I am Paul Singh

My friend Raj told me that he was going to attend an unveiling at the National Gurdwara this past Monday that was going to help DHS recognize Kirpans more easily.

Looks like The Washington Post picked up the story too.

The centuries-old requirement has collided with beefed-up, post-Sept. 11 rules that no longer allow people to leave legal weapons and other banned items with security guards working in such buildings as courthouses and federal offices. In two dozen cases in the past two years, Sikhs have been arrested, threatened with arrest or harassed in disputes with guards over the ceremonial kirpan, according to the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

In an effort to bridge the culture-security gap, the Homeland Security Department and the Sikh legal group yesterday unveiled a poster meant to help screeners through these interactions. The poster, which will be distributed to federal facilities across the country, shows photos of different kirpans, ranging from a symbolic necklace some women wear to the more common three- to six-inch daggers, as well as full-on swords. Sikhs often wear them under their clothing, bound to them by a cloth body holster.

Full Article: A Pointed Reminder for Security Screeners - washingtonpost.com

Technorati Tags: kirpan, sikh, SALDEF, National Gurdwara

Everyone knows that a ton of kids are born these days to unwed mothers, but I never knew it wold be 4 out of 10!

The increase in births to unwed mothers was seen in all racial groups, but rose most sharply among Hispanics. It was up among all age groups except youngsters ages 10 to 17.

Here’s an interesting note:

“A lot of people think of teenagers and unmarried mothers synonymously, but they are not driving this,” said Stephanie Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics, a co-author of the report.

Full Article: 4 in 10 U.S. children born in 2005 were out of wedlock - CNN.com

Wow. I guess Europe was the only logical place that someone would try to implement something like this.

“The Cabinet finds it undesirable that face-covering clothing — including the burqa — is worn in public places for reasons of public order, security and protection of citizens,” Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk said.

Basing the order on security concerns apparently was intended to respond to warnings that outlawing clothing like the all-enveloping burqa, worn by some Muslim women, could violate the constitutional guarantee against religious discrimination.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. Although, I don’t suppose anyone would ever say “let’s ban turbans because you could have a bomb in there” but you never know these days. Full Article: MSNBC: Dutch government seeks to ban full-length veils

Technorati Tags: Netherlands, burqa, turban, ban

Yeah, I’m a little late blogging about this but dammit if I don’t get pissed off just watching this video. I really, really hope the officers involved in this go to jail. It’s a long cell phone video that is mostly audio, but I encourage you all to really watch it and make your own judgements on this one.

Youtube: UCLA Student gets Tazered

Update: Looks like the student was Iranian-American. Don’t forget to carry your “papers” when you go to the library these days.

Update 2: Looks like MSNBC finally picked up on this with this article and it appears that the student is going to sue. The article also includes brief excerpts from both sides of the story and (I’m no lawyer) I’m guessing this is going to drag out for quite a while.

Technorati Tags: ucla, tazer, library, video, student

As a self-professed photo geek, I refuse to use camera phones even though I carry two around all day, every day. (No, I’m not that popular!)

Digital Photography School’s Blog has an article explaining some recommended “best practices” when shooting with your camera phone. Some favorites:

Get Close - One of the most common mistakes with camera phone images is that their subject ends up being a tiny, unrecognizable object in the distance. Camera phone images tend to be smallish due to low resolution - so fill up your view finder with your subject to save having to zoom in on the subject in editing it later (which decreases quality even more). Having said this, getting too close on some model camera phones creates distorition of either fisheye effect or lack of focus due to poor macro ability.

Avoid Using the Digital Zoom - As tempting as it might be to zoom in on your subject when taking your picture (if you have a zoom feature on your camera phone), it actually will decrease the quality of your shot to use your digital zoom. Plus you can always edit your shot later using photo editing software on your computer. Some camera phones are beginning to hit the market with ‘optical zooms’ - these are fine to use as they don’t enlarge your subject by enlarging pixels.

Full Article: 13 Tips for Improving Camera Phone Photos

It seems that everyone has a different opinion of where the housing market is really going these days. Home buyers (like the wifey and I) are waiting to see how deep the rabbit hole really is and home sellers seem to be disillusioned with the astronomical prices they want for their homes.

Realtors are a professionally upbeat group, and their trade association is sometimes criticized for parsing data to present a too-positive spin.

Anyways, it’s nice to see that a major real estate organization is finally “admitting” what the rest of us knew all along.

As the National Association of Realtors opened this fall’s gathering in New Orleans last weekend, the mood was decidedly different. The much-celebrated real estate boom has officially ended; nationally, economists now say, the housing market peaked in August 2005. For 2006, the industry expects existing-home sales to fall by 9 percent, and new-home sales to decline 17 percent. In some markets, prices have begun to fall, too.

Usually, I hate listening to the fluff that these chief economists throw out, but this seems interesting:

“The biggest question I’m faced with is how far do prices have to drop and how long will it take for the correction to finally turn around in [those] markets. I don’t have an answer,” Lereah says, conceding that those markets could stay soft into 2008. But he counters that falling prices, while unpleasant for homeowners, are really a good thing, because lower prices will spur more buyers to make offers, and the resulting sales will help not only commission-hungry agents, but also the furniture makers, appliance companies and other ancillaries that make housing such a vital prop to the economy. And while he calls predictions that home prices might fall 30 or 40 percent “nonsensical,” he can’t offer a number of his own.

And now the really interesting part:

But among leading brokers, there’s much anxiety over the fact that the real estate industry has been less innovative at exploiting the power of the Internet.

With the current generation of computer geeks growing up and entering the housing markets, real estate agents are really going to need to focus their efforts on finding more interesting ways to engage their target customers. Furthermore, as real estate agents get even more desperate to find customers, they’re going to want solutions that help them gain even more leads.

Sounds like it’s really only a matter of time until products such as Cellulist become the norm within the real estate industry.

Full Article:Housing: What the Realtors Are Saying - MSNBC.com

With my own yearly performance review just around the corner, there’s some good stuff in this article. Some of my favorites so far:

Use numbers. Tell them you fixed 30 defects. Say that you saved the company approximately $30,000 dollars. Using numbers will give them the impression that you pay attention to detail. Plus, it will make it easier for your manager to double-check your facts. Managers like it when you make things easier for them.

Increase your effort 2 months before your review. Managers have short term memory. They’re hardly going to remember last January when you saved the company from a forest fire. During this time period, take on an extra project to show your company some love. Give your manager extra status reports. They love constant communication.

Full Article: How To Ace A Performance Review » Binary Dollar

Sukhi’s parents got a copy of Dil Apna Punjabi the other day so we decided to check it out. Sukhi thinks it wasn’t all that great (read: she thought it sucked) and I loved it. I’ll spare you the details since we all know what the core of every Indian movie is — boy and girl like each other, parents say no, blah blah, dance dance, and before you know it, everyone’s married.

Sure — it had all the cheesy dances, someone crying every few minutes and the oh-so-unexpected love triangle but I loved the movie. It’s nice to see some movies in punjabi finally coming out since I could never understand what all those hindi-speaking folks were saying half of the time.

Anyways, go grab the movie from the local Indian store and check it out.

I’ve finished up some more Wordpress updates I needed to do and cleaned up some old plugins that were lying around. Lesson learned — don’t pull a Paul and wait around for a year to apply all the updates.

Married life is great. Work is going well. My own business, UpSolv, is doing well. I’m trying to get back into photography again — picked up a Canon 30D for you camera buffs.

Stay tuned.