I played this today in my Cairo Hotel room, complete with the usual background noise. The guitar is a Suzuki SST-CS20 Strat clone I found here a couple of days ago. I got a practice amp the same day but haven't been using it. What you hear is just the vibrating strings without even a vibrating cavity to project sound. Words and music by Arash Sobhani, performed by Kiosk. This is the title song from their 2005 CD.
Connie Bobroff, a graduate student in Persian studies at the University of Texas at Austin who puts Persian language educational materials on the Internet, gave me some pointers how to get started making my computers display Persian and Arabic characters. The key is the Unicode character set UTF-8. This is a very elementary fact taken for granted in the Middle East, where Persian and Arabic are in daily use on millions of computers. For me though, it was new ground that I have not yet fully covered. For this blog, which is hosted on my Free-BSD server, I had a directive put in my Apache software that makes UTF-8 the default character set, and I also told the Google Blogger software to use UTF-8. The result is that I am now able to say:
!این یک جمله به زبان فارسی است و چهقدر قشنگ است
There is a small victory there (the ability to use characters that are definitely too small), but I still have more work to do. To make web pages that display Persian and Arabic characters, I need to change editors because the one I'm now using, SecureCRT, does not know how to display these little squiggles so I can see what I'm doing, and can't be made to know how because it isn't designed to load those fonts. Since the Google Blog editor does know how to do that, I'm exploring other web-based editors that are not tied to blogging. I probably won't abandon SecureCRT because I'm too attached to the emacs editor with its wonderful keyboard macros. If I find a web-based editor that supports emacs, that will be a different story!
Another problem is that my email server, which uses SquirrelMail as its client, is also unable to display these letters. I'm working on that. Somewhere buried in my mail toaster code there is probably an option for setting UTF-8 as the default character set.
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A friend recently said he thought email is by nature a hit-and-run quickie form of communication. I objected to this because I'm used to sending long email messages that sometimes take more than a day to prepare and include attachments and pasted components that have to be assembled and organized.
Something that does fit my friend's description is text messaging (SMS) on a mobile telephone. I've never sent a text message on a mobile telephone. I have received them, but they were advertisements from my mobile telephone provider and I didn't pay much attention to them. However, mobile phone text messages are short by definition and design and have to be written quickly on a tiny headset keyboard.
I've been reading about how popular SMS messages have become in many parts of the world. People vote with them in New Zealand, and they register to vote with them in Hungary and England. In Iran, this kind of communication is just about the only public media that is not open to government scrutiny (the identity of the sender is anonymous) and people love it. The article I read said in Iran the language of SMS is the language of sarcasm, used by people (most of the people there) who take a dim view of the government. The article said SMS is more popular than email in lots of places, and that an SMS can be sent as email. I'm not a networked or connected person, but I do like to use email. SMS is something I want to learn about. This makes me feel old and out of touch, which in fact I am.
I suppose the fact that I don't feel old and out of touch most of the time is probably good for my state of adjustment to my circumstances. It is a delusional state of mind that helps me cope.
When I am in Egypt next week I will probably buy a mobile phone that displays Arabic characters and can accept a GSM SIM. Then I can send SMS Arabic text messages and email messages for display on a computers that can display the UTF-8 character set! This will improve my ability to communicate with my friends in Egypt while I'm in the USA. Then again, maybe not. I just read about a new version of SMS that enables a voice recording to be sent to a mobile phone. Vodafone in Egypt provides that service. If I can find a way to send voice message to mobile phones in Egypt from my desktop computer, I'll do that.
