When I started typing the title, I accidentally wrote “Tomania”, the country of dictator Adenoid Hynkel in Charles Chaplin’s masterpiece The Great Dictator.

Although it was just a simple mistake, it proves to be incredibly appropriate.

In a country of the European Union, Romania of the year 2008, the vice president of the National Liberal Party, a governing party who’s president is the prime minister, declares this (my approximate translation):

RO: “…mai bine se face o eventuală nedreptate decât să fie tolerată o dezordine”.

EN: “…It’s preferable to have a possible injustice rather than tolerating disorder.”

I am really, really ashamed I am a citizen of this country, and it saddens me even more remembering I had the opportunity to leave for good, and I didn’t.

There is no hope, this country will never change. This nation is like a flock of stupid sheep, constantly driven over the cliff by scum rulers.

Source: Mediafax, via Gandul (Romanian language only).

…and 8 days. This is how old I am.

Someone told me that ‘classics’ consider it the age of supreme wisdom. I don’t know who those classics may be. And I definitely don’t agree. Supposedly the figure comes from the age of Jesus somehow. And I couldn’t care less about religion, be it Christian or any other kind. I don’t pretend to know the subject inside-out, but my view of humanity is quite clear — man is the worst kind of animal that ever roamed the Earth, there’s no hope for humanity and man will probably blow this whole planet to tiny little pieces sooner or later.

So I don’t consider myself at the peak of my wisdom, far from it really. As I can’t really consider myself at the peak of anything latelly.

I thought the previous post will be the last in this series (at least for a while), but I really must share this with you, it’s priceless. And of course it comes from my favorite, MS Windows.

While trying to move some user’s documents from an old computer to a newly assigned one, I stumbled upon a folder which Windows Explorer refused to copy, the error message saying “Cannot copy file:”, then a blank for the file name (sorry, no screen shot for this one, I simply didn’t think of it at the time).

First thing that crossed my mind was that this was a path length problem, as I was copying the files through the network using UNC paths (\\<server>\<share>\<path>), operation which most often than not suffers from this kind of problems. So I mapped the network path to a drive letter to slightly shorten it, but it still wouldn’t want to copy the damned folder.

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Stumbled upon this site filled with useless and silly quizzes, but this one might be more truthful than it seems:

Which is not something one would normally say about this one:

Just too bad the code for the badge they provide on the site contains a shameless link to their dating service. Not nice. Oh well…

Update December 11^th: I have removed the badge code because the background images linked externally were slowing down the page display. The code was also displaying inconsistently across browsers, so I just rendered the badges as images. I have kept the links to the quizzes, but not the ones to the dating service though.

This may well be the last installment for this series of posts, because as (I think) I have mentioned before I’ve quit my current sysadmin job. December 21 will be my last day with Graffiti BBDO, but this is going to be another post.

I must confess the story of this first screenshot is a little blurry, I took it several weeks ago but couldn’t find the time to write about it until now.

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But I still have to say it: I finally found some time and upgraded my WordPress installation to version 2.3, codenamed “Dexter” :). I couldn’t have missed it for the world! I wish I could have made it for his birthday, but anyway… better late than never. Now I just wish I could also change the theme so it can be a true dedication to our beloved dog, but I have to be realistic about it: it’s not going to happen too soon.

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

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Today didn’t start very well, I just yelled at a coworker which imposes his (bad) musical tastes on the rest of us working in the same office.

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.

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On Saturday morning, around 11 o’clock, I was off to a local supermarket on a mission assigned by my wife Crenguţa: to get a list of prices for some 2 dozen products.

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It seems I’m stuck in the realm of stupid software lately. Or rather stupid programmers.

Well, since I don’t seem to do anything creative these days (which by the way — it really pisses me off), I’d better not fight it anymore and just go with the flow.

I recently had to reinstall Windows on a Compaq nx9010. Despite the fact the CNET review states that it runs very cool, this particular one blew out heat like a steam locomotive, with the fan noise appropriately loud to complete the image. Other than that, it seemed to run pretty decent with a fresh installation.

Err… strike that. After one reboot prompted by the installation of some driver, winlogon greeted me with the following:

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