Last night my new flatmate, Romanian AIESEC trainee Dragos, arrived in Mersin on the Adana train. He has settled in fine so far. After a walk along the coast to the centre and back home, Dragos reheated a delicious (but extremely fatty) pork dish his Mother cooked a few days ago in Romania.
Cheese and brown bread accompanied the pork.
On the right hand column, below all the other links, I have added BBC news feeds for the Middle East and Europe. The news stories are updated often and I hope the service is useful.
I used RSS Digest to develop the Javascript code from the RSS feed.
Update: I have replaced the Middle East and Europe feeds with a general news feed, including a brief description of each story.
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
