January 29, 2005
Birthday galore
It's our favorite Romanian business blogger, Dragos Novac's birthday in 2 days (January 31st). Anyone reading this can surprise him by going and voting for his weblog which is nominated in the Best Southeastern European Weblog category at the Satin Pijama Awards.
How do I know about his birthday? No, I'm not the date obsessed type, as I had a few classmates back in high school that knew everyone's birthday and astral sign by heart. On the contrary, I could never memorize dates nor numbers and that's one of the reasons I created a Birthday Alarm account back last summer. So, one of these days I was eyeing the e-mail notification that came from the service announcing that Ioana's (as in Ioana, my girlfriend) birthday is right around the corner and I thought, hey what the heck, and sent out a mass message in Yahoo! Messenger asking everyone on my contact list to enter his or her birthday. The result was that in less than one minute my taskbar filled up twice with the responses coming in through Messenger and that I've got around 50 birthdays entered. So that evening I was busy studying the dates and concluded that the oldest two guys in my contact list are from '71 and the youngest gal is from the year of the Romanian revolution, 1989 and noted some coincidences, like birthdays on the same date. I guess this would be a golden opportunity for those who believe in astral signs to study who matches who and compare each personality with the person's sign but I'm not that type.
And one more note: if you were among those that took that half minute and filled out the form expect at least a virtual card by the time your most loved / hated day of the year comes around.
January 20, 2005
I've been a good Secret Santa!
It all started with an entry in Gabriel Radic's weblog that arrived in my feed reader sometime by the end of November. After reading the entry, a few clicks and some form filling I was part of Secret Santa 2004.
Some time passed and on December the 10th an e-mail arrived containing the name, e-mail, web address and a link to the wishlist of the person I was supposed to surprise with a Christmas present. Unfortunately back then I was really low on money (as I am now as a matter of fact) but I promised myself that I'm going to get Kevin something cool.
Fast forward four days and an e-mail arrives from a certain Andrew explaining me that he just ordered my gift and apologizing because Amazon estimated that it'll only arrive around the 10th of January. Now that short mail not only made my day but probably my week and a lot more! I wrote back quickly sending lots of thanks and guiltilly thinking that I still had no money to get anything to the guy who I was supposed to surprise. And then I spent a few days looking at my Amazon wishlist hovering the button hiding the items that were already purchased and holding back my urge to click it just to keep the surprise factor. But finally my curiosity won and I gave in... And found out that a two disc DVD version of Snatch was on it's way to my parent's house in Baia Sprie. Now that was some awsome news!
A few days before Christmas I finally received some well earned money and as such I finally got around and ordered Kevin a Pixies CD. As he was from UK, amazon.co.uk estimated that the package will arrive just before Christmas. So, eventually everything was OK and I only had to sit around and wait for a few days, and voila! exactly a month after passing the order, on the 15th of January 2005 my package arrived! Nowadays I'm really busy watching all the special features the two discs are packed with.
Thank you Gabi for the link that got me into the game in the first place and thank you Andy for the fantastic gift!
January 15, 2005
IRBA 2004 Winners
No, I didn't grab anything, not even a third prize. Not that I was nominated in that many categories, but I guess that this is the prize for my laziness to write entries and even to urge people to vote for me. :-)
For those interested there's a really short sum up of the winners on Cristian Paul's blog. Unfortunately I can't link to the official results, and there will probably be no IRBA 2005. And that's because Gabriel suddenly decided to take his blog offline. All the links give nice 404s. I wonder, could it be related to this?
Anyway, next year get ready for k!RBA. Now guess what that 'k!' stands for. Or well, maybe not. Hehe.