An American Life in Istanbul

Current Mood: Alarmed & Angry & Confused & Mischievous & Sad & Sickly

So the guy I took my laptop to could not recover the data. He expected so and he told me, but I was hoping beyond all hope that this wasn’t true. There are however more advanced data recovery services that will be my follow up. There are two problems with this however:

1. It is going to take a while. A couple of weeks maybe.

2. Well just read the following from the FAQ on datarecoverygroup.com:

Data Recovery FAQ - Are there instances where lost data cannot be recovered?Yes.

There are instances where the damage to the hard drive is so severe that data recovery is not possible. This usually occurs when the read/write heads actually “crash” and gouge the magnetic storage media to the point where the data is destroyed.

However, in a number of cases data recovery was possible at the time the damage first occurred, but became non-recoverable through the use of commercial recovery software. This software is designed to recover data from working drives. If your drive has experienced a mechanical or electrical failure, the use of recovery software can cause permanent loss of your data.

I of course did not use commercial recovery software since my computer went from working to completely not working. I am afraid however that the service guys simply used commercial recovery software not aware of the fact that if the hard drive is making funny noises, there is a hardware problem which cannot be fixed with software. I am afraid what he did may have made the problem worse.

My immediate reaction of course is the flip out and tear this guy apart. He’s a professional and he’s supposed to know these things. Of course, this is Turkey, and you cannot have the same expectations as in the US. To be a consumer here you must be much more knowledgeable as it seems that a lot of the burden rests on you, not the vendor. For me, this is a hard lesson learned. If my data is permantly lost and whoever I go to next says you shouldn’t have hand it over to them, I can assure you no computer technician is ever going to touch my laptop anywhere outside the US again.

Now for my own interest I will compile a list of what I lost:

1. All pictures taken after September 2006
2. All movies made after September 2006
3. All contact information in my address book. This includes many people from Switzerland and the Marshal Islands
4. The newer  episodes of Southpark, Big Love and The Office
5. All the information and prices lists for our potential international clients.
6. All the information for the English manuals and documentation that I was working on.
7. A lot of other work files.
8. A boat load of software. Actually Leyla has a CD with all of it, but she didn’t give it to Patrick as she said she would, so I have no idea what happened to it.
9. All my information for my various online accounts, bank accounts credit cards. I might have a copy of this file from September 2006, but I have added a lot since then.
10. The worst thing of all is how nicely organized I had everything. It is going to take me a week or so to get back to that level. I am hoping I can import the backups I made of my old emails so that i can get back most of the email addresses I had in my address book.
11. All my music.

If there was one person responsible for this (obviously not me), just someone I could scapegoat, they would be really really sorry. More sorry than I am that I didn’t back up in like I had planned to.

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Current Mood: Angry & Confused & Sad & Sickly

Some of you will appreciate the magnitude of this crisis more than others. You need to know that I was very very very attached to my laptop. For the past few weeks, my computer has been acting funny when it heats up. To prevent this from happening, I didn’t run too many programs at once, and I would shut down for a while when it started acting up. This seemed to be working. Tuesday night I left it on at work, and on Wednesday it was really acting up. So, Thursday morning I decided to do a back up of my hard disk just in case something went wrong.Thursday morning, when I got into to work, I set up my external hard drive, opened my laptop and pushed the power button. Instead of being greeted with an apple on my screen during booting, I was greeted with a question mark. When I booted from disk, my computer said there was a serious error on my hard disk and that it could not boot from it. So I took the computer to one of two apple repair shops in this city. They are currently doing some four day data recovery process on my hard drive, but they said by the sounds that were coming out of my hard drive, it doesn’t look good. Fortunately, I backed up my work documents about 1 month ago, and I backed up most of the stuff on my computer in September, but still. My laptop was my life. Hundreds of people’s contact information was in there, everything was so organized, all my personal documents I created since coming to

Turkey, my various tooling projects. Since getting that laptop, I never went anywhere without. Now on month shy of the three year mark, my hard drive has failed, the day I intended to back it up. With the uncertainty over the question of whether or not my data can be recovered, I have not been able to sleep very well lately. I am currently using Murat’s crappy Window’s laptop. I will be able to pick up my computer tomorrow with a new hard drive. Whether or not I get my data back is a question still unanswered. I am not usually a religious person, but I think  it is time to start praying.So for the time being there will be no more picture of the week, if there are any pictures at all going up on my blog. I am actually hardly in the mood to write anything…

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I started this blog with one goal: to allow concerned friends and family to follow my life. Specifically for my father to live life vicariously through me. I think he is probably my most attentive reader.  It has gradually begun to change.

Murat has recently become a regular reader of my blog and he has commented to me several times that if I keep at it for a while, my blog could be something valuable one day. He said there is no one else in Istanbul publicly writing about their interactions with the culture in blog like me, and that I have a real potential to create something here. The subtitle on my blog changed from “Your window to my life” to “An American life in Istanbul” because of Murat’s influence.

I have been considering this lately and thinking about how to be a successful blogger. I looked around at some other blogs that are successful and I realized that they all have a common theme. My blog has been rather unfocused. Sometimes I am posting funny things, sometimes just pictures, sometimes links… not really any one uniform thing. I am just sort of posting my mind at that moment onto the blog, which for me seems great, but I realize is not a recipe for success. Sunday night talking to Ant in Tophane and later talking online with Chen (a friend from high school and CMU) confirmed this idea. To be successful I must have a common theme.

I will therefore no longer be posting random funny things I find, emails from Beth, or anything like that. I will focus more on Turkish culture and my interactions with it. I of course will still try to meet my original mission of serving my family, but I will try to do so while providing cultural commentary. I will continue to post a picture of the week but I may make an effort to search for pictures that are tied to this theme (perhaps I will not always use my own pictures). I will probably continue to have entries here and there about only Turkish culture (geography, food, history).

This will mean that there will not be as many posts, but that they will be longer. This also means that I may run out of things to write about sooner or later. Let’s keeps our fingers crossed that this doesn’t happen. Lastly, please continue to enjoy my blog, post feedback, and share it with your friends and family.

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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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Current Mood: 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!

 

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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Current Mood: Cool

I finally got around to picking out a new theme for my blog. Like it? Notice anything about it? Mac users, this should be easy. The theme is called iTheme, and is designed to look like the apple OSX operating system. Go ahead, you can say it, I am a tool. If I get enough “I hate it comments,” I have a couple more themes that I like that I can use instead.

Also new is I added another page with a list of places I have been. From there you can link to related photo galleries. I also updated the about section of my blog by adding a picture.

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Current Mood: Esctatic

So I read somewhere that someone had torn their adaptor apart and resoldered a connector. So I decided what the hell, why not tear mine apart as well. I went to the electrical guys in the company and they helped me cut it open (we had to use a hacksaw) and resolder the main cable coming into the adaptor and… great success! It seems to be working fine now. Of course nothing looked wrong with the connector. While they were doing the soldering, I did my best to clean the connector that plugs into my laptop. So it could have have been either of those two things that did it.

Here is a picture of what my power adaptor looks like now. Since we had to hacksaw it apart, we needed to add a lot of tape to it.

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Current Mood: Angry

Yesterday Murat and I went to Izmir to meet with members of our partner company Arcom. Since we will be selling their products along side of our products internationally, it was important that Murat and I get a good understanding of their high pressure compressors and the market that they cater to. It was a great day. I learned a lot and we had a fantastic dinner with Sakir and Ahmet (not Murat’s uncle). Ahmet, who is in his mid 30’s I would say, has been working in compressors since he was 10 years old!

I would post pictures from the day if were not for the computer problems I am currently facing. My laptop power cord has completely died. For a year or so now it has been having trouble making a good connection. It will be plugged in, but often I will have wiggle it around to get it to actually supply power to my laptop. Over the past few months it has been getting progressively worse and worse. Finally, on Thursday, it gave out. I have 1 hour and 57 minutes of battery life left in my laptop. I therefore cannot write too much today. I will say something to those other frustrated apple users out there that this is a common problem. The power cords that Apple sold with its G4 laptops suck. They are complete junk. From what I have read, some people have replaced theirs three times in the first year they had it. To make matters worse, it’s 80 USD for a new one!

Of course, I saw this problem coming before it happened. I did little about it until a week and a half ago when i did some research. I found that in Turkey I could get a power cord made by Macally - a company that specializes in apple accessories - for about 50 euros (http://www.macally.com/EN/Product/Homes.asp). This was still a bit pricy so I ordered one of their products to the US where it is theoretically happily waiting for me at home in New York. The cost, a mere 32 USD. Based on reviews of both power cords, these are ugly, but they get the job done and are far more robust than Apple’s flamboyant white power adaptors. Sorry readers, you will just have to wait…

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Izzy’s friend Ant, who is a computer/Internet tool, helped me find this plugin for my wordpress blog that lets me embed videos! Yeah! Thanks Ant. Anyway, so here is the Hannover Messe video except now it’s embed in my blog.

messe-stand-compressed-2.mp4

and music!

Song: Nice Weather For Ducks

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