Blogs Are Born of Boredom
I’ve been remiss not to post for so long, but therein lies the paradox of the blog: the most newsworthy times offer the least chances for reflection.
Turkey is great, and interesting, all the time. Settling in at work, I’m feeling the personal style adjustments I will need to be making. Everything here is fast-paced and last-minute. But somehow things always seem to order themselves and work out okay in the end. Even being as tight as I am, I’m adjusting alright. It’s nice to be here, so my whole situation operates under this style. Before, the mix of US and Turkey was very stressful to manage.
With chaotic execution befitting newly-adjusted residents of Turkey, Kristin and I both managed to get local cellphones today: mine from work (!) and hers from the local storefront in a nice mall (Astoria) near my office. See what I mean? Work furiously and everything will happen in proper order, with little management.
The phones are with the same provider, so we’re getting a steal on her pay-as-you-go plan. Something like $0.03 per minute mobile-to-mobile. The account setup fee was a whopping 5 YTL ($3.33). We went the way of the tariff-laying chicken.
Phones are everything over here. You can add minutes to your prepaid plan within the Metro (subway) system, even. The contracts seem to range from reasonable to brutal ripoffs. Even exploring the option of an invoiced plan is out of the question until we get a “permanent” mailing address!
The weather has been completely miserable since we got here, until late this morning, when the sun came out — literally for the very first time since Saturday. I’ve been under said weather, with a fairly persistent cold that has me wishing it wasn’t considered impolite to blow one’s nose in public here. Lots of trips to the restroom for scratchy paper towels.
At work we type on localized (okay, localised) Turkish keyboards, with the key mapping remaining US. This means about every form of punctuation is reached by pressing a button with a different symbol on it. It’s like setting the keyboard to Dvorak for punctuation only.
Non-touch typists are in perpetual hell. I’ve seen people using Caps Lock as Shift and many other crimes of inefficiency. Some people do use the Turkish mappings, but for me this would require re-learning where “i” is on the keyboard, as an undotted I “uh”not“ee”-sound key lies in the normal spot.
The language thing is much better now. Verbs in this language are an orderly mess, meaning they are regular but daunting in quirks and complexity. I’m quite close to attaining a level of proficiency that will at least allow me to express desires when attempting to buy things. I know some numbers, and I have a good “street sense” for the language, meaning I know “pharmacy,” “street,” and advertising things like “bargain.”
I can limp through a newspaper picking out connective words, familiar suffixes, and the occasional noun. Things are coming along, and Rosetta Stone should vastly accelerate the progress.
I have officially traded laptops with Kristin, giving her the Macbook and I taking the Sony Vaio (which feels like a boat anchor after carrying around a 12” lightweight around for a year or so). I always knew I would end up with the Vaio somehow, and it seems to be working fine.
I’m in the limbo period of an emotional buying experience, this time with the Asus EEE PC. I’m thinking they need another version or two to get the right mix of aesthetics, features, and usability. So, I’m just going to enjoy not spending money on computers for a while and use what we have. I hope to expand my use of the Palm TX to complement a few of the other portable devices I have on the roster at this point. One thing I’m missing (Kristin has it with her new cell) is the ability to Skype over 802.11g with a device palm-sized or so.
I would wholeheartedly recommend the Sansa clip to just about anyone, but especially for justly DRM content like online-downloadable library books. Now if I could only improve my blind instincts picking out authors of books to download. The general poor quality of sci-fi/fantasy always stuns me…
The national championship game, from our point of view, is at 3 AM on Friday morning, so that’s not going to happen. And, there’s no 9⁄80 here, so I work every workday. We’re so spoiled to that in the US Shell world. We’re happy Orb users, so we can watch various family Media Center computers’ recordings and live feeds over the internet costlessly. So, don’t mention a score until Saturday morning!