Jun 29

I sure picked a good time to be in Turkey. For starters, they really don’t like us Americans here:

Turkey ‘most anti-US country’ in world, poll says

and it’s really hot! I haven’t been able to sleep well all week. Fortuneately I am getting air conditioning in my room in the next few days. I actually slept on my porch on the hottest day this week, but that didn’t help too much. Despite being on the sea, there was wind at all!

Officials said temperatures in the largest city Istanbul hit a seasonal record of 43.1 degrees Celsius in the district of Sile, the highest figure since weather services began keeping records in 1929.

and:

…temperatures expected to reach as high as 50 degrees today in places such as Antalya on the southern coast…?zmir’s ancient city of Ephesus was reported to be 60 degrees Celsius on Monday…

Lastly, gas is incredibly expensive here. Yesterday, to put gas in the car, I paid 3 ytl/lt. What is that in dollars/gallon?

3 ytl/lt * 3.785 lt/gal * 1 USD/1.31 ytl = 8.67 $/gallon.

Yes, incase you have trouble reading the above equation that is $8.67 for one gallon of gasoline.

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Jun 29

So, as I said before, I put a small blog traffic tracking program on my blog to see who views my website and stuff like that. So here is a quick rundown of the infromation that was collected:

In the past week I had 102 visitors and 800 hits (I think this means that each person on average accessed 8 pages). This includes automated programs that crawl the internet checking out websites. Googlebot for example periodically crawls my website and reports back errors it finds to me through my google account.

I had visits from the following countries (with the percentage of total traffic they account for):

United States 61.97
Turkey 13.97
Great Britain 5.99
China 3.24
Canada 0.87
Slovenia 0.5
Norway 0.37
Australia 0.37
Croatia 0.37
France 0.25
Germany 0.25
Japan 0.25
Russian Federation 0.12
Italy 0.12
Spain 0.12

About 30% of visitors were using some release of firefox, and about 35% were using some release of microsoft internet explorer.

The overwhelming majority were using Windows.

Since my blog is hosted on a server in the UK, if you use google’s uk site - google.co.uk and search “pictures of buyukcekmece” my blog comes up.

Only 13 of my visitors accessed my blog through other websites. This means that most people are going directly to my blog (I need to get links to my blog out there on more websites :-)

And lastly, the most interesting statistic I think, is the top three IP addresses that access my blog. The third place, 5.11% of my blog traffic is the googlebot. Second place, with 5.48% is an IP address from Great Britain (Izzy maybe), and first place, with 22.07% of my traffic, is Globecomm Systems Incorporated! (my family’s company). So here is a special thanks to Mom, Dad, Graham and Cathy.

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Jun 28

You would think in a hot country, shorts would be very popular. Sadly this is not the case, here and in many countries around the world, men wear pants, no matter how hot is. I asked Izzy why and he gave me this explanation, which I have read online, and is true of many countries.

When kids are growing up they are given shorts so that their parents do not have to continually buy them new pants as they get bigger. When they come of age, and become men, they are given pants. Thus it has become a sign of manhood to wear the pants. According to a bit of research I did, this was also the case in the United States until some 50 years ago or so. On a flight I took recently, I read an article talking about how the British military was one of the first to issue shorts. This was for troops stationed in India who were cutting off the legs of their pants to get some relief from the heat.

In conclusion, if you come to visit me, I don’t care how hot it is, you are going to wear pants.

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Jun 27

Current Mood:Angry emoticon Angry & Sad emoticon Sad & Sickly emoticon Sickly

Yesterday Murat and I took our first day of windsurfing classes. It was hot and sunny, with not too much wind. These are arguably excellent conditions for learning to windsurf. We left work at around 1700, and after a quick stop at home we arrived at the club at 1730 to begin our first of a series of ten windsurfing lessons. I am not to enthusiastic about windsurfing. I prefer sports that are intense and exhausting. Things like rock climbing, skiing, soccer, tennis or racket ball. Windsurfing always looked to passive and slow. Sure as you get good, it can be very intense on a windy day, but it always seemed like it was too much effort to get that good since so much balance is needed. But, I decided to try it anyway. I live in Buyukcekmece which has very little to do. One of the few things to do is the windsurfing club, which happens to be Istanbul’s only windsurfing club. So for 300 ytl, I get 10 one-hour lessons, then I will decide how much I like it.

We began by learning about the theory of wind and how sails work. This was review for me because of my sailing experience. Then we hopped on the simulator to run through some scenarios. Here is a picture of us with our instructor.

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Next we took to the water. Let me just say now, the water is absolutely disgusting in the bay. There is so much trash. People here just throw trash on the ground or in the sea, so the shore lines that are not regulalry cleaned are attrocious. If I decide not to windsurf anymore after my ten lessons, the cleanliness of the water will be one of the factors leading to that decision. I proposed that the club organize a monthly cleanup with as many of it’s members as will volunteer. A group of 20 people could make the beach spotless in under an hour.

I started off no problem. I stood up and went and was able to turn and control my direction and everything. Murat was a shaky mess. I guess he doesn’t have the balance that I do because he was shaking a lot, and he fell a few times. This picture represents a common site from the shore during yesterday’s lesson:

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And here is Murat struggling to keep his balance

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Here is me being amazing and posing for the camera while still windsurfing.

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And yet another great pose.

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At the end of the lesson, they had Murat do some balance exercises. Which was funny to watch, but I didn’t take any pictures because I was hungry and lazy.

As we were leaving, things took a turn for the worst. First of all, this is our sweet ride. When I go into the city I am usually driving this car because it has insurance and the mercedes doesn’t. It is definitely a fun car to drive, although, not my favorite car that the company has.

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When we went to the car to leave, we noticed this!

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Somebody had smashed our window while we were not more than 100 meters from the car. Yet somehow we didn’t see anybody! So we called the police. They came and began dusting the car for finger prints which I thought was hilarious. The police in Turkey so far have shown themselves to be completely useless. They have harassed me and my friends now three times for bribes, and they do little to control the awful drivers that plague this city. Murat is of the opinion that Istanbul has the worst drivers in the world, I would say second to Cairo, but I haven’t been to enough places to say that with any certainty. As they were dusting the car for finger prints, they stopped and asked each other why they were doing that (the same questions I had as soon as I saw the duster). Instead we simply went to the police station and filled a report.

Now quite late, we went to the company’s usual dinner place, Iskele. One of the main guys in the windsurfing club owns Iskele so he drove us there. Knowing I don’t eat fish, we stopped on the way to buy some meat and we all had a nice meal together. The food was good but the meal was very long and boring. Everyone was speaking Turkish, as usual. I don’t think I will be going out with that group again. I must have sat there for an hour not hearing a word of English. Anyway, here’s the picture from dinner:

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On a side note, it has been very hot lately and I haven’t been able to sleep too well. I wake up every morning dehydrated with a headache, dripping with sweat. It sucks. I was going to go buy a fan yesterday, but the car broke. Hopefully we will get AC sometime this week.

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Jun 26

Here are two videos I took over the weekend. One is all the Turks partying on the bus, the other is of me vaulting over the railing and plunging headfirst from the top of the boat into the water. It was a lot of fun.

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Partying on the Bus to Cesme.MOV

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Jun 26

Current Mood:Esctatic emoticon Esctatic

On a whim I decided to go to Izmir this weekend. I am not sure why, but I didn’t feel too much like sticking around Istanbul, so I bought an extremely over priced plane ticket and took the 55 minute flight to Izmir, in the south of Turkey. For the purposes of this entry, you can reference the map below which contains the places I went to.

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Before going, I called our partners in Izmir, Arcom, to see if they were available for the weekend. If you remember from the Hannover Messe, there were the three guys not from my company there with us: Ismael, Sakir and Ahmet (Ahmet is the boss). I called Sakir (Ismael doesn’t speak english and Ahmet’s is weak) and he said yes I should come, and that I could stay with him.

So Friday night was rather easy going. I managed to have a 45 minute conversation with Ismael while we smoked nargile in Kordon (the seaside area of Izmir). Everytime I meet Ismael I am amazed. He left school at age 10 to work on compressors, which he has been doing ever since. He now in charge of all the technical aspects (including design) of Arcom’s compressors. He also some how manages to communicate with me successfully despite knowing very little English.

Saturday, we went diving! I apparently picked the weekend of the company dive trip. Since Arcom makes high pressure compressors (a lot of breathing air appliacations), they have a lot of dive schools as customers. So we visited one such dive school. The whole company, except for two guys who had to be on call, piled on to a bus in what had to be 90-95 degree wheather, and drove one hour to Cesme. Because it was so hot, they kept both sets of doors open the entire way :smile: Here is a picture of me on the boat. I love Turkey!

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And here is a picture of the Arcom compressor that they sold to the dive club:

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Diving was really great. Being on a boat was great. Relaxing and doing nothing was great. That evening Sakir and I tried to go out but we were so beat from the sun that we went to sleep early.

The next day we went to Efes (Ephesus in Greek). Efes was amazing! Just to give you some random information about Efes, it was the site of the temple of artemis, one of the seven ancient wonders of the world. John the apostle moved there after Jesus’ death. The Virgin Mary also came with him as she was entrusted to his care upon Jesus’ death. What is believed to be the last place she lived before she died is very near to Efes and I also visited it. It was the second most important city in the Byzantine empire after Constantinople. After it’s harbor filled with silt from the nearby river, the city rapidly declined.

My reaction to the city was a very positive one. It was very hot so we did not spend too much time there ( we had an afternoon appointment with the beach at a luxury resort where Sakir had sold a compressor), but I was awed. Not much of the city is left, but what is left is amazing, as is the setting that the city is in. The whole atmosphere that surrounds you as you walk down the main road, flanked by 2000 year old buildings, is incredible. The rolling hills with their sparse trees and the brown vegetation, seperated by miles on all sides from any buildings, make it one of the most charming ruins I have visited. Anyone visiting Turkey really must go. Here is a picture of the ampitheatre. You can see they even managed to unearth one of the ancient cranes used to build cities back then.

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Here are two of my favorite pictures from Efes. For the first, just read the caption on the toilet sign. I didn’t go in, but I can only imagine what it must have been like in there.

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And this picture… let me just give you the defintion of genuine:

genuine
adjective
1. not fake or counterfeit; “a genuine Picasso”; “genuine leather” [ant: counterfeit]
   
   

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University

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The best is when they follow you yelling, “my friend, my brother, come, genuine fake watches”

After the historical stuff we went and relaxed on the beach. Did some snorkeling, some swimming. It was too hot to really do anything. Towards the end of the day we went into Kusadasi, a nearby city. This city was incredible. It is built on the steep hills surrounding a small harbor. It was very nice, but a bit touristy. Fun all the same. After that, Sakir dropped me at the airport. Sakir was an excellent host and I look forward to visiting Izmir several more times over the next year. Oh, here is a picture of Kusadasi:

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Lastly, here is a link to the rest of the photos from the weekend:

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Jun 22

Current Mood:Playful emoticon Playful

So, once again, i am going to cop out of writing anything of real interest to you, and instead tell you about the new software I just added to my server. It’s called slimstat and it can be downloaded and used on any blog by clicking here. Slimstat allows me to track hits on my blog. I can see when they came, how many people came, what they looked at, where they linked in from (incase they didn’t come directly), what country they came from… you get the picture. Now, I will be able to see if I am getting enough weekly traffic to make it worth my while to keep writing. As you can see from the picture below, I already got one hit since I installed it from my friend Jerome in China. Thanks for visiting my blog Jerome. He visited the site once, and accessed 21 different files/pages. He was using windows vista with microsoft internet explorer 7.0. Isn’t that cool? So I better see lots of hits in the next week from Turkey and the US!

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By the way, this weekend I am flying to Izmir to go scuba diving. If you go to weather.com and look at the weather forecast this weekend for Izmir, you will see that it is 100 F every day or hotter. Should be a good weekend to dive.

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Jun 16

Current Mood:Bored emoticon Bored

This is the post that many of you have been waiting for. I hope you all appreciate how much time it took me to do this entry. I admit, the photomerges are not very well done, but there were a lot of them and I had to resize everything! In other words, it took a lot of time. Anyway, here it is, enjoy!map.jpg

Let’s start with a simple map. Here you can see the basic layout of our apartment. I drew this quickly in photoshop so the scales aren’t exactly right. The bathroom across from my room has as a jacuzzi tub that we have never used. In the living room is the weight set. The 3rd bedroom is where Baris used to stay and is now empty (anyone want to visit?). Let’s start the tour with that room.

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All three bedrooms face east, so we all get woken up in the morning by the sunrise. It’s actually quite nice. If I am in the apartment on Saturday mornings, I open the curtains and lay on my bed in the sun.

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As you can see, we are now using Baris’ room for our laundry. You’ll have to excuse the bad photomerge. I did not feel like putting in any effort into making them good photomerges. It would have taken way too long considering how many I did.

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This is Murat’s room. Murat’s is the biggest, then mine, then Baris’, but they are all pretty much the same size. The door at the back there leads to the bathroom. The door on the left to the hallway.

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Not that much different than Baris’ room.

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My room is the only room with any character to it. It has a nice big flag to add some color, my bed has the quilt my mother made for me when I graduated high school, and there is usually crap all over the floor. The cleaning lady had just come the day before so my room is uncharacteristicly clean in this picture. She comes and cleans the apartment, washes the dishes, and does our laundry. Murat and have ahd our clothes mixed up pretty much every week and have been thinking about how to remedy this problem without having to do the laundry ourselves.

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My closet, or at least half of it. You can see it’s full of lots of good stuff! The shirt on the right isn’t blocking anything secret, so don’t worry. Just some wine and scotch bottles.

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America! Yeah!

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This is a picture taken from the entrance to Baris’ room. It’s a photomerge showing the hallway. From the right, you have the third bathroom (just a toilet and sink), the entrance to the apartment, the kitchen, and further off to the left is the living room.

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This picture is also taken from infront of Baris’ room. To the right is my room, then Murat’s room, then the second bathroom.

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…keep going down…

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…keep going down…

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Now we arrive in the living room! Wooo. This is where Murat sleeps most of the time. On the table there you can see a game of Axis and Allies. There is also the weight set, which only I use for the most part. I think Baris and Murat have used it three times each. This room is very well lit and is in general a very comfortable and soothing room to be in.

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Of course, here we have our kitchen. It is extremely understocked! We have one proper knife, one frying pan, two pots… you get the picture. I live a very hard and difficult life, don’t I? In general, we never use this room.

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The view from our porch. There are always lots of kids playing here. It’s difficult to grow grass in Turkey (at least that’s what I am told), so there isn’t a whole lot. It’s always dusty in Istanbul, the kids playground is no exception.

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And the view from the east face of the apartment (my room). There is a nice bay there which is supposed to be the second best place in Turkey to windsurf (the best place in Turkey is one of the top 5 places in the world). Murat is going to join the windsurfing club there and I may as well. The sport doesn’t seem intense enough to satisfy me so I am hesitant to make the investment.

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That’s my ride yo. Pretty pimp isn’t it?

Here’s a bunch of pictures of the flower boxes I have set up. I only have four or five boxes and two small plants. Every pay check I spend a bit of money on new plant stuff, so next week I will be adding some new plants.

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The flowers are doing really well, but some other plant got in the other box that started to take over. Because I didn’t remember what I planted there, it took me a while to realize it was a weed. But now everything is ok, I think.

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Snap dragons. They do well in the climate.

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So I bought some peas, put them in the firdge and forgot about them. They started growing in there so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to plant them. They grew really fast.

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Some random red flowers I planted from seeds. They also grew fairly quickly.

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Basil, slow to start, but it came in quite nicely.

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The one on the left is my favorite plant. The one on the right is really lame and I don’t like it. The one on the left though is great. I have on in my office also.

And that’s it. I hope you enjoyed these pictures and my little virtual tour of my apartment.

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Jun 15

Yes it’s true! Roberto Carlos (if you don’t know who that is look him up on wikipedia) is going to start playing for Fenerbache, a soccer club here in Istanbul, next year. Fenerbache recently won the Turkish championships on their 100 year anniversary. They closed the season by announcing the deal. Check out the CNN article:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SPORT/football/06/06/turkey.carlos.reut/index.html

I know I am looking forward to the next besiktas v fenerbache game. An interesting little fact: Besiktas and Galtasaray are the only two clubs in Turkey on the European side. That means that most of their games are transcontinental games and are the only regular season transcontinental
games in the world.

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Jun 14

I had some free time so I made an album with pictures of some of the places I have been and some of the places I have gone before 2007. Enjoy:

AdventuresBefore2007 

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