well, well, well, i missed out on a lot of things, but here is the movie. the file is called "last chance" since that was the working title, i found out just now, when checking the reencoded version that the new title is "love at last sight". i have to apologize that the quality of this online version is quite bad, but I didn't take the time to read the mencoder manual but just followed some easy tutorial from the gentoo people. but no more beating around the bush here is the link. Warning: File has 47mb!

until shortly ago, i didn't use podcasts. i was even thinking that it is probably just some kind of internet bubble, hailed by all the geeks but hardly usefull to anyone else. i also thought that audiobooks are an invention for the lazy, probably an attack on all those who read, a symptom of the intellectual demise of society. well i have been wrong. bored to death by turkish tv and having no books. i finally started to follow the links on boingboing to several podcasts that publish short fiction on the net. first of all were Cory Doctorow on craphound.com and escape pod, both podcasts where you get nice short fiction, mostly sf and some fantasy and horror. the stuff is of varying quality but mostly quite good. escapepod has far better sound quality since i suppose some professional sound editing is involved, the authors as well as narrators change from story to story. all in all nice little stories, perfect to accompany me on a boring trip from asia to europe or back. the real addiction though has started when i entered the world of scott siegler. i started listening to ancestor last wednesday and finished it on saturday, well this is a hole novel and goes for probably something like 14h, cut into small pieces of approx. 40min with some blabla by the author and some readers comments. the book is probably one of the most thrilling things i have heard or read in the last couple of years, and there is more. because it took me only till sunday to finish the first 14 episodes of his newest book infection, and am now desperately waiting for him to release the next part. well and in the mean time i subscribed to his first novel earth core, at http://www.podiobooks.com, which is a great place since there you can subscribe to a whole bunch of other podcast novels as well. and of course everything is for free. thankyou internet, i think i'm finally going to stop watching tv.

So Philipp actually has a blog, i knew it, but so far didn't have the url

... for my room. ;-) link

I haven't been blogging for a very long time. But it's worldcup now and although I'm not seriously interested in it this caught my attention and seems to be worth blogging: WorldCup MCMC Simulation

lately me and murat went to take some movies. i've been to this place before. it's similar to those socialistic shopping malls i've seen in macedonia, maybe worse. some 70's concrete building inside three floors randomly filled with small shops. but most important there is security at the entrance. metal detectors and two uniforms. the first time i was there i had to leave my swiss army knife with them. i know this is a serious weapon. but when we went there this time, i left my weapon at home, i had a better look at the shops in that mall. and well, the first shop was a shop for knifes the second one for guns.

9 days since my last post. quite some things have happened. i've been to europe twice for going out and from what i've seen istanbul is quite the city for party. we've been to rock bars including live music (one garage punck-rock band (great party) and some girl-rock-band (instrument-wise better but partywise boring)) as well as to a home-party organised by other exchange students. but overall i have to admit that this short peep into istanbul's nightlive doesn't allow me to give a qualified statement on what's really going on here. anyway my main field of activity has been other than going out lately. the weather hasn't been this nice and i guess we have crazy march what is equivalent to crazy april in the freezing cold north. so i've spent alot of time in front of my computer. reading a lot into different topics of statistics especially econometrics and bayesian inference. those who follow my del.icio.us might have noticed.

google's kindness to redirect me to their local service wherever i use the net from has pissed me of already before. i simple don't want to use the german or whatever google when i go to google.com only because i am in austria. well now i'm in turkey and i'm redirected to google.com.tr so everything is in turkish. well i don't care so much about that because i now what should be where even if i don't understand the language, but for convinience i tried to change the language today, again everything in turkish, so i guessed what should be where and where i could possibly choose the language. that's not so easy cause there are quite a few selectors where you can do that, but not enaugh the languages are also in turkish and if that's not enough inglizce is not in the alphabetically right place somewhere behind the "H" languages and somewhat before the "J" languages it's somewhere at the bottom. great job.

last two days the weather was absolutely wonderful, and i spent a lot of time walking by the sea, or at least sitting there an drinking tea. it's really great it even makes reading about harmonic processes joyful ;). had my first lecture yesterday, operations research II. did expect something completely different since someone told me the professor is good and in the picture on his website he looked quite young. in fact this picture must be quite old. but i guess the teaching was ok. in class they didn't have tables only chairs with small tables attached. the room was quit full approximately 40 students. but the strangest thing was that as some people where late we were assigned to write an essay on the costs and benefits of being punctual. well i'm considering that as a joke.

so now i'm 4 days here. what have i seen so far, not much, well i've changed continents once since i live in asia now. but haven't left kadikoy so far. weather is not so nice at the moment ;) we do have around 5-10 degrees but cloudy. so i'm not very eager to leave the house. anyway this website has to be completed some time and i'll be in istanbul for 4-5 months more. tomorrow i'll probably do some sightseeing with murat since it's his free day. we'll see how that turns out. our communication is getting better we reached the state where we sit in the kitchen and show words in the dictionary to each other so another reason to stay home, learn turkish. or better leave now and do this at some coffee shop. well first i'd need to change money. it's incredibly expensive here. well about the same as vienna, but i expected a lot cheaper.