Entries from August 2007 ↓

I was waiting for the funicular when I heard a commotion on the escalator behind me.  There was a column blocking my view, but suddenly a guy in his mid-60s wearing shorts and a t-shirt burst into view and shouted, “The Turks!  They stole my wallet!”
He.  Was.  Livid.
The way he charged onto the platform, paused [...]

Today it seemed like I was having trouble getting the permission I needed for part of my project, so at one point Pinar suggested I call Dr. Ali Bardakoglu, president of the Diyanet, to see if he could help.
Right, I thought. It was great that I got a half hour of his time last year, [...]

Things were wild in the neighborhood tonight. I came home around 5pm and found that a couple of blind musicians had set up in the street behind my in-laws’ apartment and were playing Turkish folk music super loud. People were tossing money from their balconies and even making requests to the group’s manager [...]

Merlin Mann has assembled an excellent set of resources on giving better presentations.  He highly recommends the site Presentation Zen, which has long been on my blogroll, and touts the story-telling approach to presentations found in Beyond Bullet Points. He also points to a great thread of reader suggestions on his own site that [...]

Today was a wild research and technology day.
Two weeks ago I got a CD from the Diyanet that I couldn’t believe existed.  It had years’ worth of data that would’ve taken me months to gather and process at a cost of a couple thousand dollars.  The person who gave it to me said it was [...]

Today is the 8th anniversary of the Marmara earthquake in northwestern Turkey.  According to official records more than 17,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands were left homeless.
I first came to Turkey to work with a disaster relief agency responding to this earthquake.  I worked for 9 months as a finance manager as the [...]