Author: Emre Girici

Privyet Moskva!!

I recently purchased the Site Analytics tool from my hosting company. It’s a cool product, delivers tons of reports, graphs and etc.

I’m regularly checking the top visitors report. It feels like a nice game between countries and cities, and the result is quite interesting. Moscow is smashing in the competition!!

Do I have a secret society regularly stalking my web page in Moscow?

California is also quite high, but the main reason is the San Jose IP addresses that my colleagues and I get in the office.

And unfortunately, Istanbul (and also the rest of Turkey) is way behind in competition.

How to be Good?

Here’s an interesting section from Nick Hornby’s “How to be Good”:

“This is what it feels like: you walk into a room and the door locks behind you and you spend a little while panicking, looking around for a key or a window or something, and then when you realize that there’s no way out, you start to make the best of what you’ve got. You try out the chair, and you realize that it’s actually not comfortable, and there’s a TV, and a couple of books, and there’s a fridge stocked with food. You know, how bad can it be? And me asking for a divorce was the panic, but very soon I get to the stage of looking around what I’ve got. And what I’ve got turns out to be two lovely kids, a nice house, a good job, a husband who doesn’t beat me and presses all the right buttons on the lift… I can do this, I think, I can live this life.”

Consolidation

Having spent the last year of my work life focusing on three magic words: Consolidation, Virtualization and Automation, i asked to myself – why I don’t apply this to my life as well? :p

So I started with Consolidation.

There’s a nice trick of WordPress. You can add a new post, and change the date of it to a previous date. For example, I can add this blog entry, and set it as if it’s been posted in 1965! That’s good isn’t it? Then I decided to consolidate all my old blogs on emregirici.com by copy pasting every former blog post with its original date.

All the posts from 2009 and backwards are from my blogspot and msn space pages, and are in Turkish. So if there’s something interesting for you, and you don’t understand, just use Google Translate or ask me 🙂

Tropa de Elite

QUESTION 1 (10 points):

The logo on the left belongs to what?

A) An anarchist armed organization in Nikaragua.

B) My heavy metal band in high school.

C) Elite special forces in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.

D) None.

ɔ :ɹǝʍsuɐ

Well, weird isn’t it? I wasn’t aware of BOPE – Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (Special Police Operations Battalion) till I watched Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad) last Sunday..

This elite force unit is founded in 1978 in the state of Rio de Janeiro for one reason: fighting with the crime in the favelas of Rio. You’ll say, why is that? Don’t they have some regular police organization there? Yes, they have.. but there are many neighborhoods, full of criminals armed with the heaviest machine guns and artillery, (probably) not willing to see any cop around. Some favelas and crime bases are at the peaks of hills, not reachable any conventional police vehicle, and so on. So there’s a need of a special force, that has been trained as a commando, trained under the craziest and hardest conditions.

Their policy is “shoot to kill”, which means that they kill the suspect without any questioning if human life is in danger. They are famous for being ruthless against crime, and also receiving criticisms from several organizations, such as Amnesty International, regarding the excessive amount of violence they use.

It’s easy to spot them with their all-black uniform, whereas the regular police units wear blue.

Forgot to mention about the movie, Tropa de Elite… It’s a must-watch.. based on a true story about the crime in Rio. The story captures even from the first minute. Soundtracks are perfect. There are some kind of brutal scenes, so be aware.

The next movie (or I must say documentary) that I’ll watch.. which is also about BOPE and crime in Rio is, Bus 147.

Technical Difficulties

Damn… I thought I screwed up the website at some point.

After installing the WordPress 3.0 on my domain, I got a weird fatal error. I first lost my connection to WordPress admin site, then to the entire site 🙂

Finally I managed to recover everything after some series of installing/uninstalling stuff. It looks like there’s no post/comment missing. But several plugins don’t work properly with WordPress 3.0. Until I do something, Youtube and Vimeo video links will not be viewed properly.

Anyway, just check these forum threads if you have a WordPress based blog on your own domain, and if you have issues after upgrading to WordPress 3.0.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/411365?replies=10#post-1556093

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/298403

El Secreto De Sus Ojos

“A guy can change anything. His face, his home, his family, his girlfriend, his religion,his God. But there’s one thing he can’t change. He can’t change his passion…”

I just watched a movie and I don’t actually know how i’m going to go to the bed and sleep. I felt like writing about that just after watching.

El Secreto de sus Ojos was the movie that I was planning to see for several weeks. Being awarded with 2009 Best Foreign Film Oscar, #182 on IMDb Top-250… I was quite sure that it would be entertaining. Since I would easily be able to place 5-6 Latin American/Spanish films to my top 20, I was ready to rate this one with high marks as well.

And I hopefully didn’t fail. This was one of the best scenarios I’ve ever seen. The plot, characters, quotes, music, Buenos Aires in 70’s… the famous Huracan-Racing game scene… the elevator scene… change of “temo” to “te amo”… okay that’s too much spoiler already…

By the way, the stadium scene… Well, it’s obvious that it’s impossible to shoot such a sequence without the use of 3d effects. But it was so clean and smooth that no one could be able to find any discontinuity in the frames… From the bird’s view over the stadium, till the close-up on Esposito’s face. Go to http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5559 to see how this 4:57 min long scene involves great art work.

We All Need Eggs

“…After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I… I realized what a terrific person she was, and… and how much fun it was just knowing her; and I… I, I thought of that old joke, y’know, the, this… this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy; he thinks he’s a chicken.” And, uh, the doctor says, “Well, why don’t you turn him in?” The guy says, “I would, but I need the eggs.” Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y’know, they’re totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and… but, uh, I guess we keep goin’ through it because, uh, most of us… need the eggs.”

What a great movie it was..