Gin in my Milk

I see all the time, some of my friends are burning to contribute to the society with their noble feelings. One says she tries to save the planet by only using "go green" products, other one defends the open source software by using open source applications, one friend is against the current conservative goverment AKP and protesting by refusing to buy products of those companies which are close to the goverment.

Yes, such activism is noble and sounds great but in reality you contribution is very little (if not none). You will be shadowed by those who hold real power.

Here is a story: I studied at Bilgi University, a great school with leftist and humanist staff, huge fellowship percentage among students, speech freedom was encouraged, overall things were great. However, one day something terrible happened. Management was in debt thus they were looking for some sort of savior, in the end an American juggernaught named Laureate bought %51 share of the university thus became the new "owners". They started by limit education fellowship amount, after that they started cencoring students. In the end it was a real mess for the original staff, it took only a single year for them to destroy all that was noble and taken over 15 years to build.

There have been many open software advocates, however none was as influential as Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google. Instead of simply growing a beard and bashing Microsoft at their speeches, they simply founded a great company which used open source sotfware and contributed to the open sofware community which immensely helped open source philosophy to spread better than anyone.

I believe that instead of only acting as a regular activist, taking a step further and holding power is the real way to empower your vision. If you kick ass at work, if you work hard, beat and dominate people around you and in the end making yourself valuable, you will win and have a real chance of making those noble feelings come true.

A related quote: "The Best Way to Complain is to Make Things." by James Muphy.

After a productive sunday morning of coding, I have finished developing my blogging engine and voila! Welcome to the very first post of Gin and my Milk!

Why did I start blogging ?

Actually for two selfish reasons: First of all, lately I've found myself having ideas popping into my head yet fading at the same speed. I had to find a quick way to archieve, later come back and refer these posts. Secondly, I want to discuss about the things that matters to me with people who cares.

What will my blog cover ?

I actually plan to draw a line in the sand amd write about from there. I hope to cover stuff that matters to me, which will be about business, software, user interface and entrepreneurship -in Turkey-. Even tho I am a software developer to the core, I will not be sharing any code snipplets or solutions to problems that I encounter.

Why I am blogging in English, not Turkish ?

I firmly believe that blogs that cover -especially IT based- business topics should be written in English. Not to mention the fact that having a much larger potential audience is a great thing.

Why I named my blog "Gin in my Milk" ?

While developing my blogging engine, I was thinking of a name for my blog. It had to be something that is not boring as hell, such as "Thought of Uluç" or "Uluç says" but rather unique. Funny enough, the song Gin & Milk by Dirty Pretty Things (leads to Grooveshark) was playing at the background while I was having such thoughts, tada!

PS: I really do not enjoy drinking gin at all, I am rather a mojito monster :)