Research, travel, procrastination-busting.

After an early morning ferry ride across the Sea of Marmara to the city of Yalova, I was walking along when I came across a few pieces of a slot-car race track lying on the sidewalk. They were just sitting there in front of a store. Another ten feet down the road there was a single piece on top of a traffic light signal box.

That was weird enough.

After a great interview with the mufti of Yalova I hopped on a bus to Bursa to catch an afternoon sermon meeting, and a couple hours later I was walking around a mall in the center of town looking for a bathroom. As I went down an escalator, I saw a large figure eight slot-car race track and a yellow stock car with an M&M’s decal zooming around. There was a young man controlling the car and a young woman sitting behind a table next to him. At first I just walked past, but then the coincidence sunk in and I had to go back to tell them what I’d seen earlier this morning. They didn’t have an explanation but I did learn that there are some people who race slot cars professionally.

I hadn’t seen a slot-car track for at least ten years, and never in Turkey, but today, within the space of two hours, I stumbled across one twice in two different cities.

I have no clue what the significance might be.

I traveled two hours outside of Istanbul today to interview Ahmet Okutan, the mufti of Tekirdağ.  He was incredibly helpful both in terms of providing information about sermon preparation in his province and in terms of setting up additional interviews in the region (tomorrow I’m going to Edirne and tomorrow night it’s off to Çanakkale). 

Thanks to him I’ve also had a driver shuttle me around and am now staying in the guesthouse of the Tekirdağ Diyanet Education Center.  This is where imams receive 40 days of training before beginning their assignments at mosques around the country.  I’ve been warmly received here, have had great conversations with the director, and have a whole apartment to myself.

 All for now…

I swear I’m going to post about my research soon, but I wanted to point out that MacHeist’s deal on a bundle of some cool Mac apps ends today. Here’s what Lifehacker has to say:

Web site MacHeist’s second annual shareware bundle sale, which offers nearly $500 worth of software for the relatively low price of $49, is underway. This year’s bundle includes popular Mac shareware like previously mentioned Cha-Ching, AppZapper, TaskPaper, and other killer apps like 1Password.

Something else sweetening the deal is that 25% of the purchase price goes to a charity of your choice.

Btw, I just happened to be checking out 1Password today before reading about this deal and loved it — after some set up, visiting a page and typing “CONTROL + \” logs you into almost any website where you have an account. No need to remember lots of usernames and passwords. 1Password also does auto-fill and generates strong passwords when you create new accounts. This is one of the slickest apps I’ve used.

A Turkish court blocked access to YouTube last week for hosting a video that portrayed Atatürk, the founder of Turkey, as a monkey. This violated several Turkish laws, including Article 301, which was in the news so much after the assassination of Hrant Dink last year. 301 is the law that makes it a crime to insult Turkishness.

I thought it was funny that Milliyet, one of the major national newspapers in Turkey, had a full-page spread on the most popular Turkish YouTube videos just a couple days after the ban went into effect. Did they miss the story?

If you’re keeping track, this is the second time access to YouTube has been blocked in Turkey in less than a year.

First we saw how a simple ballpoint pen could unlock those expensive Kryptonite bike locks, now pens are wrecking havoc on your locked luggage.  This quick video shows how easy it is to break into a locked suitcase by simply poking a ballpoint pen through the zipper.  The worst part is that you won’t know anything has happened when you pick up your luggage at the baggage claim.

I bet having some kind of lock on your luggage still reduces the likelihood that it gets pilfered as it makes the rounds through airport security, but I wouldn’t want to take any chances.  As for the days of checking a locked suitcase at a hostel or bus terminal for a few hours, those are long gone.

Of course you can debate how useful those locks were to begin with.  Do they deter would-be thieves?  Attract more attention?  After new TSA regulations I actually switched to using twisty-ties, figuring they serve the same deterrence function in the airport and probably make it look like I’m a cheapskate with nothing to steal.

Nevertheless, this video will probably serve as a good wake-up call and get more people to take their valuables with them on the plane.

[Via Elliot Blog]

Belated props to my home state for kicking off the presidential race…



I found this image at the Etch-A-Sketchist, a site mentioned somewhat randomly at the end of the NYT piece on Scrivener.  And then there’s Etched in Time, a site that shows off the work of a young man who apparently sold his soul to Ohio Art in order to make amazing portraits.

Scrivener got a glowing tribute in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday.  This is the application I’ve been using for several months to write all my field notes, store ideas, and draft papers.  It’s not a full replacement for MS Word or other word processors — mostly because it can’t handle footnotes like those programs can — but for most types of writing and drafts of academic work it’s a great product.

I’m a big fan of full-screen writing, using green text on a black background (scroll down this post for a picture), and Scrivener offers the best implementation of this I’ve seen.  From the NYT story:

When you’re working on a Scrivener opus, you’re not surrounded by teetering stacks of Firefox windows showing old Google searches or Citibank reports of suspicious activity. Life’s daily cares slip into the shadows. What emerges instead is one pristine and welcoming scroll: Your clean and focused mind.

Of course you could say that about any full-screen writing program, but Scrivener seems to get it just right.

Another great feature is that Scrivener saves your work as you go.  In fact, it was the Scrivener user’s manual that alerted me to the tip I gave the other day about Macs and the red dot, a detail that is basically irrelevant in this app.

I’m not planning on turning this blog into a Mac love-fest, and I’m not getting paid to promote Scrivener, but I think it’s a really cool program many of you would like.  Check out the free trial.