GeekXperts

See our new blog for helpful hints on anything geek.

GeekXperts:
http://geekxperts.blogspot.com/

My new blog

After the very bad service I received from Google (they marked my blog as spam), I switched to wordpress.com

My new blog is

alpkup.wordpress.com


I will not write here again. Please check my new blog for new posts.

Yunus Emre

Yunus Emre'den seçmeler

Bu sayfa sadece Türkçe olacak. İleride belki İngilizce bir benzerini de hazırlarım. Kendi seçtiğim şeyleri koyacağım. Arada bir bakın, ama bir anda çok fazla okumayın, şiirleri anlamadan, onların üzerinde düşünmeden geçmeyin.

GALATASARAY

It is the best Turkish soccer team on the Earth. There is no debate about it. It was once one of the best in the whole Europe too. Due to poor management, it suffered lots of performance losses. Also, being far away made me forget supporting my team.

I'm going back to my old days, hoping that my team will return back to its glorious days. The greatest champion: GALATASARAY!!!

iobit

This is an interesting company. They have very few but very nice products. I strongly recommend them. At the moment, I'm waiting to see their spyware defender program too.

www.iobit.com

musicopat.com

I had this idea, and as in many other things, other people with possibly more resources implemented it before me. Nevertheless, I waited a long time for this web site, and it's pretty cool. Check it out:

www.musicopat.com

It is FREE and LEGAL music that cannot be downloaded but played online. Most importantly, they have almost all the Turkish labels. Let's support them.

Yunus Emre

Yunus Emre hakkında pek çok şey koyacağım buraya. Bu ilki.

I'll put some Yunus Emre poems here, but I cannot translate the poems. I'll try to translate some other related info though. So, let's start with this one.

Sabahattin Eyüboğlu says the following about Yunus Emre:
"Despite all his religious personality and devotion to Islam, Yunus was not a man from any religion, any sect; he was not even a man of the religion. On the contrary, he was beyond all different religions, mosques, churches, sanctuaries; he was especially against strict religious people. His religion did not have a book, a worship ritual or direction. The only rule, dogma of his belief was love: the widest, limitless, the most humanist love; pure love. When you asked Yunus about his religion, his God, he would say nothing but LOVE, ATTACHMENT, and COMPANIONSHIP."

Who

We. We should be compatible, but different. We should like similar stuff to eat/do/go/etc., but know different things. We should have similar world views, but from different angles. We should be discussing, attacking each other's ideas fiercely alas gently, so that when we sum up, we make more than 2 people.

Turkish

Two years ago, a friend told me that Turkish sounds very melodic, like song lyrics. I only managed to understand it now.
In Turkish, every syllable contains a vowel. So, it is really easy to elongate them while pronouncing. In songs, you need to fit the syllables to the music, so this is where that property comes into play. This is not applicable to English actually.

New Photos

Californication

Amerika ve Arkadaşlar (3. Sene)

Brown banner is THE WORST web site I've ever seen

How can my university pay some people millions of dollars (which was millions more than the anticipated amount) to create the world's worst course registration service. Even the naive paper-based service and boca was better. I can list the bad sides of it, but I don't want to fill my blog with it.
I want my money back. Actually, even I could have designed a much better one for much less money. I am sure someone got rich without deserving, most probably only by using his/her connections. I'm also sure the connection got richer. Yet, I'm not accusing any particular person. They are already aware of this fact.

ipod rocks

Interesting news: Sony gave up its fight against Apple in the music industry. The old giant is replaced by the new one. I tried some sony mp3 players before buying my ipod two years ago, but they had only 3 levels of volume: low, medium, high. You can easily tell how shitty they are. Read the news about their defeat:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136659-c,onlineentertainment/article.html

Gül

First: Note to non-Turkish friends:
There is nothing wrong with Turkey (except what was already wrong). The new president will not behave much different than the previous ones. Turkey will continue developing, as always. Everyone in Turkey wants a better country, and works for that. Do not listen to outsider comments who do not know the country's dynamics. Ask a Turkish person if you would like more information on the issue.

Second: Note to Turkish friends (thus in Turkish):
Kimsenin kimseye laf etme hakkı yoktur. Kimsenin, özellikle kendini müslüman sayan kimsenin, "Gül müslümandır, Sezer değildir" gibi saçma cümleler ile şirk koşup kendini haşa Allah yerine koymaya hakkı yoktur. Kimsenin laiklik elden gitti diye yaygara koparmasına gerek yoktur. Kimsenin sokakta mini etekle gezen kıza laf atma, başörtüsüyle gezene gerici gözüyle bakma hakkı yoktur. Kimsenin kadınla erkeği ayırma hakkı da yoktur aslında. İşimiz gücümüz yokmuş gibi 6 aydır yerimizde sayıyoruz. Lütfen herkes adam gibi kendi işine baksın, ben dahil!

BEWARE of amtrak and enterprise

Very well known transportation services, the amtrak train service and the enterprise rental car service, have tried to cheat us. So, be really aware when using them. The incidents are below:

Amtrak: One amtrak agent told something, while the other told the opposite later, denying my right to get back my refund for a ticket cancellation. After waiting for 1 hour 15 minutes on the customer service line, I somewhat managed. But they are not to be trusted.


Enterprise: If they ask you to upgrade your car level, never do that. This means, they don't have that low level car at hand, and they'll have to upgrade anyways. They are just trying to get some more money for that.

Don't think large companies are nice!

lens.com and justlenses.com DO NOT BUY

DO NOT BUY from lens.com or justlenses.com
They try to make every effort for the customer to suffer. Their shipment is extremely SLOW, their sales support is very POOR.
So, NEVER ever SHOP from those two web sites (don't even click):
lens.com or justlenses.com

More new technology

Today's topic is the new Adobe Acrobat Reader (it's name might have changed, but everyone knows what i mean, the pdf reader). Now, it really reads.
Yes, you select some part of the text, and then tell the program to read it out loud for you. It can easily read numbers, percentages, ratios, etc. All this is in just your very basic pdf reader, nothing more...
Note: Don't download the adobe photoshop album starter edition, which they try to make you download with the reader. I hate when they try to trick you doing such things. Such a big company like Adobe should not be doing those tricks.

Californication

I really liked California. The weather, first. Second, the places around, or more accurately, the variety and the number of places nearby. Regarding my internship, I liked the fact that I can take my weekends off. Do you guys (poor grad students like me) ever know how it feels? Now I do.
But very little time remains. I'll soon be back to Providence, a part of the Heaven :)

Back to US

I have lot's of things to write, yet I don't remember them :)
Thus, I'll postpone. But, I'm back to US, which means I'll be writing more often.

(Türkçe not: often lafını ofın değil de oftın diye okuyor ya bu gavurlar, ben anlamıyorum. Madem öyle water lafına da votır de adam gibi :)

See: maps.ask.com

Leaving

I'm going to Turkey for the next two weeks. I'll attend 3 weddings of my 5 close friends from high school in those 2 weeks. Then, i'll visit my sis in Germany for 2-3 days. After that, wait for me San Francisco :)
I'll be at Cisco, doing an internship. In the meantime, I'm planning to do lots of background reading for my research (cryptography). So, my plan is to work during weekdays, read crypto at weeknights, and have fun visiting lots of new nearby places during weekends. If I can accomplish my plan, it'd be a very nice summer.
After summer? I'll be back, hopefully with new project ideas.
Have a nice summer... :)

Time to post

I guess it's time to post again. So, there was a bomb blast in Ankara today
http://www.milliyet.com.tr/2007/05/22/son/sontur50.asp

I had no problems with anyone, but some events (including but not only this) made me think that really "Türkün Türkten başka dostu yoktur".

I AM SO PISSED OFF !!!
(put some curses to fill in the blanks ...
i don't want to curse explicitly)

Ruckus

OK, I have advertised lots of other services I use, why not advertise Ruckus too?

So, it's a free music service for college students (mainly in US). You register with your college e-mail address, and then you can download and play tons of music on your computer. Of course, it's legal and free.

Why wait? Go to
www.ruckus.com

Photos

I have uploaded some new photos and improved the quality of the previous ones (since now we have 1GB of free space on picasa web). Check them out (more to come later).

http://picasaweb.google.com/alpkup

Informative Chatting

Today I had the chance to sit and talk with Natali and Duygu, something I realized I was missing. I remembered old days when we just sat and talked about serious but unrelated, fun but important issues for hours. We can no longer do that..
It was very informative for me. I love listening to people, especially people whose opinions I value. I also like talking, but I guess I like listening more. Maybe as everything else, we should better balance them too.
Thanks girls :)


By the way, this reminded me of our Starbucks talks in our first year, equivalent to the cafe talks in Turkey, though sometimes much more intellectual.

Çok Mutluyum

I want to write this in Turkish.

Bugün belki de öğrencilik hayatımın son resmi dersine girdim, az önce belki de son resmi ödevimi bitirdim. Şimdilik tabii iş başımdan aşkın olduğu için pek farkedemedim ama ilginç bir durum. Bugünleri göreceğimi hiç düşünmezdim, ömür boyu öğrenci geldik öğrenci gidiyorduk...
Bakalım sonrası nasıl olacak. Göreceğiz. Umarım en az öğrencilik kadar güzel olur... :)

Ayrıca, annemin de dediği gibi, ne kadar çok güzel insanlar var etrafımda... Bu dünyada en lazım şey o herhalde. Annem hep "kötülerle karşılaştırmasın Allah" der. Amin!

Quick Post

I don't want to be recognized for what I do for living
I want to be recognized for what I do for the living

Research

I haven't written on my research b4. Now is the time :)
Currently, I'm working on a project related to the use of electronic cash. It is a fun project, and I actually liked what I'm doing. Even though the codebase I'm working on is very messy and missing lot's of stuff, every day I understand more, learn more, accomplish more!
Let's hope, it goes at least as good, and even better...

Armenian-Turkish Concert (CANCELLED)

Our Armenian-Turkish concert was prevented by outside parties pressuring our musicians not to perform. The Turkish Cultural Society and Armenian Students' Association at Brown are still committed to creating events of mutual benefit aimed at creating apolitical dialogue. Even though the situation was completely outside our reach, we apologize to all our friends and guests for this unfortunate cancellation and any inconveniences caused by that.

Brown Turkish Cultural Society and Armenian Students' Association

More Technology

I'm discovering more and more Yahoo! products nowadays. They are all good, actually, better than Google in many cases. One of my newest discoveries is the Yahoo audio search. Try it, it finds the audio files for you, easily.

http://audio.yahoo.com

Picasa

I just realized how Picasa web albums are improved. They offer 1GB free space for your photos. By the way, currently my 150 photos take only 25MB with 1024x768 resolution (a pretty good quality). They have lots of new features. Definitely check it out:

http://picasaweb.google.com/

Concert

Nowadays, we are working on a concert project. It's going to be a very nice one hopefully, with very good music and food afterwards. The concert is a joint Armenian-Turkish concert, dedicated to a healthy dialogue.
Come, join, bring friends...
April 6th, Brown University, Providence, RI

http://students.brown.edu/Turkish

Aybalam

I'm soo happy that my sister is coming here and she'll be with me on my birthday :)
I wanna take her to Niagara Falls, but I'm open to any other suggestions. Actually I'd like to go there, I haven't seen them, and also I might visit some friends in Waterloo, and she actually has a friend of hers there too.
We shall see..
Kısmet :)

Technology

Back to technological issues.
I realized that currently the best image search engine is Yahoo
http://images.search.yahoo.com/

It really is the best. Actually, Yahoo was also the first to introduce the video search engine. They are still good, with better advertising, they'll keep up.

Decision Process

It's a long, exciting, confusing but yet important process. I need to decide without getting crazy. Since there's no ultimate "best", it's probably not that crucial. But, still, one cannot and should not make seemingly bad decisions, while being aware of that.
After deciding, I'll just work on that and hope for the best. Nothing more..