Timeout

Usually I don't like shopping, especially for cloth since I find it very hard to find something I really like. So I was happy one or two years ago when I found a chain where I could find stuff I like at reasonable prices. I got jeans, shirts and T-shirts (e.g. Run Like Hell) from Timeout, but the crisis stroke again and this retailer went out of business. All their shops in Bucharest were closed and so I'll have to ramble again through countless stores to find something to buy. Luckily my Merrell shoes bought in Delaware six years ago are still in very good shape and I also run 3-4 km in park every now and then so I should be able to go for a shopping session when I will really need it :)

Future cars

Today we have diesel and petrol cars and a few hybrids, the most successful being Toyota Prius. As this industry is build on inoculation of the idea of having a personal vehicle, unless some catastrophic event (natural or economical) happens I don't see that many people giving up their beloved cars no matter how good the public transport will be.
So what will be the future of cars? Among the alternatives to oil based propelled cars the hype is nowadays on electric cars. Some estimates are saying that by 2020 10% of new sales will be electric cars, others estimate the adoption rate will be much slower to only 1-2% of new sales. At least one big company (Renault) is betting on the first estimate and plans to launch a full range of electric cars in a few years. The main drawbacks for electric cars at this moment are the cost of batteries (most of them use lithium which is not that abundant) and the infrastructure for recharging them. See the full story here.
As for myself, I hope the next car I buy will be at least a hybrid one.

Architect, IT architect

So what does an (IT) architect do, apart from designing railroads? Apparently this is a role that started to appear in IT projects around the begging of 21st century (I never heard about IT architects in Star Trek, so I guess they solved the problem of writing software meanwhile) and does something to handle complex projects. I don't see myself as an architect (at least for now), but if you receive an envelope giving you this title, what can you do? Hopefully I'll have some fun when playing the architect part :)

Horse jumping contest

Last weekend I went to an interesting event: a horse jumping contest at Hipocan club in Corbeanca, near Bucharest. I occasionally saw this type of event at TV, but it was the first time I saw a live contest. It was very nice to see all those horses, although the weather was rather chilly. I didn't have a camera to take photos, but I found some from this event on another blog here.

Addictive

Radiohead - Jigsaw Falling Into Place

Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow

Ender's Game is probably the best science fiction novel I ever read. It was somewhere towards the end of high school and I liked both the science and the fiction in it. I stopped reading science fiction books in that period (more about this in another post), but recently I stumbled upon some books by the same author. On the cover of Ender's Shadow I read that it tells the same story as in the original book, but from the point of view of another character. So I bought it and after a couple of days I was done with it. The same fascinating story, but with new points of view and interesting twists. In the next couple of weeks I read the other three books (Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant) from this new saga and they all live up to the expectations raised by the first one.