Lousy Sunday Evenings
The time of the week I dislike most of all is Sunday evening...
especially after a great, fun weekend and apparently, more so when I
don't have a busy Monday waiting for me when I wake up tomorrow.
No lengthy arguments for this one...
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| Christian Nasulea - 25.11.2007 | |
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Exchange Rate Prophecies
The Romanian Leu to Euro exchange rate has been increasing steadily for some time now. Just to give you an idea, the exchange rate increased from 3.3157 on November 1st to 3.6221 on November 23rd (today). That's a 9.24% increase and today's exchange rate is a record for this year. There have been countless experts and specialists in and out of TV shows for days now, all with opinions and all sorts of arguments to back those opinions.
Many of those opinions sought to explain why it is happening but some people also came (were sent to this Earth) to tell us what will happen next. I won't reffer to any one person in particular but just to give you a few examples Mircea Badea (popular press review TV host), a counselor of Mugur Isarescu (governor of the National Bank of Romania), representatives of financial companies all came forth to prophetize. Some of them said the increase would continue and once the exchange rate would be up it would stay up.
Now, it's my turn to bring my own prophecy out into the world.
I think the exchange rate is what the National Bank wants it to be. They have enough foreign currency reserves to allow them to play with the indexes. We all know there are convergence criteria to be respected for Romania to be able to switch to the euro... at some point. Do all these experts think the national bank is going to let the exchange rate slide out of the convergenge criteria and out of control?
I think what is really going on is that the National Bank saw what happened around Christmas last year and decided to make preparations. The increase in exchange rate is just a countermeasure put in place, in advance, to counteract another, otherwise inevitable, fall of the euro caused by the enormous amount of Christmas spending Romania goes through every year. Without this increase I believe Romania would slip out of the convergence criteria in the opposite direction.
And so I have foretold.
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| Christian Nasulea - 23.11.2007 | |
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Police Problem Spot Map
The General Police Inspectorate in Bucharest has put together an interesting tool for those people who have no choice but to battle traffic in Bucharest. Whether you deal with it every day or you just have to go on a brief incursion into the heart of the mad city here's something that might help you plan a bit better.
The continuously updated map can be found on the Bucharest Police Website.
Now, as far as usability is concerned what they did is far, far from perfect. In an interview on TV last night a spokesperson of the Bucharest Police said that this thing is updated continuously and that they're also encouraging drivers to call 9544 to provide even more information to be put up on the map. I'm not exactly sure they're updating the traffic jam info as often as they should.
Despite these and a lot of other shortcoimngs I'd still like to give them a big thumbs up for the initiative.
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| Christian Nasulea - 23.11.2007 | |
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Scheduled Epidemics
Being stuck at home with this little kids' virus I have (Chicken Pox, read 2 posts back for more details), of course, people started sharing stories with me of what it was like when they had the virus themselves. There were plenty of "you'll laugh about this years from now", not-haha, not-very funny, "that's how I lost half my finger" stories that you probably shouldn't tell someone who's in quarantine with something... anything. There were even plenty of cruel jokes about the virus and about the guy with the virus, many of them very personal, many of them with strange references and odd sexual subtext. I won't go into any details about these, I know my friends, their jokes, and I'm still a firm believer in saying the joke with no regard for people's feelings - if it's a real joke among real friends people will get over it, no sense killing a good joke.
But... that's not even what I want to talk about. The stories I want to talk about were few. I'm talking about those stories about the complications that can occur in some cases, abortions, nasty infections, pneumonia, hepatitis and probably many more. According to an article on About.com all these things occur in people with compromised immunity, newborns and adults but it's generally known that if you don't get it when you're young it will give you bigger "problems" if you get it when you're older.
Now, my problem is, if we know it's pretty harmless to kids and we know potential future problems are so big why don't we just schedule a well-planned epidemic for all the kids to share every now and again? I mean, if you prepare well enough you can give the little guys life-long immunity to the damn virus without a lot of hassle. Of course, there's also the possibility of getting a vaccine but that's not permanent so scheduling the epidemic produces better results. Also, if you're prepared most people should develop the easier version of the disease. And besides, it's more fun to be sick with somebody.
I know it's not as simple as that, I also know all you doctor-people reading my blog might have something to say against this, but I just want to know if anyone's given this any serious thought.
NOTE: The picture is of a bird flu virus as it was the first public domain picture of a virus I found. Go figure!
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| Christian Nasulea - 21.11.2007 | |
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2-Letter Domains in .RO
I put together a little test last week to see what 2 letter domain names are still available in the .ro TLD. I wasn't entirely surprised to find out that there are no more 2 letter domains available. In fact, there are no domains made up of two numeral characters left either. I ran a complete check on all the domains made of two characters containing only letters and numbers (1296 of them). There were 264 of these domains still available and they're all made up of a letter and a number.
Email me for a full list.
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| Christian Nasulea - 20.11.2007 | |
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Blood Transfusions Website
I was listenting to an interview on TV yesterday about the CSR
programmes of one of Romania's largest companies. Big companies aren't
the only ones giving back to the community, they just do a better job
at bragging about their good deeds.
Here's our latest good deed. I'm proud to introduce the website of the Center for Blood Transfusions in Ploiesti, www.transfuzii.ro.
Although the project website is less than 72 hours old and therefore
still in an embryonic state, I'm hoping it will help the center improve
the quality and quantity of their products by boosting their
communication with their potential donors. I'm not going to write a
long discourse about why this is very important, instead I will let you
consider the scenarios yourselves.
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| Christian Nasulea - 19.11.2007 | |
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Chicken Pox
The good news is I'm on holiday. The bad news is most people insist on calling it quarantine. That's right, I've come down with chicken pox (Romanian: varicela, common name: varsat de vant; Azeri: qizilca).
It seems my symptoms started out on Thursday afternoon after my car broke down. I had a fever but I thought it was only because I was extremely sleep deprived. For all those who don't understand "extremely sleep deprived" let me just say fever is a very common symptom when you lack as much sleep as I manage to gather sometimes.
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| Christian Nasulea - 17.11.2007 | |
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Corruption in Transit
What is the most corrupt institution in present-day Romania? Nope, it's not the Government. It's not the Parliament. It's not the Ministry of Justice. It's not even the DNA (the National Direction Against Corruption). It's not the Department of Forestry. It's not even the National Hunting and Fishing Association. It's not a hospital and it's not a school. I'll cut to the chase.
It's the CFR, the National Railroad Company.
Well, that's my opinion, at least, and I will soon tell you why. I'm not talking about high-level corruption involving high-ranking officials in the company and weird deals involving their relatives. I'm talking about a kind of corruption which is so well embedded into the way things work that it might well be part of the bases of the whole organization.
Here's the story. We went on a weekend trip to Sibiu. I might cover why we went by train in another post, although that's really not important. We got to the train station arount 23:00 on Friday evening and our train was due to leave at 23:50. We went to buy our tickets, which we did, and we also wanted 2 beds on the sleeping car. The lady at the ticket office told us they were changing information systems and she couldn't give us the beds although she still had the diagram, but that as usual we should be able to get tickets from the steward on the train. Now, I knew this meant the steward would ask for a bit more money than the ticket actually cost, usually about 10 RON more, but this time it was a lot better. We had to beg the guy to give us 2 beds on a virtually empty sleeping car and you can bet he didn't issue any kind of ticket, not even for the nominal cost of the beds. And when the discussion ended it was obvious he was just ... doing us a favour.
When we got back it was even more interesting. This time the sleeping car was full so the steward told us to wait in another car until the train got to Fagaras when two of the beds would be freed. OK, reasonable enough. After a few calculations we decided it wasn't worth paying for 2 beds for the 4 hours that were left till we got to Bucharest so we waited for the regular controller to ask him to issue us tickets for 2 regular 2nd class seats. Well, surprisingly enough, the controller had already talked to the steward and they had decided that the beds weren't available anymore (just in case we still wanted them). I mean, the controller has to live too, doesn't he? We thought: "OK, no more shady business with the steward. Let's just get those tickets for the seats.". But no, the controller told us he thought it was better if we just paid him a bit more than the price of the seats so that he could "manage" to leave us the entire compartment to ourselves so we could sleep on the benches all the way to Bucharest. It didn't really seem like we had a choice. And guess what: no tickets...
Add this little story to what usually happens on most trains, especially slow trains, and you have a pretty good picture of what I mean. I'm talking here about the 1 to 5 ratio (tickets bought to people actually travelling on a train) which frequently checks out, especially on the commuter trains.
FINAL NOTE and DISCLAIMER: I am by no means admitting to paying any bribes to any employees of the National Railroad Company. I am simply trying to give a fair and accurate account of how on two consecutive occasions I was asked to pay for the services of the National Railroad Company by their employees and was not issued an official document confirming the receipt of the money.
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| Christian Nasulea - 15.11.2007 | |
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For The Blind
You know I like ads and advertising, especially the good ads with a lasting effect on the viewer. How about this one?
The above is an ad that, I assume, is asking drivers to be more responsible about the way they drive, especially when bikers are around. I personally think that many times (and I just said many, not the majority of) accidents involving bikers are the fault of the bikers themselves, however the fact remains that many drivers in this country are simply irresponsible and the consequences are usually fatal for the bikers.
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| Christian Nasulea - 14.11.2007 | |
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Michael & Gabriel
Happy Name Day to all those bearing the names of the archangels.
Either of the names will do. Although, as Cami said, in all fairness if you want to comply with this name day's requirements your name should be both Michael and Gabriel.
Note to people outside Romania:
This day is a big deal in Romania. Half the people in Romania are named Michael (RO: Mihai), Gabriel, Mihaela, Gabriela or derivatives of these. The other half is named John (RO: Ion).
I'm exagerating, of course, but you get the idea.
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| Christian Nasulea - 08.11.2007 | |
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