Touring Amsterdam

I have contributed the pictures for a virtual tour of Amsterdam, written by Ms. Ayse Erin and posted on the Virtourist website.

Here is the tour itself.

Reviewing Comics

As part of a tutorial I am doing, I have been collecting books written about comics for the past couple of months and I have decided to present their reviews and summaries in a blog, I will start posting about books right away and will update systematically.
Here it is.
I hope it would be helpful to someone who is looking for this literature.

Calling Home

In both of the occasions I saw him with his fellow musicians, he epitomized in his performance what I loved so much about jazz. That aura of pure and unbridled creative energy flowing with passion and utmost dedication was almost tangible around the stage.
I remember a feeling of power and intensity, grabbing the most untamed parts of my brain and tingling it, saying "come out and play!", that sense of elevation and humanity. (A feeling that I have devoted years in explaining but still fail to do so appropriately.)
And I also remember him being one of the nicest and most polite people I ever saw on stage, and that when I learned his passing I felt an incredible feeling of loss and sadness.

Rest in peace Esbjorn Svennson, you will be remembered, and missed.

I had the opportunity to take the above picture during sound check before his set at the North Sea Jazz Festival '07.

A Wonderful world

Some say, over at the Windows side of things, the Mac does not have the rich application library and one would not be able to do certain things with the lack of these apps.
Just by browsing over posts that are tagged "freeware" on the "Unofficial Apple Weblog" the other night, I think I have proven that argument, to myself, very wrong.
In just a hour or so, I have found so many cool little things that make your computing life just a little bit more pleasurable and more elegant that I am astounded.

First, there is the lovely named Caffeine, which undertakes the simple task of preventing your Mac to go to sleep. I am eagerly waiting for the next meeting with one of my supervisors to put it to good use while studying something off the screen.

Next is Nocturne, by the amazingly clever people who gave the world the genius that is Quicksilver and it claims to ease the strain of looking at a bright screen in a completely dark environment. It achieves this by making everything B&W and Inverting the colors. A claim that I had a couple of occasions to test and can report that it certainly makes reading off a screen in complete darkness a much more pleasurable experience.

Then there is the wonderful reading tool Skim, which made my almost cry with pleasure as I've been wanting a PDF reader that can make highlights and underlines for as long as I can remember.


None of these are brand-new but that didn't diminish at all from the joy of discovering them.
What's even more delightful is the common aspects of all those little apps though;
As it is highlighted by the latest series of articles at Ars, they exude care and attention to detail and reflect the intention of their programmers to achieve a simple solution with beautiful and elegant means. Not just provide a tool for doing something.
This approach is probably what I love the most in the whole Mac platform,
and an inability to understand this is most probably reason Office '08 is so terrible.

On Passion

There is nothing in the world that moves me like the two great Passions of J.S. Bach, the St.John and the St.Matthew. To be honest, they are enormous works that take more than two hours and I don't have the slightest idea what the choir and the soloists sing about. I mean I know they are singing the Passion from the gospel of John and Matthew. But that's not the point.
When listening the (for me incomparable) rendition of these works from John Eliot Gardiner, his English Baroque Soloists and the wonderful Monteverdi Choir, I couldn't care less about what the actual words are.
What matters, and what sends shivers down my spine, is the amount of passion these excellent musicians put in performing this piece of music and even more so, one man has put in writing it two hundred and seventy years ago. I wonder, which is more impressive;
Being the specially created subjects of an omnipotent being and expressing our devotion in the form guided by the prophet he sent for us to follow, or
Being a lump of carbon so mind-numbingly improbable to evolve on its own that the discovery of the existence of a similar being is the most exciting discovery imaginable. And on top of that, developing self-awareness and consciousness somehow that would enable it to love, for all intents and purposes, an imaginary being this intensely and passionately.

Just listening to the opening choir of St.Matthew at that very special moment when the first light of dawn rises from the horizon in the middle of an empty plain without a single other movement and that is my closest encounter with divinity. And the source of that overwhelming feeling is the capacity of a man, Bach of course, to feel so much and so deep and express that by creating something that has not existed before, by giving something to the world that inspired him.
I know that a lot of science fiction authors are with me in this, so I can ask a bit more confidently, what can be more impressive and beautiful than that?

On Three

When I first heard Roads I was in a gym with a very good friend of mine and we had to sit down to be able to keep our balance. It was hit-in-the-head-with-a-brick good, but really no reason to elaborate that. Since then, seeing Portishead was a constant item in my must-see-before-you-die performances list and as of yesterday night I can put a big, nice and satisfied check next to it.

I have seen my fair share of concerts and have seldom experienced such a clean and precise sounding band. Musically, they were all I was hoping and some more, because I haven't heard the new album and judging by the performances last night, I should eagerly anticipate it as well. Of course, a special laudatory remark should go to Beth Gibbons, whom I can listen to reading the ingredients of a box of cereal from behind a wall and still find it musical. A big, bold "excellent" is the word that remains from the night.

Also, I am rather impressed, in fact hugely impressed, by the venue as well, the Heineken Music Hall. I am used to wander around for an hour just to find a parking place at the Foret National in Brussels and being shoved and pushed in a grubby and unwelcoming atmosphere in concerts.

Hopping on to the Metro and being dropped off in front of the door of a modern, spacious, organized and most importantly clean hall and being able to comfortably walk to the train station and after waiting for 5 minutes again hopping onto a metro to go back was an indescribably pleasurable experience for a concert goer. So a big salute to all the parties involved. Come to think of it, all my concert experiences in the Netherlands have been an absolute joy in organizational means, no wonder the Dutch are the logistics experts of Europe. A justly earned title I would say.

A personal note

It can be said that I have made more than my fair share's rubbish decisions concerning relationships with women but today marks the second anniversary of my best. A fact that is validated by the understated passing of the occasion; my reason for waking up every morning as a complete and happy man should not require an extra reason to be celebrated on a round number. But that is no reason to get it on record. So happy anniversary to being one in two and two in one.

A what now?

According to this test, which was linked in the Stumbleupon profile page, this is what I turned out to be;
"Mastermind". Introverted intellectual with a preference for finding certainty. A builder of systems and the applier of theoretical models. 2.1% of total population.

I think I can live with that.

On Geert Wilders' Fitna

So it is... After a huge debate on various platforms about whether it will be broadcasted and how, finally the film that supposedly warns the Dutch against "Islamisation" is made available on the net.
Although Wilders tried to show some form of decency by avoiding the controversial (and pointlessly offensive) alleged scene of tearing pages from the Koran, I found the film to be shallow and intentionally inflammatory.
To be honest, I am offended.
I am offended not as a Turkish person who supposedly comes from a Muslim Country. As I have revealed before, I am an atheist and have been as long as I can remember.
But I am offended as someone who deeply respects the great and established Western tradition of argumentation, reasoning and moderation. I am living in Europe because I put great value in discussing problems and issues with reasoning and understanding. Even when some parties involved reject that premise, the way to deal with them should also be uncovered by these principles.
Hacking together a hate video about people who supposedly hate you is not the ideal way of dealing with the issue, any issue.
The history and tradition of Europe, and especially the Netherlands, demands better from its people and especially from its politicians.
We should know better.

Telling Stories

Thanks to a heads up by ms.Ayse Erin, I have become aware of Penguin's "We Tell Stories" project. Over the course of 6 weeks, 6 authors are going to remake 6 classic works in their own styles and in a uniquely web oriented fashion.
The first project of the series was "21 Steps" by Charles Cumming, a very impressive effort of basing the quickly flying narrative of a thriller onto the Google Earth API. As the story moves along, one gets to fly with the character to the locations of the events. It is a brilliant idea and for a genre that feeds on the locations so much, rooftop chases and architectural wonders, the method is excellently chosen and executed. Well done.
Currently I am watching the second week's story unravel over two blogs, I don't want to spoil the fun with a mediocre description, so everything there is to be learned about the project can be learned from here.

As a researcher whose primary interest is exactly this sort of novel dimensions new media enables us, I am eager to discover what the rest of the "authors" will turn up with.
It is such a fascinating thing to live in the middle of the unraveling of such a new and revolutionary communication technology.
Bring it on...