Pebbles From Paradise

Low Power From Now On! Yesterday, when I was writing about saving a tree I had forgotten that Irem and I have been busy doing our bit for the environment. The last time we were at Ümraniye Carrefour we stocked up on low energy light bulbs and this week I have been busily installing them. [...]

The Best Receptacle For Written Verbiage!  One of the problems of being a health-care professional is that one’s home fills up with confidential medical papers, affidavits, supervisors reports and the like. This stuff is largely verbiage and opinion, rarely born out by future events but which may significantly impact upon the lives of people in [...]

I’ve just posted a topic at the Facebook group Stanford Peace Innovation, which aims to develop world peace using web 2.0 technologies. . . . . I had a few thoughts, but I’m unsure if they are appropriate? It was an axiom of the late Milton H. Erickson that in order to communicate one must [...]

Here’s a recent post I made to Michael Mallows NLP Forum on Yahoo. I’ve just discovered Viddlin’ and I have a headache! If like me when you were a lad, (I don’t pretend to understand the female experience since to do so gets me into trouble with feminists), you lived in a timeless world of [...]

We Need An Open Courseware Policy Yesterday when I was making my short video about The Family Business School I was unaware of Open Courseware. What a wonderful idea it is, and does it not answer many of the criticisms I made of conventional university courses in my film. Today I have had to evaluate [...]

Our First Yacht, This Year. Today we had a beach picnic. Amazon’s friends came too. They look like Amazon Pirates. In the bay a yacht was at anchor. It was a perfect afternoon. Amazon Pirates! Yunus, (photograph by Amazon Bray, aged 4 years). Melisa, (photograph by Amazon Bray, aged 4 years). After The Picnic Everyone [...]

I am stuck close to home today because I’m waiting on a programmer in DaNang to complete an upgrade on The Family Business School web site. DaNang is four hours ahead of here and my programmer e-mailed me before I was up, and promptly disappeared off the map. Maybe she’s at school? The Twitter Logo [...]

Kumlubük As A Digital Kodachrome! After having to stay near the screen all day yesterday Irem and I took to the hills, well we walked to Kumlubük actually. We needed to get out because although normally we sit at home, baking bread and writing rubbish, in the past few weeks we’ve been under pressure to [...]

$1.2 MILLION to build a list of over 40,000 rabid buyers in less than 9 months When you look down the right hand column of this journal you will find a number of advertisements from Google Adsense. People who click on the links there are taken off this web site to some exotic destination that [...]

The Kumlubük Plain In Monochrome Digital photography rules, O.K! In just a few minutes I can achieve what used to take hours in the darkroom. And imagine how impossible it would be to escape from the reality of business pressures by entering the darkroom, mixing chemicals, getting the temperature right, focusing the enlarger, washing and [...]

The Shoreline At Kumlubük Do you ever wave Mrs? No I don’t mean do you wave to people from the window of a train, or the back of a limousine, what I mean is do you ever take the time to switch off your Blackberry and stare at waves lapping on the shore. I found [...]

Irem and Amazon Try Out Their Water Colours. Here are the chick-a-dees immersed in their own worlds of colour and creativity. And what a wonderful job the Kodak sensor in the E-400 has done of rendering accurate colour. Frequently I apply some digital filters to images taken with this camera in order to emulate the [...]

The Fish Was Delicious We hadn’t intended to spend the day on a beach. It wasn’t planned, although we were ready because I own a little Suzuki jeep so we can off-road to locations that are inaccessible to folk with more prosaic vehicles, so perhaps I was prepared when Oğuz Bey invited us to join [...]

Look at this fellow, only slightly longer than a slow-worm, but far more dangerous! A couple of years ago one of the residents here at Amos was stung by a bee at The Amos Restaurant. He suffered anaphylactic shock and died. Naturally we were all very upset. When people travel abroad they need to bear [...]

Lone Pine! I like taking black and white photographs, especially in the summer when there is strong differentiation of tone. The image above says it all about this tree, and no amount of colour could improve upon the aesthetic of this image. The image below, by contrast, has been improved by being in monochrome. In [...]

It’s National Children’s Day In Turkey and the children of Turunc started in fine form with the annual tableaux of sketches, skits, and dancing at the Ataturk Memorial. Amazon took part this year for the first time. She is the youngest in her school, do you see her in this picture?

I think Amazon must have overdosed me on cartoon animations!

Not A Good Idea? Oh dear it’s raining today and so on-line I’ve been educating myself about the future of the Internet. The man who knows most about this subject is Jonathan Zittrain and he’s worried. Zittrain’s concern revolves around the trend toward moving your Internet access away from the familiar P.C., where, nominally, you [...]

A Wonderful Book For A Lad! As a small boy I knew nothing of language reform, I just knew that I couldn’t spell, that adults told me that this was a bad thing, and I discovered at school that sometimes my inability could be painful. Imagine my surprise one Christmas when my eldest brother Nick [...]

My Twitter Logo Yesterday I was discussing how the movement for the reform of the English language has been spurred forward by the constraining size of the little window on your mobile phone. The small size, and the fiddling keyboard, (which may be abbreviated to ‘FKBD’ in text speak), demands that, those with frankfurter fingers [...]