Dec 6 update

Remember Pearl Harbor tomorrow.

Well, we are enjoying our time in Houston. Even with the record
breaking snow fall on Friday.

But we have been very busy. As usual, we had a several page shopping
list. Things that are usually not available, but sometimes just too
expensive outside the US. Yes, some things are cheaper in the US. For
example, computers, and Dave's 5.8 year old Dells needed replacing. He
loved Dells for many years, but he had so many identical hardware
failures on his 2 identical Precision M60s that he was looking forward
to some new and reliable computers.

The M60s were very high end computers and only very recently eclipsed
in hardware capability, but they had lots of parts fail, motherboards,
screens, video cards, etc, and Dave was very glad that he had the
"International Fix Anything that Breaks" warranty, but it expired in
Jan 2009 and several high dollar items failed after. Even though his
credit card added a year of warranty, it is a major hassle to get the
parts sent to Turkey. One of the downsides of travel.

But, the new Dell computers that Dave was interested in had IT experts
that buy 50 or 100 computers for big companies writing in the feedback
columns that they were seeing high failures, unlike the dependable
Inspiron models they had been buying for years.

Dave took this to mean that Dell cannot be trusted until they have
several years of "good grades." So, now he had to look at all of the
countless laptops out there today. Ugh! What a long job.

Well, he recently chose an ASUS UL50Vt that says that it has 12 hr
battery life due many ingenious power saving tricks. Since the battery
has less capacity than his M60s, we hope that this means that when we
are sailing it will use much, much less electricity. It also has a
cool feature that it recognizes Dave when he sits down in front of it.
It logs him in without him having to touch the computer or enter
passwords. Tre Cool!

The bad news so far is that ASUS included a lot of perhaps interesting
software, but has nearly NO documentation, so it is a guessing game as
to how these things work or even what they are for. Grrrrrrr! Dell was
prolific with excellent documentation and Dave has high documentation
standards as a result.

Time will tell how the old software will work on Window 7 Pro 64 bit
computers, But the new computers cost so much less than any one of the
last 4 computers that he has had, so he could spend a little on
software and still be way ahead. The UL50Vt seems to be a good to very
good laptop with an outstanding battery life and super low power
consumption. (Time will tell if that claim is correct.)

His other new computer is a Hewlett Packard dv6t Quad. That means that
in a manner of speaking that it has 4 CPUs or 'brains' and allows
'hyperthreading' so that it can do several things at once, IF the
software is smart enough to figure that out. It was on sale the day
Dave bought it and even though he'd already decided what he wanted, it
was a pleasant surprise to get over $400 off and several free upgrades
to features that Dave would not have gotten, but when they are free,
why not.

Tip: Once you have narrowed the choices to a few models, do a Goggle on

dv6t rebate

But use your computer name instead of dv6t. There was a $200 off
coupon, just for the asking. He found it totally by accident, but what
a nice surprise!

Dave is somewhat dubious about that 4 things at once stuff, but thinks
that it is a nearly state of the art computer that will be able to do
anything that he needs for the next several years and hold it's value
well. But, when anyone can get a laptop for under $300 that is
probably fine for the main uses, perhaps in 3 years we will switch to
low end computers. The jury is out on that one.

Sorry to drag on about this. Can you tell that Dave wrote it??? Happy Holidays.

Turkey is rich in history and pre-history

Click the photo if you want see it full size. The little “vaportrails” above the Blue Mosque, in Istanbul are because it is a time exposure and there were birds flying over it.




Many say that the area that is now Turkey is the birthplace of cheese, butter, olive oil, tortillas, money in the form of gold coins, mosaics and similar art forms.

Janet and I thought it humorous that from Houston to Baltimore, most cities that we past were proud to be “America’s Second Largest Seaport”. One hopes that they each used a different way to measure and not just imagination. But, Turkey has some strong evidence for all of these claims. For example, some mosaics here are much older that the Roman Civilization.

We know that the Romans discovered cherry trees here and spread them around the world. The tulip was first raised here and spread by the Dutch.

Turkey and the Tigris, Euphrates valleys are widely thought to be the cradle of Western civilization.
Modern Turkey is certainly the location of Göbeklitepe, which is a large area of stones that appear to have been large buildings, but built about 12,000 years ago BP (before present) or 10,000 BCE or BC. That is 7,000 years before the Pyramids! That is thousands of years before most scientists thought our ancestors stopped being hunter gatherers and invented towns that eventually grew into cities. There have been some arguments over this site.

This is not a collection of Teepees or Yurts. The largest stone is 25 tons and most are covered with excellent art in the form of carved animals. “They” estimate at least 2,000 men were needed to build it. “They” fail to mention how many women. At some time, perhaps 10,000 or more years ago, it was buried which caused it to be very well preserved.

The Turks proud of this, but they are also quick to point out that the “Turkish People” really came from Mongolia in about the year 1000. (This conquest/migration seems to have been very complicated and is somewhat in dispute as to exactly how many people and when each came, some came in about 700, but the big pushes were later (I think) so let’s just say “around 1000 to 1100”). The Byzantine Empire was being conquered and replaced. Some say that the Crusades were started by one group of Turks that were a superb cavalry that supported themselves through conquest of new lands. They kept moving west until the Franks had to mass a major counter attack. Once the Franks were rolling east, they eventually captured Jerusalem.

That is a horrible over simplification of a very long and complicated time of warfare and religion. I suppose that, whenever possible, the victor re-wrote the history and “history” has been used as a propaganda tool for thousands of years. So keep an open mind and expect the unexpected.

If you get a very comfortable chair and Wikipedia and Google, you can learn a lot and get very confused. By the way, they say that DNA research has added to, rather than lessened the confusion.

I think it safe to say that for at least 12,000 years and probably for hundreds of thousands of years Turkey and the Middle East have been in frequent flux. Sort of like today.

We find the Turkish people to be very nice. The stereotypes of the Islamic or Middle Eastern peoples are, as with most stereotypes, way off the mark.

I have to get back to packing for our trip,

Dave & Janet

Our 2nd Test of updates by email

This is just to test the theory.

Dave

Ephesus 01

Update 21 Oct 2009

We should apologize for lack of communication. We spent from 1 June 2009 until 13 Sept (mostly hauled out on dry land) at Yacht Marina across Marmaris Bay from Netsel. We repainted the hull, deck & cabin top.

Then we did sail a little to Finike, Turkey, arriving 27 Sept. Alegría will winter in Finike. It is a very quite, much more “Turkish” town, with about 1% as many tourists and less than 1% as many Turks preying on tourists.

“Yes. Please”, “Buy my carpet!”, Buy my jewelry!” That sort of tout activity is nearly unknown here. Also, food is much less expensive and there is a bigger weekly market.

We have been travelling inland for the past two weeks with friends Richard and Ann from Baltimore. We met their plane in Istanbul and spent a few days sight-seeing there. Then we bussed back to Finike stopping at Troy where Ann stepped into the hole in the floor and fell down a 12 foot staircase inside the Trojan horse. Other than a lot of bruises she didn’t break anything but she really could have easily been killed. She is one tough lady. She does have training in karate and she thinks she may have done a karate roll but everything happened so fast she isn’t sure. All I (Janet) saw was her head and one foot as she fell through the hole in the floor.

In the film "Top Gun", they ask Tom Cruise, “What were you thinking in (at a tricky part of practice aerial combat).” His answer was, “Thinking? What are you talking about? In that situation there is no time for “Thinking.” You just react. Either you react correctly or you die.” Ann knows what he means.

After Troy we visited Ephesus, Miletus, Pamukkale, Fethiye and Olympos. They are all different and all wonderful. Yesterday (20 Oct) Richard and Ann caught the bus for Kapadokya and then back to Istanbul from where they will fly home in a week. We had a great time and saw a lot of the places that we have wanted to see. We rode with them as far as Antalya and saw the excellent museum there.

So far we like Finike a lot. There is a fairly large live aboard community but we’ve only been here aboard the boat for about a week in total days, so we haven’t met a lot of people yet. We hope to remedy that at the next Sunday BBQ and the “morning coffee” tomorrow.

We fly to Houston, Texas on the 11th of November and return to Turkey on the 2nd of February. We’ll stay a few days in Istanbul and then do some sight-seeing in Ankara and then back to the boat and the boat jobs….

Janet & Dave

ALEGRIAN Adventures

This is my first try at moving our website to this free blog. Polite suggestions are welcome. Our gmail address is the best way to reach us. It is alegria1976. (You will need to combine the information on this page to make proper email addresses. I do it this way to hopefully repel spam robots, but not you. If this makes no sense, ask your favorite computer person.)

We also watch our old
>>svalegria<< hotmail address and >>alegria_1976<< yahoo address.

One reason for the change is that my mom will be closing her earthlink account as she has been given a better price elsewhere and is closing down her mail order business.

The other reason is that it is supposed to be easier for me to keep you up to date. I hope so. We will see.