trailer estates: YOUR MORE RESPONSIVE CANADIATES; FOR T.E. BOARD 2005

Who are you going to vote for and why?

The prior advice was from a friend. This time, it is from a previously unknown person who sent me an email:

I saw your advertisement on your website and I thought that you were a carefull person.
But if you claim thatyou are a carefull person who walks around,travel around the world you are not right because you dont write about negative things in the places you went and I always see you complaining about the things in Turkey I did not like the way you write everything as I think you write one sided .I want you to compare the things that is happening around Turkey and think about it firstly and than the reactions of the people and be brief please about what you want to mean .If you are in the aim of writing bad things at first think about the events in your country or another country of the world .if you add this e-mail on your website ı will be your sites member and in this way you may claim that you were optimistic about Turkey and show it to everybody .

The other week I signed up to Skype, an Internet telephony service that is taking on the world.

The big thing about Skype is calls to other Skype accounts all across the world are free. Also, the sound quality is meant to be good, much better than previous free or cheap internet telephony providers. If you have a Skype account leave your handle in the comments. My handle is “taheny”. All I need now is a headset and I’m set.

PS: interesting and disheartening to see the UAE has blocked Skype’s website.

Even now, 6 months after transferring my blog from http://users.chariot.net.au/~jktaheny/blogger/blog.htm to http://taheny.com, Google still ranks my old website address above this one for most searches. It is annoying, as I want visitors to come here and read ‘Joe’s up to date Ramblings’.

After some contemplation, today I added a Robots.txt file to my old website. In theory, the following piece of script should stop all search engine robots visiting the old blog:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

If the text works and the search robots (including Google) don’t visit my old blog, I hope and expect it to drop out of the search rankings to be replaced with my current blog. We will see.

When looking for Robots.txt advice, I came across the Whitehouse’s Robots.txt page with over 2000 lines of text. This many lines in a Robots.txt is not uncommon for large websites (whitehouse.gov has over 600,000 pages).

What I did find strange was almost all the pages contained in the text were Iraq-related. Here is a random screenshot:

I know Iraq has been a major issue, but surely, most of the Whitehouse web pages are not Iraq-related. If this is the case, why does the Whitehouse not want many Iraq pages spidered? Are they embarrassed by the mess they have made?

UPDATE: The Whitehouse/Robots.txt/Iraq issue has been covered many times before.

The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has recently revised their extremely cautious Turkey travel advice. Reading the advice, one could get the perception that Turkey is a terrifyingly dangerous place to visit. In my experience, the opposite is true.

On a funnier note, DFAT accidentally released the following travel advice for Perth, south western Australia’s main city and the most isolated city in the world:

This is a message to let you know that Perth is dangerous at this time of year. xxx.

As a Perth Council spokesman commented in reply:

The weather is a bit dodgy

If visiting London wasn’t enough, I am in for another jolt when my new flatmate, Dragos, arrives in the next week.

Dragos is a Romanian AIESEC trainee coming to Mersin to work for Intertim, my boss’s business associate’s company.

For most of the past three years I have lived by myself, in my own private castle, doing what I want, whenever I want it. The freedom has been great. When Dragos comes, I will have to share the house, share the fridge, consider him instead of just thinking about myself, introduce him to Mersin and Turkey and make sure he settles in comfortably.

I am really, really looking forward to the challenge, lifestyle modifications involved, learning experience and fun I will have when Dragos comes. I can’t wait!

However, before anything happens I have to rearrange the house…The Final Countdown is on until Dragos arrives (and the song is also currently playing on the computer).

Tonight I was going to leave the office early, get a haircut, go for a walk and do a load of washing. However, I have an mp3 CD containing almost 400 megabytes of music playing on the computer.

Orhan very kindly prepared the CD of my self-selected 80s music list.

The memories… I’m only part of the way through the CD and I hope I’m I can drag my self away from the office before the five or six hours of music finishes.

Musically, I didn’t actually develop my tastes until the 1990s and I’m much more of a 90s person. However, for most of 00s I’ve been away from “civilisation” (for civilisation, read: English-language music variety), only exposed to current pop schlock and the odd hit and memory.

This lack of exposure to non-mainstream English-language music has lead, funnily enough, to a greater appreciation of 80s music. Getting old could also be a factor in this musical change 🙂

On another musical note, Peter, the other Australian in Mersin, has ordered a Creative Zen Micro 5 GB MP3 Player. Once he gets it, I will have a look and see how it goes. For a person whose CD player fell of the fridge and who has a limited selection of CDs in Mersin, an mp3 player with a decent hard disk (5 gb is enough for more than 1,000 songs) looks very attractive.

(An adaptation of the song name currently playing on the computer: Video Killed The Radio Star.)

UPDATE (02:00, 2005/05/12): I haven’t been able to Bust A Move and I’m still here listening to the final moment of the CD. Some of the songs I have’t heard for years.

It has now just finished and I’m off home to bed!

On Sunday work’s employees from both Adana and Mersin convoyed (no hitchhiking) to Findikpinari northwest of Mersin for a picnic.

The barbecued marinated chicken, sucuk (Turkish sausage), onion and green peppers were delicious.

We ate under the shade of a carob tree with spring daisy and poppy flowers, orange orchards, tomato houses, beehives and the odd tortoise providing company.

The ladies posing: (from the left) Ummuhan, Buket, Sebiha and Hatice.

Chef Serkan. Note the three barbecues used.

A lone poppy surrounded by daisies. Under the vegetation in the top right of the photo was a small tortoise.