Ankara on the Hill, by nate_marsh.

This is actually one of my favorite photos. It is a panorama taken from the Roman Citadel located on a lava outcrop that overlooks most of Ankara.

This photo is taken looking out to the north (I think) to a part of the city that is less developed with hundreds of traditional red roofed houses. I am sure many of these are mud brick and it is unclear if there is some governement pressure to move familys out of these homes into more modern developments. On the way out of town, you can see thousands of razed houses that once dotted the hillsides. Most did not have modern amenites, like running water and were likely unsafe during earthquakes – I wonder if that was the rational for the big move.
Anyways, I love Ankara, it is an awesome city.

Many longtime readers are undoubtably upset by the change of look & feel on Dr. Thinky – and I assure you, no one is more outraged than me. I updated D.T. to be running then newest Wordpress software and threw on two antispam plugins and then, caught up in it all, I tried to fiddle around with the layout. In a shocking turn of events, I broke the layout for good. So, I have decided to redo the theme. The new theme will be most more “saucy” and should look pretty similar to how it is now, or much different, depending how much bug juice I have designing up this sucker!

1.) I’m Smarter Than You Radio direct link

I found this kickass radio station on Shoutcast a few months ago and have been glued to it since then. The music is a great mix of new stuff, old stuff that I have never heard and the occasional esoteric tune from beyond the spectrum thrown in. I don’t really understand if someone actively sets the playlist or if it is semi-random/shuffled, but I have found a lot of great music from tuning in. It also plays a lot of genuinely good music that I already have, which is the point of good radio, the delicate mix of old & new.

I first heard Girl Talk on this ol’ radiostation, bought the cds, I went to a Girl Talk show at the MiddleEast last Saturday. The live show was fantastic – the same concept of Night Ripper, but put together much differently with some longer pieces. I also really enjoyed the opening act, Dan Deacon – great “kinda hard to explain music” – had an awesome sing-along during the concert. Here’s an amusing piece about him in the Baltimore CityPaper.They closed a night with a Dan Decon/Girl Talk duet of Senseless Apprentice – most likely a once in a lifetime experience!

2.) The Roku M1001

Recently I moved my computer out of my bed room doing some fancy reworking of the living situation. The downfall of this was that my precious musics were trapped downstairs on my computer. While perusing streaming music solutions, this little device came onto my radar. Lots of streaming devices either look ugly or are impractical (they stream whatever is currently playing on your computer). Will looking at the M1001 on the Roku site they were offering a $50 off coupon, so I bit the bullet & bought it. Not only is this puppy a painless way to navigate your music library from another room, even with 7,000 songs, it actually looks pretty classy! Whoa!

It can pretty effortlessly switch between different peoples shared music library and rarely needs to buffer any thing, snappy. A big plus is that it streams internet radio without a computer turned on. So, I can flip it on and in under 5 seconds, it streams imsmarterthanyou radio right into my life, awesomeness.

3.) Shankly Mixes on Bittorrent

I have no idea who Shankly is but he makes some really kickass mixes. What I assume to be his lowly servant, Shankly’s Love Child diligently puts his mixes on Bittorent once a month. There is some really fantastic music in there that I have really enjoyed and actually purchased. The shear bulk of good music is a bit intimidating, tons of new music but lots of live/covers/mashups as well. Throw a couple months worth of mixes on random and you will be blessed with some really great tunes. I actually get giddy when acquiring the newest set. It’s a great balance to imsmarterthanyou – 99% of the stuff is new to me and

I bought two gadgets recently that I love & use everyday. That’s why I am sharing them with you, which is basically me when I read this later.

1. 
   iRiver Clix 2gb
   This is a fantastic little mp3 player. I guess I am a bit of an iRiver fanboy – I really enjoy their design and UI – this is the 4 iRiver mp3 player I’ve purchased. I am a big fan of the look of this player, a simple small rectangle with no visible buttons on the surface. In fact, each side is a button, so you navigate by pressing the sides of the surface. The UI itself is simple and quick. I really enjoy its ability to display album art with mp3s. I rarely buy albums anymore, so it is great to see the cd covers with the music. I am trying to encode all my mp3z with album art from iTune through the geeky process described here. The clix gets bonus points for it’s ability to display photos and movies, both look great. One downer is that it only supports Windows Media Player or MediaMonkey. Also, you have to plug it into a computer to recharge unless you buy their special charging cable.
2. 
   Samsung SyncMaster 205BWThis precious baby I purchased a month ago. I decided to get rid of the mammoth 22″ Dell CRT monitor I had and to purchase a nice LCD widescreen monitor. This monitor was one of the cheaper models of this scale. I never used a widescreen monitor before, so I was pleasantly suprised to discover how much real estate it gives, it’s native resolution is 1680×1050 – very nice.
   The biggest bummer I experienced with the monitor was that one blue pixel was stuck. With a white or complex background, it is impossible to see, but if the area is black, a bright blue pixel sticks out. I thought that was a dead pixel and just sucked it up, one out of 1,764,000 is not bad but it irked me from time to time. Today, I discovered through my readings that it was actually a stuck pixel, and a simple free java program called JScreenFix could, by rapidly alternating the pixel colors. Sounds like snake oil, but after letting it run for 30 seconds, my pixek is cured! Praise the Lord!!!

Gordion Panorama, by nate_marsh.

I have finally got to playing with some of my photos from Turkey. This panorama is 14 stitched images. I had initially had some problems lining up the images and adjusting the levels, I ran this through Adobe Photoshop CS3’s new Photomerge and (5 minutes later) this big boy was produced.
I did some cropping and light color correction but I am pretty happy with the image so far, the images fit almost perfectly. Need to fix the sky a bit, but I like the spread. Click on “All Sizes” to see the original image. There’s noticeable compression but not terrible. I’ll try to pretty it up a bit later this week.