And again it has been more than a week since I last updated my mindfields, but I did had some stuff to do, of course. My mood : good … very good even. I started reporting at work so it is one of the most busiest weeks, and most stressful for that matter cause things as the web hotel are playing around with my nerves. So taking that into consideration I would say my mood is quite good.
In another order of ideas, last evening I went to see the all famous mr. James Bond 007, carrying as a title “Casino Royale”. The main character has been changed with a dane (I think), that is blond (of course), but contrary to all beliefs has performed very very good and gave a very interesting note of reality to the movie. This edition of the movie didn’t performed extra-sophisticated gadgets, although 007 managed to crash a beautiful Aston Martin DB9 (I just hope it wasn’t real). One of the things I liked the most is that fact that the end is not where you might think it is. It’s much after that. And it’s not an all mighty happy ending, it is quite sad actually and yes I did appreciate this note of realism as well.
Apart from that me and Martin had a meeting with Lauritz.com the other day, which didn’t end very nice, but then again, that’s life, you just can’t win them all can you ? Tomorrow we have a brunch with MSN/Microsoft, which sounds to be nice, although I might end up not finishing my reporting when I want to. On Friday I am moving to block number 2, this time for good… hopefully. Its going to be a lot of hassle to carry everything but hey … at least I know that for the next 6 months I will stay there.
That’s all for tonight … Paris is closing in … wee

Recently my mindfields was visited by a very unexpected person, but on the other hand very welcomed. Mike Moran, one of the speakers of the conference I have wrote about, stopped by to comment a bit on my post, therefore I would like to thank him for his visit and good state of spirit in which he shared his ideas about my post. At first I couldn’t actually believe it, and Mike, I have no clue about how you found out, but I’m glad you did.
Now, let’s go to more personal stuff, weekend was nice… Saturday was of course one of those long nights, on which I can say that I had enough fun, Sunday I was lazy … (no wonder). Today I mixed up a date for a meeting, which I had to have, but it’s in fact another time (no wonder … it’s me). It was good I realized soon enough to avoid influencing my schedule too bad.
I have a lot of things lately on my mind, things are starting to take a weird turn in my feelings, and I could say that they are probably going the right direction. I have waited for this for a long time now, but it’s just a bit confusing at this point, and hopefully I will be able to wake up and do things right (if I knew what right means). Listening to “A Perfect Circle – Passive” now, thanks to Fab, which was kind enough to share some music, and somehow that’s how I am feeling… passive. Is it good ? Is it bad ? Questions … what would humanity do without them?
I’m really wondering now, should I even go there? Will it be painful to open up that side of me, again? This time is new, it’s different … but it might be painful ? I don’t want to hurt anyone that’s for sure, but I have to take care of myself as well, and paradoxically enough if I choose not to hurt someone I might end up hurting me, and the other way around. One of the many strange twists in life. I can feel it opening up, and my body starts shivering … is it a good sign, or it’s just that they are not really giving any heating right now ?
In the Search Engine world, Google Yahoo and MSN are doing something very odd and rare to see in the IT world, they are working together!!! Noooo … Google did not buy everybody and making them work for them. That’s Microsoft tactics – hehe – (if you can’t outsmart them … buy them, if you can’t buy them, copy them). It seems that they are working to develop one of Googles projects, the XML site maps. That’s quite funny as all three are competitors in the same market, although G is the biggest and most popular of them all. According to some anonymous inside sources, MSN is probably going to shut down sometime soon, therefore everything is being moved to live.com . I find it a very interesting initiative to make things easier for webmasters and users generally speaking as this will improve the indexing performances and will (hopefully) help users find information easier and more important – relevant wise. I am soon going to create a reference guide to explain most abstract terms used in Search Engines as “spiders” and the above mentioned XML. I hope I can set it up automatically, so I can add terms on the fly to an existing database/post, but I will not set a date for this as I wouldn’t like to disappoint.
I am dealing with a lot of projects these days, school, work, and personal … all the way, hardly finding time to write here or to have a personal life, and it doesn’t sound as things are going to get better any time soon. I do appreciate the experience and knowledge I am getting from everything I do, but sometimes I just wished that the day would have 36 hours and the month had at least 40 days, but hey, you can’t really make the planet to spin slower can you? Actually, it seems to be spinning even faster these days (is it only me?).
12:51 AM – and this is time for me to end …
Have a nice one !

I am going to start this post by telling a bit about the Scandinavian Search Marketing 2006, which I attended yesterday, held at the IT University, happening to be very close to where I live at this very point. One of the speakers who impressed me the most was Philip Schindler, Google’s Director for the whole European region, a very young guy, who seemed to have done this whole presentation charade before (duuuh) . His performance included fast talking, explicit terminology which I bet more than half of the listeners didn’t get, and a little insight of Google’s theory of life. Very nice. The other one who impressed me was Mike Moran, IBM’s chief engineer and responsible for the companies success. What I liked mostly about him is though he was an old generation fellow, he was FUNNY, and well informed and up to day with the trends. Very very interesting person. He even has a book which seems to be canonical among marketeers nowadays (“Search Engine Marketing”). One of the other things that he mentioned and I kind of liked it, was “do things fast, make mistakes, fix them”. That’s one way of looking at it, but in terms of natural optimization that might not be so wise. Search engines are known to visit a page every week or so (depending on the actualization speed of the website), so if you screw up today, and Google visits you tomorrow, and taking into consideration that you are a mid-sized company with at least a few hundred hits daily, you might have a problem until next week’s visit of a spider.Not very funny is it ?
In terms of Paid results you can do that without problems. Things can change fast, and they will in case you screw up. Here you will find Mike’s notes about the conference which he attended with us in Copenhagen.
Other things on the line for today: I have scheduled a hard-disk format on my laptop this evening, so I’m going to be installing a fresh copy of Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2, which should be able to provide updates from Microsoft bypassing WGA. We shall see tonight.
I’m quite depressed with my digital camera who has died for unknown reasons, leaving me without any imaging devices. Hopefully I will resolve this issue quick enough.
In an ending paragraph, I would like to say something about the recent release of the PlayStation 3 into the US market. According to news sites, people have been standing eating and sleeping in a cue for several days in order to get their hands on one of the 400.000 consoles that have been prepared for the launch. The gadget costs around 500$ (american that is), but enthusiasts seem not to care about price when it comes to the gaming needs they have.
Somehow I reaaaally don’t understand those guys. I mean, OK, it’s a very nice console, top technological achievements in it, I bet it provides blasting experiences when it comes to simulating reality, but then again… it’s just a console. How much lack of sex or other activities must you have in order to stay in line for nights in row, spending a quite big amount of cash to get one of these “wonders” of the technological world ? There aren’t even enough games out there already released to enjoy your investment! Why can’t people like wait, for a couple more weeks and get them like any other product, in store, without any hassle. It’s this “herd” thinking, hey … if I have it today, I can totally laugh of my geek-friends who don’t have it yet and they are still playing on that old Pentium 4 at 3,0 ghz.
It is perhaps a frustration, of unachieved things that are surfacing the sub-conscious in order to set so seldom satisfactions. End of that…
Tomorrow is Saturday, and I think I already have some stuff scheduled for that …. (is it legal to schedule during weekends??)
Today on the other hand it’s my mom’s birthday, and though she will never read this, I still want to wish her Happy Birthday.

Leita’ ..

I cannot stop being amazed of how days go by, of how ours fly. Today I was on the bus on my way to danish courses and I was actually thinking about how my day passed. Didn’t exactly get to do a lot of things, although I might have had quite a bunch of them sitting there in the back of my head. After danish, I got home and I started mounting my new 200 GB external hard-disk in its box, and formatting it, and there you go … it’s 11 again. Anyway, among the things I heard lately is an explicit one, and that is the role of Russia in delivering gas to Europe. Being the country with the biggest natural resources when it comes to gas, they have made themselves indispensable and now they are rising the prices in a “feel-it-in-your-pocket” manner. According to recent news, president Putin has visited recently Algeria, another giant gas exporter, where they have probably discussed strategies to milk Europe of money. Somehow, it might seem fair; they are still among one of the biggest powers in the world, they have the resources, it’s theirs, and why not selling it for the price? What the heck… EU people can afford it, and if they can’t, well, that will give Russia the time they lost, in order to catch up financially and technologically. A good plan some would say, as not even USA, can at this point impose any kind of price strategies for Russia. It’s like I have an apple and you want to buy it cause you are hungry. I am selling it really expensive, and you would like to have it as you need it, but you are also free to go and buy one from someone else (like there is anybody else). Discussing recently with one of my Russian friends, he was telling me how rich people can be in Moscow, not that this would be of any surprise, Bucharest is the same on a smaller scale I guess. But enough for Moscow so far, let’s go back to time … tricky problem isn’t it. Soon I will move again, 1st of December, which is good because I will stay there until June/July at least. It’s only one building away, therefore it shouldn’t be too much hassle. Then Paris comes along … 7-10 December … and in another 10 days from that, I’m going back home (is it ?!?) in Romania for 2 weeks, for the Christmas holiday. I wish I could have got more out of it, say 1 month, as I had plans to go in the mountains for a couple of days at least. That unfortunately is not being possible because of work. Oh well, you can’t win them all can you? Haven’t been a lot to school recently, and tomorrow I have to attend the Scandinavian Search Conference , or FDIH, which promises to be rather interesting and informative (and damn expensive to attend to – lucky my company is among sponsors, he he), but then again that means that I have to miss school … again. I have to write an e-mail to a friend now, as I am late with a reply …
‘nite

Carcotasii, or a literally translation the “grumbling” guys, are 2 quite funny and irritating guys who make fun of a lot of political and public persons in Romania. Some of them really deserve it, some of them don’t deserve it at all, but at some point these guys are going over the limit, making a funny thing … not so funny anymore.
This video will be rather complicated to understand to non-Romanian speakers, but it worths seeing it all the way. Enjoy.

Last evening I have attended a reception meant to provide insight to medias regarding a new website called Business.dk , which is a sub-branch of the newspaper (and website) Berlingske.
This newspaper is against all tendencies of the market, not free. Probably because it targets a different niche in the market, being people interested in inside news from companies, and movements on markets rather than what Mr.Bush did lately. Going back to Business.dk , they had a very ambitious presentation, promising to have at least one update every 10 minutes, being by 2009 the best news website (business focused obviously) on the danish market. Now that’s a very nice… mission, but it depends very much on how much cash the mother-newspaper is able to pump into advertising it. Anyways, the cocktails were very very nice (had a few of those – there were free you know), and was in bed at about 10:30 for understandable reasons of course.
Now a bit of fun … they are not all true but … they are relatively interesting.

After five years and repeated delays, Microsoft Corp. finished Windows Vista on Wednesday and announced plans to release it in stores Jan. 30 — ending an unusually arduous chapter in the life of the company’s flagship product.Microsoft’s next big challenge will be getting people to upgrade to the program. But for a moment, at least, the company’s relief at finishing the project was palpable.

“This is a good day,” said Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft’s Platforms & Services Division, the emotion audible in his voice during an 11 a.m. conference call announcing the milestone. “Less than an hour ago, we officially signed off on Windows Vista. It’s rock-solid, and we’re ready to ship.”

It is a huge operating system which has as major improvements visual graphical effects, and not so much on stability or performance. Without seeing it at work I’d say it is just an attempt to match the MacOSX. The system requirements for a real feel of Vista are pretty obscene for the current level of PC’s but I guess we will see more when it actually gets to our desks. I think I have to change my hard drive at least, if I want to install it (huge thing).

I love this video …

Kind of lame subject to write about, but as my mindfields are not very well defined at this point, I will rather say what I have to. Steaua, the Romanian team which I support passively has lost on stadium “Santiago Bernabeu” against one of worlds most reputable teams, Real Madrid, due to a mistake made by a defender who passed the ball to the goalkeeper while he was hunting ducks(auto-goal). Anyway, that being said … I understood that the game itself was very beautiful to watch. Too bad I didn’t see it, but then again there’s a lot of things we miss nowadays and don’t even think about it very much. For example how many of us knew that the new iPod shuffle will be released soon ? Or that elephants seem to have joined the class of animals that can actually see their reflection in a mirror and make a difference out of it(joining most primates and dolphins amongst others)? In an ever-changing world, we would need not to sleep to keep up with all the developments and news going round the globe at the speed of light.Work was overwhelming recently and I find it hard to focus sometimes, although I know there is much to be done, and it’s all standing on my shoulders. But that helps me push myself, as see my limits, which are being tested at this very point from every direction, emotionally physically and mentally. Outrider Denmark is being born and I will be the uncle. Let’s hope I will not have to use the forceps to go through. I think I’ve caught a cold … again … anyway, will get you guys updated soon.