Welcome to another lesson in suckology! Today's topic is Manic Street Sweepers from Hell (or Bucharest).
When the weather is good I go to the office by bike. Yeah, I am a hot shot biker. My bicycle is state of the art junk and I can ride it even through major Bucharest street holes. Ok, I am being a bit unfair, as they are rebuilding all the streets now... So let me rephrase it: I can ride it even through destroyed streets that are in the process of being rebuilt.
When I first bought my bike it had no wheel protectors and I quickly realised that driving through wet or muddy terrain tended to leave a long straight line of wet dirt from my trousers bottom to the top of my head. So I bought these metal things that protect my wheels and myself from things like that. Now I can even go through moderate puddles and I only wet the bottom of my pants legs. Which is ok, I am tech guy, I'm married, I don't really need to look good. You did sense the irony there, right?
So everything was set for riding my bike. I could even hear the Queen song while going to work. To my immediate surprise I found the streets were wet! Not only in the morning, when I go to work, but also in the evening when I return. The culprits seem to be [echo]Street Sweepers!

Ok, a small technical paranthesis. All this is done to protect the mighty citizen from dust. Or so they say, actually, this is more of a EU directive or standard and, as we Romanians love to brown our noses, the City Hall felt compelled to comply. Street sweeping, in theory, should be done to clean the street of debris (by using machines with brooms) which also employ some system to keep the dust from rising up while brooming. Most employ water, the most advanced use vacuum generation and filtration.

Well, Romanians decided to split this process into two separate parts: one machine wets the street, the other sweeps. Even better, while one wets one street, the other sweeps another. The result is dry sweeping that generates immense quantities of air borne dust and wet pavement. As you might not be familiar with Romanian technology, let me explain to you what these street wetters looks like: big water containers with sprinklers. And not your average street wetter sprinkler system with a row of small water sprays, but one big water pipe with holes in it!
What this does is create huge puddles of water in the crossroads, where the trucks stop, but the drivers are too lazy/stupid to also stop the sprinkler system. Also the roads are far from flat, so in all the little depressions in the asphalt other puddles occur.

Well, how does this affect me and why these abominations suck? Let's take them one at a time:

• water makes my bike skid on the pavement. While this might be acceptable in other countries, with flat roads, maybe even with bicycle lanes, in Romania you have roads with waves, especially on the sides, no bicycle lanes (and the only one in Bucharest is used by old people to walk on) and the sewers are right in the pavement, they look like big square 5-10 cm deep holes. So, if on bicycle, you might want to break from time to time


• water makes cars skid on the pavement. It's actually called hydroplaning, when the water goes between the car wheel and the road. Some drivers might want to control or at least stop their car when they wake up and see they're on a collision course with a bike.


• new research shows that water on the pavement elevates the temperature comfort level, making it even easier to affect oh, let's say, people that drive on the said roads when the heat is up and don't have air conditioning in their car. Or a car.


• there is no way to get around a street wetter with the bike. The only solution is to wait until all the cars go past it, then go all around the other side of the street to avoid getting sprinkled. Luckily, these dumb ugly beasts are slower than my bike.

My obvious conclusion is: Street sweepers suck!
I am citing from a random link: PM-10 / PM-2.5 class street sweepers are in a developmental stage. This type of sweeper will pick up dust particulate down to 10 micron is size. The city's Envirowhirl PM-10 street sweeper utilizes a combination of mechanical and air sweeper features to pick up debris. They also utilize an internal system of dry filters to retain all dust larger than 10 microns within the sweeper's hopper. No water is used for dust control.
I hope they bring something like this in Bucharest soon and that it doesn't suck. Much.

'Crocodile Hunter' Irwin killed

An incredible and sad news for me, Steve died from the sting of a stringray that (ironically) has venom with no lethal effect on humans. The barb on the end of the fish tail has up to 20 cm and it probably penetrated the heart or has hurt some other major organ in the chest area. Steve is the second man ever to die from a stingray in Australia, the previous death being in 1945. Ironic, stupid, sad.
It is amazing that his death affects me so much, when other big people's deaths have only made me a little sad. Maybe it's because he was young, in the middle of his life, having so much to look forward to. I've also admired his insane passion. I am rarely passionate about something and I admire any person that can shine a little, like Steve seemed to do 24 hours a day.
At least his memory will remain intact from the ravages of old age. My deepest condoleances to his wife and two children.

You know the annoying feeling when you want to find something on the net and you can't find the proper search keywords? It's like trying to find the Triple X movie rather than porn flicks. It happends a lot when you want to find something that you know is named in some way, but a new buzz word is emerging and you either don't find everything you need or you find a lot of unrelated stuff. Like trying to find people talking about computer programming, but you end up with all these TV programming sites. Now try to find how to turn your PC into a TV by programming :).

Anyway, searching on programming led me to wonder about the difference between programming and software development in describing my own job. As previously mentioned, there are other sorts of programming and development except computer ones and to top it all, people mean different things when using these concepts in the software context. Wikipedia, for example, takes "programming" and gives me the page for "computer programming". It then takes software development and takes me to software engineering (which in my mind are different things).

How does google see this? Let's search:

Term	Page count
Software development	175.000.000
Programming	858.000.000
Computer programming	19.700.000
Software engineering	80.700.000
Software developer	27.400.000
Programmer	156.000.000
Computer programmer	4.270.000
Software engineer	22.500.000
Developer	1.030.000.000

So it seems that there is a lot more programming and programmers than software development or software developers, but add "computer" in front and there is less. But that's because no one bothers to say "computer" in those cases.

And there is more. While software development/engineering start to go towards "designing programs", computer programming goes towards "typing code". I believe that is happening because in large software companies there are a lot of people writing code, but very few that actually have a say on how the program is to behave or what technology to use. I am watching Microsoft presentations and they are ridiculing the "old school" programmers that type their code while the new breed of software developers point, click, drag, drop and everything works in a few minutes. People that actually think through what algorithms to use and how it all works and optimize lines of code and try to think like a compiler from time to time are grunts to be enclosed in cubicles, while those who think how the general program should work, create UML diagrams of interacting business objects are the lords of their domain.
That makes no sense to me, especially since the drag and drop people use software delveloped by code typers. Or it does make sense in the way that software development has become a feudal industry, like most industries become shortly after they become mass consumed. They have an elite, a clique that behaves like aristocracy, while most members of that industry work their asses off in the employ of these people. This gives a whooole new meaning to the term software revolution :)

So what is this job that I am performing? Am I just a meta-computer? Something high level that understands what it must do and obeys blindly by using a computer? Why is it that I like to code? Is there a difference in my mind between software and a program, so that the term software developer scratches my ears while programmer boosts my ego? And why do most people feel the other way around?

These are questions that I will probably be asking for a long time. Meanwhile, take a look at this wikipedia page, which I found informative: Programming paradigm. Also, consider this little link: Javascript 3D where you can find the explanation on how to do a Wolfenstein like game in Javascript, with only 5 kilobytes of code. You might want to wait a bit until it loads completely or use Mozilla Firefox. I noticed it works faster. Can't believe it? Check it out! That's what programmers do!

I have just returned from a holiday in Balchik, Bulgaria, and this is my view on it.

You might have seen a commercial or heard a friend that Albena and Balchik are a great place to visit and spend your holidays. Even if they are separated by only 10 km the difference between them is the difference between heaven and hell.

Albena is the standard seaside commercial resort, with wide beaches occupied by a string of expensive hotels, with jerks attempting to speak to you in your native language while trying to sell you junk at high prices, a place invaded by tourists and with poor service at any shop, as they are owned by companies and operated by hired help. The useful things you can buy at Albena are of very little variety, meaning that almost every shop has everything you can buy, all drinks are either Pepsi or Coca Cola, etc. Albena is a franchise, and besides the natural reserve (which is a nice forest patch) and the Thracian treasure (that I didn't really go visit), there is nothing nice there.

Balchik, on the other hand, is a small piece of paradise. It is actually a town, a rather old one, with small houses (and villas) sprinkled onto an almost abrupt seawall. The beach is very small and private, while the shops in the area are operated by their owners, which are usually very nice people. The prices are almost half of anything you meet in Albena and the tourist numbers are small during the week and medium during the weekend. Another good thing about Balchik being a town is that you have both seaside hotels, small villas, large villas, apartments for rent or purchase, high profile restaurants, small cozy restaurants, cheap supermarkets, etc. So you have everything you need. The view is spectacular, with a tasteful combination of mountain and sea.

In conclusion, I highly recommend Balchik as a holiday destination or (as I fantasised during my stay there) a remote place where you can buy a house or apartment and write in the quiet atmosphere of the small town.

Now, for the detailed impressions from Balchik

Leaving Bucharest

Both me and my wife wanted a nice holiday where we get to experiment as much as possible, so we decided against an "all inclusive" package. So we arranged with people from Balchik to house us, while we took transportation separately. Searching on the web, we stumbled upon Balchik Holidays, a site owned by a young nice couple, Val and Marta, operating a small local tourism company with very decent prices. As you will see later on, they treated us fairly and nice and we recommend them if you need to make similar arrangements. We decided on Corali as a transportation company. Our opinion of them is poor to very poor. They are plagued by lack of proper organisation, delays in transport and drivers that don't know the cities they pass through. I will give them the benefit of the doubt, though. Maybe there are situations when they perform well, but this was not one of them. Unfortunately, I can't really imagine a Romanian company that would do a lot better, so don't expect too much from the trip to and from Balchik by bus. It could be a good idea to look for a company that goes to Albena, then get a 4 leva bus to Balchik.

The bus left Bucharest at 8:30 and, enough said, arrived in Balchik at 18:00. The bus started from somewhere in Transilvania, though, so there are people who spent a lot more in the bus than we did. Immediately it became apparent that the well organised passenger list contained 51 names. The bus itself had 50 seats. That meant that one lady got her money back and spent the entire road on a small chair with no back placed amidst the rows of seats. I also don't know who makes these buses. While they look nice and are air conditioned, I couldn't fit my legs properly the entire trip. Even if I am a rather tall guy, the length of the femur bone shouldn't be much bigger than the one of a smaller guy, the lucky guy the buses are designed on. I think the highest age at which I would have been comfortable in those seats would have been 14 years old.

Ok, enough with the seats. The bus starts from Bucharest, goes to Constanta, leaves the country through Vama Veche, then proceeds to Balchik. The highway to the sea is not yet finished, so there were delays there, then the customs, which must be "greased" to let us through. The customs officers reached a so high level of comfort that they took money while we all looked through the windows of the bus. We could have had cameras or something, but they didn't care.

Once we reached Balchik we were deposited in a parking lot placed in front of the road towards the Botanical Garden. If I am to continue my religious analogies of heaven and hell, that spot is purgatory. It is the most 'Albenised' place in Balchik. You have restaurants that boast their menus along with greetings in Romanian and waiters that try (annoyingly, I might add) to speak Romanian or whatever your native language happens to be. The prices there are medium to high, the service depends on the place.
For example I was terribly disappointed by the service at Taraleza, a small restaurant that was praised in a Romanian TV news story. The only Romanian they knew was in the greetings outside, the prices were high, the crab rolls they gave us make my wife sick, the tripe soup they gave us had very little tripe in it and (what bugs me most) I asked them for garlic and they brought me a small cup of a clear liquid. They refused to bring me sour cream, they said the soup had enough (as they would know). I poured the entire cup in the soup, only to find it a moment later uneatable. The 'garlic' sauce was garlic in vinegar.
The Sea Horse, the restaurant right in front of the parking lot, had the same tripe soup (even the amount and shape of the tripe bits were uncannily similar), but they brought dried red pepper bits and a sauce that contained yoghurt, as well as garlic and , of course, vinegar. That was more acceptable and I could even feel the garlic inside.
As a parenthesis, Tihia Kat, or at least this is how I remember the name, a serbian grill restaurant on the seaside, have a garlic sauce made from sour cream and very little garlic.
But back to the parking lot, except for their monetary exchange, you shouldn't really use anything there. Besides, when you will leave Balchik you will have extra levas (the Leva is the Bulgarian money) and you will have to wait for the bus (which will be late) so you will be forced to sit somewhere.

Balchik

When the bus entered the town, we got scared. There were communist style blocks of flats, really ugly ones, and dirty garbage filled road sides. But that's just on the outskirts. As you will see, Balchik is actually made of two distinct parts: the side near the sea, which is the old part of the city, with houses and queen Maria's summer residence, and the expansion zone, where you will have blocks of flats, schools, a large super market, etc.
Our two rooms apartment was 500 m from the beach, as advertised. What was left unsaid is that the road is a continuous hill at maybe a 30 degrees slope. That resulted in muscular pain for the first two days, but we quickly got used to it. What was unexpected was that the pain felt in the lower part of the leg, which is actually very little exercised. And I should know, I ride my bicycle to work.
This side of the city is a combination of modern construction techniques and old stone roads and walls. If you are a computer programmer and you build maps for 3D games, like shooters or, better yet, quests or MMORPGS, then you should definitely go to Balchik and your software company should pay for it. There is something to be said about stone stairs that are hidden from view by the fact the walls are made from the same exact material. If you stay more than a day or two, you will come to know not only the streets, but also these hidden stairs that you can find all over the place.
We also had TV cable in our rented apartment. Something was wrong with it, though, as only a few channels were clearly visible. And, even if I did want to relearn Bulgarian, I couldn't watch anything but National Geographic, Zone Reality and Viasat History. I even stumbled upon a show about a bus going down hill without breaks, entering the water, skidding 80 meters, then drowning most of the people in it. Nice show, huh?
Val and Marta were very nice, they took us for a dinner and they explained the main things we needed to know about the town, then they gave us the house keys and left us be. They weren't a bother in any way and hopefully, neither were we to them.

Holiday

There was sun there. And lots of it. If it weren't for my wife, I would have cowered in fear in the room, trying to fix the cable. Luckily, she rules my life, so I went down to the beach every morning, then we ate in a restaurant, then we had long walks through the city. If you are like me, you should not disconsider the power of the sun lotion. They seem to have different strengths marked by weird numbers. Just take the highest strength you can find and put it all over you. Else you get your skin burnt. And, if you are like me, you hate having oily things on you that smell like flowers and squeezed animals. Get over it. Not being able to touch anything or having any type of water except very cold one seem hot is not cool. (Pun not intended)
Balchik is truly beautiful. Formerly part of Romanian territory, it was chosen by queen Maria for her summer residence. That means a huge domain was filled with beautiful gardens and a few nice mansions were built. The buildings themselves are not interesting, the small trinkets that are linked to the queen or to her house are nothing more than money wasters, but now the domain was turned into a Botanical Garden. Even if less organised than the one in Bucharest, it is a lot more interesting. It combines slopes, plants of all kinds (including cactae), water falls, a high view of the open sea and the all present stone stairs and hidden passage ways.
The town itself looks a lot like a more crowded version of Maria's residence, with fisherman style houses sprouting amongst the stone roads and plants. This is something that the Romanian seaside lacks: plants. Even Albena had beautiful trees and forest patches near the sea. Romanians destroyed everything that wasn't cheap commercialism.
The prices were all in leva, which was more or less half a euro, and stotinki, hundredths of a leva. Energizer drink: 1 leva. Average restaurant meal: 7 leva per person. Taxi ride: 1-5 leva (for the same distance). Beach umbrella: 3 leva. Beach chaiselong: 3 leva. (as opposed to Albena where a chaise was 5 leva, a pillow was 3 leva, an umbrella 7 leva, etc.) Evening meal from the supermarket: 5 leva for two people. Restaurant bread slice: 20 stotinki.
I have no idea why every Balchik restaurant asked us for the exact number of bread slices we wanted. I asked smilingly for one bread and they brought me a slice. When I asked for ten slices all the waiters turned towards me like they have seen the devil. "Are you sure?".
The sand on the beach was very fine, as well as the sand beneath the water. There were two days after what we gathered was a storm in the open sea, when the shallow water was filled with algae fragments, but it wasn't terribly annoying. The entire Golden Sands-Albena-Balchik beach is in a golf, so there are no big waves and the beach is somewhat protected. The water was warm and pleasant.
People on the beach ranged from very fat people coming in families to skinny young girls. Not many girls, though. The ones that were acceptably attractive were more slim than sexy. There is no distinctive Bulgarian genome. People can look like Turks, Russians, Romanians or anywhere in between. Balchik has amazingly few gypsies.
Language: all Bulgarians know Bulgarian. Some of them understand English, some of them understand Romanian. I guess that some of them understand German, since all the menus were in Bulgarians, English and German, but I didn't try it out.
Music. I have been informed that a few months ago there was a rock festival in Balchik, White Snake and The Scorpions sang there. But I found that this was not a good enough explanation for the fact that almost every song in the town was an American 60-70's song. It wasn't annoying, but it was uncanny. I've even imagined Teal'c observing that the music technology of the planet seemed to be 30-40 years behind our own.

The Dark Side

Search for the supermarket Akvilon, on Hristo Botev street. It marks the start of the dark side of Balchik, the place of ugly grey blocks of flats. They do have regular cable and internet, though. Akvilon does provide for anything you need, as it is similar to Billa or MegaImage shops. The prices are lower than anything you get in the old part of the city, but not by much.

The End

We left on monday, the bus was supposed to pick us up at 18:30 from the parking lot, they were there, but only arrived in Balchik. We had to wait until 20:00 for them to go to the Golden Sands and Albena, leave their passengers, then return. We arrived in Bucharest at 2:00 in the morning.
What else can I say except thank you for sticking to the very boring end of my notes on Balchik. Maybe I will add more as I remember.

Special Notes

• Cats - Balchik is a town of cats. Everywhere you go you meet a cat of any conceivable color except green. Most are accustomed to humans and grateful for any petting, playing or, of course, food

• Bread - restaurants give you bread in slices. They ask for the exact number of slices. One bread means one slice.

• Ayran - in Romania, ayran is a liquid yoghurt drink with salt. In Bulgarian, airan means yoghurt. So you will be able to see Danone Airan. They do have a sortiment of liquid salty yoghurt that is very tasty in rather unpleasant plastic 500ml or 250ml bottles. Ask for airan at Morsko Oko. They used this variety. Then you can buy it at a supermarket

• Boza - there is a drink made (I guess) from sweetened wheat called Boza. I can't imagine any person except an insane child that could drink boza and like it.

• Music - most places were tuned to Radio Edno (radio 1) and they played mostly songs from the 60's-70's.

• Garlic - beware the garlic sauces. They are likely to contain less garlic and a lot of vinegar

• Romanian speaking waiters - beware! Even if there are some exceptions, Bulgarians trying to communicate in Romanian usually want to sell you overpriced or under quality stuff

• Taxi drivers - good luck trying to convince them to start their meters. Try not to give them 5 leva for a trip.

• Botanical Garden/Maria's Castle - you may be intrigued by the ticketing system there. You need to buy a ticket of 10 leva to see a small garden, then advance to a ticketing booth to get another 10 leva ticket for the castle and the actual botanical garden. At the entrance to the castle you will be asked for both tickets. You can't buy them there, you need to go back 10 meters to the above mentioned ticketing booth

• Muscular pain from climbing up and down Balchik streets - a massage helps, try pressing more on the painful parts. It doesn't help too much though. Walking another day is useful, also.

• Bus rides - if you are taller than 1.80m, ask for special seating for your legs.

• Car rides - the Balchik streets are at 30 or more degrees slope. Drive carefully.

• Toilets - most of the bars and restaurants in the town have the annoying habit of charging for the use of their toilets

• Albena - it sucks. If you want to go there, there are regular minibuses to Albena, Golden Sands or Varna

• Recommended restaurants: The Blue Lion , Morsko Oko

• To avoid: Taraleza, the Irish Rover, the cafeteria in front of the Irish Rover, the bar in Queen Maria's residence.

• You might notice in Balchik a lot of printed A4 posters glued upon light poles, gates, bulletin boards, etc, representing dead people and when they died. It seems to be a local habit of commemorating the deceased.

WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics

WinDirStat is a little useful program that creates a graphical representation of one's harddrive. It uses colored rectangles to represent directory structure, file size and file type. You can click on the rectangles and see what the file is, zoom in and out, etc. What's mostly useful for is seeing the big space wasters as large rectangles and being able to identify them. I am still not sure what Unknown space is, but I have 6.5Gb of it.

A good friend of mine was telling me when we were in highschool that people are made out of different personalities, each alive and fighting for control. He called them rather pompously infrapersonalities. They all define you in some way or another and the "you" is not a simple sum, but a warped weighted average.

Taking the reasoning further, I reached the conclusion that the way we perceive other people is also encapsulated in a hostage personality that describes that person. We don't relate to the actual people, but with our projection of them. Of course, that applies to everything, not just people, but it's besides the point I am trying to make.

What if you spend a lot of time defining such a person? Doesn't it mean the associated infrapersonality "gains weight"? It becomes more alive inside you. There is even a disorder when people switch from one dominant personality to another.

But what if you had feelings for that person? Could its infrapersonality remain alive, evolving separately inside you? Of course it could. And then, why can't you retain the feelings you had for that person if it is alive and so close to you?

I end my reasoning here. I completely pass the (important) point that even if you do love a living and existing person it is still a feeling related to an internal representation of that person. At least it gets updated. Can one projection of another person make you continue to be in love with it, in the absence of that person? I think it can. Worse, I think it is happening to me, and that makes me (even more than you possibly thought) in love with myself. Bummer, huh?

It just occurred to me that the biggest problem on Earth is not war, but the unending talks that come afterwards. Therefore, I propose a UN resolution that bans war. If any country starts a war without being sanctioned by the UN, it is to pay. And pay a lot. No, the answer is not military retaliation or anything, but money. Each unsanctioned war day is to cost between 10 and 100 million EUROs.

The solution is both simple and elegant. If you need to start a blitzkrieg, do it, just make sure to pay afterwards. You want to go to a country, bomb its infrastructure, steal its oil? No problem, just make sure you win more than you pay to the UN. You want to stall the peace talks? Ok, but do it on your own money. You don't agree to pay? Just forget about exporting or importing anything.

Of course, there is a catch. Lately, no conflict was called a war. Therefore a clear definition of it is also required. That would help mentally challenged leaders to use the right words, too. What's my definition of war? Any conflict outside your borders perpetrated by the national armed force.

What about Hezbollah? you will ask. They attack outside the Lebanon borders and are not the official national armed force. They should be off the hook. Yes, you heard me right. Israel wants retaliation, do it with a private force of people payed or otherwise motivated to do so. In other words: pay for it!

And if you don't want to pay, ask the UN, NATO, or any other legitimate international force to sanction your need for blood or solve your problems or whatever. We can't wait for politicians to solve a problem WHILE the problem exists. They move slow, they have no foresight and their hindsight is limited to what helps them look good. Use preemptive measures: any war costs. Don't forget that the military and the politicians are ruled by the same type of people that rules everybody today: suits! The modern name for aristocracy. And they only care about one thing: money!

Gibson arrest 'handled correctly'

This is a rant marginally related to the Holocaust sucks post. Let me first say that I am NOT against the jewish people, even if I strongly think the Israeli external policy is a dark shameful spot on the face of humanity in general.

There are some words or attitudes that are socially not cool, politically incorrect, or whatever you want to call them. For example talking about fascists or terrorists as bad people is good. Talking about Jews as bad people is not good. Using 'nigger' when you're white is not good, but as a black man it's completely ok. I wonder if it's ok to say it if you're Asian. Of course, this is all bullcrap. People have the right to say what they think and not be persecuted by it. Eventually, if a behaviour is determined by society to be wrong, then it should be punished or looked down upon in ALL its manifestations.
My main focus today will be antisemitism. First of all, the very word annoys the hell out of me, Semites are Jews as well as Arabs and some other nationalities. To hijack the term to mean almost exclusively racism against Jews is discriminating in itself. Second of all, there is no need for a special word that describes racism against a single race or group of races. We've determined that racism is bad and that antisemitism is racism, so why use two words? Is it because, somehow, idiots think hating Jews is worst than hating Romanians, for example? And third of all, have you noticed that the most "opressed" of nationalities usually have a strong xenophobic culture, almost always having a special word for people that are not like them? The Jews have Goim, which means People and also Body. They very rarely use it in relationship with jewish people and most of the time only to refer to non-Jews. They also have specific other words that mean non-Jewish. They don't use kind words about Goim either. But I guess that's not racism, because they actually look down upon all races equally, except their own. In a way, they discriminate themselves, right?
So my solution is this: let us consider any racist remark a bad thing, while in the same time consider idiotic and not worth any attention any phrase or argument that contains "antisemitic". That would solve it, right?

Just now I watched a little youtube.com video that explained the two slit experiment. Basically, what happends is that a pattern emerges if you use waves and another when you use particles. Then you fire electrons in the thing, and wave patterns emerge, even if you fire one electron at a time, therefore the single electron is interfering with itself! But even stranger, when you put an observer to see what slit the electron goes through, the pattern changes into a particle pattern. This proves that observation changes what we observe.

Wait a minute! But isn't science supposed to be based on observation? This very experiment has been observed, for crying out loud. So what does it mean? If you demonstrate something by scientific experimentation, therefore using observation, doesn't that mean you only demonstrate what happends when you look at something, rather than what that something is? Since the same experiment has been observed using eyes and it behaved differently when they use a finer tool, then it means the type of observer alters the result. Would things start behaving differently if an alien was to come on Earth? This is mind boggling.

Links:
YouTube video -< it was removed from YouTube
Another YouTube video
Wikipedia on the double slit experiment
Cool java applet on wave interference

Do you know how some games have so much publicity spin on them and so much advertising that they immediately start making money and becoming "the most popular game"? Arx Fatalis is not one of those. This game is a rediscovery of the good old values of Ultima Underworld: good story, great playability, nice AI, very little or no getting stuck possibilities, fantastic immersion in another world. If you loved Ultima Underworld (which can be found free on the net, but I am not sure you can make it work on the newest computers around), you will definitely fall in love with Arx Fatalis. I am telling you, I am hooked. I finished the game in a working week and two weekends and I did it so fast because my wife wanted me to give some attention to her. Yes, you read right, Arx Fatalis IS better than sex.

You can get it very cheaply from Good Old Games.

Ok, what is so great about it? I will give a few hints and let you discover the rest for yourselves:

• you make magic by mouse gestures (you move the mouse in certain patterns, like in Black and White)
  
• the AI characters yell for help from associated NPCs and run away when too hurt
  
• I once ran into an impenetrable beast that could kill me with one touch. Running away from it I reached a dead end. I expected to find no way out, but the beast disappeared and reappeared a few feet behind, just enough to let me run away.
  
• I couldn't find ONE spot where I would have gotten stuck in the entire game.
  
• the quests are intelligent. You need to use brains to finish this one. It's not something that must be searched on google to finish, either. If you have the will, there is a way.
  
• you can kill almost every character in the game as well as finish their quests.
  
• a lot of side quests. You can finish the game in a week or in a few months, it depends on you.
  
• hidden magic spells. Each rune has a specific meaning. Try combining them in innovative ways.
  

Not interested yet? Oh, come on!

Update: I have found a Doom3 mod that tries to be a prequel to Arx Fatalis. A pretty neat effort and I am glad I found a new reason to upgrade my computer :). This is their site: Arx – End Of Sun and this is a gameplay video: Arx - End of Sun (Gameplay Video #1) [Doom 3 SP Mod].

Mark's Sysinternals Blog

I hope this is something Microsoft did in order to improve their products, but I fear that the only reason for this purchase is to shut down the sites that give for free better tools than the one Microsoft puts in their OS. If this happends, I'll just move to Cygwin and ports from Linux for system tools X(

Nowadays Indigo seems to be a classy name. Everything is Indigo, from WCF to skins for every possible program or device. The new beta for Yahoo Messenger comes with the classic skin (aka Old Windows Forms style), Indigo (something that looks like Windows XP) and Maverick. Even if I changed my skin to classic, every time I restarted Yahoo I got the Indigo skin back. The only solution I found for this is going to Program Files/Yahoo!/Shared/Graphics and delete/rename the Indigo and Maverick folders. Now Yahoo looks and feels like the low profile/high utility app that it's supposed to be.

"How can you say that, Siderite, since all your rants are typical intellectual rants and you are obviously one?" writes a loyal blog reader.

Well, loyal reader, only reader and also writer of this blog, I also suck! Yes. Writing a blog that basically helps no one except for the programming tips, for the main purpose of being read by anyone, shows that I suck big time. And I am not the only one. Forums and blogs are sprouting all over the net, an infestation marketed as Web 2.0, basically saying absolutely nothing useful. The writers usually start blogging for the same reason that young girls write diaries, then "accidentally" leave them so anyone can read them. The opinion of people we don't care about and that normally should not care about us should be irrelevant, but the human need for self affirmation seems to counteract this obvious logic.

And I've realised this (well, finally at a conscious level) by reading these small magazines that are free and left to be read in bars and restaurants. They contain a few articles, targeting medium or high income young adults, as most of the clientele of this places is, and written by intellectuals. The rest of the pages are filled, of course, with commercials and ads. I first got interested, because the things that these guys said resonated with my own thoughts. Then I realized that they only did so with negative thoughts, talking about how the world is and shouldn't be and the adjacent sarcasm and intelligent irony. They didn't really provide useful solutions; and the more I read them, the more they sounded like whining.

So it hit me! These people have no reason to write anything to others. They only express their own impotence as members of the most elitist and minority group: intellectuals. They are intelligent, they read a lot, know a lot, and can't do anything about it. They are surrounded by idiots and the world these idiots create and the only possible thing to do about it is BLOG! (as in rant, using any media they can access). And because their opinion is nothing more than a sad whine, with no effect whatsoever, they suck. And so do I!

Why Windows takes so long to shut down.

Now this is a nice article that just touches my soul. How many of us, computer geeks have been at the mercy of the Windows shutdown? How many minutes wasted staring blindly into the monitor for that simple but elusive power off?

I have installed the Hive Cleanup Service and it mostly works. However, I can't say that it provides with the instant shutdown that I was looking for and I have no idea if the fact that my computer shuts down regularily now is due to this software, but it certainyl didn't hurt my computer in any way.

Profile of the Sociopath

This link is a short summary of the psychological profile of a sociopath. Having dealt with at least two in my life, and with one when I was least prepared for it (Grrr!), I kinda stumbled over this. As a paranthesis, search on Google for cult leaders and their psychological profile. Some weird event from your adolescence or the strange behaviour of your child can be sometimes explained by the influence of sociopathy and cultism.

If you read carefully the link above, a pattern forms and a profile of a sociopath emerges. Are they many in society today? And asking myself that I noticed that this profile fits a lot of women almost like a glove. Don't believe me? Read it for yourself. Of course, it doesn't ALL fit, else we would be in big trouble, but I started wondering, as the defining characteristic of psychopats is the incapacity for love and shallow emotions, how do women feel? Could that be an explanation for the way we can't understand the opposite sex, while they understand us perfectly? Could it also explain while we get mad rather rarely, but intensely, while they seem to get enraged after all kind of stupid things, then quickly get over it? Do they really love? These are questions that stuck with me for days.

Of course, a general and simple answer doesn't exist. If I look closely, a lot of those traits fit me as well. Does it mean I am a sociopath, coolly manipulating my blog readers? I just might :D