1 year later:

 “Remember remember the fifth of November
 Gunpowder, treason and plot.
 I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
 Should ever be forgot”

Here is an amusing letter:

Herbert A. Millington
Chair - Search Committee
412A Clarkson Hall, Whitson University
College Hill, MA 34109

Dear Professor Millington,
Thank you for your letter of March 16. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me an assistant professor position in your department. This year I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising field of candidates, it is impossible for me to accept all refusals. Despite Whitson’s outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet my needs at this time. Therefore, I will assume the position of assistant professor in your department this August. I look forward to seeing you then.

In a recent report, Turkey stands out among 30 OECD countries as the country with the most expensive broadband price per megabit/sec with $81.13. And Turkey is not one of the high income countries either.

Do you want to join an exclusive/beta site that requires invitations? Try InviteShare, a hub where people share their invites to many popular sites like pownce, joost, moola, 8apps, spock etc. They have an abundant number of invites, I was able to receive my invitations to all of these popular sites within a few minutes. I’m glad that someone took the initiative to start such a website to connect people with invitations to those who do not. I think the defining theme of Internet is becoming collaboration.

I would like to share a non-governmental organization in Turkey, which has been a source of inspiration for me. LHSV was founded by doctors, to provide free health services to the underprivileged. The interesting part is how they do it:

Since 11 years, LHSV collects waste paper, soda cans, plastic bags and used printer cartridges. [We] collect approximately 100 tons of waste and waste paper per month. The revenue of this activity is used in financing our medical services.

I’m glad that I have finished reading the comprehensive book on globalism, called The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman, a foreign affairs columnist at the New York Times.

In the first part of the book, Friedman describes the sudden changes around the world caused by globalism, and tells that the world has gone flat without him noticing. Furthermore, he explains the way businesses operate in this new world, which he calls flat. The book is enriched by many examples of outsourcing, offshoring, supply-chaining, insourcing etc. from companies that operate on a global scale. He describes his visits to various companies around the world, and shares the views of executive officers of such companies.

 “Remember remember the fifth of November
 Gunpowder, treason and plot.
 I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
 Should ever be forgot”

Personal computer have changed so drastically since 90s, with LCD screens, laser mice, dvd-rws, usb disks and wireless cards etc. but there has been no innovation going on regarding keyboards. Keyboards are basically what they used to be 15 years ago, and the role they play in making up the user experience is too important to be ignored.So, here is a proposal for new keyboards: Keyboards shouldn’t have a fixed layout. That’s basically it. Buttons of the keyboard should have digital displays, enabling the user to change the layout of the keyboard on the fly. With predefined schemes, when my father is using the keyboard, he would change it to “Turkish F” layout, and I would use the “Turkish Q” or change to Dvorak if I’d like. Moreover, when I load Photoshop, the buttons would automatically turn into shortcut buttons, making it utterly more productive. Look at the symbols we use frequently while programming: !+-();=?{}<>$. On the traditional keyboard, almost all of these symbols require the combination of pressing two keys at once. I’m very suprised that there is no “programmer keyboard” or “programming keyboard” on the market since the traditional keyboard is so unproductive and unergonomic to write code. The time has come…

Sometimes we face obstacles that block our way, things that slow down our progress in achieving what we want. Yet what people see as obstacles, can be, just the opposite in fact. Richard Feynman describes his love for teaching in his book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr.Feynman!” and criticizes the view of teaching as an interruption to doing research:

…I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever….They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas….Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from students. Nothing!

When I received my free Ubuntu 6.06 LTS CD by mail, I wasn’t planning to install Ubuntu at all. Eventhough I support the open source movement, I’m still not a big fan of linux as an end user. I thought maybe that could change, just maybe Linux had evolved by now. And believe me, it had been a very, very long time since I tried a new linux distro. Fedora was installed on my machine and I didn’t even remember the password to login to the system. Heck, it was time to install Ubuntu. Dadada ….