Category: life

Since 5 weeks I am living on the Büyükada island about 1.5 hours by ferry from the European centre of Istanbul. The first thing you notice about the island is its quietness and calm. This is mainly due to the ban of combustion engine driven individual transport – in other words, everybody walks, cycles or uses one of the horse-drawn carriages. The posh crowd hovers around on silent electro scooters or has a tiny electric engine strapped to their bikes. A few delivery vans, construction trucks or police cars cause noise and dust, but that’s it. Even the dogs sleep in the middle of the street. Thousands of cats fight with each other over territory or with sea gulls or stray dogs over food.

I came here through Ludwig from Tunel Art Café in Istanbul. He is part of Naya Retreats, a meditation and wellness centre on the island. In exchange for a little good tech karma for his various projects I can stay at Naya and do my work over the Internet. The house (some photos) is mainly empty at the moment apart from Murat the organic gardener, his friend Ayda and me. Because the island is a popular destination for Istanbulians especially on sunny days there are always some visitors around the house. On Fridays I usually go to town to do city things and stay over at my German friends place (hello Cox, Sahide, Lena, Heike, Eike, Lukas!). After a day or two I get dizzy from the urban madness and I go back to the island of the exiled (various Ottoman royalties and Leon Trotsky lived here).

So I did last weekend. When I came back to the island on Saturday afternoon, together with my Lebanese-Canadian friend Lamia, the bike that I left at the ferry terminal was gone. Long fingers there and long faces here. Not the loss of the bike, but the idea of the island not being so peaceful after all made me sad.

This morning I was at the ferry terminal again and had another look at the place where I last saw the bike. There were two police men discussing something, pointing around. I walked up to one of them and said, hey my bike got stolen – right here. He looked me up and down, mused for a moment, and then waved me towards the nearby balustrade to the sea and pointed down. I looked, and there was a red bike in the water. I shook my head, thought ‘ha, that would have been funny’, but nay, this is not the bike I am missing, mine is silver. He gesticulated, have another look, there are two bikes. And, heureka – there it was! I started laughing from happiness, still high from the wonderfully sunny and happy weekend, and about the irony of it all (the last two days I anxiously looked after every silverish bike passing by, ready to jump at the thief). I think the young police people were a little puzzled by me being so happy about someone throwing my bike into the sea. After a short wait help in the form of a boat hook arrived. We pulled the bikes out together, me climbing around the balustrade, 5 police people happy about the action pulling the hook. A person walking by said some disturbed person or some kid does this from time to time. At this spot, and over there at the other ferry. Another passer-by offered me translation.

The bikes were brought to the police station, dripping water from the seaweed caught in spokes and gear-wheels. A report was filled out and under supervision of a police guard with a big-ass machine gun a lower rank cop and me removed all plants from the bikes. The young guy with the gun seemed to have forgotten the purpose of that thing in his hand from holding it all day long. When I asked him not to point it at me, because it scares the hell out of me, he first did not understand but then smiled, ‘Oh, this? Right, sure!’. After a few moments the gun barrel was up at stomach height again, because he had already forgotten my fear and because it obviously is most comfortable to hold it like this. After half an hour I got my ID card and the bike back and there I was, the happiest boy in Istanbul, slowly cycling home, stopping at a bench in the sun, over-viewing the misty sea, eating a simit as sweet as kisses.. 🙂 Trust in the people on this island, humanity as a whole and my reality – restored. He he.

Because some teenagers of Greek and Turkish nationality insulted each other on YouTube the site has now been banned for most of Turkey for insulting national Turkish pride. That is just ridiculous. Why don’t they just forbid TV? Not that I would mind.. Anyway, for those of you in Turkey that really can’t live without YouTube, check out an open proxy near you or use Tor. A good example of how the Internet can protect freedom of expression and freedom of information through its various channels.

Update: The block had been lifted a few days later – mainly because Google/YouTube quickly censored the prank videos themselves. This is not the first time “Don’t be evil” Google chooses the way of least resistance in governmental censorship issues, especially Google’s self-censorship in China remains controversial.

I just came back from a small trip to Kavalla in north-eastern Greece and Ayvalik, a small fisher town built by Greek people on the Turkish Aegean coast. It was good to be on the road again for a while, eat some dust, camp out and get the kick of the car slowing down for you.

Along the way I was picked up by several old men in trucks or vans (only speaking Turkish/Greek), a burek baker delivering his stuff to the border station at night, a car trailer van (an interesting breed of drivers), a German couple driving a huge caravan with a tiny dog inside (caravans never stop usually, but this one I overtook a few times in faster cars, and the third time they thought that is quite amusing and picked me up), a young accountant paying the ferry for me (thanks again!), two times a police man off duty (one going to attend the heart transplantation of his four year old child, the other driving to the funeral of his sister), two bus wind shield technicians speeding down the roads carrying four wind shields 1000 EUR a piece and a gas truck driver (“When this blows up there is nothing you can do, but to drive away very fast. Several square kilometres will be wasteland.”).

The border crossing into Greece was somewhat special (I had to leave and re-enter the country to renew my tourist visa after 3 months). It was dark already when I walked the last few kilometres towards the border and an enormous wind made it almost impossible to walk. There I was, flying around the empty straight road, slowly advancing forward, mummed up in my clothes, trying to hitch-hike while being pushed off the street. It must have been a frightening sight for the — very few — cars passing by. I had my fun and played with the storm until the baker man stopped and gave me a lift. The structures at the border station were shaking in the wind, toll bars breaking, things were flying around. Everyone had expressions of “yey, there is not going to be school tomorrow” in their faces and waved me through without hassle.

The night on my way to Ayvalik I was stuck at some petrol station in the middle of nowhere. There were about 150 km to go, so I camped on a field behind a little hill. The next morning, I walked down to the street, literally the first car stopped and brought me all the way to Ayvalik. Insert some cosmic energy here please. 🙂

Hitch-hiking worked very well during the trip, as soon as I was standing at the right spot I never waited longer than half an hour. But to get to the right spot sometimes took a few kilometres of walking. After Bengue joined me on the way back from Ayvalik to Istanbul today actually waiting times dramatically reduced to minutes and usually one of the first 5 cars stopped.

Oh, about the headline: It’s my birthday today and on Friday I will have a little party at the Tuenel art cafe in Taksim, Istanbul. Come along if you read this!

I am selling a domain name on Ebay. Read the full story in the item description (scroll down for English version).

This is wonderful, Greenpeace started a bold campaign adressing the computer hardware industry and Apple computers in particular, who is ranking last on their list for green electronics, demanding their products to be better recyclable and free from toxic substances. The campaign uses all sorts of Web 2.0 viral channels including a fake keynote video on YouTube with Apple founder Steve Jobs announcing the Green Apple. Not to be missed is their special “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ad. As you would expect, Greenpeace takes the company by its weakest point — their image — and uses well-known symbols of Apple’s fame and redirects their energy with the help of subvertising techniques. Very clever, and I am sure Steve will react to it as soon as “greenness” becomes a desired feature in computers. First reactions of the commercial Apple crowd were mixed though: A Greenpeace booth got evicted from MacExpo London last October, but activists could roam freely at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco a few days ago. So, help making the computer industry go sustainable by spreading the word!

Michael calls it Movement Research in Public Spaces. A bunch of people meet somewhere in the city, jump around, play imaginative scenes, roll around the floor and do other odd stuff that makes passers-by stop, kids cheer, groups of Japanese tourists clap. Today’s improvisation meeting was the highlight of a series of get-togethers like that during this week. Ten moving improvisationists showed up, I was amongst them, and walked — partly with their eyes closed — to a small square next to the Hagia Sofia mosque/church and let everything out for about an hour. I met wonderful people and connected with them instantly. Michael contacted me through my friend Dante before he came to Istanbul a week ago and since then I am discovering the contemporary dance scene with him. There are more little studios hidden in the houses around the Galata tower than you would think. Expressing one’s emotions and impulses through dance is such a pure and self-healing activity.

In graphical programming you might want to rotate things at some point. I am not a mathematician, so I was happy when I figured out how to do it. Here is some pseudo code which you can adapt to the programming language of your choice.

xRot = xCenter + cos(Angle) * (x - xCenter) - sin(Angle) * (y - yCenter)
yRot = yCenter + sin(Angle) * (x - xCenter) + cos(Angle) * (y - yCenter)

Example in Processing (Java needed)

xRot and yRot give the rotated point, xCenter and yCenter mark the point that you want to rotate around, x and y mark the original point. Note that in most programming languages you will need to give Angle in radian, so multiply your degree value with Pi devided by 180 (Angle = Degree * PI / 180). Have fun spinning things around!

Another piece of generative animation called Workers out on a saturday night 😉 can now be viewed. I spent most of last night trying to figure out how to rotate coordinates “by foot”, then kind of understood and went on to the rotation functions build into processing which really make life much easier. Next up: Some 3D action!

A few weeks ago I attended a workshop about the Java based visual arts programming kit Processing. Have a look at my first Processing creations in my sandbox (you need Java enabled in your browser).

A few years ago a friend of mine and me started a small company called “netzteil”, running coin-operated Linux Internet kiosks in German youth hostels. The burst of the first Internet bubble unfortunately took the company down with it two years later. One of the people involved now wrote an article about it (German only). You can see the cute machines in my sandbox. Enjoy!