kerimsatirli.com

A few days ago, while reading my RSS feeds, I decided that I had to change something about the content I was reading. I wanted more. I love reading other people’s blogs and as such, I came up with an interesting project:

The idea here is to get 3 (three) people to start a blog. When you offer freebies, chances are you’ll always find enough takers, so I had a few rules:

1.) I want more than one nationality, so not everyone could be from the Netherlands
2.) I don’t care about what you write, as long as you write
3.) If you decided to jump in, I expect you to adhere to the rules of the game (specifically #2, #3, #4, #7 and #8)

Nothing big and in return, you’d get free hosting (incl. a free domain), you retain the copyright and if you ever decide to move, I’ll even help you set up your stuff.

As it stands, I believe that I’ve found three subjects: 66% male, 66% Dutch and 66% of the content will be written in English.

We’ll see how it turns out…

Oh and as to why I am doing this? Well, if “because I can” isn’t good enough for you, my second answer would be: “because I want more people to voice their opinions and share their knowledge with the world”.

As a student, I find that I have little time and loads of work to do, so I like to streamline my workflow. Part of that streamlining process is my hub to the digital world - my Tablet PC, a pimped out Toshiba Tecra M4 running the latest Windows Vista build.

I strongly believe in the formfactor of Tablet PCs and I expect them to be the standard amongst students in about 5 years - well, I hope so anyway and if prices go down, that might just happen.

Financial issues aside, I know that I’ve had a better learning experience last year because of my Tablet PC. Thanks to applications like Microsoft OneNote 2007 (currently in beta testing), I’m able to take notes during classes. I don’t have to worry about bringing the right set of pens or markers with me, OneNote 2007 (and 2003 too, naturally) has it all. Other great features include the ability to transform ink into text (which tends to work even with my chicken scribble) or enhance an image to make the text inside that image (!) searchable. And if you’re too lazy to write yourself, just take audio notes and listen to the session at your earliest convenience. Feel like sharing your notes? Just export to a PDF and share it with any Windows or Mac user.

Apart from OneNote 2007, I also strongly depend on Outlook 2007, which basically handles my day. Once it’s sync’ed with my Smartphone, I can always see which class is coming up next and where I ought to be. Doesn’t get much easier than that.

No matter what you study nowadays, chances are that you’re gonna use the internet. A good browsing experience is key and as such, I prefer to use Firefox. I don’t dislike Internet Explorer or anything, I’m just a lot more satisfied with the features Firefox offers me.

Studying is no fun if you can’t socialize and since everyone prefers to use a different network (be it MSN, ICQ, Y!, AOL or Skype), I went with Trillian a few years ago and haven’t looked back once. Trillian is truly the hub of my online life, showing me the information I need (Wikipedia integration, information about Timezones for people from abroad) and enabling me to chat without being annoyed by ads about dating sites or car insurance policies.

Apart from those four, there’s also Adode Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash, as well as Photoshop and Illustrator. Couldn’t live without any of those really, but the first four, I believe should be installed on any student PC - that is, if you’re serious about getting good grades.

With less than 12 hours left till my next year in college officially starts, I’m hyped, and it doesn’t appear that I’m the only one (although I find the whole experience a lot more relaxing…). For as long as I can remember, I always wished that my holidays would last another two weeks, or at least a few more days … not so this year.

I’m as excited as a little boy right before he gets to unpack his christmas present - kinda weird, but then again - not everyone has the privilege of being able to attend one of the coolest colleges in the Netherlands.

Preliminary information shows that we’ve lost nearly a 100 students since last school year and while it does sound like a lot, there are still nearly 170 left.

This year marks the switch to the well known e-Learning platform called “Blackboard” and I’m happy to say that so far it’s looking quite good.

Earlier on, our faculty was using a proprietary system and naturally, not everyone was happy with the switch, but to the credit of the tech staff, I have to say that students were able to give loads of input. Input regarding the looks, input regarding features we’d like to see and input regarding features we’d like to keep. From what I can tell, most of the features have been hacked into the platform and I’m quite confident that Blackboard will empower our learning experience in a positive way.

A few weeks ago I submitted a few design ideas to GottaBeMobile for a t-shirt design for a contest they ran (which didn’t create enough buzz in the first place) and I managed to convince the judges with my catchy slogan.

You can watch their post about their GearShop here, or just head over to CafePress and check out the stuff that’s available.

Making the t-shirt for them was a blast. Rob is a very kind guy and he rewarded my input with a FictionWise.com gift certificate (which translates into many hours of reading).

Now that this t-shirt is done, I’m thinking of creating one for “Talk like a pirate day“. Yup, that’s right. Tuesday, 19th of September marks the 11th birthday of this parodic holiday.

We’ll see how it turns out…

In the IT world, people are accustomed to resets; if your Pocket PC doesn’t work anymore, you reset it; if your server doesn’t work anymore, you reset it and if your blog bores you, you kill all the content and thereby reset it.

Long story short - the old content is gone and new one will come. New content warrants a new face so without further ado, I give you “lifeofacoder 2.0″.