from Telus that conveniently comes with a GPS chip that can be enabled with extra software. In other words, there is a lock of sorts on the use of GPS until you get Telus to unlock the service for you (based on my understanding). Somewhat dissapointing since the last Blackberry device that I owned did not have such a lock (the World Edition). After doing a quick search on the topic, it seems that people have discovered some ways around this unfair lock [keeping in mind that iPhones come with GPS  navigation out of the box]:  http://supportforums.blackberry.com/rim/board/message?board.id=8300&message.id=2119

Assuming you’ve been to this site before, you’ll notice a re-design. I just moved this blog from Wordpress.com servers onto a private host (namely Dreamhost.com). Moving onto a private host allows me to have full control over what is displayed on the blog and it’s look and feel (somewhat limited when you use Wordpress.com). With the new design, I’m hoping to give this blog a bit more focus and attempt to write mainly about a few key areas:

1) Internet & Technology
2) Business & Enterpreneurship
3) Consumer Reviews
4) Some miscellanious items…

You can consider this somewhat of a restart for my blogging efforts

Aydin.

As you all know, at Chide.it we’ve been working on FluidSurveys.com (online survey software) for a while. It’s been quite successful in that we’ve gotten a fairly large user base of people who use the software frequently and have provided us with great feedback.

Sometime last year, a good friend suggested that we roll out an enterprise version of the software that is more robust, secure, and feature rich. We decided to give this a shot. As we were developing the software, a number of government departments heard about this enterprise class survey software being developed locally in Ottawa, Canada and they gave us the challenge of making sure that it is CLF2.0 compliant. We knew it wouldn’t be easy, but we took on the challenge and we’re now proud to announce that the enterprise edition of FluidSurveys is now CLF2.0 Compliant. This is a big milestone for us and I’m very proud of our team for making this a possibility.

We’re now happy to say that the enterprise software is being adopted rapidly accross federal and provincial governments, colleges, universities, and market research companies. It’s great news and I thought I’d share it with all readers of this blog
If you’d like a demo of CLF2.0 Compliant surveys, please check out this page on the Chide.it website.

Geni.com does a good job of allowing you to very easily create a family tree. It’s nice because you start adding members of your family and if you add their email addresses, they will be notified. Once they are notified, they can log in and make changes to the family tree and add more details. Of course, the number 1 concern here is privacy. The good news is that Geni has lots of privacy settings.

As far as I know, the company has raised more than $10 million dollars in VC money. I know that they make some money off of selling premium accounts but I’m not sure if that business model will be enough to make them nicely profitable… maybe I’m missing something…

All in all, great website. Try it out!

Aydin.

This week, SuitUpp is back to Sean John. I can’t help but look at this and think that this is something that a mobster would wear… but, that’s just me.

I bumped into Natasha D’Souza the other day and she told me about her new Social Media Company. Natasha’s a social media wiz and if you’re looking to make your presence known on the internet, you should absolutely consult with her. You can check out VirtualEyeSee (the company) here: http://www.virtualeyesee.com.

A bit late in writing this… but, might as well put it up. I made sure to set 3 different goals for this year (each with measurable benchmarks). The goals are all-encompassing enough that I can relate almost any activity that I partake in daily to one of them.

The idea is that whenever I look at the time (watch, clock, cellphone, tv, computer), I’ll have to remember to ask myself “is what I’m doing right now the most efficient way of spending my time in accomplishing one of those 3 different goals”. Answering this question over and over again daily should “theoretically” help me keep the resolutions. Let’s see how it plays out.
Aydin.