Unguided Blog

I am back, finally! Being unemployed for so long had taken its toll and I had to take a vacation to shake off all the dust. Fortunately, living in Turkey gives some privileges, so I did not have to take a long distance flight, bored with complicated hotel bookings, transfers at an airport in strange hours of the day, or night.

However, I am picky when it comes to where to go, if it is summer time. I have some rules, or so claim a few of my friends. I call them habits. I admit, it is sometimes difficult to explain to those who have not been born by the sea, but those who have will probably sympathize with me.

So, without further ado, my rules, written or unwritten:

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I came across this at Apache. Too bad the blog was suspended.

Warning: Consult your doctor before using medication.

A discussion somewhere has taken me back to a long gone era. Since all holes were fixed and sunlight could not get in, my mind kept wandering to a time not known or forgotten by many I should say, alas. To the Golden Age of the BBS’s, the bulletin board systems, so to speak. They all of a sudden flourished all around the world but especially in USA and Europe. Run by enthusiasts in their homes, usually with custom equipment and a modem, they could barely handle more than eight people online simultaneously, and mind you, eight was a good number.

Some of them reached to such a fame and recognition that they had followers calling internationally. And those international calls, being expensive at the time, created, well, the sublime art of phreaking. Those phone charges had to be avoided. Most being teenagers, many did not have the luxury of paying for them.

Apart from those touchy issues above, they created a literature of their own, a unique culture. With their text files, the ASCII art, they were the pioneers of blogging.

I remembered a text-file named “Fun with Unix”. Originally written and uploaded to alt.folklore.computers by Charlie Gibb on 29 Apr 1991, this text-file was a classic example of the era. Of course, some commands will not produce the same results in most modern Linux shells but you are free to give them a try. I have removed the usual prompt with a dot for easier reading. Lines without a dot are the shell’s responses. Kind of cute if you consider all those were done without a mouse in the command line.
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I can never understand what is wrong with the Americans and their obsession with acronyms. My first encounter with them was years ago, in an inter-company board meeting. Dressed casual as previously instructed, we were sitting around a big U-shaped table. At the open edge of the table was a screen on which various slides about development, financials and various stuff would be shown.

The gentleman, well, supposedly higher ranking than the rest of us took the microphone and a parade of acronyms began. One after the other, non-stop, a myriad of acronyms were being shot at us, without showing any sign of mercy or regret: kpi, pnl, bs, pso, tsr, roi, abc, def.. The list was long. Do not get me wrong. I knew what he was talking about, that bs stood for balance sheet, not bullshit for example, but the scene was so surreal that it was like we were orbiting the Earth in a shuttle, and all those acronyms were floating in the cabin at zero gravity. At one point, I almost opened my mouth to catch and swallow one (Now you know what goes on inside those board meetings; making thousands per hour while you are sweating for a few bucks is not so easy). I poured myself a cup of coffee, instead.

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It was Lala who got me in this shopping frenzy. She gave a mouth drooling account of her feelings about watching the storm and enjoying nature’s symphony entitled “Falling Rain” (her words, not mine) in her post Like Mother, Like Son.

After reading the article, I peacefully went to bed. In summer we hardly see thunder storms, let alone tornadoes here. The temperature is hardly below 35 degrees (Celsius, do the math yourselves to convert to Fahrenheit), humidity always high. It has a peculiar kind of appeal, though. And I woke up to a day with dark clouds gathering and a medium northerly wind, reminding me to take two aspirins in order to prevent the expected headache to come whenever there is a sharp drop in the temperature.

I started to prepare the breakfast, and took the plates, glasses, and the tea pot (I do it, the tea I mean, very well by the way) out to the garden like I often do in this time of year. Everything was alright until halfway through the breakfast. Then, a few things started to bother me. The old wooden table, chairs I repaired a hundred times, the fading color of the umbrella on the other side, the window panes crying “Paint me,” even the birds on the now old bench were singing differently. As the wind increased its intensity, so did the itch. There was only one way to stop it.

I got back inside, fired up the PC, started googling for companies offering garden furniture, patio products, etc. Found a good looking one with really good looking patio furniture and garden decor called Patio Preserve, and picked up 5000 dollar worth of their product line for my shopping cart. When I reached the payment page, I learned that they were not shipping to Turkey but only 50 states of USA, and etc, etc. While I was muttering lovely phrases of the Turkish language one after the other (language is important in swearing; imagine doing it in French and you’ll understand. Some languages are simply not fit for the job, but Turkish is) my itch was already over.

The truth is I already knew they were not shipping to Turkey. The first thing I check in on-line shopping is the shipping policy of the company, but it’s a trick I learned from my mother and improvised for the cyber world. She used to go out for shopping whenever she felt depressed or angry, although there was really, I mean really nothing to shop for. She told me “It’s the voyage, not the destination that counts.” Apparently it works!

Garden safely and naturally with the Arbico Organics!