Org gelişmeleri

Ekim ortasında Yamaha A300 TR orgu aldım ve ilk özel dersimizi de yaptık. Klasik gitar bilgimin önemli faydasını gördüm: Notadan çalabiliyor, yüzük ve serçe parmaklarımı birbirinden bağımsız hareket ettirebiliyorum. Şu an On Top of Old Smokey parçasını çalabilecek durumdayım:



Günde yaklaşık 1 saat çalışıyorum. Müzik çalışmalarımı belgelemek için Şamil's Music isimli ayrı bir blog oluşturdum.

Blogspot ve engelli memleket

Nisan ayındaki blogspot'un yasaklanması öngörüm sonunda gerçekleşti. Sürpriz olmadı tabi, sıradaki adayım Facebook. Yetkilileri göreve çağırıyorum, vatandaşa tuvalet duvarlarındaki "bunu yazan tosun" mecrası dışında kendini ifade imkanı verilmesin lütfen, körpe dimağlar zehirlenmesin, hep sıfır noktasında durulsun!


Okuma parçası: Söyleyemediklerimiz

Cool Book Review

That's how a book review should be (a review of Good to Great, review title "Why GtG is a brain-dead book"):

Books like Good to Great prey on the fact that you napped through statistics--if you'd been caffeined up during those dull lectures, you'd have remembered the fallacy of composition (the coin flipper's exercise), the distinction between random outcomes and relevant ones, and the enormous difference between what's causal and what's coincidental. Look, there's nothing new in business: there are only a few basic strategies, and only a few macro and microeconomic truths. Ever notice how fads like supply side economics, the Japanization of America, the endless bull market, the end of history, The New Economy and the Macarena all seemed to collapse under the weight of basic market concepts you already knew? So SNAP OUT OF IT, gulp down that double espresso, go back to your old and boring (but still accurate and useful) Michael Porter, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Benjamim Graham, and Burton Malkiel, and stop chasing misallocated or downright blockheaded metaphors from Who Moved My Cheese, The Art of War and poor, misunderstood Charles Darwin, and for God's sake, please take a pass on this Three Card Monte of a book.

Lesson: Most reviewers are plain dumb. Always make sure you read the one star (i.e. poor) reviews of popular books. You can also look at the other reviews of the same person to get an idea of what he likes. I myself once felt into the trap of buying a business book by looking at positive reviews. Later, I wrote the following review for Creating Contagious Commitment:

You could sum all of this book's content in just one page, even one paragraph: Design processes on the basis of usability. Include in process design activities people who will use the process. If you don't convince people about the merits of a new process, they won't use it, worse they will sabotage it. Once the process catches momentum, it will spread quickly. Now, if you repeat this a thousand times with slightly different sentences, add a thousand "tipping point" phrases, a lot of tables and graphs of questionable use, voila, you have a book. It is a wonder to me how it got such a high rating.

You can apply this lesson to everything you buy, like hotel bookings. Negative reviews usually yield deeper insight.

Spotçular Çarşısı

Fatih sayesinde haberimiz oldu, Arda sayesinde bilgilendik: Ulus'ta İtfaiye meydanı denilen yere yakın spotçular çarşısı var. Tüm dükkanları 1 saatte gezebilirisiniz. Özelliği yeni beyaz eşya ve elektronik cihazları piyasanın yarısına yakın fiyatlarla alabilmeniz. Önceleri "çalıntı mal mı yoksa?", "defoludur", "garantisi yoktur" gibi çamurlar atmak istedik pahallı pahallı yaptığımız alışverişleri haklı çıkarmak için. Heyhat, ekşi sözlük der ki:

4. Beyaz eşya ve elektronikte ülkenin o anki ekonomik koşullarına göre tüketiciye %40-50'lere kadar indirim şeklinde yansıyan ticaret biçimi. likit paraya ihtiyacı olan yetkili bayii malını piyasa fiyatının oldukça altına spotçulara satar, fabrikaya taksitle satılmış gibi gösterir, her ay taksit tutarını fabrikaya öder. beyaz eşya firmalarının böyle bir oluşuma izin vermediği söylenir, gelin görün ki ankara'da yerini herkesin bildiği ve kapısında tabelası olan bir "spotçular çarşısı" bulunmaktadır..
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26. 1)bayinin firmaya aylık olarak taahhüt ettiği kadar mal satamamasından dolayı firmaya imtiyazını kaybetmemek amacıyla, toplu halde, görünürde sermayesine veya zararına, spotçu tüccarlara mal satması sonucu ortaya çıkan düşük karla peşin çalışılan piyasa

2) firmanın peşin satış alıp ile vadeliye kullandırarak satması sonucu önceden zararına, ama vadeli satış sonrasında daha yüksek karla parayı çevirmesi esasına göre çalışan toptan alıcıların oluşturduğu piyasa

3) tüm ürünlerin 1.el olup, faturalı ambalajlı satıldığı piyasa

4) tüm ürünler fabrika tarafından garantisi var olan piyasa

Hatta orada esnafın bir kısmının anlı şanlı alışveriş merkezlerinde pahallı mal satan mağazaları da varmış. Sanırım anahtar "peşin para"... Bundan sonra birşey alacaksam araştırma listeme spotçuları da ekleyeceğim.

Yaşasın Milchschnitte!

Almanya'da geçen çoçukluk günlerimden özlemle andığım çikolata/kek ürünlerinden biriydi Milchschnitte. Ne zaman biri "Almanya'ya gidiyorum, var mı istediğin?" dese "Yasal olarak mümkün olan en fazla miktarda Milchschnitte getir" der, açık çek yazardım.


Meğer 2007'den beri Türkiye'de Süt Dilimi adı altında satılıyormuş, ben yeni farkettim, hemen aldım üçer beşer. Kinder Pingui de gelmiş, ondan da edindim bir numune:


Milchschnitte/Süt Dilimi'nin ne kadar nefis birşey olduğu hakkında daha fazla malumat ekşi sözlük yazısında. Marketlerde peynir/yoğurt ürünlerinin bulunduğu soğutmalı kısımda yer alır. Yeyiniz, yediriniz...

mp3: Ümit Besen - Nikah Masası

Compartmentalization

Compartmentalization

Why are so many seemingly intelligent, rational people caught in the grip of the irrational beliefs of religion? Law, engineering, chemistry, mathematics... fields that require a great deal of thinking, seem to be no guarantee of rational thinking.

The root of Compartmentalization, I believe, is the fear of death, and the inability to conceive of their own non-existence. People are so afraid of dying, of leaving everything they know and love, that they are willing to believe a lie, a fairy-tale, in order to comfort themselves.

Stevey's Blog Rants

Business Requirements are Bullshit

You can look at any phenomenally successful company, and it's pretty obvious that their success was founded on building on something they personally wanted. The extent that any company begins to deviate from this course is the extent to which their ship starts taking on water.

And the key leading indicator that they're getting ready to head off course? You guessed it: it's when they start talking about gathering business requirements.

Because, dude, face it: if it's something you want, then you already know what the requirements are. You don't need to "gather" them. You think about it all the time. You can list the requirements from memory. And usually it's pretty simple.

Done and get things smart:

You want someone who's superhumanly godlike. Someone who can teach you a bunch of stuff. Someone you admire and wish you could emulate, not someone who you think will admire and emulate you.

They're your seed engineers: the ones who will make or break your company with both their initial technical output and the engineering-culture decisions they put into place — decisions that will largely determine how the company works for the next twenty years.

Success & Motivation

Success & Motivation:

Most people won’t put in the time to get a knowledge advantage. Sure, there were folks that worked hard at picking up every bit of information that they could, but we were few and far between. To this day, I feel like if I put in enough time consuming all the information available, particularly with the net making it so readily available, I can get an advantage in any technology business.

Always ask yourself how someone could preempt your products or service. How can they put you out of business? Is it price? Is it service? Is it ease of use? No product is perfect and if there are good competitors in your market, they will figure out how to abuse you. It’s always better if you are honest with yourself and anticipate where the problems will come from.

The point of all this is that it doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and either should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because…

All that matters in business is that you get it right once.

Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.

mp3: Shirley Bassey - If you go away

Kamikaze

When death came before dishonour:

One of the most tragic tales in Mr Axell's book is that of Lieutenant Hajime Fujii who, in December 1944, was turned down for a kamikaze mission because he was a family man. A few days later he returned home and found a note from his wife Fumiko. She had drowned herself and her two children, one-year-old Chieko and Kazuko, four, in the Arakawa river to free her husband for his mission. Five months later he flew to his death off Okinawa. The Japanese Government was so shocked by this incident they prohibited its publication until the war was over.

The soldier who wouldn't quit:

As Onoda was departing to begin his mission, his division commander told him, "You are absolutely forbidden to die by your own hand. It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens, we'll come back for you. Until then, so long as you have one soldier, you are to continue to lead him. You may have to live on coconuts. If that's the case, live on coconuts! Under no circumstances are you to give up your life voluntarily." It turns out that Onoda was exceptionally good at following orders, and it would be 29 years before he finally laid down his arms and surrendered.

mp3: Nine Inch Nails - Just like you imagined