For a few hours, as I stood in the line at the Bucharest prefecture for getting new licence plates after one of them fell down, I had a single word throbbing in my head like a bad headache: decay.

You see, I went there,in Pipera, near the Oracle offices, only half a year ago and I was amazed of the apparent efficiency of the place. You would go and ask at the Information desk on the proper procedure to solve your particular problem, you would take an order number and you would wait until an electronic display would show your number. You could see that the current number is 1 and that it changes every ten minutes or so, so if you have number 20 you have to return in approximately three hours. The building was new, large, with a lot of parking spaces, lit up inside, with clean toilets; in short everything you would want of a governmental building. I then thought: "Belonging to this European Union thing has its perks". The only problem were these peddlers waiting outside the offices, trying to sell you stuff like covers for documents or supports for licence plates. It reminded one you were in Romania.

This time, the electronic displays were dead. The chairs that were in the hallways for people to sit on where mostly broken, and not because of some sort of vandalism, they were just so badly designed that after sitting on them a few times, their backs would bend. Trying to right them back would strain the metal so in the end they would just fall. Half of the neon lights were defective. The male bathroom was just closed and if you wanted to wash your hands or whatever a written sign would direct you to the first floor. The functionaries, never an example of enthusiasm, managed to look even more despondent and despaired at their job. People would stand in long queues, the old Romanian system, waiting for hours to get to one of the few desks that were occupied in order to sign a few papers. The sound system, that was previously used to announce important messages, was now spewing music from a local radio station. At one time, one of the usual announcements also came out of the speakers, but at a lower volume than the music, so you wouldn't understand anything. A woman in the line got sick and went to sit down. Or she just swindled us in order to keep her spot while not standing in the line.

And thus I have wasted three hours and a half there for a signature and two new licence plates. When I got out of the building a female peddler asked me if I wanted covers for my documents. I said no, and she wished me a nice day. I bought a licence plate support from a guy, happy that I didn't have to go somewhere else for one. He even offered to install it for me, but I did it with my wife, like a couple thing.

In the end, the peddlers were the consistent and efficient ones, being even polite while they serviced you, waiting for people to buy their stuff in order to earn a few euros per day.

Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships is a sort of summarization of previous works by Eric Berne, the "father" of Transactional Analysis. It was written in 1964, but it is very actual (barring some author views that could be construed as not politically correct in this age of sensitivity). In fact it felt to me so to the point, that I am asking myself how come I've never heard of this book before.

The idea of the book is that all people are torn between their three major components:

• the Parent - exponent of the social environment, things that "are done" in the "proper" way
• the Adult - who reacts to the circumstances as they change
• the Child - the emotional being who craves satisfaction and enjoys life the most

As I see it, is a separation in things one learns from others, things one thinks for themselves and things one likes or dislikes. At the end of the book the author resorts to a similar division: the Jerk, the one that does everything based on what others would think of them, and the Sulk, the one that does everything in order to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are being mistreated by the world and they are justified in their feelings, similar to the Parent and the Child.

Then there is a presentation of Transactional Analysis, an area of psychology that feels more like economics applied to human beings, where people do things in order to settle debts or gain profit. A nice example is two people that work together and say "hi" to each other in passing whenever they meet first in the day. This is equivalent to settling a debt that each have for their level of relationship. If one of them fails to say "hi", the other will feel attacked, just as if one of the two would stop and say "well, hello! How are you?" which would also feel like an attack, one that indebts the other. These transactions are being categorized into simple transactions, pasttimes, etc.

But then the interesting part comes up. It is funny, I felt for the entire length of the read that the chapters are in the reverse order. Each chapter was more to the point and more interesting than the first. I would have organized the book starting from the introduction, then reversing the remaining chapters. The interesting part is about games, which seem like normal transactions, only they have an alternate "tricky" purpose, one that is not obvious to both people in the transaction.

Quite annoyingly, many of the games described in the book apply to the reader. One feels exposed while reading it. With a structured list of these games, one can use the book as a reference to be used for further study. Each game is presented with their purpose, their "thesis" or pretext and expectations, their actors and their "antithesis". A clear warning is sent by Berne, though: the antithesis of a game is just a way to shortcircuit it and refuse to play, not a "solution" for the problems raised by the playing of said game. Indeed, when faced with a person that refuses to play or, worse, blocks their own playing of the game, they become anxious, depressed, maybe violent, depending on how "hard" they play the game.

An interesting ending is the listing of the reasons why games exist from different standpoints: social, personal, emotional, etc. The games are learned and, in that sense, inherited from parents, then from the environment. People that play the same games stick together and people that play different games are growing apart. That pretty much explains why people that come from the same settings get to have the same social standings and work and live in the same world. Sadly, it also explains why social cases need to make enormous efforts to be accepted, to "make it".

Also, the author presents his view of the best psychological mindset, the one he calls Autonomy. It requires three ingredients: Awareness, to be able to see your surroundings as they are, not as you were taught to; Spontaneity, to be able to have access to your own thoughts, unfiltered by other mechanisms; Intimacy, to be able to share what you are, as you are. A kind of a Zen philosophy. He reckons anything less is not quite living, but only going through the motions. I am not sure how I feel about this, right now.

For me, the book was very interesting. In truth, I should reread it, or at least summarize it into a logical schema that I would add to this post. I am not sure I will do that, but I intend to. Afterwards, I would use it as a tool for introspection and for analyzing my interactions with others. Yes, but...

Another post in my series of series I've been watching. Seriesly.


Again, since it is obvious that I am also watching shows I don't particularly like, I will employ this colour coding scheme: red for shows I do not recommend, green for those I like.

• Doctor Who - the first episode of season 7 was released. An interesting concept, but a rather unpleasant implementation. The writers chose to throw us directly in the midst of action and I felt there was no background and everything was disconnected. I do hope for the better.
• Torchwood - the next season of the other Doctor Who spin-off has not started yet. I don't even know if will ever start. I would watch it then.
• Eureka - Eureka has ended. A pretty weird finale, trying to save everything, give the show a chance for the future and also tie it to its very beginning.
• Criminal Minds - a lot of episodes remain to be watched, two seasons worth, but I couldn't make myself watch them. I think I've had my fill of police procedurals for a while.
• Dexter - I can't wait for the seventh season. Dexter's sister knows! It will be exciting, although I don't want another of those "Dexter is a daddy and he has a conscience" seasons.
• Fringe - there was one episode where the Observers had conquered Earth and were behaving like good old fashioned Nazis (oh, come on! Where is your creativity?!) but it ended just as it started, out of context. The latest season of Fringe ended with hints that this is the direction the next season will take. I certainly don't want yet another WWII movie clone.
• True Blood - season 5 just ended and it was pretty fun. There were a lot of boring episodes concerning the vampire authority that just didn't make sense and some other filler episodes, but all in all it was consistent with previous quality. Bill has become a super vamp, only he's nuts! Cool!
• Weeds - the series has not ended yet and I am still watching it. I get tired of the American affectations of the show; I think that bothers me most about it. And the story has become unsaveable. And the lead character is seven years older than the hot MILF she started as. But I am still watching... hmm
• The Good Wife - season 3 ended well. Unfortunately, Tony Scott died, too. I hope that doesn't affect the quality of the show. Season 4 is due to start at the end of the month.
• Haven - season 3 of Haven is also to start at the end of the month. I will probably watch it, since I can do it with my wife, but the show has gotten stale.
• Lost Girl - haven't watched this show for a while, even if I have a lot of episodes to see. I know it is a teenager show, but some of them work for me, too. This was too... Twittery?
• Falling Skies - second season was OK. It's sci-fi, so I watch it, but the script doesn't make sense most of the time. A new alien species has arrived for season 3. Are they allies or foes? Or has Pamela dreamed again?
• Southpark - the second half of the 16th season is due in October. It is one of the few comedy shows I watch and I really like it. The humour quality is not consistent, but it is great on average.
• The Killing - still on my watch list, being a police show and all.
• Suits - second season just ended and it was pretty far fetched.I enjoy watching it, though.
• Breaking Bad - I have decided I will watch BB when this fifth and final season ends. I don't know why I couldn't bring myself to watch the last two seasons. Maybe because the main character is so desperate when he actually doesn't need to be.
• Californication - the fifth season was pretty cool and it ended with Hank being poisoned. Will he survive? Doh!
• Beavis&Butt-head - I am waiting to see if they make any more episodes. I was disappointed with the new episodes.
• Homeland - still on my to watch list, mainly because my wife was watching it with me and she doesn't want to watch it now, but I bet she would mind if I watch it alone. And also I didn't feel like it much.
• The Fades - BBC Three fucked up badly. They cancelled the show in favour of Being Human's fifth season. You see, it has vampires and werewolves in it. Wankers!
• Hidden - Four episode miniseries from the BBC about the dirtyworks of the British political system. Still haven't watched it.
• The Walking Dead - I am still watching it, and the new season seems to introduce a real threat: other live humans. Makes sense, but how nice can it be, after the emotional drama crap they pulled last season?
• A Game of Thrones - The show is moving so fast, they had to change the story a little. At every episode I get to hear "Oy! that wasn't in the book!" from the wife. Of course it wasn't, dear, it had no pictures! Mean jokes aside, the show is solid, but better for those not having read the books.
• Awake - I didn't start watching it an meanwhile it was cancelled. I have no idea if I will ever watch that lone season.
• Black Mirror - it was brilliant. Three separate sci-fi stories in three stand alone episodes, but high quality stuff. I hope the Brits make more.
• Boss - season 2 has started and I haven't seen one episode.
• Great Expectations - three episodes in all, another take on the Great Expectations story. I thought the wife would want to watch it, but she did not. I don't think I will watch it alone and, anyway, it's not really a TV series, more like a three part movie.
• L5 - the second episode of this VODO show still hasn't been released. I wonder if they will ever do release it. I liked the first one.
• Mad Men - still great, I've watched the fifth season and can't wait to see the sixth. Jared Harris has left the show, and I really liked him and his character.
• Misfits - next season is expected to start in late October. I wonder why so many of its stars left the show, but the show still goes on.
• Pioneer One - I have no idea if there will ever be a second season. It seems they have gone dark, while on the site there is a request for funding for a new show, called Control.
• Sherlock - I liked the first series and I will watch the second. The American's thought it was good, too, since they are making their own version, with Lucy Liu as Watson :)
• Spartacus - Vengeance - I like the show. Seeing that the story of Spartacus is so vast, I had expected a few seasons of this. However, it was announced that the next season (called War of the Damned) will wrap up everything and end the show. Why?!
• The River - horror TV show that I didn't watch, mainly because it was cancelled after the first season. I still might.
• Todd and the Book of Pure Evil - I liked the first season, but then it got a little old. The show was cancelled after the first two seasons.
• Touch - I have watched a few episodes of this. I can say that I did not like it. Keifer Sutherland is always out of breath in order to "act" emotion, but all he manages to do is make one wonder if he has a lung condition. The child is annoying. The story is, basically, that the child is magic and the people around him "help" him ... err... be magic? Only it's not magic, it's math, patterns and cell phones. Really.

Now for new shows:

• My Babysitter's a Vampire - Another Canadian fantasy comedy show. And it's better than Todd and the Book of Pure Evil! Well, it's basically True Blood in a high school and made for children and young teens. But I like it! Guilty pleasure. The blonde vampire chick is hot, too.
• Bullet in the Face - what a strange show. It's grotesquely bad acted, but in a way that makes you think they intended it like this and you are missing some kind of point. The plot revolves around a psychotic killer that gets to wear the face of the cop he killed in order to get revenge on his girlfriend who shot him in the face. It would be unconscionable to recommend it, but I watched two episodes. anyway.
• Continuum - A sci-fi show! Yay! With cops! Boo! Actually, the premise is pretty interesting and the lead actress hot. But it feels like a police procedural either way, which sucks. The plot is that a bunch of future terrorists and a cop are teleported back to our times. The terrorists terrorize, while the cop tries to catch them. Only some of the twists and some of the scripts are painfully bad. I watch it, since it's sci-fi, but it hurts a little.
• Copper - a BBC America drama about Irish immigrants during the American civil war. And set in New York (where else?). Have not started watching it, yet, but it's fresh.
• Longmire - another show about a cop. Only it doesn't feel that way. I actually look forward to the episodes of Longmire. The show is about a small town sheriff and it is based on actual books (you know, paper things with letters on it). The actors play well, the stories are good and the first season had only 10 episodes, so they each were good quality.
• Perception - another House/LieToMe clone, with this intelligent and charismatic, yet weird and rude, professor that specialises in human perception. And he helps the police solve cases. Bleah!
• Political Animals - this is a pretty neat show, even if it is about American politics seen from within a family that is filled with political people. It is not always exciting, but I like watching it, for now.
• Scandal - political thriller made by the people behind Grey's Anatomy. I haven't started watching it.
• The Newsroom - this is one of those shows that decries some aspect of American life by showing us there are exceptions to the rule, which invalidates the rule and makes us all feel good. In Romania we have this saying that the exception confirms the rule, so... Anyway, it is about unconventional people working to make "real news" and fighting corporate interests that push them to do crappy popular bullshit in order to gain ratings. People are very smart, quick, socially inept, endearing, quoting statistics and old English poetry and totally fake.

That ends this post. How much time am I wasting in order to watch all these shows? Well, it took me an hour and a half just to write about it, so you do the math.

Ship of Fools is a sci-fi book written by Richard Paul Russo. It reads a lot like a journal, written in the first person, with little (or badly evoked) emotional involvement or dynamic action. Add to this that the main character is called Bartolomeo and he is on board of a ship with no history and going nowhere in particular, where there is always a struggle between the captain and the bishop and the people of the lower class, and you kind of get the impression you are reading a Spanish crewman ship log adapted to science fiction. The low focus on technology and the way people are thinking and acting increases the feeling that this is something futuristic only by accident, and the reality of it is some feudal world, only milder than one would expect those dark times to have been. Somewhere in the second half of the book the plot veers slightly towards Event Horizon, an opportunity to make some biblical references. Even then, the book is written in the same linear and descriptive way, despite being in the first person.

The title comes from a long existing concept in Western literature, usually depicting a bunch of ridiculous people travelling together, but without an aim, and also characterizing the society from which they came as a whole. However, the book doesn't really feel like a satire and the fact that it won the Philip K. Dick award in 2001 makes me think that maybe I missed something.

Bottom line: An interesting subject, but approached in a manner that I did not enjoy very much. I could empathize with the main character, but only to a point. When actual technical decisions were made, I thought everybody was kind of stupid. Luckily enough, it is not part of any series, it is a standalone book.

To my shame, I've lived a long time with the impression that for an HTML element, a style attribute that is written inline always beats any of the CSS rules that apply to that element. That is a fallacy. Here is an example:

<style>
div {
   width:100px;
   height:100px;
   background-color:blue !important;
}
</style>
<div style="background-color:red;"></div>

What do you think the div's color will be? Based on my long standing illusion, the div should be red, as it has that color defined inline, in the style attribute. But that is wrong, the !important keyword forces the CSS rule over the inline styling. The square will actually be blue! And it is not some new implementation branch for non-Internet Explorer browsers, either. It works consistently on all browsers.

Now, you might think that this is some information you absorb, but doesn't really matter. Well, it does. Let me enhance that example and change the width of the div, using the same !important trick:

<style>
div {
   width:100px !important;
   height:100px;
   background-color:blue !important;
}
</style>
<div style="background-color:red;"></div>
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
$(function() {
//  $('div').width(200); // the width remains 100!
//  $('div').width('200px'); // the width remains 100!
//  $('div')[0].style.width='200px'; // the width remains 100!

//  $('div').width('200px !important'); //this is not a valid value for the width parameter! in IE it will even show an error
//  $('div').css('width','200px !important'); //this is not a valid value for the width parameter! in IE it will even show an error
//  $('div')[0].style.width='200px !important'; //this is not a valid value for the width parameter! in IE it will even show an error

var oldStyle=$('div').attr('style')||'';
$('div').attr('style',oldStyle+';width: 200px !important'); // this is the only thing I found to be working!

});
</script>

As you can notice, the might jQuery failed, setting the width property in style failed, the only solution was to add a string to the style tag and override the !important keyword from the CSS with an inline !important keyword!

Update (via Dan Popa): And here is why it happens: CSS Specificity

I've heard about Dilbert as this corporate satire comic that is very funny. I've avoided it as much as possible, probably because I was afraid it would make fun of my way of life and find it makes valid points. Today, I succumbed to my curiosity and clicked a YouTube Dilbert video.



Conclusion: I am Dilbert...

Apparently it is the week of eulogies on my blog. Neil Armstrong died on August the 25^th. You may remember him: he was the guy that first stepped on the Moon. I didn't know the guy, other people say he was inspiring, a great person and other things like that. A good emotional blog post you can read at the Bad Astronomy site.

But I think that his death, at 82 years of age, is less relevant than the fact we stopped going to the Moon. From the dirty dozen that walked on a space body other than Earth, only 8 remain alive and they are, without exception, born in the early 1930s, so all around 80 years old. Depending on many factors that usually cancel out, these people have around a decade of life left in them, so expect that in 10 years or less we will have no man on Earth that went anywhere else. The death of the last man to have walked on the Moon would be even sadder than Neil's.

That's not only romantically ugly, emotionally wrong, it is plain stupid. It's like we close our senses, humanity as a whole, to the options we have, to the alternatives laid out right in front of us. We act like those retarded tourists that go to an exotic location only once in their life and they return with "Meh! No one spoke English, I didn't have the guts to try the food and the service was crap". Forget the accounting bottom lines and the terribilistic "We gotta stop putting our eggs in a single basket", just think that in a few years we, as the human race, we'll have forgotten what it is like to step on the Moon, the experience gone from our collective memory. We will just sit there, on the bloody couch, counting our money and looking at the picture of the imprint of Neil Amstrong's foot, a simple postcard to replace memories lost.

Yes! Another good sci-fi book. Blindsight is a hard science fiction standalone novel in which, using the idea of contact with an impossibly alien species as a pretext, Peter Watts discusses hard subjects like the future of humanity and its very definition, the nature of conciousness and the difference between intelligence and self awareness. It also features vampires (ugh!), but with a good scientific background and true relation to the plot.

There is no romance in this bleak and autopsic book, where the essence of all the characters gets dissected to complete the tableau of the human race under cold fluorescent lighting. Good stuff! But one gets to expect this from Canadian writers, eh? :)

The other cool reason why you should read the book is that it is free at Watts' site: Blindsight. Enjoy!

Of course that when an international celebrity, a man who touched the lives of many, a loved friend and movie person dies, I make it all about me. But you see, I can't not feel guilty, as I believe I am at to blame for Tony Scott's death.

I have long known that I am part of the long tail, that part of humanity that is forever ignored and shunned as a bunch of individually strange mutants with odd tastes that can't appreciate the world and can't be appreciated by the majority of other homo sapiens (or even each other). But it goes much farther and creepier than this.

When I like a restaurant or bar, it closes down immediately. If I think a particular location is quaint and pleasant it is immediately assaulted and raped by supermarket and hotel chains. If I enjoy using a line of bus or tramway, it gets redirected or work starts on it and never ends. If I like a movie, it never gets sequels (or prequels or parallel stories or spin-offs or any kind of remake). If I like a TV series, it promptly gets cancelled, sometimes in mid season even when the rest of the episodes have already been filmed and montaged. And, of course, if I like an actor or a director, they die. It is a fact of life. I liked Tony Scott, I enjoyed his creations, so he had to die.

Funny thing is, I've enjoyed Scott's movie creations without caring that he did the work, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, Days of Thunder, The Last Boyscout, Enemy of the State, to name a few. I only noticed him in TV series, having worked together with his brother Ridley on some of the best shows there are out there. Even if the plot was about the usual stuff, like police procedure or lawyers or whatever, the shows always had that human dimension that made you feel like you are watching real people living their life. Numb3rs and The Good Wife enter this category. And I said "Tony and Ridley Scott make the best TV shows!". That was my mistake and now Tony is dead.

"Why Tony?", you may ask. There is an answer to this, too. I really, really, really hated what Ridley Scott did to Prometheus, thus ensuring a healthy and long lived franchise and dooming poor Tony.

Now, about Tony Scott and the feelings that his work and his death evoked to normal people, even if I knew anything about it, I couldn't write it better than the guys at The Horror Club. Sorry M'Hael, it was me!

The Legacy of Heorot is a good sci-fi book, part of yet another trilogy: Heorot, written by no less than three authors: Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes. You've heard of Niven by way of Ringworld, the others are no first time writers either, but I have frankly never heard of them.

The book is about a colony of people on the fourth planet of Tau Ceti. They call it Avalon and the colony Camelot, declaring their ideal of an honest equalist society that has the good of the people at heart. But of course, as the title of the series suggests, the plot moves towards the story of Beowulf rather than any round table. In face of doom and disaster, people tend to go through standard phases, starting with denial, while any façade of equality and reason quickly crumbles.

And this above paragraph pretty much details the subject of the book as well as the reason why I was partly disappointed with it. I was afraid that the story would be yet another actualization of the myth of Beowulf, which would have bored me to hell, but it wasn't. Yet it wasn't really a strong psychological or social commentary either. More of an optimistic view of the first human interstellar colony. Like any government or corporation would spend a whole lot of money on a space ship, in order to send it to another planet and then made it a present to the crew of the ship, fire and forget like. (See how I start and finish sentences with "like", I'm pretty rad, huh?) And all the people there, selected by a well designed process, would be nice and intelligent and having no social pathology at all.

But the book is nice enough, regardless of my bleak and neurotic projections. It focuses on the planet's (very simple) ecology and the way the colonists interact with each other and fight for their prize. They have colonized a small island in order to minimize threats, but there is a huge unexplored continent waiting for them, therefore the trilogy. It was nice, though, that the first book is rather standalone. If you choose to read it and you do not want to continue the series, there is no hook at the end, it just satisfactorily finishes all that was started.

I was searching for horror books and I tried this list from a book site. Little did I know that the asshole that wrote the list had a vampire fetish and so he listed all the books with vampires that he ever read.

Blood and Magic, by Lena Austin, is not a horror book, it's an adult fantasy book where sexy vampire bitches have sex with magical and well endowed unicorns. That should say enough about the book, and yet I have read it. It was easy to read, being a short single threaded narrative that had the only purpose of getting the main character (said red headed vampire girl) well fucked, respected and pretty much anything she wanted. I am sure sometime in the future will be discovering that she is also a princess of sorts.

This ends my review.

I've just returned from a holiday spent in the lovely Bulgarian town called Obzor. At least other people say it's lovely, I thought it was full of them (people, I mean) which would explain both their assessment and mine. Anyway, my wife and I stayed at this hotel called The Cliff and spent 8 days together celebrating her birthday and 10 years of marriage. Happy birthday, love! These are my impressions of the journey.

First we had to get there and there are two major routes from Bucharest to Obzor: through Ruse and across Bulgaria and through Durankulak, after driving on the newly constructed A2 highway in Romania (the digit two coming from the fact that we only have two highways at the moment and this is the second). We went via Ruse and returned on the highway, with similar time results and positive feelings. The GPS did it again and chose a more scenic route running through small villages like, for example, Sindel. I shouted "Fatality!" when we exited the village, to my wife's dismay. Even so, it was a good quality road, which in Romania you rarely see in small rural areas and we enjoyed the wilderness.

Ok, we got there. The Cliff hotel is located just outside Obzor and is a four star hotel. That means... at the moment I have no idea what it means, I just assumed it would be way better than a three star hotel, but it appears it is about the same, only with a pool and a lot more expensive. Actually, I want to spend some time discussing The Cliff. It is one of those hotels that have so much potential and yet the experience is being spoiled by little details which I suspect are the fault of greedy little owners not understanding that they are serving people, that's their job, not just owning stuff and getting richer.

About The Cliff hotel in Obzor, Bulgaria

The hotel is situated on a cliff (surprise!) and is in fact a complex of buildings having a system of interconnected pools at the center. The buildings are nice and the pool almost great. Imagine this medium sized pool that has between 1.3 and 1.7 meters in depth, that connects to a smaller one via a jumping point which doubles as a waterfall. Then a small canal takes the water to an even smaller pool, designed for small children. Somewhere in the middle of the meandering canal there is a small jacuzzi. This pool alone and the way it looked make The Cliff a beautiful hotel. One can get to a rather isolated part of the beach via a long set of stairs or by going with the car in Obzor. A taxi can be employed, charging the enormous sum of 10 leva for a 2-3km run, or one could walk the same way.

The beach is one of those great fine sand beaches, only there are some unexpected rocks further into the water. This freaked me out a little, as I was starting to swim and I found myself hugging a gigantic boulder. The rock was covered with algae, not with razor sharp shells, so it was more of a psychological shock. I suppose that makes that part of the beach so remote and isolated. We didn't even try the commercial part of the beach because of all the people, the noise and the fact that we had a perfectly fine chlorinated pool inside the hotel! I didn't have to suffer floating garbage, stinging eyes or the smell of decaying algae and seashells, which other people find so endearing. I don't know about that, wouldn't the same effect be obtained with a bit of garbage in a salt shaker? But returning to the subject of the beach, can you imagine that 10-20m from the edge of the sea, the depth was still around my waist?

So, The Cliff is a beautiful hotel, isolated, with few people and a great pool. What could possibly go wrong? Everything else, of course.

The staff had almost no knowledge of English or Romanian, except maybe some of the folks at the reception. Even so, the others were morose unhappy people that kind of drifted, like some ghosts from The Shining. The reservation included free breakfast and my wife tried to drink the coffee, only to notice it was instant coffee. She asked for an espresso and was told she had to go to the bar and buy one.

Nobody can stand between my wife and her coffee! Civilisations rise and fall when she gets angry. I am an engineer, I can easily find what is the weakest point in a system and make it break, but she is the destroyer of worlds! She is like a cute sexy Dalek. She exterminates anything standing in the way of her daily coffee.

Also the prices from the restaurant were impossible for the quality of the food. I had to pay 25 leva for 5 shrimps in a plate. For the same amount of money I get a full platter of all kind of seafood at the Regina Maria hotel in Balchik, around 80 kilometres above Obzor. (BTW, I can't recommend that hotel enough, also four stars, but one feels good there).

The room had a TV, an old AllView with only 20 total channels that showed anything 10 seconds after you turned it on. That's OK, since we could only get 15 channels anyway with only BBC World in English and the rest in Bulgarian. Two of those were music televisions, but one had horrible audio and both had horrible music. Seriously, Romanian music television is no bastion of good taste, but that was utter crap. There was wireless Internet, only it only worked when not many people were using it and was slow as hell when it did work. We had air conditioning, but the windows could not open, just the main balcony door. There was easy access from other balconies and even from the hotel stair to our balcony so, in the interest of personal security, we had to choose between torpid fresh air and insects and no security or cool air conditioned stale air in a little safe cocoon. The bath was big and had these retro looking finishes, only they went too far. The bath curtain bar was rusted and stained all towels placed on it and the shower head was like a gardening implement with small pressured water jets that hurt rather than cleaned. The insect repellent smell of the bath went away in about three days.

The hotel also had a spa. That included massages with expensive cosmetics, colon cleansing, sauna, etc. The prices were huge, though. Imagine that you had to pay 80 leva for an hour of massage. What bothered me even more is that, after two days, a "promotional" price list was left under our door. They took 25% off some of the procedures. So if you are stupid enough to pay from the first two days, no promotion for you. So you go to a hotel with spa, you pay 80 euros a double room per day and then they tell you the prices are different for any spa procedure so they don't offer you any in the price of the room.

Now, all the hotels have those little annoying cards that double as keys. You have to place them in a slot in order to have electric current. So you can't charge your devices or leave the air conditioning on while you go to sun tan next to the pool. Unless you have a different, similarly shaped card, which I had, the only possible use for those spammy fidelity cards you get at various medical or shopping facilities. But that's like a general rule when going on holiday: always have a standard shaped card to leave in the electric current slot in the hotel.

To summarize: if they bought a little more Internet bandwidth, paid for satellite TV and upgraded the TVs in the room, made some sort of window that you can open without letting everyone in and, above all, didn't think to rip you off at every opportunity, the hotel would have been great! Instead, it felt like a below average overpriced tourist trap.

We also had an unexpected surprise from them. You see, in order to book a room there, you authorize them to take half of the staying sum from your account. For all practical purposes you pay that sum. You then go to the hotel and pay the rest of the sum. Then, they take the sum you authorized them to take when making the reservation, then the rest of the sum, then they "unblock" the authorized sum when you leave the hotel. That means you pay 1.5 times the actual sum until the original half is returned to you. We left on Sunday, and we were kind of... disconcerted... when we noticed a negative balance on our purely debit card. So take that into account (sorry for the pun).

Getting back. A few hundred meters below The Cliff there is the yooBulgaria resort. One could probably go over the Net, find this hotel and choose it, just like we did with The Cliff, to spend their holidays. We went there. It looked nice, but the entire hotel was surrounded by abandoned buildings, victims of the economic crisis in times of great investment in the tourism business in Bulgaria. Seriously, it looked like the hotel was the lucky building that survived a full aerial bombardment of the entire zone. I am talking about empty concrete scaffolds with graffiti on them. Horror movies and parkour videos could be made there.

The town of Obzor was actually a village till 1984. Then it was promoted and then the Communist era ended and the tourism took hold. As a result it is a combination of greedy tourist corporations, small family owned businesses and a tourism oriented management.

We searched the Internet on the best restaurants there and we found: "Starata Kushta", recommended by three different sites that had the same text in them. We couldn't find this restaurant and so we went to recommendation number two: the Tania restaurant. It is a nice little thing, but rather expensive. The guy recommended the pizza there; he probably never went to Romania. Their pizza is mediocre at best. Try the fish things, but do not, under any circumstances, ask for sauces. They are horrible. Then we tried our luck with what was there (and this is my recommendation for anyone visiting Obzor: try your luck, eventually you will find something you will like) and found Morska Perla, or the Sea Pearl. There was this deliciously looking waitress there. We were, of course, served by the old ugly one that didn't know English. The fish was OK, the prices reasonable, but they had this apricot brandy that was really something. We also tried Dionisi, right next to Tania. The pizza in Tania was about 14 leva and rather small. The one at Dionisi was the same size and 4.5 leva. Unfortunately you paid for what you got: pizza from supermarket dough and some cheap stuff sprinkled over. The spaghetti were floating in oil.

The last restaurant I want to mention was almost great: it's called Rai (Heaven) and it is also located around Tania, about 500 meters from it. They have this Rai Calamari dish that has 500 grams and costs 27 leva. I thought it sounded OK, but I really expected some piece of fried cephalopod and instead got a squid filled with a mix of onions, oyster and small shrimp and served with four jumbo shrimps. So, even if the menu didn't advertise it (bad for them) the dish was actually a seafood plateau, something I had been searching for unsuccessfully in Obzor and went up to Balchik to have at Regina Maria (did I mention the hotel and the restaurant are great? They have sushi!)

The only problem with Obzor restaurants and bars is that they don't have dark beer. None of them! I also asked for lemonade and none of them had any! It's water with lemon and something sweet, for crying out loud... I drank a lot of Grozdova Rakia (grape brandy), a Bulgarian speciality, and Kamenitsa, their beer.

That's about it. We visited close by Nesebar, which is nice, but filled with tourists. There was a cool restaurant there, called Hemingway. Not in any way connected to the writer, but good food. We never got to Burgas and we only passed through Varna a few times. Bottom line: Obzor is a nice see side town, but I wouldn't want to be housed in that cacophony of noises, music and smells. The Cliff was a good option, remote as it was, although the sounds from Obzor occasionally made their way there, as well, but it had its flaws.

Yes, it's that Guillermo del Toro and he wrote a book, together with this Chuck Hogan dude. Actually he wrote more books, this is part one of the Strain trilogy which, judging by the name, should have been about either a contagion or some sort of pulled muscle, but instead is about vampires.

Now, I don't want to be mean towards poor Guillermo. Vampires, even if really overdone nowadays, are pretty cool. The ones in the book are not even sparkling or talking with a Russian accent, but are vicious creatures that have in mind only one thing: to feed. That makes them the more believable type of vampire, although the technical details that are trying to explain in scientific terms the process of vampirification are complete rubbish.

The book is about a contagion of sort, that of vampirism. A "master" comes in New York (where the hell else), wreaking havoc and turning everybody to vampires. They even say this type of vampire is a virus incarnate, although the analogy gets a little strained (get it?). An old Jew is the only one who knows what vampires truly are and how to fight them and he teams up with this New Yorker epidemiologist (and later a pest control rat hunter second generation Russian) in order to fight this asshole vampire.

This melange of different cultures gives opportunity to talk about the Holocaust and 9/11 and even Romania, all at the same time! The writers shamelessly abuse this without actually connecting these facts with the story in any significant way. That bothered me. I understand people can become a little obsessive over things like this, but what kind of a jerk keeps using them to further their careers and books? Anyway, before turning this into another "stop using Hitler, the Holocaust and 9/11 as arguments" extension of the Godwin law, let's get on with the book.

The writing itself is not bad. The only things that kept me getting out of the atmosphere of the book (except the shamelessness above) were some of the emotional background stories used to describe the beginning of the infestation. I would blame that on me, though, as I am often prone to get annoyed by the feelings of others, especially when they get in the way of a good storyline.

Being a trilogy, the book doesn't really end at The Strain. It's just a broken shard of a whole story. You get some hints on what would happen and also some of the arches are closed by the end of the book, so it isn't completely annoying.

Bottom line: Hmm, it was good, not really a masterpiece. It reads like a movie, with a simple almost linear plot. The thing is that, even if it managed to convey the terror of such an occurrence in general, it didn't really evoke in me feelings of horror or at least some empathy with characters that feel that horror, and that is what I was looking for. I've read the book in under a week, but I am not really prepared to spend another two reading the continuation.

I know of this method from the good old Internet Explorer 6 days. In order to force the browser to redraw an element, solving weird browser refresh issues, change it's css class. I usually go for element.className+='';. So you see, you don't have to actually change it. Sometimes you need to do this after a bit of code has been executed, so put it all in a setTimeout.

More explicitly, I was trying to solve this weird bug where using jQuery slideUp/slideDown I would get some elements in Internet Explorer 8 to disregard some CSS rules. Mainly the header of a collapsible panel would suddenly and intermittently seem to lose a margin-bottom: 18px !important; rule. In order to fix this instead of panel.slideUp(); I used

panel.slideUp(400/*the default value*/,function() { 
  setTimeout(function() { 
    header.each(function(){ 
      this.className+=''; 
    }); 
  },1); 
});

where panel is the collapsible part and header is the clickable part. Same for slideDown.

I had to fix this weird bug today, where only in IE9 the entire page would freeze suddenly. The only way to get anything done was to select some text or scroll a scrollable area. I was creating an input text field, then, when pressing enter, I would do something with the value and remove the element.

It appears that in Internet Explorer 9 it is wrong to remove the element that holds the focus. Use window.focus(); before you do that.