Mircea Bardac /random_thoughts

I was doing stuff around the how today, when I turned on the TV to keep me company. I have noticed that I have a reflex about TV: whenever I turn it on, it is most likely to be on Discovery Channel.

I find Discovery Channel to be a great way of entertainment during breakfast, as I actually watch TV while doing some other activities. I often watch Myth Busters, which is one great show. I like inovation and that show is all about that.

If I remember well, right after Myth Busters, there were 2 documentary films today. I’ve watched them because they sounded interesting. I don’t remember their exact titles (or corresponding shows), but I remember their content.

One was about how windmills appeared in the Netherlands and all their uses. The saw mills were impressive. The Netherlands‘ naval fleet benefited the most because of the saw mills. Using the saw mills they could cut in a few hours the same amount of timber they had cut before in a few months. The sawers’ guild even tried to stop the implementation of saw mills because they felt they could loose their jobs. It was a very interesting story about windmills and the numerous uses people in the Netherlands found for them.

The second documentary film was about Canal du Midi (en), a water channel built by Pierre-Paul_Riquet (en) in the 17th century linking the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. I was totally impressed by the beauty of the scenery (check the pictures in the French Wikipedia article I’ve linked). The technical innovations were also impressive. The first water roundabout was created on that channel. The Malpas Tunnel was created through a hill just for this channel.

It seems there’s an official site about Canal du Midi. Make sure you check it out.

I think it was an interesting afternoon on Discovery Channel.

While working at the computer, I got the following amaroK information popup:

amaroK has had to delete some of the images that you downloaded from Amazon. Amazon’s licensing policy require us to remove content within 90 days of its download. You can read more about Amazon’s policies here. Please note that this only affects covers downloaded using the Cover Manager’s fetch covers feature and the covers downloaded using the context menu in the Context browser, not manually added covers.

That is what I call a good interaction between the licenses world and the open source world.
Congratulations! Everybody wins.

I have arrived today back in Bucharest, after a night spent on the train traveling back from Vatra Dornei, the place where I have been for the last 10 days.

It’s been a wonderful mountaining experience with lots of accomplishments and excitement. I will return soon with some details and some pictures, as soon I can get them from one of my colleagues.

On another front, I have been listed 700+ unread e-mails - I haven’t looked over the RSS feeds yet.
I’m trying to go through everything as fast as possible and return to my summer holiday schedule (which not yet published).

This is the day I leave for Vatra Dornei (gallery), the place where I have scheduled 10 days of relaxation and excitement together with 2 adveturous friends.

We will be leaving at ~10 pm, travel >550 km by train and arrive in Vatra Dornei at ~7 am.

The trip will include:

• hitch hiking
• sightseeing
• tours for visiting the monastires in the North of Moldova

The weather is a bit tricky during this time of year. Actually, the entire year has been weird when it comes to weather. As it happened all over Europe, increased rainfalls caused a lot of damages (many rivers flooding their bays). I hope we won’t encounter such problems.

Have fun these days. I know we will

I don’t know where to put this entry… under Leisure or under Programming. I’ll put it in both.
Why am I asking this? Well, I just finished the last week of the semester… an exhausting week. Got home partially on foot, as I do every time when I come back from school. I always walk half of my way home, because I have the boulevard on one side and the university campus on the other side. It’s a nice blend between the green nature (in the campus) and the city. When everything gets gray because of blocks of flats, I get on a bus and go home.

Later the day I started the computer and, of course, Psi. I believe the Yahoo! transport I use was down, or I couldn’t have remembered that Psi has a bit of an annoying bug. During the nights of studying, the Yahoo transport went out and came back, but Psi set Online as my status for the transport, not my account status. My Computer Science mind, recently overloaded by somehow useless stuff, felt the need to express itself in a constructive manner. I’ve therefore started digging through the sources and came up with a patch for this problem. I’ve also FlySprayed the bug (as I normally do).

I don’t know how to consider this action… but it really felt good. After all the work for school, after all the sleepless nights, this tiny one hour patch made me feel really good. Finding the classes/functions in the code took most of the time - it was like a quest.

I did something that pleased me after a long week of work. Feels really good.

Enjoy the patch (attached in the FlySpray task). Making it allowed me to gain some more info on Psi’s inner-workings. More ideas got born. I feel really creative sometimes. Fortunately, I do write my ideas