List 2000, Turkey's first large-scale web directory. Armed with ZIP disks
representing several person-years of translations, including last-minute
heroics by multilingual experts Pascale Garcia, Greta von Lambert, and Rie
Gibbons, I left for Istanbul in May 1997 with my boss, Sam Uresin,
programmer Carl Rischar, and graphic artist Jeff Kostick. There we worked
with some of Turkey's best technological experts including Burak Aktay,
Engin Cetinkaya, Riza Saracli, and Volkan Dindin, to prepare for an
extravagant and heavily-publicized opening event. According to Murphy's
law, everything that can go wrong did go wrong, and we were working
18-hour days, plus a harrowing 36-hour final day, but we were able to make
the site "live" on the web with a Netshow broadcast of the event when the
boss said "go!" at 8PM opening night.