BasBasBas.com

Category: study

  • Silence!

    In case you’re wondering why it’s been so quiet on this blog lately… There are a few reasons.

    • I’m working on my graduation thesis about the Future of Music Distribution which is quite hard work;
    • I’m working for a record label here in Bulgaria, working on the internet side of things, mainly promotion;
    • I’m doing an assignment for a political party here and helping them out with their internet campaign, since the parliamentary elections are coming up;
    • I’m making videos for SpinEARTH.tv – although haven’t finished any recently… Actually, I attended a show and accidentally deleted the video I made there. F!!K!
    • I’m going to be speaking on a conference about self-development and social psychology in Prague next month and brainstorming about what I want to say. I want it to be groundbreaking and paradigm shattering!

    On top of all that, one of my best mates visited me for 7 days last week annnnddddd we saw the sun come up quite a few times.

    Will resume a more regular blogging schedule soon though. 🙂

    BasBasBas.com is about my life abroad. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul, Bulgaria and travels in the region, but like to ponder about the future also. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

  • New Blog: The Future of Music Distribution

    Future Music logoAs if the amount of blogs and micro-blogs I have right now are not enough… I set up yet another blog. For my final thesis I’m studying the Future of Music Distribution. While I was studying I realized that instead of saving my notes in a document on my computer, it would be easier to post them to a place where I can access them from every computer. Then I thought “why not make them public?” So that’s what I did. I present to  you my new blog, The Future of Music Distribution. 🙂

    The Future of Music Distribution

    Don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging here, but instead of posting 5 updates per day regarding this topic on this blog, I’ve chosen to keep it separate. My ‘life’, travels, pictures and views go on here and all stuff related to my final thesis go on there. Visit The Future of Music Distribution now!

    BasBasBas.com is about my life abroad. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul, Bulgaria and travels in the region, but like to ponder about the future also. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

  • Groove Armada’s New Mini-Album… For Free!

    Groove Armadas new EP... for free!Groove Armada, the famous big beat, electronica and trip-hop producers, are sharing their newest EP freely with their fans through a nifty downloading scheme. One of the guys from Groove Armada recently stated about filesharing that “it’s utterly futile to try and stop people, just like it was stopping people creating mix tapes once they had two decks and a tape recorder”.

    You can download Groove Armada’s newest mini-album by clicking here or on the picture (provided by aeter). All you need to do is enter your age, since the deal is sponsored by Bacardi rum and you have to be above the legal drinking age in your country, and your email address to receive the first song of the album immediately and to acquire the rest later.

    This is very interesting to me, since I’ll be doing my final thesis of my bachelor degree very soon and it will be about the future of music distribution. It is very obvious that labels need to adopt new business models and that the old models simply don’t work anymore, since music is going back to being a service, instead of a product, so access is the most important thing. Groove Armada have realized this very well and have started this music distribution campaign which is bound to go viral (it already is).

    Apparently Groove Armada spoke about this deal with Bacardi at the MIDEM Conference  in Cannes, France where the music business meets every year. Below is an example of one of their chillout songs, for two more famous songs, check out Superstylin (big beat) or My Friend (lounge/electronica) on YouTube.


    Groove Armada – Fly Me To The Moon from Giul Viera & Fabia Oliveira on Vimeo.

    For Groove Armada’s new mini-EP, click here. If you’re a music lover like me, also have a look at The MiX-Files where I post my DJ sets as Spartz (for drum ‘n bass), spacescape (experimental & psychedelic), and EvilAngle (house/eclectro/breakbeat).

    BasBasBas.com is about my life abroad. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul, Bulgaria and travels in the region, but like to ponder about the future also. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

  • Finally found a flat!

    So I finally found my flat for the time to come. I moved from Istanbul to Sofia, Bulgaria one and a half week ago and have been flathunting each day, but it took quite a while to find something.

    I lived here one and a half year ago and prices were quite low, but to find something decent near the center for a reasonable price is very difficult now, especially for a foreign student.

    What an awful process. Going from flat to flat, waiting for agents, replying to online ads for apartments that have been given out already, saying yes to a flat to find out that they’d rather have a Bulgarian living there and not a foreigner. Saying yes to a flat to hear the next day that they are only interested in people for a long-term stay. Seeing all corners of the city, resisting agents’ arguments on why some nasty remote suburb is a great place to live (which it is not).

    What a painstakingly exhausting process. Hence the pic, from Flickr by hiromy.

    Well, yesterday I found my apartment. I still have to sign the contract later today, but it looks like all is well, but you can follow my Twitter feed to get an update when everything is all done, or wait for the next blog post.

    The flat is quite close to my old apartment where I lived up until a year ago (how time flies), although my old apartment had a much better location. It has a separate living room and kitchen, although I prefer the two combined because I’m lazy, plus I like to listen to my DJ sets or other music while I’m cooking. A bedroom with a nice double bed; bigger bedroom than the last one, for those in the know. Since I’ll be spending a lot of time at home behind the computer, to write my final thesis, I wanted to make sure I’d be comfortable at least. Now I’m sure. A video soon!

    Below are two videos of my old flats, the first one is of the flat I previously lived in in Bulgaria, the second is the flat I shared with 3 other students in Istanbul.

    BasBasBas.com is about my life abroad. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul, Bulgaria and travels in the region. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

  • Politics 2.0

    The influence of new media on current day politics

    An essay by Bas Grasmayer

    The 20th century was the age of mass media. The impact of radio during the first half of the century and that of television during the second brought politics closer to home. Starting from people grouping around the one radio in their neighbourhood, to the radio in their street, until the point that everyone had a radio in their home. The same happened for television and through these media politics entered the living room. Through sound at first, but later through moving images which became more detailed and more accurately coloured over the course of the last century.

    We’re now close to ten years into the new century. Television and radio are still important, but there is a new player in the field of mass media: the internet. This essay will look at how the internet has already influenced politics and hopes to answer, in part, the following question:

    How is the World Wide Web as a medium influencing
    politics and the government right now?

    New Media

    In the 2008 US Presidential elections, politicians were seen embracing new media. Barack Obama became microblogging service Twitter’s most followed user and YouTube set up a site called You Choose ’08 dedicated to the elections. On the latter, campaign teams posted videos hoping they would go ‘viral’, a term used to describe the phenomenon of certain content on the internet being spread out through huge networks of users, which is often initially an exponential process. Ron Paul, who was running to become the Republican presidential candidate, had so much support on the internet that TIME magazine at one point commented that due to “his  success  recruiting  supporters  through  new  social  media  channels” he was “the  new  2.0  candidate”.

    (more…)

  • Bulgaria’s Public Opinion on the Turkish Minority

    This Tuesday I’m giving a presentation for my course in Public Opinion accompanying my essay on Bulgaria’s public opinion of Turkey. It’s already finished, so I figured I’d put it online. I’m moving from Istanbul to Sofia next week, so it’s double-appropriate 😉

    I stripped it from some of the images, because SlideShare was not displaying them properly (eg. overlapping the text etc.)

    Public Opinion of Turkey in Bulgaria

    View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: bulgaria turkey)

    Slide 10 should say: “Turkish people abuse their position as an ethnic minority to get rights even normal Bulgarians don’t have”.

    Hope you enjoy. More updates soon. Heading into a very busy week.

  • Drugs, Prostitution and Same-Sex Marriage

    That’s the title of a 10-15 minute presentation I’m giving soon for my Intercultural Communication classes at Yeditepe University, here in Istanbul. I designed it in such a way that it can also be enjoyed without my vocal explanations and here it is!

    Drugs, Prostitution and Same-Sex Marriage

    View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: travel international)

    The Intercultural Communication course is likely to be the most innovative course I’ve taken during my higher education (sadly — universities should make more use of modern technologies). Every Tuesday, we get into a classroom at 4 o’ clock in the afternoon and have a video conference with a class in Lincoln, Nebraska, US. We present ourselves, our culture, customs, daily lives and our countries to each other. It’s fascinating, because both the Turkish class as well as the American class have students from many different backgrounds.

    This part of the Intercultural Communication course, called Global Classroom, has been quite fun so far. We’ve managed to make 2 students from the Nebraskan class dance in front of the camera and they’ve managed to make 2 of our students wrestle in front of the camera (or was it Jiu-Jitsu?).

    There’s only a few sessions left, so I hope I actually get to do my presentation, as our lecturer wanted everyone to prepare one, but there will be no time to actually execute all of them.

    I hope the presentation has given you an insight into Holland’s liberal policies and if you have any questions please feel free to reply. I love answering questions about these issues.

    How about in your countries, how is your government dealing with these issues? What is your personal opinion on these matters? Has the war on drugs failed? Is same-sex marriage morally wrong or is keeping it illegal a form of discrimination? What about prostitution?

  • We Found BATMAN!

    After a few weeks, we finally found the ‘batcave’ where BATMAN resides. No, not the fictional Batman. No, not the real Batman either. Since we moved into our flat here in Istanbul, we’ve spotted a strong connection all throughout our apartment which is named ‘BATMAN’. Online 24 hours per day, stronger than all the other connections in our area… Where’s BATMAN when you need him?

    Well, no more daily trips to the coffee bar around the corner (it’s still an awesome place though and I’ll gladly take you there). After ringing all the doorbells in our flat, talking to everyone, showing our note written in Turkish, asking strangers if they were Batman… Nothing. Then we went to the apartments nextdoor… No Batman to be found. Finally, after trying everything, we discovered that there were 2 apartments in the -1 level of our building… Could this be… the batcave?

    Yes! We did it. We proposed to share the costs for an unlimited internet account for the next few months in exchange for a password and access to BATMAN. Internet at home’s a ‘luxury’ in Turkey, but for students used to European standards, it’s a necessity. Imagine what it’s like for a blogger. 😉

    Want to stay up to date on my Istanbul adventures? Follow my Twitter feed, or subscribe to this blog by RSS or email.

  • Residence Permit Chaos

    As I wrote before, it’s really hard to get your residence permit in Turkey. The bureaucracy is crazy and apparently nobody really knows what exact documents you need to show them for them to issue you a residence permit. I received an email from one of my university’s international office employees that shows the Turkish bureaucratic chaos quite well.

    I’ve bolded the parts of the email that really display the chaoticness very well, for quick reading. 😉

    Date: Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 9:24 PM
    Subject: Residence Permit

    For those who are through – bravo .. geçmiƟ olsun too ..
    For those who are still going tomorrow . .stay calm – stay together in line – at the entrance and upstairs while getting the little piece of paper for  BANKO (bank, window) and numbers … don’t let people crowd in – or cut into your line – then you will be left behind .. and do not take cameras with you – they might see it in the x-ray machine .. and do not take pictures inside the compound or building ..
     
    The cafeteria is down the steps – the A Block is up the stairs after your ID check – (where they enter your name into the computer from your ID card or passport … make sure you get the card back .. and then exit the entry building – and wait for your group on the stairs .. then into the A Blok door – and one floor up – where you get little pieces of paper – BANKO and SERIES ..
     
    BANKO 1 to 9 are located in the main room in front of the building .. BANKO 10-15 is in rear room (behind the elevators  near the toilets) .. BANKO 16-18 are in the opposite corner (separate entry door) in the rear room and are really tight for space … each BANKO has its own series .. shown in larger numerals on your piece of paper .. . you just need to be there when your number comes up – but there is no indication – just word of mouth from others . .about which number is being looked at .. stay calm ..
     
    Cafeteria is downstairs  Burger King/Migros outside – a block down .. Aksaray is about 5 blocks down .. and the Grand Bazaar is another 5 blocks or su .. the “light rail trolley” is across the main street in front of the police building (VATAN CADDESI) and up the hill about 5 blocks to the next main street which has the rails right down the middle of the street – this system takes you to Blue Mosque, EminönĂŒ .. the ferry docks .. always travel towards your left side as you exit the police building .. and you come to the old city ..
     
    As for paper work –
     
    Every university has a different style of “student validation” .. and every university has difficulties with some banko people – for example, the “example” brought by two students from another university for us – was rejected by six of the banko officials – and had to be redone .. not enough information .. students did not even get processed with it .. but one official says this is what we should be doing …
     
    Every time – the system changes – every time there are new or old officials .. making some petty decision ..
     
    However, the division chief showed us what to do on the student validation paper .. and we did that – if his own people do not accept it – (as one tried to do) they can go speak to their chief (as I told him on the phone – he did – it was ok) ..
     
    There is no reason to get upset – keep patient – and have your paperwork in order – yes
    do not show English duration and acceptance letters – they look and might decide you need them to be in Turkish .. just show the minimum forms
     
    and maximum patience ..  and call if you have a problem .. and let Brandon know ..
     
    maybe we can solve it at the time ..
     
    Terry
    Oh, how I wish this was just limited to the foreigner police. This type of bureaucracy is everywhere.
    Yup. Welcome to Turkey! 😉

  • Off To Bulgaria

    I’m off to see my girlfriend in Bulgaria. Which means I’ll be writing a bit about Bulgaria over the next week. If you want to know what it’s like there, just head over to my Picasa albums and have a look at the lower half of the page.

    Speaking of Picasaweb… I took some pictures yesterday of a more or less typical day of me in Istanbul. Go check them out now. 

    Also some great news… I got a freelance writing opportunity passed down from the international office from my university. Turkish Daily News, a Turkish newspaper in English, sent them a message that they’re looking for international students because they could offer an interesting perspective on Istanbul. This is very exciting and I hope to get a nice chance to show my take on Istanbul on a bigger scale, as well as increase my journalistic experiences after having worked with the Bulgarian National Radio before.

    My life’s developing at lightspeed! I can feel the rush! (and the stress, but enough about that already!)

    I’ll write soon, from Bulgaria!

    Edit – Oh, and I’ve been included in a blog carnival called Carnival of Cities, covering many interesting posts about many interesting cities around the world. Go check it out! And Foxnomad was so kind as to make a summary of it and include my post 🙂

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