Month: August 2008

A great day

As opposed to the previous gloomy post, here I'll tell you (my dear single reader 🙂 about a great day I had a few days ago.

It all started at 8 in the morning: the phone call confirmed - the weather was great. Then a drive from Varna to Russalka (one of the best resorts on our seaside ever) - the trip was great - village roads light on traffic. I arrived in a sexy small bay with a motor boat (I don't know what that's called) on it and a really small island 10 meters from the shore. After a two-hour wait (I was late) I got on the wet suit and the oxygen bottle and my coach and I made a really nice trip around the island - up to 8-meter dives.

I tried to schedule a 25 meter dive - no luck. I had to have a special certificate.

Then with the pass for the diving I was free to do anything inside the resort. Now is the time to say that Russalka is a closed resort. Once inside everything is free - I had three cokes. It's very beautiful. (No camera sorry, I swam with my phone). I almost read Truman Capote's Summer Crossing.

Then on the way back I decided to go check out cape Shabla. Pretty nice place. Pretty close to the border with Romania. No more than 20 minutes there.

On the way there I stopped at Kamen Bryag and checked the ancient Tracian fortress Ajla. An amazing elevated view towards the sea. So pretty. Again 20 minutes there only.

Finally I arrived at Kaliakra - this is by far the most beautiful place I have ever seen in my life. Especially on sunset. The sea looked so powerful and mighty.

The day finished at Slunchev Bryag after a two hour drive at a Roger Sanchez's party. My car got towed and they gave it back for the humble price of 60 leva 🙁 and a 800-meter, 15-leva taxi trip.

I got to bed at 6:30 after the same 2-hour drive after the party.

A great day.

About killing

Few days ago I accidentally hit a sparrow with my car. The poor creature did not survive. There's a really heavy feeling that grabs you right after that moment. Anger, frustration, trying to exonerate one's self. Sadness.

And if that's not enough, yesterday I hit a fox on the highway. I did not even stop to see what happened for which I kinda feel guilty. Again the sadness and thinking about life, the universe and everything else.

Damn bad luck. I have never hit anything before. And from the feeling of it - I'm no good for taking lives - I just can't bare the thought of it.

Blogs that supply part of the content in the RSS/Atom feeds

There are blogs that only supply a resume or part of the content in the RSS. And the reason, I guess, is that they want you to leave the comfort of your own RSS reader and visit their site and maybe see some ads or who-cares-else what.

Well, FUCK THEM. The best I know are not doing it. Actually the best I know have no ads and have minimalistic web sites (I understand it as only content and unobtrusive navigation buttons/links).... and..... provide outstanding content.

Blogs that do that:
http://www.karieri.bg/blog/
http://www.nova-rabota.com/

I decided to stop reading them.

Other things that turn me down - copyright footer, a lot of links like "vote for me in ...." and guys that start taking themselves too seriously. For the latter I'm ready to make an exception, because some of them have an amazing style.

SonyEricsson K750i. SonyEricsson people, THANK YOU

Sony Ericsson K750i was my phone for quite a while. This is a thank-you note to the creators of that amazing machine.
Yesterday the latest accident finished it. This time for sure. It doesn't want to switch on. It's not showing any sign of life.

This phone made amazing pictures,
most of my public images are made with it. It was the best of its time.
There are still phone that can't match that. The iPhone's camera, for
example, sucks. With a really steady hand one could make night shots
too. I had a 2GB flash card of the awful sony format - memory stick.

The opera mini made it a decent browser. I could read mobi.capital.bg and mobi.dnevnik.bg in the restroom. BTW mobi.dnevnik.bg is boring as opposed to mobi.capital.bg.
Opera mini, BTW, is an example of a perfect minimalistic software. It's amazing. Great job.

I could use the phone with a bluetooth GPS
until I lost the GPS in Amsterdam. The software choice wasn't that
great, because I only had Java and no operating system. Here's the
place to mention Nav4All
- an amazing map software with routing (navigation) maps for Bulgaria.
Once I ended up in a construction site in Sofia, but I hear these
things happen to every map software. Nav4All used internet for
downloading maps, and that made it quite a drag.

ReaderManiac made the phone an electronic book reader. Again
an amazing software - I was planning to write an article about it, but
maybe some other time. I read like 10 books on it. See the read books section
(phone pages state that I read this on the phone). Navigation was
amazing. Different font and sizes, great software. It even told you
when to rest your eyes. I could supply Cyrillic fonts.

Lacking an OS made the phone very stable and pretty fast. It crashed only once a few months. I hate the so called organizers - Windows Mobile sucks big time.

The 2GB flash made the phone an excellent mp3 player.
While snowboarding at -20 degrees Celsius it was working flawlessly.
The earpieces weren't that well attached but the quality was quite
satisfying.

A business phone: when it said that the battery was depleted it could work for at least a day at heavy use.

Negative sides:
the jacks got pretty dirty and the earpieces and the usb connection got
interferences. The screen wasn't as bright as the new phones. The
inside of the protective glass (plastic) in front of the screen got
full with sand and dirt and it was quite hard to clean it up. Thanks,
Steen. Ugly flash card jack (memory stick duo), ugly earphones jack
(something SonyEricsson). Nokia beats it here..

Update: I'd like to thank the mobile-review site for the outstanding reviews they make. Here's the one for K750i. Surely, I'll consult them for my next phone too. Also, their news page looks quite deserted, I really hope, they would continue to write good reviews.

So chronologically:

First
while free-riding (snowboarding outside the track in fresh snow) I
dropped it. After 80 minutes of heavy ringing I found it pretty wet
under 20cm of snow still working and most importantly ringing so I
could find it.

Second, I swam with it in a pool for at least
half a minute. After a complete drying it continued to work but with a
few minor quirks. Battery swelled up few days later and nearly blew up
the whole phone. The new battery didn't charge correctly. The quality
of the talks went significantly lower.

Third, yesterday I was
with the phone in the sea for around 10 minutes. This was the end of
it. It didn't show any signs of life after that. I did everything I can.

It's over.

Thank you, SonyEricsson people. This is was an amazing example of equipment.

Unfortunately
SonyEricsson does not have a decent model with GPS. And that's what I'm
looking for. I'm planning to have an iPhone (my roommate has one, it's
a decent thing, but not for a primary phone) and maybe a Nokia with a
GPS. My friends say E71, although ugly, is a pretty good one for
business purposes. Both suck at pictures.
Maybe N82 too. We'll see.
Update2: BTW, mobile-review guys give a pretty bad review of the iPhone. They're right, I also strongly dislike Apple and its "closed" approach, but the article seems a little prejudiced. It seems personal. A red (bad) point for them.

Any other suggestions?
I'm looking for a GPS, decent mapping software with maps and
routing/navigation, wireless, a decent camera, fast interaction, no
Windows Mobile, a lot of space, decent mp3 player, sturdy....

Vital equipment dying

I think I'm having a bad dream.
Most of the most important technical equipment around me is failing:

First the phone: SonyEricsson K750i. An amazing machine. Very sturdy, survived a swimming pool, being lost in the snow while snowboarding, numerous hits, is now dead.

The laptop's battery completely fucked up, it's constantly overheating. The laptop itself is scaring me up - not to die one day - it's a DELL, so....

My car is on the end of its usable life. Although I'm so thankful to it for saving my life after all the stupid things I did when I was younger, I have to change it.

I'm planning to buy a motorcycle.

It's partly my fault - most of the equipment was showing dreadful signs for a long time, but I constantly postpone to take measures.

So now to be able to buy all that I'm thinking of finding a second job or sell a kidney.

I hate CDs/DVDs

I really do. Windows doesn't seem to understand them - the whole system stops and waits for a single DVD. The laptop is shaking.

Read/write times are really slow. Burning them with the windows's ATAPI service is hell.

When used to working with 3-5 MB/sec without worm-up times and spin times and whatever else times, it's really annoying.

But DVDs are the only reasonable way to give someone 15 GB even though you'll have to spend 2 hours to burn them.

P.S. I want to remove my laptop's DVD combo whatever bullshit, but I can't 🙁 It's such a waste of weight and space.

Vista/XP can't burn a single CD/DVD without infuriating you

This is part of the series 'Vista sucks'. Although XP sucks as much as Vista
in this case.

 

There was a feature first introduced in XP for burning CDs. In Xp the service
was called something like ATAPI burning or whatever. Couldn't burn DVDs. In
Vista the same software could burn DVDs. I couldn't find the service name. I may
have missed it somehow.

So this software was a nice feature - simple, fairly stable.

But it's so darn slow and requires twice as much space as the burned data.
Here's why:

First you copy the files on the CD/DVD with Windows Explorer. This copies the
files in a cache of some kind. Trying to burn 4.5 GB requires 4-5 minutes of
copying - and the machine is unusable  - copying utilizes the HDD. If you do
something else it could take up to 20 min.

Then to burn them, the wizard should be started - this again copies the files
to another cache I guess. Again 5 to 20 minutes.

This means 9 GB of space needed + the actual 4.5 GB. And a lot of time.

Vista/XP you messed up a good idea again. Vista/XP you suck.

As far as I can remember Nero was a lot faster, no cache needed, or at least
no that much. Is Nero still good? Is there a light version of it?