I haven’t posted anything for a while. Partly because I have been busy and also because I have been slacking on quite a lot of things.

The semester has ended like a month ago, this means I’ll start writing my dissertation in the coming academic year.  For the first time in my university career, I received a GPA of 4, which is great news. Also, I started to take intensive French courses from the summer school but I think I have made a mistake, as I don’t have much energy left to study at home after 5 hours of French everyday.  And the other stuff that I have to do and the hot weather doesn’t really help. C’est difficile!

Other than that, I quit smoking last Saturday. So, it has been a week. I have handled it quite well with few nicotine deficiency attacks (or whatever they are called), and I’m pretty well at the moment.

Anyway, off to studying French now so that I can go out tonight.

My room is a mess. I’ve found a small screwdriver somewhere near my desktop computer, and I put it between the pages of A Thousand Plateaus.

It was only after I put the screwdriver, I realized the significance. I shouldn’t do think of significances though.

No, not the Weird Al Yankovic song. Some folks have made a generative music project called Sound of Ebay.

Whatever algorithm they are using and however they are doing this, the idea is very interesting indeed. The project basically fetches the information on your Ebay account to generate music.
Anyway, listen to my Ebay account’s music here:

A relatively similar project made using Lily and recorded into a video titled “Finally found a use for the NY times” can be viewed at Vimeo. This project basically turns the data available on the web page into music. Apparently Lily has other uses as well but I am too lazy to read the pages.

Last night, while I was in bed, I remembered this short story titled “Scene” from the collection Suburban Sketches by William Dean Howells. I am not really a fan of realist writing but for some reason I had the imagery of this little short story in my mind, for some reason. I don’t do this and I actually try not to associate words with images - can images ever substitute words? Anyway, this collection of short stories depict the suburban life of people in Old Charlesbridge, and “Scene” is about a young women who drowns herself. She is found dead by the community, who are pretty curious to see what had happened. One of the townspeople says “It was the best thing she cuold do,” creating a story in his mind. The narrator responds: “Upon this answer that literary soul fell at once to patching himself up a romantic story for the suicide, after the pitiful fashion of this fiction-ridden age, when we must relate everything we see to something we have read. He was the less to blame for it, because he could not help it; but certainly he is not to be praised for his associations with the tragic fact brought to his notice.”

Anyway, after this brief introduction, I’d like to quote what I really like about this piece:
» Read the rest of the entry..

Just learnt this interesting web service from Kevin and got an invitation to the alpha testing.  Seesmic is said to be “Twitter but with video” and apparently the flow of responses are intense.

So, you want a  invitation?

Leave a comment that makes sense, and I’ll send you one to the email you provide.  First come, first served.

Epic words from President G. Bush:

“I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal,” he said in an interview for Yahoo and Politico magazine.

“I don’t want some mum whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them.” *

*Clap* *Clap* *Clap*

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Ben ve lisansüstü programdan arkadaşım Fırat dalga geçerek günün gazetesini okuyoruz. Dikkat ederseniz haberler genelde çok kötü yazılıyorlar ve bu şekilde okumaya eğiliminiz varsa oldukça komik oluyorlar - bir şeyleri çok ciddiye alan birisi değilseniz. Fırat’la olan konuşmalarımız da genelde bu şekilde, böyle bir bilinç-akışıyla gidiyor.

Bu videoyu ofisimizde çektik, tavan oldukça yüksek olduğundan ve içerisi oldukça boş olduğundan ses bir miktar yankı yapmış. Bir süre genişekran/16:9 olan bu videoyu Quicktime’da encode etme problemi yaşadıktan sonra sorunu hallettim ve birkaç ufak tefek montajla bu hale getirdim.

*: Videoda yanıtı var.

[FYI: The video is in Turkish] I and Firat - a friend from grad school - is reading the news on the newspaper in a mocking way. News are written very badly if you pay attention and they are quite funny if you have that tendency or unless you are someone who takes things really seriously. This is sort of how our speech goes with Firat, with this kind of stream of consciousness.

We shot this in our office; because the ceiling is quite high and the office is quite empty, there is some echo in the sound. After having some problems with widescreen/16:9 encoding, I solved the issues by playing with the settings manually, and with a couple of editing I came up with this.

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This is Zazu. He is a couple of weeks old and was found by Irem, a friend of mine from grad school. The story of Zazu is interesting: When Irem came back home, her dog Duduk was barking to an old stove (that uses coal) that has been in her house’s entrance-ish garden. She took Duduk home thinking that the cat will leave when it feels safe. But Duduk wasn’t really comfortable and kept barking late at night. So she decided to have a look, got everything in the stove out in 2 AM and found this little kitty covered with ashes - too much of them, our hands kept becoming black whenever we petted the poor kitty. She took him to a vet in the morning and brought it to her office in the university to find him a home. Zazu was either traumatized or was too tired and sleepless - he didn’t do much all day. But our instructor, Zafer Aracagok, who took him home, said Zazu even started to discover the house in his first hours there - after a long day of moving here and there.

We all loved Zazu. This is his first video recordings shot at Uptown Bistro on Bilkent University campus.

This is my first video post and my first attempt in videoblogging. The video quality isn’t really good due to my lack of knowledge of video compression and all that (edit: bitrate is increased now). Also, although I tried every guideline I’d found, I couldn’t really make it deinterlaced (fixed now). The editing isn’t superb but I think this is not bad for a first timer (yes, this is my very first video editing, so treat me fairly :) ). So, what do you think? About the cat? About the video?

Yesterday, Dr. Daniela Reimann published a post titled “8 ways your ipod can help you be a better student” written by Heather Johnson.  Dr. Reimann has comments disabled so I’m posting here.

The guide is written in a very let’s-think-oh-yes-there-is-this-too kind of way and it’s disturbingly wrong.  So, you can avoid unnecessary (!?) trips to the library by listening to a audio version study guide of The Great Gatsby, eh?  Why not read the novel on time?  Do you really think study guides can ever substitute reading the novel or the short story?

Also, how does an audiobook replace reading? I declare this person who has written this has never and ever read a book, has never made research on anything at all. Are reading and listening the same thing?

These online-this-and-that consultant people are easy with what they talk.

Quick update (longer versions will hopefully follow, depending on my postponing and procrastination mood):

I got myself a camcorder, a Canon MVX4i (Optura 600 in the US) and will hopefully post some videos very soon - once I properly learn how I should encode my videos and more importantly how to properly edit them. The reviews of the camcorder as well as those who are using it were pretty positive for this camcorder. So, after considering other models and other brands, I gave a shot for this one. And actually it doesn’t matter much as I can’t evaluate it myself, I just tried to get the best for that price. But anyway, it’s a very compact player that I can carry with myself most of the time. So expect “hahaha do that and get published on the internets!” videos. I’m a total noob when it comes to these kind of stuff (which is actually surprising for people, who think I’m a geek): the other day, when I first started playing with the camcorder, it took me like 5 minutes to figure out the place of the button that should start the recording. Then I decided to go reading the manual (as always, RTFM). Then when I opened the camcorder and saw nothing on the LCD, I was like wtf?! until I realized that the lens cap was in its place.  I will post a small review (um, not a review… More like ‘hey check it out!’ kind of post with photos and all.

If you need help getting started videoblogging and any other related thing (Wordpress and videoblogging, encoding, publishing, syndicating, etc), take a look at Show in a Box, where you can find experienced users and very well prepared tutorials.

Also, I got myself a very itsy bitsy theremin that waits to be assembled. I will hopefully post a video of this one very soon, once I got time. Actually been waiting my camcorder to assemble it - so I should do that very soon because I’m curious with what I can do with that little thing. In the meanwhile, check this and this video and other related ones on Youtube to see what theremin can do. My little one (uh, that was nasty) won’t be able to do those kind of tricks as it’s a pretty simple one, but what the heck.