Tennis

I started (after a pause of two years) playing tennis with some of my colleagues. We're not that good at it, but after two sessions I can see we improved our play. And the team building is also good :) Last weekend I also went to see the semi-finals and the final of the Romanian Open, which was cool. There was also a demonstrative match between Monica Seles and Martina Navratilova.

Next Harry Potter novel and BPEL

I started reading the third Harry Potter and also started learning some BPEL for a new project. BPEL is not that fun (drag and drop programing in WID...) and will also not be that portable since another team in the project already uses IBM extensions.

Harry Potter

I started reading Harry Potter last week. It's nice and I'm already at the second novel in the series. I wonder when was the last time I read children stories. Could be "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" (a year or two ago)... That was a very nice and original one, go ahead and read it if you have the opportunity.

Usually I prefer to "consume" fashionable books and movies after a while. I still haven't seen Titanic :)

Vacation on an island

I'll be on vacantion next week on an island in Greece. It is called Santorini and it's famous for the volcano that created/destroyed it. Don't ask me what I would take on an island, cause I'm not going alone and I'll stay just for a week :) It's my first island vacation, but I hope it will be just the begining and I'll be able to stay longer next time.

More questions and a book

I took a look at some posts from the beginning of this blog and I saw a post with this question: why do people write blogs?

I still don't know why, but I have more questions:
- why do people start blogs and abandon them? (they are just too lazy?)
- why do people read (lots of) blogs?

I'm reading a book by Neagu Djuvara - Amintiri din pribegie (Memories from exile - although "pribegie" doesn't mean exactly "exile", but I don't know how to translate it). This guy lived in exile during the communist era (from 1944 to 1990). He returned immediately after the 1989 revolution and is an active and well known public person although he's over 80 years old. He spent about 20 years in Niger, so the book gives an interesting insight into African affairs among other things.

Alicante

I'm in Alicante (Spain) since last Sunday working on a new project for my company. I didn't see much of the town, just the turistic part around the harbour which is not very large, but it's animated in the summer. There's a lot of work to do, but we go out almost every night and try various dishes. Not to mention sangria... :)

Rolling Stones

Last night I've seen the Rolling Stones live in Bucharest (together with some other 60.000 people). Great show and what can I say: "I know, it's only rock and roll but I like it"...

Surgery

Today I got back to work after two months. I had a surgery for lumbar disc herniation. The good news is that I had a lot of time for reading in this period. More to come on the books I read.

Alive and well

Wow! It's been almost a year since my last post on this blog... This means the real life keeps me busy. I didn't even had much time for reading. A week ago or so I finished a novel called The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman. Weird, but nice though.

As for computer science, I keep applying it every day :)

The fish doesn't think...

Busy period for me lately - I changed my job among other stuff - so I didn't blog for a while. I just stopped by to tell you that it's official now, according to the latest findings we evloved from fish.

...the fish knows everything.

Chat right from GMail

Google is about to introduce a new feature to GMail. You would be able to chat with somebody right from your GMail account if you see her online. This report says this is more of an attempt to attract more users towards GTalk (the IM service offered by Google). But I don't think it's necessarily this. I think it's primarily a GMail feature which will add value to the email service. I actaully sugested this chat capability a couple of months ago in the feedback form they have on the help page. We have the technology to connect to am IM network from a browser window: AJAX, not the old Java applet way. Check this cool site that lets you chat in many IM networks from your browser; it's very handy when you are on a machine which doesn't have your preferred IM client installed. So Google just added a natural feature to their service. Enjoy!

Walking on the frozen waves in Mangalia 

Touristic harbour was entirely frozen 

Next to the Casino 

Same place, more detailed 

Frozen (Black) Sea

It was very cold last week in Romania (-20 Celsius, and even colder), and the Black Sea froze near the shore. A spectacular view, that happens rarely here (I heard last time happened in 1985). I'll post some pictures from Constanta and Mangalia here.

Google Video

Google has for some time now a service where you can upload videos and search and see videos uploaded by others (you can see it here). Recently they launched a video store as well, where they sell some TV series, NBA games, as well as videos which anybody can upload and request some money for others to see them. I think this will become a huge business in the future, but I don't intend to buy videos any time soon. As for the free ones, I found some funny ones, like commercials or some videoclips of Romanian bands that were off the copyright radar (they ban the videos for which the uploader does not have the copyright as soon as they find them).

What needs badly to be improved in order for this service to be usefull is the search. Currently it seems the search is done based only on the title of the video, which gives a rather poor results. I think an easy to implement idea would be to let users add keywords about a specific video. This can be abused by adding wrong keywords, but if most of the users are well behaved the resulting semantic should increase search quality.

Talking about weather

That's what English people do, I, not being able to do just that, started reading a book "The Weather in the Imagination" by Lucian Boia. This guy is a Romanian historian, specializing in the history of ideas and the imaginary of people, i.e. he takes an idea or a concept and traces back how this concept was viewed or percieved (including in the form of myths and ideologies) in different eras and cultures. This time he takes it on weather/climate and investigates ideas like that of climate which determines the character of a nation, and the global warming and the end of the world through a climate catastrophe.

I read many of his books and I find his history much more enlightening than the one generally taught in school where you have to memorize loads of dates and events. He also manages to be funny many times, so the reading is also entertaining.

The best of his books is in my opinion "History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness" which discusses many of the myths of the Romanian history. I'm not sure how interesting would be this book for someone who is not Romanian (i.e. to understand the gap between this version of history and the "official" one), but for the ones that passed through our school system, were "brain-washed" in history classes and are still open-minded persons it definitely worth a read.

Be cool, but try to stay warm

Russia is having an argument with Ukraine over the gas price, and the rest of Europe is trembling. They depend in a large measure on the gas from Russia that passes through Ukraine. European Union will hold a summit today discussing their energy policy. The trend in the latest years was to increase the imports from Russia, as ecologists obtained the closure of many nuclear reactors accross Europe. Not that I'm totally opposed to ecologists, but to close your reactors, having no real alternative plans but to depend in a large measure by Russia doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

On the other hand, as we consume more and more energy to run our computers, it's good to see more efficency on cooling them. Here is a story about a company that is doing this: optimizing the air conditioning systems in data centers.

Happy New Year!

We started a new year, so we have a reason to be happy :)
And to go back to work :)