It’s windy again. After a few days of 20+ temperatures, this is quite a burden. And I hate it! Yes, I am back to facing cold weather on my multiple places to go to days. Oh, well, will say it again, I hate it! So I am waiting for the spring again, hoping it will come to stay eventually, sometimes in mid-March would be perfect for me!

Speaking of months, there is a weird process with month February! I always expect it to be longer…And when things appear to be far from me, it hits me, it only has 28 days this year (sometimes 29)! And I loose my recently acquired tranquility. But never mind!

I decided (a very long time ago) that given the amount of different tasks per day I needed some real time management strategy. So I first started by firmly dividing my day and getting involved in some very practical time units allocation. Well, it did not work! So the conclusion of this failure is: school-like schedules are no good: they do not embed sudden changes of plans and it is hard to alter a very specific time table.

So I came up with another great idea: setting tasks as things to do for each day, without mentioning when exactly to do it. This new method does appear to give me a larger amount of freedom each day and everything can be postponed for the nigh. This way, finally accomplishing everything could be a great thing and I would not have to deal with minor failures as not being able to do a certain task when I had planned to do it.

You might wonder which the conclusion of this experiment is. Well, you will have to be patient for a while, I have only started it today! :D

Another thing, I took George’s example and found out what my blog is worth:

I wonder what amazed me most about this book: the perfectly shaped love triangles, the main love story that starts when the boy is 5 and the girl is 7 and is very much alive in their thirties, the constant wondering if it is all real, all unreal, all partly real?

I don’t have a favorite character either. I love Blue Duna/Mabel for his long lasting love, for his way of acceptance, for being the type of the “different from the others” man, for suffering so genuinely when being compared with the rest, for being do determined to believe the civil war is nothing but a nightmare, an image of a vengeful subconscious.

I also love Brunette Ada, the raingirl daughter of two movie cinemas, an avant-garde woman and passionate photographer, blaming herself too much for a crime she did not commit, being afraid to admit to the love she feels for Duna.

I love Aras, the symbol of traditional masculinity and competitiveness, the pretty boy that does not care other girls than his own admire him. His clumsiness in treating the woman he loves as opposed of his perfect way of doing everything else.

The quiet and pale Merrich that is actually strong-willed, sharp-tongued and very focused. The lady doctor that seems so independent but depends on her husbands opinion even for shopping.

The poet Dogan Gokay for his typical way of putting every thought into literary expression. I love his permanent contact with and guidance of the young people around him. His strange passions and perfect insight of others’ character.

Pervin Gokay and Sureyya Mercan for their movie stars love: true, flamboyant, romantic, perfect, troubled, normal, mundane and a lot more at the same time.

These are just a few characters of the novel, all having such real relationships with each other, all having an impact and leaving a print on everyone else’s life. Family connections, love connections, hate connections, all are perfectly shown in the book.

Warm memories combined with war atrocities and violence, sanity mixed with complete madness, heaven and hell, all happening as they usually do in our Earthly world.

You can find more details on the author here. And a description of the book here.

It is finally over, no more exams to study for. The results for now are as follows: 4 grades of 10 and 2 of 9. Also I am pretty sure I’ll pass the last exam as well. So I am pretty pleased with what I’ve accomplished. My plans are now to only focus on the online course I applied for with DeSales University and my license paper which was postponed long enough because of these exams.

I’m also hoping for a quick trip to the mountains and some skiing. This should be fun as I’m a beginner and it would be K’s first time to try it. Well, maybe we won’t break our necks. At least we will try not to.

Last night I succeeded in meeting Cristina. She said it’s been like three weeks since last time and that we should see each other more often. Well, she’s seen me twice this year, more than my mom. And there are people that I haven’t seen since before Christmas…I should try to squeeze them all in especially since the exams are now out of the way.

On my way home, while waiting for the tram, I sat down trying to read a little. Near me (how did I pick that seat?), a young couple (first/second year of university, high-school eve) were having an after break-up conversation. Oh, man, the crap people sometimes say to each other!...

As most of you know, we’ve had a nice little aquarium for some time now, filled with fishes (it was about 8 different species, or 9, now we’re down to 7…). Well we bought them, cared for them, fed them and all that, and one could have thought it should be enough…Well guys, it is not…

First some of them died…apparently being taken out of your original aquarium on a terribly cold weather and driven to a new home is not that good for them. Well, I felt bad for each of them and never could do the “take ‘em out and flush ‘em “.

Then the real treat: a few days ago a fish vanished…First we thought he might have jumped and died…But we could not find him at all…I said he had been eaten, but K said it was impossible, he was too big to be eaten. I said ok, maybe he jumped and we will eventually find him…

A day later another fish vanished…Well, guys, this time it was the smallest fish in the aquarium, he couldn’t have possibly jumped! Something fishy is going on in that aquarium!...

Well, guys, I am studying for my last exam of tomorrow. Of course I’ve just started the serious studying today, that is what I always do…There is a Romanian saying that you should not try to make the pig fatter the day before you slaughter it…Well, if that is the only day it eats, it might just do the trick…For me it always does: thank God for the mind He has given me that still allows me to study enough the day/morning/night before.

These days I feel a strong need to start writing again. Maybe I will as this time it’s like an inner calling. It’s not like before, when it was just me wanting to get back to this habit so bad without any solid foundation, it’s like a need to let out all I’ve been gathering in these years of not writing a short story at least. I am looking forward to giving it some time after the exams, actually.

Well, this is basically the news, along with some fresh snow and colder weather. Will have more for you soon!

The Black Sea is quite an attraction for Romanian and foreign turists during summers. But this winter, it thought it should change the routine. As it contains less sault than other seas around the world, it froze to display a major show that gathered people from different parts of the country to see it.

My dad was one of these less than 24 hours tourists. As I could not go with him (work, exams, the usual routine), I made a special request for pictures as I was sure it would be an amazing view. I was right, and I thought to share it with you. The rest of the pictures are posted on my other blog. Take a look and enjoy!

I don’t usually post work related news, but this new threat has really caught my eye…It all started by emails presenting the virus and its “potential” that every one took for hoaxes at first. When taking a better look, the threat turned out to be real.

This nice little malware (malicious software) does what you would have most: takes all your .doc, .txt and .pdf files and others of this type, then, on the 3rd of the month, it deletes them. Imagine how nice it will be to find yourself without an important paper due the next day? I would really go nuts to be honest!

Luckily, all antivirus products are detecting and disinfecting it by now (Even Norton :D). But it got me wondering as it did before. Some say it’s AV software producers who create these viruses of all kinds to keep the business going. So I had a little chat with a colleague of mine from the Virus Lab, whose job is practically adding signatures for new threats.

As he said, most new variants of malware are created by socially impaired people who want to feel like they control the world and usually consist in old variants that are copied and then a few code lines are changed. Voila! New virus! Real threats, like the one I’ve just told you about, are quite rare. Those who create such “masterpieces” are the real smart ones, and although I could admire their intelligence at a certain point, I’d have to say, why the heck did you pick on me with your new cool virus?

Viruses take it all out on normal users mostly. Windows users…cause as you know, Linux viruses are just a few. I don’t know who creates such nice little programs, but if I ever met one, I would take his precious malware and stick it up his ass!