TMNT

The teaser:


and the trailer:

Mr. Bean

Can sent me a Mr. Bean video which took me back to my days in high school where substitute teacher for English classes would make us watch this hilarious guy. I just found a better one:



I have no idea if he's still doing his thing but along with Benny Hill, they constitute a group of weird but funny childhood memories for me.

Melvis

Melvis, originally uploaded by brownbeatle.

My current research at grad school is about speech processing and microphone arrays and this is our current solution to a repeatable human talker model.

Melvis = matt + elvis
Matt is the guy who got this thing together and elvis is elvis:) - the name is my professor's invention.

Buying a portable music player...

I think it was my first ever post in this blog that I mentioned about buying a portable music device in the near future. Normally, this is no more complicated than buying a dvd player, camera or a stereo system. Fix a budget with some uncertainty, do a search on existing models, look at the up and coming models, prioritize your needs from the device and buy the best product that matches your needs and price range.

When it comes down to portable music devices, the story is a lot more complicated because of the following three letters: DRM. There are loads of talk, discussion, opposition on DRM which I will not go into (not right now at least) but if you do, this techcrunch post and the subsequent trackbacks and comments are not a bad place to start. Basically the main problem is when buying a portable music player, you not only buy a technical device that plays music in certain digital formats but you also pledge yourself (assuming you do not download illegally and/or your only source of music is not audio cd's where you create your mp3's from) to a specific music purchasing environment (as in ipod/itunes) as long as you keep that player and/or the songs you purchased from that music store. Because of the licensing, say you have an ipod and you bought 500 songs from itunes in a span, if a time comes where you have/want to change your player, you'll have to forget about those 500 songs as well even though you've paid for them. Not even that complicated: If you have an ipod but have a lot music in the regular mp3 format that say you acquired perfectly legally from e-music * and suddenly Apple decides to change the ipod's firmware such that it won't play regular mp3's, again you're practically screwed - you have to give up all your songs from itunes if you want to buy a new ipod. Actually it's not even about the money. For avid and passionate music listeners like me who seriously spend time and energy to find and purchase good music to listen to, it's not a pleasant stance to experience the possibility of losing a large part of the hardly acquired music collection.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that once you make your choice, you're very affected by the current and future decisions of record labels, music stores and the hardware companies and it's important to make an informed and well thought decision. A lot of people don't even think about this issue when buying a player and usually that's my stance as well on a lot of other equipment purchases but finding, acquiring and storing good music that I find is very important for me. In the next post I'll try to explain my current stand and in the coming ones I'll hopefully talk about other alternatives.

Progress Review

I haven't been posting in a week due to some work and non-work related events in my life although I have to admit that all is pretty well. In the mean time here are two interesting photo sets from flickr that might be interesting.

1) Olivia Leigh - Reflections of Oneself
2) Defensor Fortis - ...my operation iraqi freedom...dec 05-jun06...

Enjoy.

Manning Chapel

Manning Chapel, originally uploaded by brownbeatle.

I was introduced the flickr a while ago, though it may be seen as a simple photo sharing service, it contains a lot of inspirational photos. I was around the campus today, exhausted after being on the phone for an hour when I took this picture - it's probably the best I've ever taken so far, with this one and that one being the other candidates. Enjoy!

Not Just Snacks

I just had very good Indian Food at Not Just Snacks - here are some pictures of the food itself.

The Chinatown Bus Experience

It's the year 2007, and judging from it's first 2 days it's promising to be a very busy year for me...

I spent the last couple of days in Washington DC to visit a few "longtimenosee" friends from back home who now live there. My main aim was to get out of Providence for a few days and relax before coming back to work - which worked out. However there's more to it:

Having traveled the road between Istanbul and Izmir for 5 years, I can easily say that I'm accustomed to various levels of travel conditions (which for instance include a 10 year old kid sleeping under my seat), mainly in buses... Therefore when I heard the availability of the Chinatown buses, I did not hesitate to consider them as an option especially when I heard their price.
When I started searching, I sadly found out that there are no direct buses between Washington DC and Providence. The only option is to go to New York and exchange buses there. Finding a bus between NY and DC is very easy, these guys are pretty well organized and you can even buy tickets from the net, though I don't think it's necessary. Here is a good Chinatown Bus search engine. I chose the Eastern Travel bus, costing 20$, for no reason at all and they turned out to be OK.

To get to NY from Providence is tricky though. I was hearing about this large van type of thing that leaves from Thayer St. early in the morning. I did search them on the web but found absolutely nothing about them. Luckily, a friend of mine was traveling to NY the same day and he somehow had the phone number of the driver - this is hardcore even by the Turkish standards. So here I'm unveiling the myth of this bus. It's a large van that leaves from Thayer St. in front of Store 24 at 730 every morning. The destination is 43 Canal St in Manhattan, very close to the East Broadway station where you can take the F train to practically anywhere. As far as I recall, it leaves the same address in Manhattan at 530 every day - although I might need to check that again - to come back to Providence. It costs 15$.

The return trip was a little more tricky. I was tired, I didn't want to travel during the day and I didn't want to exchange buses at night, so I came up with the Bonanza bus which in the website was scheduled as 315 am Mondays and Saturdays. After calling the guys to make sure that it was Monday, my friend took me to the station and boom - no bus. I went to my friends office to look at early morning planes and buses and suddenly found out that there was a bus to NY at 330 am in the morning by Today's Bus. I caught the bus, it was a little more shittier than the Eastern Bus but who cares at that point. I found an unoccupied couple of seats at the back and started to enjoy the ride, sleeping until I woke up to find out that we are in the middle of the highway picking up passengers. At first I thought it was Baltimore but then the lady sitting next to me said that another bus from the same company broke down and they were taking all the passengers in. It was unbelievable. There were around 10 people standing up for the entire journey and because the space between the seats are smaller then the usual (even the lady sitting next to me couldn't fit), I had to lean to my left with my legs on the corridor - magically I still was able to sleep.

In conclusion I still very much recommend the Chinatown Buses over the regular Bonanza bus. They're half the price and except pretty weird situations like my return trip, they're fairly comfortable plus you get to catch a glimpse of Chinatown in the cities you travel.