A few weeks ago, Turkey instituted a fairly broad-based outdoor/covered-space smoking ban. My news report this morning states that people are now using this to run out on restaurant bills, as they claim to be going outside for a smoke and never come back.
I have decided that an immersion experience in a foreign language is comprised of several spikey ups and downs.
Most of your significant learning is done very quickly, almost too fast to notice. Vocabulary is a steady trickle, but verbs, sentence structure, grammar, and the like tend to be more like flashes of insight.
These flashes are followed by a brief sort of renaissance of speaking where you ooze new knowledge and feel generally impressed with yourself.
This leads the way to a harsh realization: your new understanding has made you keenly aware of a new aspect of the language you have yet to understand but now understand that you don’t understand.
This produces a hopeless discouragement with your progress; you wonder if you’ve improved at all in the last [time period]. The former knowledge rush now seems trivial.
You decide it’s not really realistic to think you’ll be able to speak the language well in any reasonable amount of time. Better to just make the best of it while you can.
And… repeat.
At least that’s how it is for me. My current point of progress is faster stitching together of sentences under pressure. I’m finding that even if the wrong words come out of my mouth, at least something is coming to mind. And I can speak a bit faster, even though a lot of Turkish is a bit of a tongue-twister for me.
Vocabulary is funny, because it is totally, totally random. I know the word for fork but do not know knife. I know how to say hope, chicken, holiday, insurance, wish, and education but I do not know ceiling or side. Although I know the word for name, I still don’t understand what some people say when they ask for a name.
Sometimes you just have to force-learn something to round out a block of knowledge. I can at this point remember every month name except October, for example. So, Ekim, Ekim, Ekim, Ekim.
It’s very interesting to have all these little things tied to life instead of quizzes and semesters. I remember the name of September because it was written on a building in Izmir named after an important day in Turkish history. The word for May is in my street address (also a historic date). November’s word is somebody’s name in Commercial Fuels. July’s was on the BBC’s Turkish page the first time I checked the news after finding out about the job last year. January is also the word for “furnace” and is used in grill restaurant names.
It’s hard to relax following this massive software development and organization rush I’ve put on in the last few weeks.
The Cluster/Python platform was rolled out, with the actual Cluster update following. Efendi is at 1.0.1 after a discovery and fix for the next/previous buttons at the bottom of the page (pesky non-root URLs!), a single TrueCrypt volume contains all my relevant personal/business files, I’m using Google Docs for less critical things, I have a Dropbox account that seems to be working well, my music all has album art embedded in a format finally acceptable to my Sony media player, and many other things have gotten done along the way.
Work is in a summer lull right now (Europe takes really big vacations), pending the ramp-up of the planning process. This has made it easier to manage the tasks that come but still retain some focus and energy for things at home.
I even perfected (or at least stabilized) my ability to make Turkish tea last night, which isn’t as touchy as it seems but has a fairly strict time schedule to follow. I’m still using too much dry tea, which turns out to not ruin the tea, but it makes cleanup hard and consumes quite a bit of your water puffing up the tea leaves (think rice).
Turkish tea is an institution here (higher per capita consumption than Great Britain), and it is made quite differently than the Western tea bag method. You use a stacked pot (big kettle on the bottom, small tea pot/pitcher on the top). Boil water in the kettle with the dry tea getting a little dry steam-heat from the base of the top pot. Pour boiling water onto the top pot’s dry tea leaves and boil lightly for 15 minutes.
What ends up in the small tea pot is a virtually undrinkable ultra-strong tea solution, which you pour into little tulip-shaped glasses and dilute 1⁄2 to 2⁄3 with the hot water in the bottom kettle.
This ends up not really tasting like conventional tea. It’s very strong, takes two cubes of sugar to calm it into a nice sweet treat, and really is the motor oil for conversation here. The apple variety takes no additional sugar (unless you’re Kristin) and is basically a liquid dessert.
Interestingly enough, the Turkish “fire-water” rakı (don’t you love those undotted i’s?) is also virtually undrinkable in raw form and is actually diluted with cool water. It turns from a clear, water-like liquor into a cloudy white solution. It’s licorice-flavored and can (while not too pleasant to sip on) be a virtual truth serum for the otherwise quite tactful Turks. Another interesting cultural institution.
Anyway, I’m going to try to enjoy the quiet for a while.
While I certainly have no intent to violate the gentlemen’s agreement to avoid talking about Cluster contributions, I will say that this part of the story was especially hard to work out because so many people seem to know so many things already.
The man in the business suit was aware of the meeting between Bowler/Barnaby and Linda, was clearly aware of what was being exchanged, and knew Linda’s relationship to Carlsberg Trust. Given that he, from the dialogue, is presumably closely associated with Amanutek, this is quite a bit of knowledge to deal with from a story standpoint.
I made a kind of mind map-style character chart plotting the relationships between the characters, which are already quite complex even at only the fifth fragment.
I have to say I really like Swansgrace as a tragic character. Between Lazarus and TREB, it’s hard to put a finger on the trajectory of the villains’ plot. I’m hoping my update helped this somewhat.
>Hi there Brandon, > >[REMOVED] is authorized by [REMOVED] to provide departure services of: > >5 nights of hotel and per diem > >14 days of rental car > >Air port transfer. > >As it is some months before you depart, please contact me a few weeks >before you are leaving so that I can assist. > >Regards, > >[REMOVED]
To make sure I’m not mixed up here, here’s me squatting in some ancient ruins:
I really want to see about understanding what makes a “smile” in music. My term, but there are just a few certain songs I know of that produce a kind of happiness-essence that I really enjoy discovering.
The chorus of Dave Matthews Band’s “The Stone” from Before These Crowded Streets is definitely one of them.
On the Contemporary Christian side of things, Chris Tomlin’s “Holy is the Lord” (Arriving) gets it when they hit the chorus the first time.
I would also submit “The Moon is Down” from Explosions in the Sky (Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Live Forever) as perhaps the supreme example. Right at 2:30 (it’s quite a long song, thankfully).
Black Lab gets a sad-happy smile in the “Gates of the Country” chorus (Your Body Above Me). That’s very Black Lab of them.
All four of these feature some kind of swell, which has to be a lot of it. They tend to have some kind of sound-wall thing going. These factors lead to it normally showing up in a chorus. It’s definitely a knack.
In accordance with my somewhat obsessive efforts lately to clear my personal to-do list, my fabled blog software is quickly reaching version 1.0. The Picasa and Google Code integration is working just right, and I only have a plugin to handle Cluster’s RSS feed left to complete tonight or tomorrow evening.
Actually writing Cluster is next on the to-do list, besides setting up a dropbox account to handle file serving for the blog (saving the need to develop a file manager for Efendi). I am kind of relieved to be writing content finally, given that this weekend featured two different projects both providing technological lily-gilding without ever touching actual story material.
I finally got a TrueCrypt volume set up to my liking to hold business documents, and I scanned quite a few new things in. I should have done this years ago: having a PDF of your birth certificate, passport, etc. can come in quite handy when you’re filling out forms online or otherwise.
My scheme for TrueCrypt is very emergency-focused, meaning I didn’t want some ridiculous 25-character password between an authorized someone and the data. So I took advantage of the “keyfile” functionality in the program to use a small encryption key placed on a tiny USB flash drive. If the drive is plugged in, the volume decrypts. If the key is absent, the program forbids access.
A cryptography expert will likely say this is kind of insecure. I tend to take what I feel is the ultimate pragmatic view on encryption, so I’m cool with whatever “risk” I am assuming here.
I plan to improve the process using this creative method, which makes sure my little key drive will always bind to drive K:. This could prevent some mix-ups if multiple drives were plugged in.
Efendi 1.0.0 is out! Take a look at the fancy feed integration… a Picasa link should be folded into the blog a bit down this page as long as this post is toward the top of the front page.
At this point, Sigma, Cluster, and Picasa updates will be provided whenever they show up.
In the great tradition of using slow days at work to hack on Cluster, I am probably about half finished with a Python/Werkzeug port of Cluster 2.0 for the new server. This implementation will feature previewing of posts to catch formatting issues, the much better markdown2.py text processor that uneventfully powers Efendi, a superior backend due to using Python’s loveable built-in functionality for making things nice, and a general lack of PHP cruft that plagued the old version.
I also have, in a promotional Shell FuelSave notebook (get the most out of every drop!), sketched out the final architectural component for Efendi. Since this addition (RSS feed aggregation) will in part actually serve to integrate Cluster into the main blog view, I hope to roll it out maybe this weekend.
This addition should also allow for announcements of new contributions to our growing collection of photos, Sigma code commits, and the like. This is very exciting, and it will take Efendi to a 1.0 that I can rest easily having completed.
Once those are completed, the Sigma Designer app is astonishingly one of the more prominent things on my to-do list at this point.
