Serrin's Tumblr

Toate pozele de Sambata seara sunt aici

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:38:33 -0400

Toate pozele de Sambata seara sunt aici

Mafiotii la Green Tea. Un joc excelent, dar destul de frustrant...

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:37:11 -0400

Mafiotii la Green Tea. Un joc excelent, dar destul de frustrant :D

Gradina Botanica si Green Tea

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:35:20 -0400

Pentru ca mi-a zis Clarisa ca ar trebui sa mai incerc si limba Romana… sa vedem daca ma descurc.

La Gradina Botanica:

Am gasit o canapea pe cinste.

Unii au incercat, altii au reusit sa invete cum se arunca o minge de fotbal american.
Nu am ajuns totusi la chiparosii de balta (Taxodium Distichum). Daca am fi ajuns la ei, ar fi aratat cam asa de colorati, si le-am fi vazut penumogenunchii (cum se numeau??)

At the childcare center again, one of the kids teaches us a...

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:50:00 -0400

At the childcare center again, one of the kids teaches us a funny game.

A great Sabbath lunch meetup between a group of us...

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:36:50 -0400

A great Sabbath lunch meetup between a group of us young’uns and a group of old ladies at our church. These old ladies are so sweet! (And they cook awesome food that we devoured.)

Bucharest, October 20, 2007

Slanic and Ciucas, October 13-14

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:34:15 -0400

Participants: Clarisa, Sinziana, Andrei.

A couple of photos below. The rest - a little bit later, in Flickr.

Insane winds and cold. And this is just the beginning.
All the equipment in the world is not enough if you don’t have good gloves.
You can use socks as gloves, but not if they’re thin cotton socks.
Sometimes, it pays off to look at the weather predictions!
It is possible to walk in spite of severe pain. Pain thresholds are way lower than the body can safely endure.
Yet, even though you will yourself to walk “as if the pain isn’t there”… it just doesn’t work that way! Is it about willpower, or a good sense of humour and lack of self-importance?
In most restaurants in Romania, they just “don’t have available” the only 1-2 items on the menu that would be suitable for a vegetarian. I should learn to stop taking it out on the waiters, poor guys! and start ignoring the menu, like Clarisa:

At Slanic. A shepherd upon the hills.

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:27:54 -0400

At Slanic. A shepherd upon the hills.

At Saua Tigailor, a mere 500 m height difference from our...

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:09:24 -0400

At Saua Tigailor, a mere 500 m height difference from our starting point. The cold and wind force us back. Ciucas, October 14, 2007.

Sheltered from the wind by one lonely fir tree. Cashews, Brazil...

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:08:14 -0400

Sheltered from the wind by one lonely fir tree. Cashews, Brazil nuts, and dried fruit in an impromptu Swedish buffet. Ciucas, October 14, 2007.

Snow-covered trees. The fog had just dispersed, a ray of sun...

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:06:35 -0400

Snow-covered trees. The fog had just dispersed, a ray of sun came through, but by the time Andrei was ready to take a picture, the sun was gone again. Ciucas, October 14, 2007.

The first snow this year. Ciucas, trailhead at Pasul Bratocea,...

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:05:22 -0400

The first snow this year. Ciucas, trailhead at Pasul Bratocea, just over 1300 m. October 14, 2007.

Work and personal time

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:18:56 -0400

Just realized: When you let work time encroach upon personal time, personal stuff will get back at you and encroach upon work time, rendering it “useless” and forcing you to work even more.

Ex: this week, worked late three evenings, which led to me not processing my inbox at home. Didn’t see and didn’t pay the bills from my phone company. Then, today, at work, I got a “last chance” SMS to pay the bills. Wasted over 1 hour to sort through how to pay, since many things have changed.

Getting organized. IKEA, September 30

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 12:39:43 -0400

Getting organized. IKEA, September 30

Orphanage, September 29

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 12:36:35 -0400

Homework with the children at the orphanage. Wish I could take some pictures, but afraid they’ll go berseck at the sight of a camera.

Piatra Mare, September 22-23

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 12:20:47 -0400

Participants: Andrei, Sinziana

No pictures, unfortunately.

Highlights:

Great weather, though on the cool side at night. My sleeping bag does not go that low.
Important to hedge when any unknown variable comes into play.
Huh, too little gas in my cartridge?
A lot of thought about what really matters.
Will give the honors courses to all people who are new to backpacking.
The swimming pool, sauna, cold pool and dinner afterwards were a great way to close the weekend.

No Google Reader fix - yet

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:37:02 -0400

I thought I had the ultimate Google Reader fix. As many others, I use starring in Google Reader to mark items to be read at a later date. I would, however, very much like to be able to use the “Next” browser button, especially for partial feeds from major news sources (Economist, BusinessWeek, any Romanian news). The “Next” browser button moves you through unread items only - and rightly so.

I thought I could get a workflow going where I mark all items as read, and then go back and “un-read” the items I want to read. Turns out… once you use Shift+A to mark all items as read, you can’t revert. You can’t un-read any of the items. That seems pretty radical, doesn’t it?

"Loren Carpenter launches an airplane flight simulator on the screen. His instructions are terse:..."

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:16:07 -0400

“Loren Carpenter launches an airplane flight simulator on the screen. His instructions are terse: “You guys on the left are controlling roll; you on the right, pitch…” The plane is airborne. The pilot is…5,000 novices. For once the auditorium is completely silent. Everyone studies the navigation instruments as the scene outside the windshield sinks in. The plane is headed for a landing in a pink valley among pink hills. The runway looks very tiny… Nobody decided whether to turn left or right, or even to turn at all. Nobody was in charge. But as if of one mind, the plane banks and turns wide… The mob decides in unison, without lateral communication, like a flock of birds taking off, to pull up once more. On the way up the plane rolls a bit. And then rolls a bit more. At some magical moment, the same strong thought simultaneously infects five thousand minds: “I wonder if we can do a 360?” Without speaking a word, the collective keeps tilting the plane. There’s no undoing it. As the horizon spins dizzily, 5,000 amateur pilots roll a jet on their first solo flight. It was actually quite graceful. They give themselves a standing ovation.”

- Kevin Kelly, “Out of Control”. Via Andrew McAfee’s blog

Wanted: Facebook app

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:37:09 -0400

Wanted: a Facebook app that functions like iRead or Visual bookshelf but pulls its data from Librarything.

iTunes syncing drives me crazy

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:31:49 -0400

Couldn’t sleep tonight because of jet lag, so I tried to get iTunes libraries to behave as I want them to. Here’s the deal: I have an external hard drive that now contains all of my music - 200+ GB of it.

I would live to have a way to move some of it - usually 500 MB or so - back to the hard drive of my Macbook. Temporarily. To listen to while at work or about. But I want iTunes to keep track of the ratings and play counts of those tracks.

After researching pretty much everything on the subject, it seems clear there’s no way to do this. The two solutions one can use in the meantime are:

Use an alternative library with only the tracks on the laptop’s hard drive. This will not keep the ratings and play counts.

Use an iPod instead.

I also spent a long time looking at syncing solutions for calendaring. I need a solution that integrates with Sugar CRM via Thunderbird’s Sugarbird. However, for someone used to iCal, Thunderbird’s Lightning is quite uesless. I can’t believe it asks me to click on the “more” tab to get to where I can post a reminder - and even then, the “reminder” solutions are very poor.

OK, but I can use Google Calendar to sync between all of these systems, right? I truly love the iCal interface, so I want to keep that. I went to Spanning Sync - only to find that you purchase it for a defined Google Calendar account.

But we’re also moving to Google Apps. Hmm… all in all, it’s driving me crazy.

How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse · The Cranking Widgets Blog

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 21:09:25 -0400

How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse · The Cranking Widgets Blog:

Thinking of taking this and transforming it into a blogging and social networking GTD that should work fine after some serious tinkering