This book is odd enough. Finally finished reading it a few days ago, I remained with the feeling of not getting it. What the hell? A guy is turned into a bug, then his family tries to take care of him, but after a while they just stop being nice to the poor insect and it finally dies.

But then, thinking about it, I noticed the symbols in the book. It is all about a dark hopeless capitalism as in Kafka's day, one that can only be coped with by roaches. Working continuously while being at the whim of whatever greedy employer you have, supporting family and servants and a bigger house than needed because you don't dare have a spine. In this sad little story, the main character did not once revolt against the situation in which he was. Actually, I am wrong, he did revolt against some trivial things like taking a picture from his room or wanting to see his sister playing the violin, thus exiting the room where he was confined.

The book itself ends with his family feeling relief of getting rid of the big roach in their house and having a better life because each of the members had to take a job to get through this.

Conclusion: this didn't feel like a very good book, but it was good enough. It is also a classic, this being the reason for reading it. So, it's worth a read, if you can take the time to think about it.

Yes! At popular demand and enormous pressure, the World Sucks series is back!
Todays episode: holidays! The word itself comes from holly and day, but in the meanwhile it collapsed into this one word that has nothing holly in it anymore. It's all about buying stuff, planning vacations in the "season" when all prices are inflated and all nice places are assaulted by noisy tourists (like yourself) which makes them less than nice, getting job time off in the same damn time with everybody else (and being considered not a team player if you want to work while all the others go away) and, last but not least, all kind of deities mixed together with local folklore to create a special kind of brand for each particular miserable disgusting day of each bloody holiday.

Accept it, people, holidays suck! It's this type of awful planned and allowed liberations that show the true nature of slavery. Holidays have become so much embedded in our culture, that we measure our own time and pleasure by them. If there is a holiday, you must enjoy it! If you don't you are a weirdo and if it ends you must stop enjoying anything. Get back to work, you lazy bum! I see people that expect those few free days from work like a child awaits the cndy from the sweets dispencer. What about the other days?! They are also yours. You can decide what to do with them. You can stop feeling miserable in any given day, you can miss on office work and stay in bed all day any time. I completely understand that some employers might not agree with this and even some self employed work alcoholics that think the world spins around them might growl at me from their dark den, but that doesn't make them right!

Holidays suck because they take away freedom, in it's most basic sense. You are allowed to not go to work, you are allowed to buy things that in the middle of the year you wouldn't even consider buying (ask yourself why?) and you are allowed to spend it with your family and friends. What? You don't have family and friends any other day? What if you don't want to spend your free time with family and friends? What if you just want to be left alone, to make a cool software program, play a game for 24 hours straight or watch the entire third season of Battlestar Galactica continuously from start to end? Then you clearly don't have the holiday spirit. Well, fuck the holiday spirit! It sucks!

Wee! I've received a PDA from my bestest of uncles (which will soon work for Google and I am so proud of him). Ok, back to adult mode. I've used the newly acquired PDA to read books! I've started Metamorphosis by Kafka, but the file was incomplete by accident, so I ended up reading The Martian Child.
It's a small text, 80KB in length, and it's not really sci-fi, but it's nice. It's the kind of warm, easy to read text suited for bus rides. It involves a sci-fi writer adopting a child who says he is a Martian. During the entire text, the author struggles with the eerie feeling that the child was actually right, even if there is no way to prove it.
It was nice enough.

Another suspected NASA hacker indicted tells the story of a Romanian hacker who entered 150 NASA computers, then made them display messages boasting the hack. Of course, the US government immediately took initiative and fixed all their computer security holes, suing the corporations that made the buggy software sued the Romanian hacker for "conspiracy and nine counts of computer intrusion", mounting up to 54 years in prison, if found guilty on all charges. I won't even go there. It is just ridiculous. A few years ago, an American soldier killed a man in a traffic accident and he was immediately flown back to the States, where they found him guilty of a misdemeanour and he didn't even do jail time. Read again he KILLED a man.

But there is also some justice in the world: U.S. marine sentenced to 40 years for rape in Philippines. Now, of course, the poor guy didn't do anything as serious as hacking into a computer and boasting that he did it, so he gets only 40 years.

A couple of weeks ago I posted this: Bush in Space. Now I come back with a few nice articles that show what the future of space is likely to be. Or not to be.

First of all, a news article from May 2006 US seeks laser to shoot down satellites talks about a "secret" U.S. project that uses lasers to shoot down "enemy" satellites. Considering the ability of most nations to put satellites in orbit, I can only conclude that they mean Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Russian or European satellites. Probably, the Chinese thought the same thing, and here is where this article: China Attempted To Blind U.S. Satellites With Laser comes in. It talks about the Chinese trying to shoot down (or at least blind them considerably) U.S. satellites spying on them. This story was "dug" here. You can see in the article that the US already plan for a "constellation" of satellites to replace the vulnerable spy satallites they already have in place.

Now, most comments on this are usually either moronically nationalistic, either uselessly anti-American. However, there are people that have actually put thought into this. How come the US is augmenting this "Cold War" with China, when they have such a lucrative economic bond. Is it because they see a more business oriented (read democratic) China as a more maleable one? A good consumer market just ripe for the US culture? Or is it because they actually fear a democratic China, as a very serious competitor. Most analysts observe that placing and defending stuff in space is way harder than destroying stuff in space. Even lasers work in space, but low tech solutions like plain old rubble would work just as well. This is described as asymmetric warfare. When even the little guy can fight back.

But what does all this mean? The US have all but openly dismissed the ISS. The only science projects that they do on the station are related to the human habitation of space, which leads me to believe they either plan on colonising the Moon or even Mars (a man can hope) or they just don't care about space any more than their precious spy satellites. How does the entire "teritory" concept work in space? How can you attack in space and not get into a ground war at the same time? These are questions about things one might think do not affect us, but they do. From weather to global positioning, from TV to the Internetand the telephone, they all come through space. You have to imagine a world where space wars are common and plan ahead against it. We cannot color the sky, we can't afford to.

I've just finished reading this book, in Romanian translation, and I found it nicely written, but not exactly my type of book. For me, art needs to draw you into atmosphere and conclusions, not to be understood only if you make the effort to draw the conclusions yourself. Yes, I am lazy, but don't get me wrong, I like art. It's just that art is supposed to communicate. I may recite a beautiful poem in Romanian, but if my audience is English, it wouldn't do any good.
So my review on this book is as follows: it is well written, freely written (I can sense throughout the book that Murakami has an open mind, not clogged by clichees and prejudice), it draws you into the atmosphere. But there is where it stops. I know there are deeper meanings in the things that happen throughout the book, but they are not properly explained. I can draw beautiful conclusions and see very deep things, but it would be my merit for making the effort and looking deep, not the writer's. And I wouldn't be sure that it's what the writer intended telling in the first place.
Read it if you are into atmospheric books :D and if you like dark, philosophical discussions.

According to Wikipedia, dink, can mean a lot of things, ranging from small boats to small penises. A dink is also a creature in the SpaceBalls parody of Star Wars. But is seems that the main use of this word right now is for "Double Income No Kids". That's me! Well, I have a cat, but he doesn't generate any income. You can also find this particular demographic group called DINKY, which is a more dynamic acronym that takes into the consideration the future possibility of offspring(Y=yet). The Americans seem to prefer Dink, while the UK and their former colonies Dinky.

Apparently being a dink means that one is part of a high-earning couple who choose not to have children and are therefore able to afford a more expensive consumer lifestyle. A dink is considered a lot of times as being also a yuppie, or Young Urban Professional, with pejorative connotations of selfishness, materialism, and superficiality.

So, apparently, I should :

• generate an income (checked)


• have a mate (checked)


• the mate should also generate income (checked)


• both generated incomes should be high (yeah, right)


• selfish (checked)


• materialist (not really)


• superficial (yes!)

So, I have demonstrated creating by oneself a Cosmopolitan test by using Wikipedia. Are you a dink? How dinky are you? Take the test! :D

In 2001, July, a strange phenomenon in the form of red rain occured in southern India. While the official explanation of this is that desert dust has been brought by winds and brought down by rain, Dr. Godfrey Louis, a proffesor of physics for the Cochin University of Science and Technology thinks otherwise: it's all about alien microbes that arrived here by riding a comet.

The story might seem a bit far fetched, but even BBC News wrote about it. And this guy released a science paper about it after what appears to be five years of study. Take a minute to read it, it's only 18 pages long. What seems odd to me is that, even if he maintains that the red rain particles are biological in nature, he doesn't mention anything about reproduction, nor of any attempt to revive them.

Anyway, it seemed interesting enough to blog about it. There is a more down to Earth and detailed article about it in Wikipedia. You can also find here is the transcript of a news report together with animations that talks about Cardiff University scientists confirming the presence of some sort of DNA in the seemlessly devoid of nucleus cells.

Check out the newly released Coma video, to celebrate the release of the new album on the 30 of november in Club Fire, Bucharest, Romania!

The whole meeting took place at the Titulescu room at RomExpo. They had 4 desks that spanned the alphabetical ordering of software firms participating, so the entry was really comfortable. They gave us a pen and a little notebook to take notes, too. The whole meeting lasted from 9:00-16:30, then there was an hour of free talks.
My general impression of the briefing was good. The presenters were enthusiastic and talked about: application development on Windows Vista with NET 3.0 and Sharepoint and Office 2007. The new Microsoft XML office format was presented, programatic methods of accessing and creating them, how to mix Sharepoint and Office in order to create quick Excel based web sites, etc. The most interesting part, though, was of course the last. It presented the advances in programming technology like the C# 3.0 features and ADO.Net vNext. Too bad I've already read about those technologies, but the enthusiastic presentation mode (alas, SPOKEN TOO LOUD) was refreshing.
The information was as compacted as possible, but there was too little code for me, even if most presenters seemed to have the same hatred for marketing slides as I did.
There were also 30 minutes of coffee break and 1 hour of lunch. The lunch food was very good and varied, from chinese apetizers like sesame meatballs and Shanghai chicken to sandwiches, salads and sweets. Taking into account that I've been to a similar Microsoft thing in Milano, where they barely gave us some sandwiches in plastic bags, this was truly great.

It just had to come. It was inevitable. Bush has signed a "tough space policy" which basically says the US will hold space itself hostage as they do water, air and economy on Earth.
Just read the BBC article and draw your own conclusions. Before they even explore it, the Americans seize space as their own, all in the name of "protecting" their space sattelites or whatever.
So next time you god damned university students want to launch your geek science projects into space, you'd better clear it with Bush. Or Rumsfeld.

This is an image from the BBC web site and the title of the BBC article is Rice launches Korea crisis tour and the caption is Japan and the US pledge to work on implementing sanctions on North Korea, the US Secretary of State says.
I knew politicians are assholes, but how can you smile like that while deciding pledging to impose sanctions on some other nation? Look at her! You'd say she's hugging her daughter while petting the cutest cat ever. And she's imposing sanctions! And the title sounds like she has just opened a tourist resort. That whole picture is wrong. Geez!

I've recently changed my email address, added spam filters both on the server and on the client and moved all known addresses into a special folder, leaving any unknown source (thus mostly spam) emails alone in the inbox folder. This resulted in me not receiving spam email for at least a week. Now I kind of miss it. I mean, I feel something is wrong, like some essential part of my life is gone. How weird is that?
And apparently, I am not alone. 231 pages in Google have "I miss spam" in them.

I've just finished The Runes of the Earth, the first in the last series of the Thomas Covenant saga. I must say that the style and content changed significantly from the first books, therefore I felt the need to review the whole saga as I see it now.
I liked that in each book new ideas were introduced, they weren't just reprints of the same story. The moral basically stays the same, but everything else, sometimes even the lead character, changes.
From the second series, a new model of writing was used, thus all the books in one series make out a story rather than one book per story. I didn't like that, especially now, when I have to wait for the next books to be published in order to see what is going on. What I also minded was the need of the characters to shed tears over all kind of stuff. I think the author overdid the misty eyes scenes. A lot of the creatures and the culture from the first series was completely obliterated in the second, but it seems to be making a come back now.
The good thing about it, though, is that the writing gets better with each book. In hindsight, the first book seems amateurish compared with the rest. No more singing, more story, less descriptions. It is interesting that the last series of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever was published 20 years from the end of the second. Donaldson justified this as taking time to become a better writer before ending the story.
Let's see how it goes.

For as long as I can remember, the MSN messenger changed my picture in a random fashion. I was setting it, then at the next restart, another was there. The last version I am using is 7.5.
Today, I finally found out what caused it: Tools → Options → Security → "This is a shared computer, so don't store my address book, display picture or background on it".
It is nice to know that if I want to keep the same picture on the messenger I have to also store my address book on the computer. Microsoft seems to think they are of similar importance :-/