Keyvan Nayyeri

[Update: As predicted I'm still at home until Thursday morning but want to rest enough to get ready for training.  Training camp is in a small city near Tehran and is 110 miles far from here.]

Yes, time goes faster than what we think!  A few hours after this post my service officially starts and I must leave home tomorrow.  I can't lie and say I have a good feeling, no, not at all!  But I have no other choice.  I know that military service in some countries (like Israel) is harder than what we have here but there are many differences.  Here we don't serve for military purposes and this service is just something to waste 20 months of best times of our life and learn how to adapt ourselves with what this government wants!  Let me write about this stuff after finishing my service!

Though I'm going to be off for two months and pass training in a camp.  Tomorrow they will let me know where that camp is.  But good news is hopefully I will pass two months of training (not four).  What I write below is just something based on others experiments who have served in latest years, but you know nothing is 100% in armies.

Probably tomorrow they will give us an address and a time and then we can get back to home for some hours or one day then should go to that address on that time to move to camp.  After that probably they'll give our clothes and gadgets and let us to come back to home and get ready for actual service and again probably our training starts from Saturday.  We must serve for two months but there are some holidays.  Usually they release us at our weekends for 1-1.5 days (Thursday and Friday) and I can come back to my geek life for some hours!  The good news is our new year eve and other holidays are coming during next month and this is a good chance for us to be at home.  So you see I won't be off all the times!

There are some points to write about what's going on during my training around here and my community activities:

• As I said before, during the last week I wrote some blog posts to leave them for publication.  I just wrote them to spend my time but after a few days I got busy and couldn't write many posts but I think they can feed my site for a while.  However, I need a break from technical blogging and don't want to care about this thing after 20 months.  I may write more posts on holidays.  For Community Server folks: there are some CS Dev Guide posts that will be published every week.
• Comments will be moderated on Nayyeri.NET so wait for a while to see them published.
• So far I've written some parts of my articles for Microsoft "The Panel" program and UniveRSS showcase and a new article is almost ready.  Initial plan was (and is) to publish these articles with version 1.0 (current version is 0.6) so I think some of my articles will be published when I'm off.  I'll send announcements here but for faster notifications you can subscribe to Microsoft MSDN Flash Newsletter.  I also heard that there will be a video interview about this showcase on Channel 9 very soon.
• Our book, Wrox Professional Community Server, will be ready next month.  I hope I can be at home to get my copies but you know, I'm Lucky Keyvan so I'll be the last guy!
• Hopefully you'll see more Beta and RC versions of Community Server 2007.  In order to let users migrate to/from Community Server blogs, I'll release an updated version of my BlogML converter very soon.

I can't remember any other item to write.  After my training hopefully I'll stay here (Tehran) and will have time to spend on my interests because they won't get my time for more than 8-9 hours per day (or at least I hope they don't do that!).  I have some initial plans for those 18 months but first I have to see what will happen.

Thankfully I don't worry about the speed of community and new technologies.  I've done my job with .NET 3.0 and 3.5.  So it's time to rest for a while

At the end I should send my thanksgivings to my friends Mehrdad, Hamed, Kouroush, Dave, Jayson, Rick and of course, Captain Steven Smith (and all other friends that I can't remember them because I have a weak memory!) for sharing their thoughts, advices and experiments with me.  I really appreciate that.

You can follow my army blog for more details about my service.  I hope peace for our world.  Hey, speaking of peace, I shaved my head this Saturday!  What was the relation between peace and my hairs?!  I don't know myself!!

Stay tuned, I'll be back very soon!