Her name was Andrea, but her friends called her Andrew, for some reason. Or at least this is what I found out a bit later, at my place. I'd also call her Andrew, as I thought she enjoyed it, or at least that she was used to it more. Turned out she really hated it, but she would not show herself vulnerable to something like this in front of her acquaintances.

One would not call her neither skinny, nor athletic, but she was a thin blonde, with a rather tense looking face, a bit short, but not much; really nice skin. I met her at this party and, even if I wasn't really attracted to her, I was in the mood. I wouldn't have minded shagging her if she was up for it. She certainly was more friendly than the brunette earlier. The bitch had noticed me looking at her and started making faces, to everyone's amusement. I told her she was looking very cute, in a babyish kind of way. I am not very good at acid remarks, obviously, especially when I am wasted. Hitting on a girl that drank in a corner with some other girl was not a good idea, anyway.

I had sobered up by the time I met Andrea. She started talking to me, actually, and I found the conversation with her quite entertaining. Her face was really interesting once she got to smile. All the tension would suddenly vanish and that smile would take 10 years off her. I was quite curious to see how she laughed. She wasn't much of a laugher, though, although I did use some of my best party jokes.

After a while she started telling me stuff about her, even rather private things. I am used to people getting drunk and spilling everything out - I usually do that - but she wasn't drunk. She did accept a drink from me, but she was definitely sober, yet she seemed desperate, somehow. Apparently she was quite the party girl. She told me about one time when she and her friends partied in a bus they rented and they woke up the next morning, all hung over and drooling all over each other. I stupidly smiled and told her I knew how that felt, all the time feeling a bit envious because I had no idea. I also felt like she read me like an open book, anyway.

By that time we'd ended up at my place and Andrea and me continued talking about all kinds of things. In a matter of hours we ended up feeling like good friends, although it was pretty clear we would not stop there. We were never going to be in love with one another either. I think she really enjoyed that I wasn't like her friends and that I didn't even know them. It was then when she told me not to call her Andrew anymore, her name was Andrea.

In fact, we got to leave the party after she did something really unexpected. We had been talking for a few minutes, normal stuff like names and how we are feeling and how the party is like, the bus thing, when she suddenly pulled a big notebook filled with pictures and personal notes written on paper that was cut in different shapes, all glued together in a thing that looked like a little girl's diary. She said "You want me to show you my life plan?". She'd written in that thing all the dreams that she had, detailed plans of what she intended to do with her life, things that she saw and she liked and she wanted to see more of. Her photos were really good, but the notes were really personal. I couldn't believe that she would show something like that to me. I felt like a thief, getting something I did not earn. The party was not a good place to be anymore, it was too impersonal and it lacked privacy.

I told her that if she wrote in the thing that she wanted to get married and have children and that was some weird ploy to pull me into it, it would certainly be a waste of time and not go well. Then she laughed, mind you. It was something I was really honest about, but I think she realised that and to my personal relief, there was no talk of children inside there. Her laughter was really beautiful.

So back at my place I started to look deeper into her journal thingie. She gave me a CD, told me that she would need to process some of the pictures she took and that on the CD was a special software that would read Binko files, whatever graphics format that was, and it would be good if I had it on my computer. It was funny and refreshing to hear that, I laughed and proceeded on installing the software. You see, we never talked about getting together again after this, certainly not at my house again. It was like she was admitting that she liked me and that she knew I liked her and that talking about it would be moot.

I felt than that maybe she would end up fixating on me, acting all neurotic and possessive at one time or another, but I didn't really care. If she would do that, she would be just opening more to me and I would never be forced to lie to her because of it, I would just react to what she would be doing or saying. Without actually defining it, it was already decided that we would have an honest relationship above all else. Not like boyfriend and girlfriend, more like that of best friends.

At that time I got a little nervous, thinking maybe I will get the "let's just be friends" speech and that was to be that, but before I could finish my thought, Andrea was kissing me. She would be gentle and sentimental in bed, not something one would expect from a party girl, but then again, I wouldn't want to believe that she would do that with anyone else.

And then I woke up. It was time for me to go to work and Andrea was already fading from my memory. It was a beautiful dream.

I am not the one to write essays on how "real men" behave or anything. But this article says it all: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7123460.stm. I have all the respect and admiration for Vitangelo Bini, even if he is too old to really lose anything by incarceration. He showed logic and respect for his wife. For her spirit, not her decaying body.

I always thought that if I get into the same situation, I would kill myself. But I wonder if this resolution is not stored in one of the first regions of the brain affected. Before I realise what is going on, I forget I always have this option. In situations like this I say screw the law and the hypocritical society that spawned them. Way to go, dude! This is how real men act.

This is a funny little story about a bunch of low end kids finding a way of letting everyone build whatever electronic device they want for almost free. The lead character is a broker, getting more and more terrified about how this simple thing destroys markets and the capitalist economy. In the end, he is to be replaced by electronic neural networks that perform flawlessly.

It seems Peter Hamilton has some issues with capitalism as there are always some characters criticising it in his books. However, in this particular story, the ending can be only one, where humans are completely replaced by the low cost electronics. It does not destroy communism, it replaces humanity.

My guess is that this is bound to happen sooner or later. Already software glitches are more frequent than hardware ones. When is someone going to realize that we, humans, have the worst hardware possible, even by biological standards. And we're only getting fatter, slower and less efficient by the day. Would I mind being replaced by a race of star faring robotic human replicas? No way.

The root of all evil has finally been found!


related link: The true key to happiness

I've just seen two movies: Sicko and Maxed Out, which describe, each in their own way, the issues arising from aggressive capitalism like the one in the USA. Some people are really quick to jump with the "oh no, it's socialist propaganda!" line and ignore the message, but, if you think about it, there is nothing wrong with some socialist propaganda now and then, since we are bombarded with capitalist propaganda every day in the form of ads and commercials and corrupt government propaganda.

I will make a (hopefully) short detour and talk about my perception of capitalism and democracy. I've always felt that there is something wrong with them, but could not exactly pinpoint it. Well, democracy is easy: the majority of people are idiots, therefore the rule of the people means you are lead by idiots. But capitalism? What is wrong with being competitive? Isn't that the only guarantee of performance? And then it struck me! Competition is not the problem, it's the performance! It's about one's definition of performance!

And now I return to the two movies, of which Sicko tells of insurance companies that pay doctors depending on how many people they refuse treatment to and Maxed Out shows how people are graded by the income they bring to the credit card companies, meaning that people with a high risk of being late on payments or even the ones that are not capable of paying are their main income sources, since they pay all those additional risk interest fees and late payment penalties.

Because this is grading performance. What it would be like for the police to try to catch mainly the people that will post bail and then run? What would it be like to have firemen being promoted on how little water they use? And since performance is now more and more defined exclusively in economic terms, who will inherit the world? The economic performers! banks, insurance companies, salesmen, marketeers, the ones that put everything into financial equations and care nothing about anything else.

The police and fire department, as brilliantly observed by Michael Moore in Sicko, are social services. In countries like the UK, Canada, France and even Cuba, getting professional medical help for your injuries for free (in other worlds universal health, health service socialization) is available. And doing great!

And now I look at Romania, I see the same thing that bothers be about America: everything is sold and bought. You need money to pay hospital bills, a lot of them not being covered by medical insurance, even if you have one; pharmacies payed by drug companies to sell their expensive products instead of for getting the right medicine to the right person; governments, no matter their political color, being bought and payed for by wealthy industrialists; banks and financial services effectively robbing you blind.

Oh yes, I agree, a socialist system does not work, but some services must be social. I would imagine welfare, health and education should be social services. The state should pay for them from taxes we all pay. No matter what company does the service, its income would originate from the state, rewarded by the real performance of their service: people not dying from poverty and disease, people cured from illness, people getting a high education and paying higher taxes because of it when their time comes.

But how can this happen in Romania? The government is so impotent and corrupt that it only does what large corporations, banks and political interests tell it to. And when people have had enough, here comes a superhero saviour, manufactured to look like the thing the people want by the very people that rob this country dry. I would hate to see Romania becoming a pale imitation of the US, a poor country with a cut-throat capitalism that benefits thieves only.

I had this English teacher in high school. She was very nice, and I also enjoyed her classes, mainly because I already knew English and because she did the unthinkable, she said she would pass anyone who didn't want to learn English, provided they didn't come to disturb the class. She was a good teacher.

Anyway, one day she started talking about the place where she is alone with her thoughts and she can feel calm. I, being even less tactful than I am today, replied "Oh, the toilet!". She felt offended, because she was talking about church. But the scene stuck with me. And sometimes, on the toilet, alone with my thoughts (and my cat - so not quite alone) I recall her reaction and my own. You see, I understood why she felt offended, it was because I compared a place she considered clean with a place she considered dirty, but I also thought about why a woman that believes in a deity that made us all considers dirty something like we do by design and clean something we do inside a building with trainers and specific rituals that are not by design.

And that got me thinking (hmm, is my blog the best thing since toilets?) about the general situation where we put so much value on an external thing, while the value itself is internal. And I am not talking here only about religion (which by now you know I consider stupid) but also about everything else. Fashion, for example. It's the human equivalent of monkey see monkey do. It's putting value on a thing, person or trend simply because you feel like it. So it's something that has internal value, you gave it importance, but you attached it to something external.

Take another example: the things we get attached to, apparently by brain design. A child is being told that his favourite toy has been cloned into a perfect copy. And he is given "the clone", which is actually the same object. And the kid wants his toy back, not the copy. And the examples are infinite.

I think it's because in our brains, things are not things, but intersections of meanings. A red pill is the intersection between "pill" and "red", themselves intersections of other concepts. The church is nothing but a silly building, but it has meaning, for it gives peace and solitude for a while. So does a bathroom. So does this blog. But there comes a time when we realise that the intersections don't add up. It's called thinking, and it's the equivalent of Bonzai trimming of one's thoughts. We start cutting away the lines that don't make sense or that hurt us, while we strenghten the ones that give us sense and pleasure. We start with a thin scaffolding of chaotic wires and we bring it to a sturdy iron bar cage where our thoughts are stable and protected. That is the real place where we are alone with our thoughts, and we are alone because we don't allow anybody or anything in.

So trim carefully, some thin wires are good while some iron bars are bad.

I know, the third entry in my blog about Basescu doesn't say much about my IQ or style, yet now I know what I felt I needed to say, but didn't realise what it was. It is the similarity between the case of Traian Basescu and Ariel Constantinof.

It is amazing still that these two similar stories happened in the same time. Indeed, Basescu is like a high school student who is suspended from the school on the basis of his behaviour, without anyone really knowing if it is "kosher" to do so. Do the high school owners have the right to expel Basescu or is this a financially motivated blunder? Both of them are big mouthed smart asses, without being really malevolent, yet being rather naive. Just as Basescu, Ariel gets a lot of sympathy from bloggers and radio hosts (radio bloggers?) everywhere, but without any true support. On each of the blog pages that describe his ordeal there are hundreds of people that offer their moral support, but really not much else. Just as Ariel, Basescu gets only a bunch of people to at least voice their anger to the school directors.

Can the case of Ariel Constantinoff serve as a simulation of what will happen to the country in a few months? I don't know, but I really like Ariel more than Basescu. And at least he has parents, the chance to go to another school. For crying out loud, he's a kid! Teachers, leave the kids alone! But who will find enough sympathy in their hearts for an old, bald, shunned ex president who didn't yet catch on with reality?

That's it! No more Basescu for a while on this blog ;)

...which is the Romanian word for "The people". Something a little archaic, like in the old days, when the people were either being oppressed, discontent or revolting. Usually, one uses the word in describing folks living in the country or a people as a whole, but then they are always specifying the country.

These days, right after the Parliament decided to suspend president Basescu, the Romanian Internet went wild. "Poporul" that, "Poporul" this. Blogs everywhere, hailing the great hero of "the people", victim to the vicious plots of traitors and communists and economic interests and so on and so on.

I am not even commenting on the decision to suspend Basescu, although I never liked the guy, but I can and will comment on the reaction of so many people, fellow bloggers, journalists and opinion leaders, all caught in the demagogic and cynical trap of the "hero".

For example, I read that Basescu (single-handedly, no doubt) brought Romania in the EU. Wrong! Most of the job was done by the PSD before, and it would have been inevitable, anyway, since the EU wanted our market. He is also responsible for the transition from the ROL (the leu, the old Romanian coin) to the RON. I might argue that the transition itself is dumb and useless since we will be switching to the Euro in 5 years, but hey... what did the president of the country in order to influence in any way the switch to the RON? Again, he is a great guy, but he did this terrible mistake of putting Tariceanu as prime minister. Did he have any other choice?! He won the elections (barely, I might add) on the back of a coalition of parties, the democrats and the liberals. Being a democrat himself, he had to put a liberal prime minister, whether he wanted or not! What else did he do, this hero of the people, except telling Bill Gates that piracy was a positive thing for Romanians? (which is true, BTW) Publicly fighting with your prime minister is NOT a good thing.

The greatest thing Basescu ever did was impersonate fantastically well a man who fights corruption. But did he? Corruption scandals are everywhere around him, involving him, suggesting political blackmail by use of the Secret Services. Are they based on anything? I don't know, but I do know that the little corruption, the one that I have to face, as a normal person, did not diminish. Quite the opposite! The current government policy seems to be take from the small and give to the big.

But returning to the people, who are these people that like Basescu? The ones that are either sympathizers of the democratic party or not having any political sympathy (as all other parties are now against him). Who are these wonderful people who will fight for the symbol of their freedom and fight against evil (no, not Bush), against the political will of all the parties and the people that support them and against all the TV attacks against the president? Who are these great minds who can think for themselves and make a decision and stick by it? They are not the "popor", that's for sure!

So for you, all these people of the press and Internet blogging bravado, I suggest you speak of yourselves, leaving "the people" alone, since you are not their representatives (as Basescu is not). Leave the illusion of greatness to the dictator-hearted people. Lead by example, not by association. Because you are not of the people, you are a little better.

Well, it sounds better in Romanian, since just a few days ago it was Easter.

Anyway, it seems that the dark force that rules Romania has finally shown its ugly head and took vengeance on president Basescu. You see, some say the country is ruled by corrupt politicians, while others blame economic interest groups. But it's all a scam to hide the real rulers of Romania: the boutique traders!

It all started quite a long while ago, when Basescu was only the mayor of Bucharest. Back then he decided to demolish boutiques that provided cheap and accessible nourishment and drinks to the population and to kill as many dogs as possible. Their plan was long and elaborate, but the boutique people got through all of this without even being noticed. They and their dogs, saved from certain death by their covert operations. Finally, the day has come! Basescu was allowed to go as high as he did only to have a bigger fall in the end.

You might consider this post another tasteless joke from my part, but you will see... some day... when Basescu has lost all his political support, nobody loves him, his beautiful Presidential residence taken from him, feeling defeated, buried in despair... the dogs will get him. Oh, yeah, they will get him. They never forget!

I've wanted to write about this for a long time now. It started with the entry about the ridiculous and diabolical street sweeper machines that make lakes of water at every intersection while "cleaning the streets and fixing the dust". As an added bonus, now entire forests outside Bucharest are being torn down to make way for housing projects. I wonder where the dust is coming from, hmm...
Anyway, I want this entry to be as complete as possible in order to tell anyone considering buying a bicycle to ride in Bucharest what exactly they are getting into.

Step I. Buying the bicycle

Now, being a girl or a slim guy and not having the desire to make bike stunts in the foreseeable future, you might be considering buying a bicycle from a hypermarket chain like Cora. Don't do it!! The bikes there are of bad quality to begin with, but considering the people at a hypermarket don't know anything about bicycles, you will also get a bike that is put together by marketeers.

Let me give you an example: the bike is twice as cheap as anything you saw in a bike shop, it also has a lot of accessories like wheel covers, water bottle support, ringer, bike support leg. Isn't that a good deal? No! The spikes of the wheels are bad Chinese quality, in short time your wheels will turn in an figure 8 like movement; the water support is nothing but a glorified wire, sooner or later you will deform it and it will scratch you or your clothes; The ringer works, but is placed in the middle of the bike horns, so you can't reach it; the wheel covers are cheap plastic and they will always fall on the wheel making loud noises and slowing your bike; the bike support leg will at first not hold your bike, since it is really bad, then it will get its mechanism jammed and you won't be able to expand it.

Still want to buy it from Cora? So where do you buy a bike from? I personally despise franchises. That's why I would not recommend First Bike or any other shop like it. However, not having bought anything from them, I can't express an opinion. I bought both my bikes from Magelan and I am rather satisfied with the bikes and the service, even if I had to pay a little extra. What is nice about Magelan is that they are a full time bike shop. They fix bikes all day long as well as sell them. They taught me about how to maintain my bike, they centered the bike wheels (this being a very important process if you don't want your wheels to deform or the bike to require more effort to ride), etc. They also presented me with bikes of 1000-4000 euros :) Luckily, you won't have to buy anything more expensive than 400 euros.

The things you want in a bike are: wheel covers (see the diabolical street sweepers above), firm brakes, an anti-theft device and a good saddle. Anything else is rather useless. You will need a bicycle pump, but I would recommend the foot pumps that are sold in car shops, not the arm muscle devices the people at Magelan sell as pumps.

Step II. Transporting the bicycle

What do you mean, transport the bike? It should transport you, right? Wrong!. The bicycle will transport you only on the road. Then you have to move it upstairs to your flat or to your office. Sometimes, like when you go shopping, you need to lock your bike and tie it to something. You will soon notice that moving your bike with an elevator is not an easy task, especially if you are tall like me and you bought a big bike. There are also old hags that insist on you cleaning the elevator after you dirty it with your bike wheels. There are blocks without elevators. The first rule about this: don't tie your bike downstairs, hoping it won't get stolen. It will!
If you have the misfortune to live in a block without elevators or with a too small one, you will have to climb the stairs with it. For example I have to do this at the office, but lucky me, it's only at the fourth floor.

Step III. Riding the bike

Oh, this part is going to be long. Take some popcorn and read carefully.
At first you will ride the bike on the sidewalk. It makes sense, since you want to be safe when you make rookie mistakes and you lose your balance. You don't want a big truck to hit you when you stop suddenly and can't keep straight. So, if you are allowed to move on the sidewalk and it's safe, you could always use the sidewalk, right? Wrong!

In a normal situation, where the city hall really thought about you, the citizen, and took measures to keep you happy, you would be OK using the sidewalk. There would be no holes, there would be easy access from the sidewalk to the street, no cars parked on the sidewalk, no cars running on the sidewalk. In Bucharest no one even considers bikes. There are holes in the sidewalk, since you have feet to go around, in or out of holes; sometimes there is a lower sidewalk edge for things like bikes, wheelchairs and child perambulators, but sometimes it is a bit too high for comfort or there is none; when there is, cars are parked in front of them and, at the street crossings, people stop on them, without even moving out of the way when they see you sitting on a bike next to them. That is, if you can move on the sidewalk at all, since cars try to beat the traffic by moving on the sidewalk or they just park there, blocking the way. Not to mention the weird thingies that one meets on the sidewalk: people!

There are three "banes of the biker" when moving on the sidewalk: lover pairs, old people and women with children. So, if you see an elderly couple that seem still in love walking with their nephew, at least go around them on the guy's side. Why are they banes? Lovers like to hold hands, while in the same time keep apart from each other, then suddenly get back together and split again. They are completely clueless, unaware of the world around them and totally unpredictable. Old people are equally unpredictable due to strange and unspeakable pains, aches and mental conditions. They can stop suddenly, zig-zag, turn around unexpectedly and, most of all, get completely freaked out when you pass by them (even at a few meters away). Women with children are firstly women, then they have children. I rest my case.

So, after a while you get annoyed with all this, you decide to move it to the next level: the street. Since the circulation rules regarding bikes are pretty clear, there shouldn't be a problem. Cars will leave the "ecartament" empty, not park there, they will move one meter away from you when they pass by you, the drivers will be civil and respect your legal status of vehicle. Rrrright!

Street "biker banes": women driving new cars, taxi cab drivers and men driving junk cars. Women with new cars usually cheated through their driving licence exam and the car is not even theirs. Someone probably bought it for them. Women in general have a strong sense of law and order, therefore they will expect you to obey every circulation rule they know of and, when faced with real life situations that are not in the bloody book, they panic, freeze, etc. Simplest way to solve this is to always consider the possibility they actually want to hit you and take precautions against it. Taxi cab drivers own the streets. They are afraid of nothing and no one, except other taxi cab drivers. And women in new cars. And men in junk cars. For example, a cab driver will always move on the tramway line and honk at you, explaining in vernacular why he has the right to be there and you don't. But it is understandable... they rarely take Latin. Anyway, the men in junk cars are careless. They know they can buy a car the next day just like the one they are driving. It will be junk, but whatever you hit or hits you, they have to pay more. What could happen in the worst case scenario? Die? They already lost everything. And worse of all, they have a junk car, which is humiliating. They try to cover this shame with loud music, usually bad music, which makes them not only dumb, but also deaf.

When you learn to avoid the banes you still have to fight the street sweepers, to learn to move quickly when the light goes green, as drivers will magically ignore you being there when they turn right and you want to go forward. And most of all, you will have to fight the "good" ideas of the city hall.

Example: they built this bike track (weee!) around the Alexandru Cuza park (formerly known as the I.O.R. park). It is a half a meter wide strip, marked with yellow, right in the middle of the sidewalk, with beautiful images of bikes drawn on it and occasionally some arrows to point out the direction. So, anyone wanting to circle the park in one direction, like a hamster in a wheel, can use this. Of course, last time I saw it, there was a cripple guy walking with dignity on it. At least he respected the direction pointed by the little arrows.

The city hall also plans to build bike lanes. A commendable effort if they didn't do in the same time things that nullify it completely. And I mean the street side garbage bins. These are the bins that drivers can throw stuff in. Of course, they are right on the side of the street, the place where the horns of your bike are supposed to be when you pass through there. Not to mention the remote possibility that any Romanian driver would want to throw things in the bins rather that directly on the street, in which case they would most likely not look behind before putting their hand out. Can you spell "open fracture"?

OK, OK, I don't want to scare you out of it. It's just that there are a lot of morons out there. You need to pay more attention, else you will get hurt. Once you understand that the world is a dark evil place that wants to cause you pain, you will be alright!

Step IV. Taking care of your bike

Your bike needs to have the wheels firmly inflated. A car has the wheel pressure at about 2.4 atmospheres. Your bike will require 3.0-3.2. That means regular pumping or, the lazy man's alternative, fill them up with air at any gas or vulcanization station. Also, if you have a flat tire, all you have to do is pay a guy at the nearest vulcanization 1-2 euros and he will take the wheel out, check the tire, fix it, put it back on. Some would be kind enough to refuse, just go to the next.

After you used it for a while, you need to take it to be checked. Not too often, like once or twice a year (recommended default value). Go to Magelan, no matter where you bought the bike from, and ask them to check it for you. They will do everything there is to be done. The service is really cheap, too.

That was a short chapter.

Step V. Miscellaneous

So you know where to buy it from, what you want on it, how to ride it, what to look out for and how to take care of your bike. What else is there?

Well, first of all, sweat. When on the bike one doesn't usually sweat as the air circulation quickly evaporates the humidity and cools the body. However, stopping is a bitch. All the heat builds up quickly in your system, now used to have external ventilation, and you start to sweat. So, when you get to the office, don't rest, don't catch your breath, take your bike up as soon as possible, go to the bathroom, remove your t-shirt, wash. Use a special towel that you brought with you or that you designated as body towel. You will have a lot of perspiration on your spine and on your chest. Your face will probably be very sweaty, too. Take your time. Your body needs to cool off, so you might need to splash water on you repeatedly.
If you do this, you will need no change clothes and you will be fresh and reasonably not stinky for your colleagues. You will rinse your mouth with water, but don't drink any until you get out of the bathroom and you are reasonably cooled down.

Also, special attention to buses. It is easy to go by them, as they stop often. But they also release those human thingies, sometimes before the bus station, sometimes they start from the station and they stop because they see some guy running after the bus or someone forgot something and they want to get off. Sometimes bus drivers do it on purpose.

The same thing goes for every car stationed at the stop light. The only accident I had with my bike was when a complete idiot opened the car door at the stop without checking if anything is coming. I slammed right into that door. The scary thing is that I also got out of a car at the red light and I realised I didn't even consider checking for a bike. So it happens to everyone. Go slowly by the cars at the stop!

The last thing: etiquette. If you are a girl, not necessarily a stunning image of womanly perfection, you will get honked, whistled at, disrespected, teased. The only ones that will not do that are the women, which, as stated previously, will silently come from behind and kill you in inept panic. Don't get mad, don't get even, just learn to let it go, ignore everything that doesn't have anything to do with you getting to your destination. If you are a guy, you will be challenged at every step of the way. Or is that at every wheel turn? Anyway, drivers will try to bully you, block your way, honk you out of composure. Same advice goes to guys as well: ignore anything that is not about to be in your way or hit you.

What you need to understand is that, in normal Bucharest morning traffic, you are faster than any car there. People that spent their entire economies and still paying huge rates at the bank to have their new car will see you pass right by them, not paying for the car, for the gas or caring about the traffic! There is a lot of frustration there, don't give it a chance to bubble up towards you.

No matter the genre, you will have to either wait for someone to pass on a street crossing and provide you with "cover" or you will have to descend from your bike and walk next to it on the crossing. This is the only rule that one would reason out of, since it it more advantageous for drivers to let you pass on your bike (since you will cross faster) than on foot. Yet 99% of them will ignore you wanting to cross the street while on your bike. It's a pride thing. Bow to the king.

If you got this far, then you probably should get a bike, it means you are committed :) It's not as bad as I portrayed it, either, but pretty close. Danger comes not from what you expect, but from the unexpected. You also expect less when you are not paying attention or are thinking of something else. I don't recommend music listening when you ride the bike, but I do recommend sun glasses and (didn't try it, yet, but soon) a face mask/air filter.

Update 2020 - most of the links here are dead, the things they referred to long forgotten. So much for "once you put it on the Internet it never disappears".

Having reached the 200^th entry, I really wanted to write something cool, something interesting, something that sticks (and it ain't shit).

I thought of blogging Kartoo, a very nice - albeit slow - visual search engine that shows not only relevant links, but also the context items that link different pages.

But Kartoo is not personal enough, so I switched to YouTube, thought about blogging (yet another) female vocalist nu-metal with goth overtones band like the Italian band Exilia. Or something else, like the Turkish band maNga, or the Spanish Dead Stoned or Demiurgo. But this is a blog, not a video/music site.

Then I thought about programming; there must be something in the three projects I am working on worth blogging about, or at least something important like Don't use the .NET Random class when concerned about security. But then again, the blog is full of (I hope) interesting programming hints.

What else is there? Ranting about bycicle lanes the city hall is building on the sidewalk and on which old people are happy to walk (slowly) without losing themselves;
interesting conceptual games like BoomShine, Straight Dice or Stickman Fight and how they can be improved;
the BBC Baghdad Navigator, to show you the distribution and timeline of Baghdad bombings;
the Lilium song for the anime Elfen Lied;
the Coma article on Wikipedia (I didn't write it);
coming improvements in the Sift3 algorithm;
InuYasha manga reaching chapter 500;
the new Google/Kartoo/Wikipedia searches for any selected text in the blog;
how I am reading Il Nome de la Rosa and The Name of the Rose in the same time, trying to grasp more of the Italian language;
Gwoemul, a very nice South Korean film...

No, there is too much to choose and I can't decide. I think I will skip entry 200 entirely.

In the Romanian jargon there is an insult: slave. It appeared ten years or so ago and it stuck. It probably came from Gypsy talk, probably holding more meaning to them, since they were liberated from slavery and into the worst social problem Romania has. But at least the cool ones are not slaves anymore, even if they recreate daily the hated cliche of the typical Gypsy Roma and are stuck in the mentality that work is somehow a shameful act.

But the word is also used by Romanians. You might see young people that have a little business or a scheme to get money quickly use it to refer to the people that are employed somewhere and go to work every day. And they are somehow right, since a lot of the rich people in Romania, business owners, top managers, land owners, etc. are uneducated folks. Instead of going to school, they chose to fight, risk, learn in the school of life. And it shows. They have a lot of money and no manners. They have a lot of opportunities, but don't really use them. They are no longer rude people with no money, they have money now, but are stuck into being the same people they started with. Kind of like the joke where the anus wanted to be the manager of the body.

How about the slave, then? The guy that goes to school, goes through all the (mechanical) motions of learning, passing exams, getting a job, living a "normal" life? Well, we are mostly wasting our time. The money we get are what we need to live, maybe even enough to get a car or, if one is lucky, an apartment. People like us spend their entire lives surviving and dreaming about what we would do if we had more money. Meanwhile, we lose 8 hours a day working, 3 preparing and going to work, 7 sleeping, 1 or 2 eating and are left with 4-5 hours in which to do "what we like". If that isn't slavery, I don't know what is, but in all that time we make the system work.

Slimy manager types that themselves work for uneducated bullies that somehow got into fortune work in the system as well. Poor 'unslavy' thieves occasionally steal something, thus making policemen work all day and accept bribes. Businesses run into the political framework maintained by corrupt politicians who themselves obey the laws of economics, which are heavily influenced by the people from other countries, who themselves are only cogs in this great machine we call humanity. And of course, all those good managers that work for great people and all the Gypsies that go to school and work and all those politicians who actually want to make a difference, too.

This is no freedom, we are all slaves. We allow ourselves to be blinded by a value system, be it invented by us or just stolen from someone else, and we live by it. We all choose our swords and then we let ourselves die by them. True freedom is inside, not outside, it's in the dreams, not in their realisation. I might even venture on saying that it's in the quantity of the dreams, not their quality, because that is what enslaves us, dreaming of a single thing, being desperate to achieve it and then to hold on to it.

You might think you are so cool when you blog about whatever goes through your head, but people have done it before you since times immemorial. Bucharest, for example, is filled with Real Time Bloggers (or RTB) and you may find them really easy by going on any public transportation vehicle (or RATB).

The RTB is easy to recognize. He or she (let's call them it) has old and discolored clothes, smells really bad and, most importantly of all, can't shut up. It will tell you its entire life story and any (if any) thoughts that it has had in the last 15 to 20 years. It will tell it whether you want it or not, usually hitting end tape and repeating itself in about 30 minutes which is, by the way, the average time someone spends in public transportation to get to one place to the other in the city.

Now, you might think that this has nothing to do with any network (aka web) or logging (since it is all verbal), but if you spend some time researching this you will notice that they are everywhere and they pretty much say the same things, so they have their own network and they are saying the same thing from their own unique perspective. So it's exactly like blogging.

Also, don't confuse them with beggars. Beggars smell worse, they ask for money and they usually make sense. They are the real life equivalent of spam or commercials. And everyone would like to click them really hard, but they are afraid they will catch some virus or some other malware.

The interesting thing is that they don't really talk to each other and in the winter, when their publicistic careers peek, there is one on each single bus, trolley, tramway or subway. If one leaves the vehicle, another one comes. So they have a very efficient way of disseminating information, unlike web bloggers who, being relatively new to this business, still wait for others to come read what they had to say and sometimes flock on the same information highway.

I also tried to add an image to this entry, however, no doubt due to their experience in blogging, couldn't find one. They probably don't have any contact with our own, new and untrusted network, and prefer the more advanced technology of 3-D smellovision.

So, quit being so full of yourself. Blogging may be the oldest profession in the world, for all you know. You're not special!

My tastes in blogs are rather particular and the number of blogs I am visiting is not large. I write mostly about computing and personal taste and a lot of the things that really bug me! Well, I did use to be a debugger, after all.

Returning to Roblogfest. This was some sort of top blog thing + a party where bloggers got together and talked about ... wait a minute! What would bloggers talk about? And even more than this, would they repeat the most interesting stuff in the blogs the next day? I imagined blog entries like "Yesterday I talked to [some guy - with a link to the guy's blog] at Roblogfest and it was really interesting what he said about [this - a link to the entry of the guy's blog]". That's the Internet for you, hyperlinking to the extreme, I thought, feeling slightly smug and imaginative.

Returning to Roblogfest. I kept bumping into it, while reading some blog or the other, waiting for some smart thing to enlighten me. Instead: the RoBlogFest competition, with voting and everything. I imagined stuff like "The least interesting blog category: Xulescu's, winner with 5534 votes" or "Most read blog: Roblogfest". Well, it wasn't interesting enough to care, so I ignored it. I kept reading BBC news and Google news, looking for stuff. Who cares about who's blog is better or not? Isn't the blog a symbol of personal expression, uncorrupted by external demand?

Returning to Roblogfest. The competition is over, the party is over. The blogs are full of Roblogfest again. This time people either enjoy having won something (more people on their blogs?) or thinking the whole competition was stupid (they didn't get more people on their blogs). Also, a lot of pictures, little youtube videos and stories about how bloggers got together and talked and whatever. Lots of links, too. "I talked to [this guy] yesterday. The rest I didn't know. I wanted to know them, but some I didn't". Most of the bloggers were kids. Some cute, some not, mostly the kind of social pariah which would write their feelings in a blog rather than sharing them during a party. They enjoyed the party, though.

This reminds me of that joke, with two people meeting in a park and admitting to each other that they really enjoy walking alone in the park, then decide to take the walk together. Yeah, I am sure now I feel smug. I am definitely superior. I would have liked to be that young again... or to go to parties and meet cute blogger girls, but I am well beyond that. I am definitely superior. And my blog is better.