Hello, World...Again...

It has been quite a while since I had an entry, huh? During the first half of May, I was busy with my deadline-extended thesis. During the second half of May, I was still working on a few things. Then, the graduation came. Really nice event...

Well, I am in Shirley, NY now at Uncle's house. I checked a few apartments today (06/03/07) in Brooklyn and applied for one of them. I am going to meet the owner tomorrow. If he likes me and my references and credit history is good enough for him, I will get the space. It is on the last floor of a six building apartment in Bay Ridge. It has one large bedroom and a large living room. Lots of windows and great deal of light inside. After staying in the basement for a year, I feel like choking even when I hear about first and even second floor apartments! Anyway, there is kitchen and bathroom, of course. When you look left from any of the windows, you see the Verrazano Bridge. When you look right, you see Manhattan. If you look straight, you still have a pretty good view :) The apartment is just a couple of blocks from the subway and it would take me 30-45 minutes to get to work, great! I will write more about the apartment and the neighborhood when I hopefully get the place. I do not want to overjoy it now!

Meanwhile, I am waiting for the new Dream Theater album that will come out on Tuesday. I have been awaiting this album for such a long time that I even saw dreams about it for one whole night! I am listening to two tracks from the album right now and the songs are pretty hard. Sorry Avram, still not the Dream Theater you liked. Well, I like it anyway. The group will go on a tour for the album. I will be at the concert in New Jersey on August 24th. I am very excited about it because I spent $600 for two special package tickets. I got first row seats. Following the show, I will be backstage with a lucky friend of mine personally meeting the members of the band. We will take pictures and get autographs. There will also be a Q&A session. You may think that I am crazy to pay this much, but as many of you already know, Dream Theater is my favorite band, so the price is well worth the experience!

I resumed watching movies at a pretty good pace. I watched Edmond last week. Sex and murder based, very weird and shocking story. On Thursday night, I watched Raising Arizona and Big Lebowski (both films by Ethan and Joel Coen) with Deniz and Bahar. The former was okay and I have watched the latter for many times (I do not remember how many!). Big Lebowski is just a great movie in my opinion.

Yesterday, I watched Stranger Than Fiction starring Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhall. It was a pretty good story and Maggie Gyllenhall was gorgeous. I watched Deja Vu today. Oh my God, what a stupid storyline! I have not seen such a ridiculous story for the last few years! I especially started to hate movies that pictures biggest problems in computer vision solved! Recognition algorithm takes seconds to run on a whole database and low resolution images are getting so clear after some magical software! If this software is out there, why the hell are we paying so much for cameras with higher MegaPixels!?!

Finally, I ended the day by watching Casino Royale. It was good, but I do not think as good as appraised. I am not a fan of Bond movies anyway.

I have been doing something that I missed so much in the past years: Reading! I was so busy with graduate study day and night that I almost completely ignored reading books. I was reading mostly magazines such as Time for the last year. So far, I have finished The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton and The Husband by Dean Koontz. Both books are fine, but I cannot advise neither too strongly. I am reading Digital Fortress by Dan Brown right now. It goes pretty smooth.

Wow, I must have missed writing! Anyway, take care everyone. I hope that I will be able to write more...