Xmas

Yay !

It's Christmas eve , here in Slovenia. This also marks begging of a short ( 1 week ) holiday period with no classes and more importantly no lab reports ;).
It would be great if i could go skiing, but there is still no snow around here. Actually we had about 2 cm of it for about 12 hours, before it melted :(.
Luckily the temperatures are around zero for the better part of the day, so artificial snow has gone into massive production. Actually two skiing grounds have opened already, but they are very much overcrowded + i don't feel like driving to Austria right now.

Oh, one important thing is happening down here.
in a week's time ( 1. jan. 07) , 5 years after Euro's debut, we are the 13th country to start using Euro currency. By being the first of the bunch of 10 new EU members, this is counted as a huge success. Our financial minister even got a prise for the best EU financial minister of the year 2006 for it .

Anyways, there's been lots of hype about it these days, and it's getting bigger. The exchange ration is 239,64 Slovenian tollars ( SIT ) for 1 Euro (€). There has also been big debate whether should the currency be called Euro ( international ) or Evro localized. Some people thought writing Euro with u is yet another sign of Slovene language going down. In the end an agreement was reached and so we are going to write it Euro in all official documents, but the term Evro is allowed otherwise.

We are going to have 2 weeks of both currencies around and from 14th January it's gonna be Euro only. The most annying thing will be the coins, which nobody gave a damn about, since the highest value usually found in circulation was about 24 cents. Now it's going to be 2 €, which is quite an increase. We are getting custom back designs of Slovene coins, which left many people unhappy, but i think it's cool. It's also going to be funny calculating all those prices from one currency to the other.

Anyways, these days we are being constantly bombarded with all types of advertisements about it, and it's slowly getting annoying.

Today, Google finally managed to convince me to switch to a new Blogger. Not that many new features, but they surely are nice. I don't have to wait for that stupid publishing sign anymore. - finally.

Anyways have a nice Christmas, and enjoy some days of relaxation and comfort ;)

Wha up ?

It's one of those rainy days here in Slovenia. You know.. rain - that wet thing falling down from the sky. Keeps on falling and falling and falling.. Doesn't seem like it's ever gonna stop. Almost feels like Norway, except it's raining harder here.
This year Slovenia has had quite extraordinary weather. I really cannot remember what was happening before June, so i won't be commenting on the first half of the year.
Anyways, July was VERY hot, and than August ( the month with the most hours of sunshine) was more or less screwed up. It was raining for two weeks, and it felt like autumn and got better in the last week August. Then it gradually got colder as it should have, but we were getting very little rainfall.
But then in the middle of October it got ridiculously warm. It was from 15 to 20 degrees Celsius - that's what May should be like. Anyways, i broke my records in terms of walking in a T-shirt outside.. and then i broke them again and again.. By that i refer to wear T-shirt and feel comfortable in it, and not freezing / running around at -20 degrees Celsius ( although i have done that as well.. ;) )
The sad part of it, we are in the middle of December and still we have no snow. it's not cold enough for artificial snow either. So this means no skiing for now.

I managed to get this Preseren prize for my research assignment, which means it appearantly wasn't that bad. This makes me quite confident and content with myself. I wrote about it at some point in time ( september 06 ), but hey, do you honestly think i will provide you with a link :p

But the timing was right on. Me and my girlfriend broke up a while ago, after being together about 1.5 year, which somehow pushed me in one of these negative thought patterns. You know, thinking about various useless things like what went wrong, and how it happened, analyzing what i might have or not fucked up, thinking if whatever you think is actually the actual thing, or if you are only deluding yourself, etc.. At some point you figure out, you are not actually progressing anywhere, just wasting your time and psychological energy, finally ending up at square 1. But it gets quite difficult not to think about it.
Thankfully i have been very busy the last week ( leaving home at 6.30 am, coming back home at about 8-10 pm every weekday ), so i didn't have too much time to think.

This prize somehow managed to break this negative cycle and currently, while blogging and listening to the music, i feel pretty damn decent.

Yesterday, we were trying to make a center of the area where i live look nice. The standard procedure is to cut down a pine tree and bring it to the village center, and then put lights on it, other surrounding trees and buildings. Although it seems pretty routine and not really that demanding at all it always take more than one full day. And guess what ? After having highly dry weather for the last 2 months, the day before, on the day and the day after ( today ) was raining more or less the whole day. Bad weather is kind of a trademark of these events. Whenever we try to do something like this, weather sucks.. You could base weather forecast on this. Last year for example there was about 40-50 cm of snow and it was snowing heavily.
But this year i wore appropriate clothing, and as a result i didn't get the usual cold, or anything at all. That feels very nice.

I am considering what should i do for the New year. I would like to go skiing, but if there is no snow, that's pretty much useless, ain't it ?
I hope we will get some snow soon...

Wever

Well, i couldn't figure out a better title ( or couldn't be bothered to).
I must say i got a little bit frustrated, cause blogger refused to publish my post about a Chinese restaurant. I retried 3 times before it worked.
Sometimes technology just doesn't work (or so it seems).

I sprained my ankle a couple of days ago when i was jumping down the stairs. I guess i will try to be more careful from now on....

I also managed to get this Prešeren prize, which made me quite happy. It's for the research assignment I submitted about two months ago.

We got this stupid law in Slovenia.
The argument goes. If you buy blank CDs for example, you might use them to make 3 legal copies of the software / music you bought. Therefore you are going to buy less music. So we are paying a replacement for all the damage our precious musicians are going to suffer.
I responded by buying 50 CDs , 50 DVDs a DVD burner and an additional hard drive. Now i should be set for some time ;)

Also with buying a new hard drive, i decided to try some alternative OSes.
I tried Kubuntu - it worked OK, but at a random boot suddenly the screen resolution got to 800X600 and i haven't managed to resolve it withing an hour, so i decided it's not worth it.
Another OS i tried was Mandriva.
It worked OK, unfortunately i couldn't use any of the great 3D effects, since i own an ATI card.
Nevertheless it seemed quite ok, but in the end it refused to install..
In the middle time i decided to try Zeta 1.2. It has problems even on the life CD.
So am going to try Ubuntu now.( notice : no K )

Off i go, to watch some Futurama.

Chinese restaurant

On Thursday i felt pretty hungry so i decided to go to a Chinese restaurant.

They have this very cool principle AYCA - All you can eat - as it says, eat as much as you can - pretty useful if you know you are not going to eat the rest of the day.
Also the price is quite acceptable ( about 2€ with state subvention - some of the student food is state subsidised, more on how the system works some other time).
Anyway, the restaurant seemed pretty Chinese to me - all the people working there where Chinese and most of them had serious problems attempting to communicate in Slovene - I really had a hard time understanding one of them - hey but in the end with a help of non-verbose communication the waiter managed to get the message through. I was wondering if they managed to get the menu right. They didn't. Made a couple of serious mistakes mostly related to noun gender ( in Slovene all nouns have a thing we call "gender" and it sounds a bit obscure if you mix it up - I don't exactly understand how some people manage - it just sounds so wrong.
Two of those mistakes were quite funny - and they got me to remember xiangming and his famous quotes.

P.S. I am using firefox 2.0 and must admit - this spell checker is pretty damn useful - it corrected more than 10 mistakes and typos in this post.
Also it can be very funny sometimes.

For example - for name Xiangming i got the following suggestions :

charmingest
charming
warming's
warming
farming's :D

Have a nice day, wherever you are !

Gettting close to 40 %

I am certain everyone has heard of a browser called firefox. It's a free, opensource browser, claimed to have better security than internet explorer.

Yesterday a version 2.0 was released with many new features and enhancements.

What i didn't know about was that according to this study Slovenia has the highest firefox usage in Europe and most probably one of the highest in the world.


In Slovenia Firefox's share is already sitting very high at 39%, growth is appereantly not decreasing with its market share.

Something in my country to be proud about.

You can read more about it here, but i am warning you, it's in French. Use Google translate to help yourself

Have a nice day !