reading book over suitable music

Which music is suitable for which chapter? Relate music with the chapter of the book.

i.e. Celtic music with a bio fits great or even maybe heavy metal beneath a fight scene. As if on a Hollywood movie…

Useless but promising :)

(PHP) It’s January 1, 2006 23.00 GMT+02.00… Love you, honey!

Nonsense title… I wanted to enter a disgusting title, because, even now I am not sure output will be an ethic result of this little experiment with my computer distilling from / combining with private life.

Here I am going to show you a few things about greeting cards, special day notices and so on.

***

Reminding everything

Let’s start where I have begun. The most important two things, I own, are a laptop and a bad memory. Thus, I forgot nearly everything I should have remembered. One of those is special days. I forgot birthdays, I forgot anniversaries, I forgot, even, my birthday :)

I have been sometimes orally censured(!) about these. Therefore, I had to find, and found a way out. My and hosting company’s computers…

The idea of making computers remember instead of me came in my mind. Those days would be remembered by the computers; despite I have been sleeping. I would write a template letter and then post it to everybody when needed.

***

First problem was, each day has its own different formal language. On Jan 1, you say “Marry christmas”, on birthdays you say “Happy birthday”. Second problem is relation between you and the recipient that probably made me think more. I have friends from distinct environments. Some are workmates, some are schoolmates, some are relatives, … You say to your teacher “Greetings Mr(s). Abcdef, it is an enormous day… Sincerely, Me.”, but to your fellow “Hi dude, god damn a good day! ain’t it??? ::)))) “. So there should have been categories and I had to prepare different templates for each category.

So I prepared the templates for: “Workmate – same age”, “Workmate – older”, “Friend – Close Fellow”, “Friend – I do not remember eventhough”, “Friend – Outside categorization”, … This was simple except inline texts of templates. Because, I do not use English for greeting messages, except for people who do not know Turkish. And in Turkish, a special call for fellows has a suffix “cim”. You add this suffix to name, and obtain what you might say. For instance, if the name of your fellow is “Dincer” then you call him “Dincercim”; if the name of fellow is “Onur” then something changes because morphological rules of Turkish, the suffix becomes “cum” which makes “Onurcum”.

Letter samples

Okay. No problem. A small code simply solved this. I took the last vowel of the word (these are rules for Turkish language suffices [1]) then shaped the suffix according to that. Then here we’ve got the calling word “Onurcum”. “Fellow” Template became more clear. I would say “Hi [Fellow-Call], “.

***

Greeting part was ended. Then I prepared such a body that would fit into both formal and informal language (e.g. “happy birthday”). After that point I had another problem because that code must be run every single day, which was more difficult than remembering once!

Suddenly, hosting company helped me. They had a cron job (What is a cron job? [2]) service for free! I added a cron job for every single day at 0.00 o’clock. The script would mail templates related to the date of that moment, birthday, anniversary, …

Sum of all, it was running well. Whenever a problem occurs or an email is sent, then I got a notice in my inbox, suggesting me to remember, if I have forgotten. Because, it would not be nice if I cannot understand what is going on as my friend thanked me in return of my (cron) email.

***

I did not write this passage to tell how I did; rather, I wrote this, because I could not weigh the ethic value of results of this project. As it is known, the important thing is to remember. Therefore, I explained what I have done for christmas messages before (and will be doing after) christmas. Furthermore, I am not sure I will use this again.

My questions to myself:
- How much is it different than writing those dates to a diary and looking up every day?
- Isn’t it important to do such a project for your a few friends of yours in the list? Isn’t, remembering those days, the same effort doing this project and adding their name to cron list?
- What if you start to be more lazy that you add some people, you even would not call on those days?
- Lastly, is artificial intelligence going to make us feel this? (I do not assert this small project uses artificial intelligence – just because it seems burdening your responsibilities to computers)

***

References

[1] Palatal (major) Harmony

i. http://www.italki.com/knowledge/contribution-Vowel+Harmony.htm
ii. http://www.turkishclass.com/tl_lesson.php?lesson_id=59
iii. http://www.learningpracticalturkish.com/turkish-is-consistent.html#vowel%20harmony
iv. If links are dead, try this PDF backed up formerly: Vowel Harmony in Turkish Language

[2] What is a cron job?

i. A Unix program that runs programs at scheduled times.
ii. http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/cron.html

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Special thanks to Mr. M. A. Aksoy for editing.