Research, travel, procrastination-busting.

The ban on Wordpress blogs in Turkey is over. I realized this when I saw my feedreader automatically updating the Wordpress blogs I read. For the last seven months I’ve had to connect to Princeton servers first in order to get around the ban, all because the nutty creationist Adnan Oktar convinced a civil court to block access in Turkey to all sites hosted on Wordpress.com.

Now that the ban is over I hope to get plugged back into the blogging world, especially some of the great sociology sites that have taken off since the ban went into effect. Scatterplot is well-known by now and I’ve really been enjoying New Soc Prof’s Weblog. I’m sure there are many more I’ve missed, but thanks to Wicked Anomie and the socioblogopia search engine, it shouldn’t be hard to get caught up.

I don’t mean to engage in bus line one-upsmanship, but I’m coming back from another trip to Ankara with the same company as last week and this time the bus has two floors and there’s a “bistro” on the first floor! It seats about 20 and I’m in the corner where they have electrical outlets. They sell whisky, wine, beer and and non-alcoholic beverages as well as different kinds of snacks.

The only disappointment was when I tried to eat the sandwich they handed out upstairs and they said that this wasn’t allowed. Huh??? No food in the cafe? It’s not like I brought my own. Oh well, it’s still really comfy.

So, have I been away from the US long enough that this, too, is now commonplace?

On Friday, for the first time in my life, I bought a copy of an English-language daily called Today’s Zaman. What did I find on the back page? A story about a ghost hunt at a former asylum in my hometown! (Well, a cancelled ghost hunt anyway.)

Amazing coincidence.

The story was on the AP wire and likely filled a “news of the weird” spot in the paper — I don’t suppose I should expect future editions to tell me when the firefighters are going to hold their annual pancake breakfast.

Thanks to my sister Laura for sending me The Onion’s article about Mead’s new Grad-School-Ruled Notebook, an innovation that squeezes even more lines on the page.

On a more serious note (no pun intended): I really wish I had stuck with taking lecture and discussion notes using pen and paper rather than going digital (laptop, handheld) in my second year. I really buy the idea that taking notes by hand leads to better processing of information and, hence, better recall.

Does anyone else have an opinion on that?

I don’t remember where I saw it, but I recently read that any blogger who finds free Internet access at the airport just has to blog about it. Well, here’s a new take on that - I’m on a bus traveling to Ankara right now, checking my email, surfing the web, and writing this post.

I have a feeling this service won’t be available on Greyhound any time soon.

I’m riding Varan, which is supposed to be Turkey’s best bus company, and I can see why. Besides offering the standard coffee, tea, and cola that you get on all intercity buses, this one has complimentary pastries and newspapers (even English ones), and headphones for those who want to listen to CNNTurk, which is on the TV right now, or music.

This last part is amazing - I can’t tell you how many buses I’ve been on where I thought I was riding in a mobile dance club. If it’s not pop music, it’s the sound of bullets in a Turkish-dubbed Bruckheimer action flick. So this is nice.

Even better, the seat next to me is empty.

If you’re using Parallels to run Windows on your Mac, you may have realized that the program takes up more space on your hard drive the longer you use it. More specifically, the file titled “winxp.hdd” balloons over time whether you’re storing files within Windows or not.*

Good news. Parallels has a built-in tool that allows you to compact the winxp file and free up lots of hard drive space. I ran the tool last week and regained 4 GB.

Here’s what you do**:

1. From within Parallels Desktop, open “Parallels Tools” from the Start menu (it’s in the Programs folder).
2. Click on “Disk Compacting” in the left column.
3. Select the volume to compact and check the box to execute all states at once.
4. Click Start.

That’s all there is to it, but the procedure takes several hours, so I recommend running it over night.

* Maybe it’s called winvista or some variant if you installed Vista - not sure about that.
** I’ve only used Parallels 3.0. I imagine it’s similar in other versions.

I was so ready to keep up last week’s momentum — I visited four different sites in three days — but instead I got a cold and have been out of the house only once since last Friday. Ugh.

On the up side, I’ve had more time to work on a paper revision due at the end of the month and, thanks to the enormous efforts of my research assistant/wife, have finally finished putting together a clean dataset of more than 40 years’ worth of Diyanet sermons (let me tell you, OCR technology is good, but far from perfect).

Here’s hoping all of you are healthier than me right now.