In case some of you didn’t realize, my comments on my blog are made using the alias skyblueshu. I have fixed that so now it will show my name as Conrad on all future posts and comments. However, old comments I have not yet figured out how to Change.
- Conrad
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Current Mood:
Happy
Well a lot has happened since I last wrote a real post way back on… December 12th! It was a real pain in the butt trying to get my domains transfered and set up my new host for my website, but it’s all finally done thanks to the help of Ant and Ali Emre.
So what has happened. I guess most of you know about the primaries in the US, which has been the news item winning most of my attention. I guess that’s not interesting for my American readers (everyone else go to cnn.com, they have good coverage).
Izzy and I went to Morocco for one week. It was an organized all expense paid tour. This was the first time I have done something like that and probably the last. I prefer to travel on my own schedule and to just wander around. Although it was a fun trip, I don’t think I will do it again. I covered four cities in seven days. On the way over I hadn’t quite gotten over a nasal infection. I couldn’t equalize the pressure when we went up and I nearly fainted from the pain. I spent the last two days of the trip praying to the porcelain gods. Anyway here are the pictures. Sorry I don’t have any of when they threw a monkey on Izzy’s head out of no where on the street. That was probably the highlight of the trip.
My brother came to visit me right after Christmas up through New Years. We went around Istanbul, partied with my friends, did some shopping… it was a nice visit. I think he had fun except for a little problem with food or water, everything went well. Another friend of mine, James (aka Spags) was here as well. Graham, Spags and myself went to Kapadokya, ‘the land of well bred horses.’ Kapadokya is one of the most interesting places in Turkey according to my friends. It is full of bizarre land formations and underground cities that have been used by countless cultures for thousands of years. Because of it’s relative isolation on the high plateau of central Turkey, it was never a important strategic point to control so it was more or less ignored by conquering armies. I will let you look at the pictures for yourself. (oh I had a sweet new year’s eve party at my apartment. Those pictures are also there)
Other than that I haven’t done too much. I went to Slovakia for an exhibition for work, but I haven’t posted any pictures. I finally got new climbing shoes. About one week afterwards Izzy hurt his shoulder so we can’t climb until it heals.
My gaming group has really taken off. We created “Istanbul Boardgame Enthusiasts” group on facebook and Izzy and I have been very aggressively trying to recruit new gamers. It has definitely paid off. The only problem we have had is about finding a place to play. Over the summer Wonderland started turning off the AC to get us to leave earlier. Then we moved to the Wrap which said they are now closing at 10:30 instead of 11:30. They had spent the weeks prior trying to kick us at at 11:00. Now we are playing at a bagel cafe called Tribeca. It’s definitely not the best place for us since we are so loud. When we are not there it is a very quiet upscale cafe. When we get there it gets a little wild, especially with the recent surge in people. I have a feeling we are going to be hassled there until we leave also. Here are a few pictures from our recent meetings:
Me explaining ‘Ticket to Ride’ to a captive audience.
In the back left of this picture is Ali Emre and myself. We are actually trying to get my webspace setup to transfer my blog in this picture.
This composite is courtesy of Rana. This was the final showdown in bang between Izzy the sheriff, and Turan the renegade. Izzy won.
On the political front, Serbs attacked the Turkish Embassy in Belgrade when Turkey backed Kosovo. Turkey invaded Northern Iraq to hopefully catch PKK terrorists. If you aren’t sure what the PKK is, I wrote about them in two previous blog entries: Turmoil in Turkey: Part I, Turmoil in Turkey: Part II. Turkey lifted the ban on women’s head scarves in all schools and other government institutions (this is a much bigger deal here than you think, but that’s for a later entry). Of course, that is only the last weeks worth of news in Turkey! To go with all three of those big events, there has been lots of protesting, especially in the east of Turkey where there has been daily rioting, vandalism and clashes with police. On the bright side of things after last weeks blizzard which dumped nearly 10 inches of snow in some places, the weather is warming up! Here’s a picture from trying to drive in the first, and the smaller of the two snow storms.
Alright, that’s all I have for now. Take care of everyone and keep reading. Thanks mom and Chris for bugging me about getting back to blogging.
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I am back! Thanks to Ant and Ali Emre for helping me with everything. There are still some kinks to be worked out but the transfer is finished. I need to fix the pictures, and Ant has some tweaking left to do but other than that, everything is on track. I promise an entry by the end of the week.
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Since a new year is about to begin, I thought I would ask you the reader if there are any specific topics or questions you would like me to address. In the coming months, or if anyone would like to see specific things in and around Turkey.
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Hello everyone,
My life has been getting busier and busier, and I have been getting more and more tired. With a week vacation in Morocco, followed by a visit from my brother and a friend from university, coming up, there is no break in sight. I therefore regret to inform you all that I am taking a break from keeping this blog. I need more time for other parts of my life. I want to exercise more, and I need to put more time in at work as things are growing here. Although I love keeping this blog, it is somewhat time consuming (coming up with fresh content all the time is not easy nor is resizing all those pictures). I will therefore take a one month break from writing (maybe you will see a few entries, but nothing near the frequency I have had). I will probably put one entry a week between now and January 12th.
On an unrelated note, today marks my ninth month of keeping this blog (and 145 entries - that’s more than an entry every two days).
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I have recently received some criticisms related to my sweeping generalizations about Turks and their culture. I know, that’s intentional. As my reader, keep in mind that I get most of my information from observations, stories, and from my interactions with the two distinct groups of people I interact with. The first group being my friends: young university educated Turks from middle to upper class Turkish families. The second group are the people I work with. They are a mix of older Turks, most without a university education. My interactions with them are limited to Alper’s willingness to translate, and their willingness to share with both Alper and I simultaneously. So I am not claiming any authority. On any of the subjects discussed here. I do my best to cite my sources, and to include links to websites containing information I include here. My goal however is not to be objective. The purpose of this blog - An American Life in Istanbul - is to provide a view of Turkish culture skewed by a lens colored with my own personal culture. So please enjoy, please criticize, please comment and please keep on reading!
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Current Mood:
Esctatic
I would like to take this opportunity to go over two things.
1. Bragging: I started using Google Analytics to track my blogs visitors and my company website visitors (I made the website, so it’s my duty to maintain it). I figure it is never a bad idea to take a few simple steps towards tracking web traffic. It’s been just over one month since I started keeping track and so far my blog has more visitors. Way to go readers! In the past month:
| –My Blog– | –Company Website– | |
| Total Visits | 431 | 326 |
| Unique Visits | 209 | 236 |
| New Visits | 39.71% | 69.94% |
| Average Page Views per visit | 2.13 | 4.80 |
Hah! Pretty good isn’t it? If you are curious you can check out the company website. Quickly interpreting the numbers leads me to the following conclusions:
- Fewer new visits means I have more returning readers. While the company website is able to get lots of new people to the website, my readers keep coming back. This is probably because my content is changing (and it’s more interesting)
- Fewer page views per visit is a bit of a silly statistic especially if you consider that the majority of my visits are from returning readers. They are only interested in the new entries all of which show up on the main page.
Furthermore, another one of our distributors has been reading my blog! I guess I have to be extra careful now.
2. Comments: Please post your thoughts on my blog. It sometimes creates interesting debate and I like to read what people think. However keep in mind, except for swearing I am not going to try not to screen any comments. A few weeks ago someone posted a comment that they assumed I wouldn’t post. They were a surprised and embarrassed to have those words go up. So be mindful of what you post. This is after all a public forum.
3. New Theme: Anyone else feel it’s time for a new theme? I am getting tired of the MacBlog theme since it doesn’t really fit my blog. If anyone has any suggestions please post them in your comments.
Thanks,
Conrad
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It has been 6 months since I created this blog. For those of you that might be interested here is some general information about my blog so far.
Number of posts: 108
Number of comments: 91
Visits since I started using a statistics program (June 22, 2007): 950
Visits by month
- June07 : 123
- July : 390
- August : 405
- September : 223
Visits by Country
- USA : 63.88%
- Turkey : 12.31%
- Canada : 3.45%
- Netherlands : 1.23% (Baris is now studying in Holland, so I guess that’s all him)
- Great Britain : 0.74%
Number of Posts by Month (they don’t add up, I know, but I had to count manually so maybe I made an error)
- March: 9
- April: 21
- May: 20
- June: 28
- July: 20
- August: 5 (and this month had the most traffic!)
- September: 7
The largest single percentage of my traffic from one IP address is still my parent’s company with 6.86% of total traffic.
The largest percentage of my users are using Firefox on a Windows based computer.
I have started using Google Analytics as well to see how well it displays traffic information. At first glance it seems a lot better than what I am using now to track my traffic. I am also going to post my blog on some blogging sites. Ant recommended I do this to increase traffic. Ok, that’s all for this boring update.
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I decided that I do not want potential customers reading my blog. If they are searching for information on my company, they should find my blog - I am sure that is not what they are looking for anyway. Also, the fact that they can read my blog makes me a little bit more reserved. I therefore decided to go through all my old entries and remove all instances of my company’s name except for in the web address. Let me know if any of you catch anything
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Current Mood:
Angry & 
Confused
Here, to catch up read Crisis and Crisis Update
The good news is, I have my laptop back it’s working. The bad news is, it has a new hard drive in it and I am now starting the slow and painful process of going through externally saved data, and reorganizing myself. I am going to take it to a professional data recovery company when I get back to the US in August, but it doesn’t look good. The Apple service guys I took it to ran some data recovery software on it for 4 days even though the hard drive was making horrible noises. It specifically says not to do this on the website of most data recovery websites, because it may cause severe physical damage to the hard drive. So if it was recoverable before, chances are it’s less recoverable now.
To add to the general crappyness of this situation, I do not have a MacOffice CD here. I took a CD that says:
“
Microsoft Office v X for Mac
Professional Edition
(Virtual PC for Mac Version 6.1)
“
Apparently what the above CD means is that it is in fact not Microsoft Office for mac. Instead it is Virtual PC (let’s you run window’s software) for Mac, which has a Microsoft Office component. This is completely useless because Virtual PC is generally not a very good program, and it takes up a lot of system resources. Only being able to run excel through Virtual PC is useless.
However, I do need Excel and Word to do my job. I know I own a license somewhere, but the question is where the heck is it? I suppose I will start calling around to my friends until I find someone with a Mac who has MacOffice. Perhaps Istanbul’s software black market may have it as well.
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