Animal lover

Since today I'm apparently into a writing disposition, here is yet another post.
Earlier this year I was on a trip to visit my grandparents, in Oltenia, near Targu-Jiu. I made some pictures on the road, with my newly purchased Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTI (yes, that is EOS 400D for the American market - blame the marketing department :D). Here are some albums:
- animals
- nature
- on the road

I was still adjusting to the camera, some of the pictures may be of poor quality. Comments are welcome :D

A long walk a day keeps the doctor away

August started with a business trip in Belgium.

The location was the town called Louvain la Neuve, a university city, with good and bad parts.

First of all I didn't like the belgian weather. From the 6 days I was there, I had one day and a half of sunshine, the rest was cloudy/rainy weather. The highest temperature was on the first day, a Sunday, when the highest temperature was 29 degrees. That when in Romania the temperature was on average around 35 degrees, all day hot shiny weather. So my bags were half loaded with rainy clothes :(.

Second of all, the town is a pedestrian & bicycle one. There are no cars, no easy mean of transportation from a side to another. So from the flat to the company office we had to walk about 25 minutes, first going down a hill, then climbing on another (the centre of the town is the lowest part). which would have been quite fine if we had some sunshine, but instead we got lots of rain, and beside that, some bicycle guys almost run over us (several times, they don't seem to be very careful)

Third of all, on the first Sunday me and my work colleague made a trip to Brusseles, were we visited the center of town and in the afternoon we met some of my old colege buddies. Two of them actually work & live in Brusseles and the third one had just arrived from Bucharest on the same day as i did, but on a different flight.

Here are some pictures from the trip:
- some sights
- my old college buddies

I Got Married

Yes I did.

The action took place on 14 of July (I told you I was a lazy bastard :P). It was a beautiful yet very frustrating event for me and my wife, a lot of things had to go "wrong" (minor things, but at that time everything seemed such a big disaster).

After that we had our honey moon (more likely we can call it week, but hey, that is the term everybody uses :D), in the lovely city of Barcelona, Spain. I will make a post with some details about the trip, as well as some pictures from there.

Venus May Be Earth's Hellish Twin

So my last post was about Mars, long time ago. What can I say, I'm a lazy bastard. Much has changed since that post, but I'll let you know in another port.

Now it seems Venus also had water at a point in time. The Venus Express is sending new data about the cloudy hellish planet. Aparently it has already detected lightning activity, hydrogen and oxygen leaving the atmosphere.

Men are from Mars may get a new meaning

That is, women also may be from Mars. Who really know? It seem Mars had after all oceans, you can read all in here. Some major event seem to be the culprit in the disappearance of the surface water on Mars. That water may still be trapped underground, after 2 billion years, so Mars could harbor life (no, not the green martians you see in cartoons, but maybe microbs, spores or some other sort of primordial life). And maybe we are all martians, emigrated here after Mars began to lose the water.

Referendum is over!

So, as many of us expected, the Referendum reinstated the suspended president. With about 74% of the voters, but with an average of about 44% of the voters actually voting. This means on next elections probably less than 33% will actually vote. So one month was for nothing, only politics on TV, but now we can all relax until the next political scandal.

I failed to go the FIA GT event this weekend, mostly because of the rain and also due to the lack of time. But here are some movies from a friend:

Movie 1
Movie 2
Movie 3
Movie 4

The nerd in us

I found this link on Marc Fleury's blog. It's an article about nerds, and their position in high school. Well, it's American based, but probably applies elsewhere as well. Interesting reading, what can I say more.

And then it was May

Off course, the month started with my birthday, but we posponed the barbeque until the 5-7 weekend. See here the photos from those days.
Very hot May this is, now the temperature has reached over 30 degrees (Celsius, that is :D).
And this weekend we'll going to have 2 events:
- a national referendum, to see if the suspended president (Traian Basescu) will stay in office or not
- a Formula 3 race in the middle of Bucharest, a 3 day event starting tommorow.

Hmm, I think I'll have to attend both events.

Earth 2?

Huray, the first exoplanet with traces of water in its atmosphere was found. Read here the story. This opens the door for a new space hunt, Earth size planets containing water, an element vital to life as we know it. Who knows when Earth 2 will be discovered.

How to avoid an asshole boss

I checked my LinkedIn account today, and I have stumbled over this article. Recommand you read it in case you wish to change your work place. It's based on the book "The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't" by Robert Sutton. I think the title says it all :D.

Have a nice Asshole free environment!

After Easter

So last weekend there was the Easter, both Ortodox and Catholic. And how did we spend it? Well, barbecues, off course :). After all, it is the first day when you can eat meat after 40 days. And there was beautiful weather. So, everybody got some stakes, or pork chops, or sausages, or mititei, and we all went to the coutryside (or nearest forest/green field) to celebrate this day. The result: tons of garbage, left behind by careless eaters.
But hey, it's just the start of the season, from now on until October all weekends can be a barbecue one. So stay tune, for more garbage will result.

The Freak Planet Next To You

Who could have known what mysteries lie in our own cosmic back yard. Here are 2 articles about new pictures from our stellar neigbour, Saturn: South pole and North pole

A new Month, a new post

Somebody sent me this link. It's a collection of great funny ads, gathered from all over the world. Must see to wonder what a creative mind can do.
Yesterday was April's Fool, but I haven't heard of any good practical jokes. What's happening to this world?

We'll soon live in the skies

Here is a nice article about the future of man kind. It argues that the best option for space bases are not teh Moon and Mars, but the Orbital Outposts. I'm just waiting for the first Sky Hotel :).

New Star

Here's a clip from a French contest, called "Nouvelle Star" (kind of an French Idol :D). This guy is fantastic! Hope to see this kind of people in Romania, soon.

Java Open Source IDE to compete with .NET

It appears Exadel will open source some of its products(Exadel Studio Pro, RichFaces, Ajax4JSF), and move them to the JBoss site for integration with the JBoss IDE, Seam, etc... Exadel Studio Pro will merge with JBoss IDE, RichFaces will become JBoss RichFaces and so on. We'll have to wait and see, as the JBoss IDE has been quite stagnant for the last 4 month or so.

Here is an interesting interview about this move, also some spicy comments, apparently there are some people who think just what they use is the best framework(see Ajax4JSF vs GWT).

JBoss Seam new features

It seems Michael Yuan has some tips for those who want to use Seam and GlassFish. Read here the instructions.
There seem to be some new features for Seam, coming soon an integration between Seam and GWT. Read here the details about the Spring and GWT integration. it appears we'll have to wait for the GWT integration, as it requires JSF 1.2.

Is JBoss going to recover?

I've been looking for some of the JBoss projects since September 2006. JBAP, EJB 3, JBoss IDE and Seam. The only one that really is still at full throttle is the Seam project (hooray for Gavin King). They have just released the 1.2.0 GA (former 1.1.7 :)) version. I was really looking to work with JBoss IDE 2.0.0, since it's suppose to work with Eclipse 3.2, but now Eclipse is at version 3.2.2 and JBoss IDE is still in the Beta 2 stage.
Today I checked the JIRA status of this project and it seem that they have a new release date, somewhere in the near future . They have also changed the JIRA for the EJB 3 project, the RC 10 should have been released at least 3 month ago, but now has disappear and is part of the new AP 4.2.0 CR2 code. This one still has no release date, so I'll just have to check it from time to time :(.