My blog, now in English, with a rhyme and a reason.

I found this interesting aphorism on the Internet and roughly translated it into English. "A man is born three times: First from his mother, then from his choices at 18. Finally from his mistakes at 40".

I finally changed my life after working in my own company for 20 years. Now I'm looking for a job abroad. My best friend and my business partner suddenly has changed into something that I cannot recognize. He became a zombie of a political figure, swindled me, lied to everybody including his wife. He started supporting a known politician known as a thief and he accused me of being a traitor for supporting somebody else. This is called New Turkey. People were naive here. Everybody would help the other. We were living in harmony even if we support different football clubs or political parties. A lot has changed under the nepotism of a political figure. Now Turkish people thinks in terms of "us" and "others". Like my former friend. I cannot believe that he is that stupid. I was angry with his political stupidity. I was forcing myself to ignore the political bullsh*t and continue to work. I had my comfort zone. I wouldn't want to leave it. I was in a Techno Park facility and what I was doing there would be considered science. I left the company after learning that he used to sell fake invoices and other fake documents to make more money. In our New Turkey, the god is money (and I just realized I'm a double Atheist then). He bought a new house next to Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul. A new BMW. I was under constant humiliation although I was the brain in the company. The sole reason he was doing that is that I denied to vote his semi-god. He might have believed that he is making the value of the company by himself. After the government cut the ticket for the fake documents, I decided to leave the company. They charged the company 1.5 million. You would say 1.5 million in what? US dollars or Euros? Well, I think 1.5 million is *very* much in almost every currency (maybe not in Bitcoins, eh? It is called infinity). To make the long word short, I was being swindled. This happens to science-oriented people a lot. We are not merchants. We do not think in terms of money making.

I used to blog here in Turkish. They say, a man is considerably more reasonable in a foreign language. I decided to blog in English for a while. Two reasons for that: First, I am losing it. A foreign language is like a flower: it should be watered from time to time, it fades, yes, it fades like a flower. Second, I need more practice because I decided to leave this open sanitarium as soon as possible. I used to speak a decent Russian, I have finished A1, A2, B1 and B2 on busuu.com. Now all I can say is basic sentences that could be useful in daily life, a few bad words and "I forgot a lot" with a decent accent. I was in Berlin to attend FIBEP congress where I was one of the speakers at the WMIC of October, 2017. I decided to learn some basic German. I studied German on the public transport for 3 months in Istanbul and I would manage my way in Berlin, IN GERMAN! Thanks to Duolingo for making it possible.

I always improved myself and learned new things. Even after leaving the university, where the shadows of my professors were longer than their own bodies, I concluded that I need to learn all the things by myself. I was writing viruses at that time in Assembly language. Not only viruses but rabbits, chameleons and experimental anti-virus programs. I have published a few programs in PC World magazine. There was no internet. Only press and BBS systems to some extent. It would take half an hour to get a scanned front page of a Playboy magazine over a 9600 modem (c'mon, I was 17 at the time). I used to note machine codes into my notebook in dormitory to type them in the next day at computer lab. I memorized opcodes and data lengths for that codes and that would help me to write basic programs without a computer.

What I learned in the university then? COBOL. Yes, the accounting language of computer languages. Somehow they decided to change the course of the computer programming class and they put Pascal and C into the arsenal of lessons they teach. But there was a problem: All the professors and lecturers at that time were experts of COBOL and they did not understand the memory locations, byte allocations, word sizes of a CPU etc. I shined. I was a student in the whole university who knew more that his professors. Lecturers used to ask me which command to use to truncate a file in Pascal. I was getting full scores. 100 over 100.

A professor of mine, Cavit Tezcan, was teaching the class word sizes of different CPUs. He said that an 8086 (not an 80x86) is a 32 bit processor. I said no, it is not, it is 16 bits and I am using its DS, CS, ES etc segment registers for this reason. His mouth turned into an, erm, I'd say something different but let's say a vacuum fish, you get the idea. I also used to get 100 points till that time from this professor. After correcting him a few times later I used to get 30s-40s from the written exams. I objected and told him that it is not fair, I would get more, he said "you would have thought about it when mocking me in front of the class". What I understood there is that this school is not gonna end in a nice way. I have established my own company before I left the school since most of the businessmen in Silicon Valley are college dropouts.

I passed some of his classes later because new teachers were assigned to ones he used to teach. I repeated even BASIC class! He insisted to fail me with the finishing project which I have finished 5 times. Then I left the university because I noticed that diploma is not something that does the real job. It is me. I used to do the real job and I need to educate myself. That was a wise decision. I learned C++, Delphi etc languages later only by myself. I used to teach myself computer languages, frameworks, databases, algorithms etc. I like the example of Leonardo Da Vinci. He was born out of wedlock and was not accepted into school for this (as if it is his decision). He thought "all they do is learning Latin and Greek and reading science papers, I can do that by myself". And he did. We know the rest.

I learned digital signal processing, C++, C#, version control systems. I adopted writing styles and taught them to young people to work in peace and harmony together within a team. I have created one of the best sound and image recognition systems for advertisement monitoring. I left my own company just getting my jacket and slamming the door. Now I start all over again. I am born at 40 again, this time from my mistakes. 

I used to be a citizen of Old Turkey. I was idealist and naive. I thought the professor has no right to teach the class wrong things. I still think this way. Our families always told us to be a nice person, never lie, never let anybody do harm to the innocent etc. New Turkey is more religious and more indecent at the same time. No country for decent people here.