May 30, 2008
Short URL of the year
Snipurl just spit out a funny shortened URL: http://snurl.com/2bleh. To bleh... Short URL-s are kind of like CAPTCHA-s, you stumble upon them frequently and once in a while an amusing one comes along. Or to be technically correct: an amusing one gets randomly generated.
Baia Sprie from satellite
What you see above is the result of two and a half hours of precise and tiring work. Check it out in original size. But be warned it's 18.5 megabytes and 5000 x 3526 pixels in resolution.
The story goes something like this: a few weeks ago we were talking at the office about Google Maps and it's lack of high resolution satellite images of Romania, when a colleague mentioned that there is a Romanian site which has them. I was very skeptical at first but after taking a peek and seeing my hometown and my parent's house from way above I was hooked. I checked out all the surroundings (streets, friend's houses, lakes, places we hiked to, etc) and even some places around the country. I spent almost a day on it scrolling like crazy because one can call that site everything except usable. And then I thought I'll try modifying the HTML frame a bit maybe I can make that map window a bit bigger. At first I failed because I couldn't really concentrate as I was at work...
But yesterday night after seeing a really beautiful image of Baia Sprie on Flickr I thought I'll give the whole thing another try. And this time my "hacking" skills payed off. After a few short minutes of tinkering I had a full screen map viewer which I used today to snap various screenshots of the map which I then used as prime material for the "epic" image that's headlining this post. And I can say that I'm really pleased with the result because basically I can scroll around freely and practically relive the 25 years I stayed there. Hehe.
An annotated version is probably coming really soon... :)
Winter favorite
Probably one of my favorite photos from the past winter. I remember arriving there late in the afternoon (around 8 PM) and then having a great nightly run on the Icoana slopes.
May 29, 2008
Moved. Yes, again...
This time to my own server. And the conclusion is that I'm thinking about ditching Movable Type. Sorry, but yes, I'll have to admit it: it's slow as Hell and it was a real pain installing it - I had to tinker with some Apache configuration files to get a damn blog working... That's innaceptable. Don't hold your breath and don't take it as a promise, the grand migration won't happen now nor tomorrow, as I have one really important personal project in the pipeline but as soon as I'll have some "free" time I'll get to it. WordPress, here I come.
May 15, 2008
Two spots for a mayor candidate
Oh and talking about professionalism... Watching the videos below (made for one of Baia Mare's mayor candidates) will make you hurt. I guarantee it.
The spots were created by an advertising agency from Cluj. I'm sorry but I refuse to link reta... Uhm, I mean, professionals.
I'm sure as hell not going to vote as I'm way too fed up with these leeches. It is my belief that it doesn't matter who gets in the chair, he'll be just as corrupt as the current one, he'll steal just as much and it'll be all the same for the average citizen. So, thanks but no thanks.
Update: I open Hotnews following some random link I've received via IM and what do I see? This. Heeelp! They're everywhere!
tinyurl.com became so tiny it's inaccessible
The professionals that provide us Internet at work, namely IPN, have some lame filters installed which went rogue and now deny access to random sites. My biggest gripe for the moment is the blockage of tinyurl.com which means twittering in the short breaks I have becomes rapidly frustrating as no links can be accessed. And no, they're not productivy boosting filters, as for a while Mozilla's download site was blocked too. That meant Firefox updates were performed by bringing the browser's setup file on a USB stick from home. Or transferring it via box.net. And that's how I know the filters are out of control, because obviously we called them about this issue and they said they're aware of it but have no idea what to do. Professionals, as I said.
Update! Found a solution.
May 12, 2008
Backup - Coming to a Mac near me
Good news day.
1. First and most important: I've got a raise. Whooo. A raise is always excellent news.
2. A replacement arrived for the 400 gig hard drive that flew away to the ethernal bit fields with most of my music archive on it a few months ago. Oh, how happy I was about that incident. Not. I tried to avoid thinking about it as much as I could but these weeks I was in the mood to listen to a specific style of which I had several gigs of MP3s on that drive. Bad luck.
Anyway, back to the good news: I'll have a spanking new hard drive ready for action! The plan is to put it into my desktop PC bringing the number of drives installed up to three. Hmmm, let's brag a bit. Desktop PC: 320 GB + 500 GB + 400 GB (the newcomer) = 1,12 TB! Wow. 500 GB Western Digital My Book World Edition that sits near my router tied into the network. Two 80 GB drives of which one is installed into my PlayStation 2 and one is in a portable USB enclosure. The one in the USB enclosure will be used for Time Machine backups from now on... 60 GB hard in my MacBook.
And I remember the moment in the autumn of 1998 when I decided to get a 4 GB hard drive thinking that it'll last me, like, forever.
May 11, 2008
Le Cafe and others
Plus lyrics for those (like me) who understand written French better.
Friday evening after a reminder and invitation from a friend we went and attended 'Très Court', a short film festival. "Movies" of up to 3 minutes (titles and credits did not count) were presented, most of them funny and some weird and / or artsy. The one above was probably my favorite of the 51 even though I voted for another clip in the respective section. The fest in it's whole was a lot of fun.
Here are some more favorite shorts I found over the Net: Duel by Antoine Revel-Mouroz, Things fall apart by R. Chiu / C. Hewitt (impressive sound design), My Mum the Wrestler by Mark Withers, Cat man do by Simon Tofield, Butterfly by Stéphane Levallois (very very nice) and Flash by Marco Cohen. Enjoy them while you can (until the video sites decide to pull them, that is).
Kings and princesses
I must confess. I'm among the growing fan base of pitzipoanca.org and cocalari.com. Emphasis on the first one (I've been genuinely sad when the blog got disabled on wordpress.com - hurray for the return on their own domain). Human stupidity and bad taste at their max can be a good source of daily laughs. Even if they more or less directly affect us. Discovered via the almighty zoso.
May 10, 2008
The end of a (hosting) era
Just got this by e-mail:
Hello,This is just an email verification for you that we've now closed your Account as you just requested via our web panel.
You will no longer receive any bills from us (unless you kept an active domain _registration_ with us) nor other communications.
We're very sorry it didn't work out and maybe we'll see you again someday!
Sincerely,
The UnHappy DreamHost Goodbye Team
I'm over at The Planet on my shiny dedicate server. Which costs more per month than DreamHost cost per year, but the quality...