Everyday I’m a day older. Every week I’m a week older. Every month I’m a month older. So you’ve guessed by now that I don’t believe it’s anything special to be one year older. And indeed it was almost an ordinary day.

Everybody congratulated me. I even decided to put up with a tradition I hate and I bought cookies and refreshments to offer them at work. Of course, every woman that went by the office and saw the cookies, wanted to know how old I was. Most of them said I’m very young, some said nothing, but all of them asked. I wonder how old they thought I was.

So everybody congratulated me, except my father. I guess the big fight we had over the phone about 2 weeks ago is still bothering him. Or he simply forgot. Either way, I tried not to get too bothered by it. Since I’m mentioning it here, I guess it didn’t work. Well, I have warned him not to push all my wrong buttons the way he did… I even told him I’m in an office full of people so I can’t discuss the things he was bringing up. Nothing mattered for him, and eventually he managed to get me really mad. So I shouted at him, and cursed a lot, and got really really mad… I thought my mother alone had the gift to bring out the worst in me, but I was obviously wrong.

Crenguţa wasn’t feeling very well, she’s probably coming down with the flu (again), so we ordered a pizza and stayed home. We opened a bottle of wine, which proved not to be very good, and didn’t go too well with the pizzas, but we drank it anyway. Then we went to sleep.

I think it is another sign I should be losing some weight! God dammit, maybe one of these days I’ll get my thumb out of my ass and start exercising…

Yesterday…

Today…

And yes, I’ve spilled my coffee all over the keyboard when it happend, but it survived. A keyboard with 9 lives… 8 starting this morning.

Not much to say, really, because the show was indeed outstanding. Accompanied by (I’m sorry I didn’t get their names) an Italian on guitar, a Croatian on accordion and his old band matte Gumbi on percussion, Al proved again, although unnecessarily, that he is a great musician and guitar player.

Edit: According to this article in the online edition of Washington Post, they were Peo Alfonsi and Fausto Beccalossi:

In addition to his longtime percussionist Gumbi Ortiz, a master of Caribbean polyrhythms, Di Meola was accompanied by two Italian-born musicians: accordionist Fausto Beccalossi and guitarist Peo Alfonsi.

I don’t know where did I get the Croatian thing, but I stand corrected.

The guy on accordion was also brilliant. I wasn’t aware an accordion was capable of such things. And he was sometimes singing along too, which was touching me in unexpected ways.

Mike Joyce puts it better:

There were several moments, however, when accordionist Beccalossi nearly stole the show with his deeply soulful rhapsodies.

A very big surprise was also Gumbi’s instrument, something I’ve never seen before, literally a big crate that was also serving as his stool. Yet that crate sounded almost like a drum kit when pounded by his bare hands. Absolutely spectacular.

Edit: Thanks to the same Washington Post article and Wikipedia, I now know the instrument is called Cajón, the Spanish word for crate, so I was close.

I’ll leave you with these pictures taken with my (crappy) mobile phone, in which you will have to trust me there’s Al di Meola on stage, last night in Bucharest.

I just wish these things would happen more often than once a few years…

Anyway, I didn’t forget about it (well, I did, we both did, but I was reminded by my mother-in-law, who called that morning to congratulate us), so we properly celebrated it that night with a romantic dinner in a very chic restaurant. I just didn’t find the time to write about it. After years of retirement for medical reasons, Crenguţa started working again this January (in an office environment and on a schedule, that is, ’cause she never stopped working. But it was about time she had a break from translation work…). This meant we had to ask her mother to take Dexter back with her to Buzău, because we didn’t want him all by himself all day long. It’s been two months already since their departure, and we miss him like hell.

So I dug up some slightly older pictures (December 2007 – January 2008). Boy, the apartment is so empty without him!

Not now when I’m in the process of changing jobs… again! But more about this when it happens.

Also the site runs on new hardware, a long awaited and deserved upgrade to Pentium 4 2.8GHz HT (overclocked to 3.1GHz, of course), 1.2GB memory and 190GB storage space (2 × 80GB drives, plus a 30GB one).

The old hardware (Pentium III 550MHz, 512MB RAM) has been retired for good, but the Fedora Core 5 installation lives on, running on my workstation in a VMware virtual machine right off the 8GB drive that was once inside the old server. It still serves as a mail server until I’ll be able to find some more time and migrate the service to the new server as well. But I must say I was amazed that it ran without a glitch in a virtual machine, away from the original hardware. Try this with Windows!

The old server is dead, long live the new server! And Linux! And WMware! And last but not least — WordPress!

I’m in a really bad place right now, and have been there for the past couple of weeks. I’m really confused and frustrated with life in general, and mine in particular.

I won’t pretend I will ever be able to find the meaning of life since so many other better thinkers before me have come out empty handed. It’s just that it seems more and more pointless each day…

I work very hard almost each and every day (today seems unexpectedly quiet so far, I hope I don’t jinx it), maybe because my boss keeps swinging everything my way. The first few months, when he wasn’t sure what I’m capable of, the workload was fine. Now that I’ve proven myself, you can barely see him set foot in the office, and even when he does, he usually spends his time playing FIFA 2007.

On Tuesday, for example, I set up 5 new computers for existing users. It might not sound too bad, but the sheer volume of files that needed to be transferred between the old and the new computers was huge. So instead of transferring data through the network as usual, I chose to take out the old hard drives and connect them to the new computers to get the best transfer speed possible. But as you can imagine when it comes to really old computers, this was a very dirty operation. And I inhaled shitloads of dust in the process…

Yesterday, continuing the computer shifting operation, I have reinstalled an old computer (a Fujitsu-Siemens Scenic P300, there’s another rant about them here). It was working fine, but somehow it slipped my mind and I forgot to install the sound card driver. The girl asked me to fix it so she can listen to music at work, so I pulled the driver from my USB stick that I had used for a previous installation and surprise! The driver refused to install, giving a cryptic error number as the only feedback. I was in a hurry because it was closing hours and I was very tired and bored and nervous, so I tried installing the Windows 2000 driver (on an XP installation). Bad idea! The computer just wouldn’t start afterwards, not even in safe mode! Fuck it. I managed to uninstall the damned driver, but I left the exercise for another occasion…

It’s really incredible, but little things like that, when facing dozens of them every day, tend to get very frustrating. And when I’m frustrated, I’m grumpy. And if I’m grumpy, I don’t usually want to talk to anyone, but I’m forced to by the nature of my work. So I get even more grumpier. And start losing my patience. And end up shouting at people, most of the times people that don’t deserve it, like my wife. Which I immediately regret, adding a touch of guilt to the deadly mix of grumpiness, frustration, impatience and sadness.

I’m getting really tired of all this. The routine of this life where each day is almost identical to the previous one is killing me. And maybe not so much the routine, but the lack of perspective is what really kills me bit by bit.

I work hard but I’m underpaid. I always was, I have no reason to believe things will change radically in the near future. So if I’m underpaid, and Crengutza is still on the (laughable) pension fee, it means we have to struggle to make ends meet. We can pay for the utilities and food, but that’s pretty much all. Even a t-shirt has to be planned in advance, money saved for it for a period of time, or we have to borrow the money from Crengutza’s sister. Which is not nice and we try to avoid it as much as possible.

So if the money are not enough for anything, it means we don’t do anything. Except work our asses off all the time. We don’t have anybody visiting us. We don’t visit anybody, except for very rare occasions when we meet with my cousins and my aunt. We don’t go to movies. We don’t go to theaters. We never leave this fucking town, although sometimes it suffocates me, literally. I’m now even trying to avoid driving to work as much as possible, because it usually takes 3 to 4 times longer than by subway.

You can understand why I instantly freak out when somebody asks me if I visited or plan to visit SIAB. Why should I? I’m quite sure I won’t be changing my car anytime soon… Someone even told me this means I’m satisfied with my current car… well, maybe I am. It definitely gets me from A to B. Of course I’d love a Jeep or any other SUV for that matter. But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to waste time and gray cells staring at cars I could never afford. Especially since all the news bulletins on TV these days keep telling me that all the cars in the show have been sold! I wonder — where the fuck do they get that kind of money? I’m pretty sure not from decent work… Which of course makes me wonder if all that moral stuff I’ve accepted as my personal guide of conduct is not all just bullshit…

Which now brings me to the whole religion idea. I never was a religious person. I mean I want to believe, but I always felt that present day churches have nothing to do with the idea of God. A true almighty all-knowing God could never be fully understood by our limited human minds, so the God of the Bible makes me laugh — it’s just a cartoon. Unfortunately a political cartoon, which wants to control my life. So thanks, but no thanks. This whole perception was recently reinforced by a series of documentaries on Discovery and National Geographic channels about the history of Christianity and the Bible in particular. They claim the Bible was “edited” several times during it’s history, most of the times leaving out of subsequent transcriptions or translations the parts considered harmful by religious or political rulers of the time. Which I suspect were nothing more or less than present day clerics and politicians: mere mortals, greedy, with stupid ambitions and little (second to none) minds. There is an abundance of examples in nowadays Romania, but about that maybe some other time.

When I first started writing this post, I settled for the title “Quick Updates”, which obviously isn’t the case anymore. I need to stop now, although I still didn’t let it all out of my system…

OK, let’s back up a bit.

My cousins want to start a business in catering. They are pretty determined (or so they seem) and have recruited my wife too. Since she is supposedly the one with the most spare time on her hands (OK, with marketing experience too), she was asked to try and make up some sort of business plan.

I have only a very fuzzy clue what that means, but it’s common sense that you need to make some kind of calculations, some kind of projections, to have at least some idea about the amount of money and time and effort you’ll need to put into such a thing, and what kind of return you can expect (if any, obviously).

So you guessed it, she needed some reference prices for food items and also for some other things needed in a kitchen: dish washing liquid, towels, stuff like that.

So it was noonish on Saturday, I had my notebook with the item list 4 pages long, and I was entering the closest supermarket, not very enthusiastic, but determined to get it over with as quickly as possible.

About 5 items down my list I got the attention of a saleswoman at the dairy department. She asked me who I am, who do I work for, and if I’m aware I’m not allowed to take notes of the prices.

SAY WHAT?

I respectfully replied that since they DISPLAY their prices, they can’t possibly be a secret. So since they are not a secret, why shouldn’t I have the right to put them down, if that’s what floats my boat? Anyway, she was sticking to her version, so I decided I don’t have time to argue with her. I told her to get real and moved on to another category of products on my list.

Another 5 minutes and lots of cross-eyed glances from various employees later, a dude from security approaches me and asks me what am I doing. I asked what seems to be the problem, so he gave his speech about how it is forbidden to take notes in their supermarket!

No I was starting to get pissed! I asked to see the source of that regulation, I demanded to see with my own eyes that interdiction! He replied that it’s part of their internal rules, and that he’s not allowed to show that to me. Now that was great! My next question was haw am I supposed to observe some rule since I’m not allowed to see it? He replied: “Because I said so!”

I believe that this was the point where my blood started boiling. Of course, I asked to see some ID, besides the plasticized badge he was waving beneath my eyes (I forgot to mention that I was totally dominating the guy, who was at least 15-20 cm shorter — some security guard, heh?). I told him I can come back in half an hour with a hand bag full of the cheap badges he was waving, so I demanded to see proper official identification. He declined. So I told him that as far as I’m concerned our little chat was over, and that no random jerk is going to tell me what I can and can’t do, so that he can just bug off.

His next move was to threat me with the police. Oh, I was scared! I tried to get on with my business, but he kept getting in front of me, trying to block my view of the price tags. I was now completely surrounded with supermarket employees, most of them talking at the same time, but basically telling me the same thing over and over: I’m not allowed to take notes of their prices.

I was already way too pissed off, and since I was getting the urge to smear the little security shit all over his precious price tags, with a last drop of reason I decided to back off and left in a hurry.

In hindsight, I could have been smarter about it and dictate the prices to Crenguţa over the phone. Or simply get a shopping cart, put some stuff inside in order to look less suspicious, and then try to get the prices list. But I wasn’t.

I don’t think what happened was right, to be mild about it. And I certainly don’t think this is the way to handle customers or public relations. Even if I was from some competitor, I still fail to see what was the problem with getting their prices on paper.

And I will probably never will. Because this is Romania, The Country where Nothing Ever Changes™!

Jesus, how I hate this fucking country…

The event management on the other side — typical for this fucking country: a complete mess.

Firstly, due to the lack of advertising, my estimation is there were just about 2000 people there. I think it should (and could) have been at least four-five times that amount.

Then the pretty expensive VIP tickets I bought were almost useless: the seats were not numbered! We sat in other seats because the ones I presume were ours were already taken when we got there, and since there was no sign of any kind of official around, there was no way to force anybody out of any seat.

But let’s keep a bright memory about this, the show was absolutely great!

Unfortunately my friend Irina didn’t bring her camera along because she feared she won’t be allowed to bring it inside. But I’ve seen some incredible scenes inside the venue (I told you the event management was absolutely disastrous): some people not only managed to bring camcorders inside, but they were also fully equipped with tripods!

So I’ll leave you with these beautiful pictures lifted from Robert Plant’s official website. They are from a show in Greece, but they look quite similar to what we saw in Bucharest.

It’s probably better to start with the picture. On the following satellite view lifted from Google Maps I’ve overlaid a small blue car and arrow to represent me and my direction of driving. The red car is, of course, the other car involved.

The green cross is in the front of my apartment’s building, the spot I had just left one minute prior to the accident.

Satellite photo with crash schematics overlaid. Moving the mouse over the picture reveals a slightly larger version.

So, this 25 year old dude driving his girlfriend’s VW Polo rushes into the crossing not only completely ignoring the Yield indicator, but also looking towards his right for incoming traffic! What a stupid fuck! He literally jumped right in front of me, from beneath a line of parked cars!

Of course, there’s no excuse for me driving a little bit too fast, but it was 1 P.M. on a Sunday, the street was virtually empty, and I was on my way to the office, to get it over with my weekly chore of replacing the back-up tapes.

Anyway, so I was driving a little bit too fast, and although I have stepped on the brakes immediately and turned the wheel to the left (there was no incoming traffic at that time, luckily), I couldn’t avoid the crash. I don’t think he saw me until I was inches away from his car, already way too late…

My feeling is the dude got lucky that day, although the whole picture might suggest otherwise. If I hadn’t turn the wheel to the left, I would have probably crushed right into the driver’s door. And we all know the cars aren’t performing very well when it comes to sideways impact… I think he would have sustained serious injuries.

But we both got out without a scratch, thank God! We spent the next two hours of our lives in a police station filling up piles of papers, my car stayed in a repair shop for the next two weeks (and I suspect there’s still something wrong with the front right-side wheel), but that’s OK.

I don’t want to think about how my life could have changed if I’d killed the mother-fucker!