if i only knew...

Two great articles

I like articles that talk about the author's personal everyday experiences, something they learned, something they discovered, something they do in a unique way every day, etc. My favourite read for articles like this is Utne Reader, but lately i haven't had a chance to pick up a copy.

Today i was browsing for some other alternative magazines, and found a couple really interesting ones, and i found a couple of articles that are exactly like the ones i talked about above.

Random Acts of Gardening from Conscious Choice magazine tells the experiences of a guy who decided he would learn how to garden not from hip how-to books, but from Mother Nature. It's a fun read and it really woke my interest again in having a garden, after having decided that it's probably not for me as i wouldn't have the discipline to tend to it in a Proper Way (whatever that may be). Now, i am thinking, maybe if i just HAD a garden, and played with it - it would actually work just as well? Without all the glossy magazine fanfare, but with at least a tree to give shades and a couple of flowers that needed little care to marvel at, and things like that?

Today, i drove Bence to the train station in the morning peak, and as i was listening to the morning radio, i was wondering whether i should try to stick to some kind of morning ritual to start my day off. Nowadays i just wake up, make coffee, fire up the laptop and get to work immediately. Listening to the morning radio i was thinking about how most people who drive to work every day at the same time and listen to the radio at the same time maybe benefit from having this routine to start their day off? Then, in the afternoon i came across
A great awakening, from Ode magazine. It talks about the same thing, but the author extended the routine to the evening as well. Something to think about...

It's a tiny, tiny baby boy

day 15: yet another finger grab
Photo by snowdeal.

For the past three days i have been hitting refresh on a blog periodically to check for new entries. No, there is no lottery involved. And i do not know the blog's owner at all. And i haven't even ever heard of the blog until Tuesday.

But it's a heartbreaking and sad and happy and exhilarating and everyimaginableadjectivethatyoucanthinkof blog. It's a young dad's blog about his prematurely born baby son's progress and fight for his life and his future. Little Eric had to be born at 24 weeks of his Mom's pregnancy to save both of their lives. (Both of them are OK now.)

Go, read the blog, and bookmark it: snowdeal.org You will learn a lot, about a lot of things. About why such things happen. About the odds of survival when you were conceived 24 weeks ago and weight 0.6 kilos. About what doctors can do to such tiny babies. (E.g. they can close a hole in their heart just by giivng medications. Isn't that amazing?) About how sweet and human a baby this small can be. About how at first you cry and feel sorry for them and then realize how amazing their story is and how, you should be happy for them now, and not feel sorry at all. Things like that. And more.

PS: Oh, and that woman in Budapest? That's me. I am sending a postcard (along with all the good thoughts that I can). Are you? (The address is posted on that entry. Eric needs company in that strange NICU unit!)

Site revamp

I spent about 10 hours today rearranging this website. And voila, a new layout for the main page, a new blog (the sidelinks blog on the right), a new place for the photoblog, and general maintenance like removing the comments forms from old entries. Here is a list of the main changes:

Less comments - even though i have MTBlacklist on, i get a lot of comment spam and i got tired of having to delete them every day. So i decided to only open comments on a case-by-case basis and close all old entries for comments. I set up a mail form where you can send email if you have something cool/interesting/important to say to me.

More links - I save a lot of links in this blog that don't need much witty commentary, so i set up a sidelinks feature. The cool thing is that once i set up the Linklog archives properly (i just have to design the templates) the links will have category and date archives, so they will act like a bookmark system as well as a blog.

More photos - like i said yesterday, Flickr promises to be just the tool i needed to be able to finally have a frequently updated photoblog. The old photo category in the personal blog served as the photoblog until yesterday, but it was such a nuisance to post photos to it - resizing, cropping, uploading, inserting, layouting - that i just didn't feel like spending the time necessary to post a proper photo entry. (Which explains why the last proper photoblogging entry in that category is dated November 04, 2003...). So now, look out photoblogging world, here i come! The latest 10 photos will be listed in the center column on the front page here, linked to my photostream page at Flickr.

Plus, i decided to put the latest entry from my mktg blog on the front page as well. Now the page really reflects what this site is - and has been - all about: it's a personal blog, a link repository, a photoblog, and a marketing blog all in one. My sandbox.

I leave the comments open on this entry for now, please let me know what you think of the new layout! :)

Climate change, society and the media

An interesting article in The New York Times summarizing the books coming out this summer about climate change, it's social causes, and the like: Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

Especially interesting is this paragraph from one of the quoted books:
"Why have Americans refused to face up to the evidence of global warming? The answers are both political and economic. But Ross Gelbspan, a former Boston Globe reporter and editor, makes the case that the news media are also guilty. In Boiling Point (Basic Books, $22, to be published in August), he argues that on matters of scientific fact, journalists employ an essentially unfair idea of 'balance' -- treating global warming as though it were still a matter of open conjecture, with equal weight on both sides. As a result, the story of global warming as reported in the American press largely reflects the political manipulation of the story, not the science. Accurate coverage, Gelbspan writes, 'would have reflected the position of mainstream scientists in 95 percent of the story -- with the skeptics getting a paragraph at the end.' "

Hungary joins the EU in 4 days

May 1st, 2004. For the last few years, this date was etched into our brains very deeply, but it was always a distant and blurry date. Even when we got to 2004 in January, it was still 4 months away. And now... it's only 4 days until my country, Hungary joins the European Union.

In the last two weeks i grew more and more excited. I always knew that it will be a very important day for the country and a very important day for my personal future as well, but the realisation that this day is now here, and happening, it's something really new and exciting to me.

It has always been a future date. The day that Hungary joins the EU. The day we become part of Europe again. The day we give up parts of our independence - this time by OUR CHOICE and not by being on the wrong side in a local or world wide war... All of this, in future tense. And now this future tense is getting slimmer and slimmer and will become a thing of the past in exactly 4 days.

Just 15 years ago, when i was 9 years old Hungary became a free country with the fall of the iron curtain. That time, i was too small to comprehend the implications and even though i knew the significance, and i saw my family's enthusiasm over the new Hungary, it wasn't really an event that shaped my thinking or my life in general. Of course it did - but it wasn't the kind of event you remember where you celebrated.

This day, May 1st, 2004, will be an event i will remember. I am now 24, old enough to understand, to know and to care about it. And old enough to not be angry with those who oppose the EU - we do have those in this country as well - but to be sorry for them. Because they are missing out on the party of their lives.

To celebrate the event, i am changing the blog's design to an EU colored one, just for fun.

Also, i will be taking photos abundantly on Friday and Saturday about all the parties and events that we celebrate here in Budapest and i will be posting them here.

Celebrate with me, celebrate with us, Hungarians! (And our 9 fellow new EU member countries!)

3 minutes silence

Today is a national holiday in Hungary, so the streets were earily quiet anyway, but the country joined the European continent's three minutes silence at noon to remember the victims of the Madrid terrorist attacks.

I was watching the TV when they announced the break and showed pictures from the attacks with no music or commentary. I channel surfed to see what the others were doing and ALL our channels joined in the remembrance. CNN and BBC were showing images from across Europe, people standing in silence. It was very moving.

After sept 11th, after the intitial shock, i came away with a greater fear of terrorism and feeling less secure anywhere in the world. I felt a bit more unfomfortable flying to North America this summer (my first trip after Sept 11th) than I did before, but I took great comfort in being a European citizen, and felt that Europe does provide a safe haven for us, because we are not direct aggressors in the eyes of terrorists.

Then, last week's Madrid bombings shattered that view completely. Of course, without the mindless aggressive politics of the US, Europe would have never achieved this kind of an enemy status in the eyes of Al Quaeda or whoever the terrorists are, but let's just skip that for now. The main point is that we lost that innocent European era forever. Yes, we had IRA, ETA and the other Euroterror, but those should not even be mentioned on the same page as you-know-who. It's a sad week for all of us, Europeans.

Liking IKEA & Starbucks is OK

Finally, someone said it. It is OK to like Starbucks and IKEA. There are so many rants about why Starbucks is evil and IKEA is evil, and so on, it's sort of become trendy to bash them, even if people are actually frequent customers in the two institutions.
I have said this before, but this post: Ikeaphobia and its discontents inspired me to say it again: I like Starbucks and I LOVE IKEA and i am not ashamed by it! :)

If you're wondering why i like Starbucks: it's the ONLY place in Europe to get a Mocha and i am addicted to that stuff, and in Vienna where i frequent Starbucks, their coffee houses actually are very very comfortable, clean and serve good music, just what i like.

As for IKEA: I grew up behind the iron curtain, deprived of such capitalistic pleasures as well-designed furniture, so i was addicted to the german and austrian IKEA catalogs that friends and relatives brought back from trips to Western Europe. They were unbelievable eye-candy and "what's it like to live in a dream world" stuff for my Eastern-European, Socialist-Realist design surrounded self back then, and it's no surprise that i could identify most of the furniture by their goofy pseudo-Scandinavian names years before i was actually able to go to an IKEA store. And in addition to these fond childhood memories, i still think IKEA has great design and i love their products, as well as their clever marketing (not because i am a masochistic consumer but because i have a marketing degree so this stuff actually interests me!).

Happy New Year

This year, 2003, was the fastest one i have ever had in my past 23 years. Last year's new year's eve seems like it was yesterday. This year had its ups and downs, but overall it wasn't a bad year. Next year will be very exciting as i will be graduating in January (gotta start studying for the final exam...), and then attempt to find a job, move to Vienna, get my 2nd online business started, i have lots of stuff on my mind and i am very excited about them.

Anyway, i have never succeeded in keeping up with new year's resolutions, but i'll list a few things i'd like to see happen in 2004:

Get in shape. I was a slacker for the bigger part of the year, plus i just came back from a 10-day holiday in Paris, city of fondues and raclettes which didn't help my figure.
Earn more $$$. Getting a job should help with this one. I should also launch at least 2 of the online business stuff that i am working on.
Move in with Bence. This should happen as early as February, finally!
Get a pet. A cat or a dog. I soooo want one.
Reduce my to-read-pile. And not buy too many new books until i do so.
Get crafty. I have piles and piles of crafty books and magazines and patterns and supplies and i never play with them. I should disconnect from the computer and get crafty more often.

Happy New Year!

Back from Paris

I am back with a bunch of cheese that's already eaten, a bunch of yummy French maggi and knorr powdered soup, a bunch of funky French magazines, three Babar books, a 1950s Marie Claire, and a HUGE stack of photos (lomos and holgas) that await scanning as well as about 80 megs of digital pics. About 40% of the pictures deal in one way or another with that certain tower of the city named Paris. Here is one of them as a teaser, more coming soon as i scan them.

Referrer zeitgeist

Because of the title of this blog, i get a lot of very interesting referrer search phrases, and i'd love to share them in a zeitgeist form. If you can help me get the MovableTypeZeitgeistPlugin to work on this blog, please let me know, i tried and failed.

Until then, here's an interesting recent referrer: someone from a Boston University computer at 02:07:50am EST today came to this site searching for "If only they knew how real this life really gets" on Google.

Shopping is everything, or is it?

Quote from the Internet Advertising Bureau daily newsletter i got today:
"Advertising Age gave its Magazine of the Year prize to "Lucky," the shopping publication that essentially invented a genre. Ad Age applauds the way the magazine cuts to the chase, offering its target demographic access to the products it wants without distracting with articles unrelated to shopping."

I find this remark (underlined) very very disturbing. It suggests that the target demographic, which i suspect is 16-30 females with lots of disposable income, does not and SHOULD NOT care about anything else than shopping. I know, the alternative for Lucky is to distract its users with make-up, what to wear to a leopard-print thong, and stuff like that, but still, surely these people don't have VISA logos in the place of their eyeballs?!

OK, i should rephrase: I find the remark not just disturbing but insulting, on behalf of Lucky's target demographics. Of course, knowing the current and foreseeable domination of consumerism in society i am probably just applying my own mindset over things that are in an entirely other realm, where shopping IS the alpha and the omega of existence.

Further quotes from the AdAge article that just make things worse and worse:

{A magazine, as one senior-level editor at another title puts it, that sees the world as "a series of products to be consumed."} Now, that's a mission statement.

A quote from the founding editor in chief: {"I can see why people would think that it means the magazine world is going to hell when this really hot magazine is a magazine without paragraphs," she says. "I get that. At the same time, all I ever tried to do was to fulfill a need, and by doing that I wasn't trying to squash anything meaningful in our culture."}

{Nevertheless, even Ms. France, (...), sounds slightly scared at what her Lucky has wrought.
"Does my jaw drop in focus groups where women look at the 'Ask the Editors' column" -- a relatively straightforward question-and-answer feature -- "and say, 'I don't want to read that page because there's too much text there'? Yes. That freaks me the hell out."} Well, then, what about looking up the word "responsibility" in the dictionary Ms France and giving it some thought? You are a decision maker and you have the power to influence this.

And a last quote from her regarding people expressing thei concerns on the magazine: {"I don't care so much. I know I've got the readers, and that community respects me."}

Well, if that's the standard you decide to live by, enjoy.

Best sites by Google

Interesting experiment: try searching for "www." on Google and it will give you the list of the sites Google thinks are the best.
A couple of things to note:
- It apparently thinks Yahoo is a better site than Google.
- Hotmail.com's result is titled "Sign-in Access Error".
- The only listing in the top 3 pages of results that is not to the root of a website is the link to download Acrobat Reader. (The reason for that being those zillions of download Acrobat Reader links and buttons all over the web where there are PDF files to read.)
- The results also confirm that the internet and e-business is running totally independently from any dot-com boom or stock market trend or whatever. It's about building a company that people find good enough to use/buy from. Why am I saying this? Look at the top 30 and you won't find *any* company other than Google that wasn't around since about 1995-96.

Here's the top 50 list in the same order as on Google as of today (it will be interesting to check regularly to see if there are any changes...):
Yahoo, Google, Excite, Microsoft, Amazon, Altavista, Adobe, CNN, Lycos, Mapquest, Infoseek, W3C, Real Networks, Netscape, New York Times, Acrobat Reader Download, Hotmail, IBM, Netscape (again, different root server), Webcrawler, HP, Macromedia, USA Today, Apple, Winzip, Washington Post, Tucows, IMDB, Metacrawler, Barnes and Noble, Northern Light, Symantec, Sun, Dogpile, ZDNet, Google Press Centre, Apache, Monster, eBay, Intel, GNU, Shareware.com, Weather.com, Cancer.org, Britannica, Winamp, World Bank, American Red Cross, MP3.com, Alltheweb

{ idea from a link by Tommi on linkpool }

Stipe shares my taste of music

What kind of music does Michael Stipe like? Grant Lee Phillips, Bjork, PJ Harvey, Hole, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, U2, Q-Tip, Madonna's Ray of Light, T.A.T.U., Radiohead, Patti Smith, Television, the Velvet Underground, very, very much, Iggy and the Stooges... {source of information}

Interesting list to say the least, some of them are obvious to anyone who ever listened to an REM song or heard Michael sing, but T.A.T.U.? That's quite a surprising choice to mention within a list of these bands and artists. And as a sidenote - i am happy to read Michael shares my view that Madonna's Ray of Light is one of the most brilliant records, especially if put into the context of her other music. It's just way better and smarter that any of her other music before or after, and I say that even though I love a lot of her other songs.

Comment spamming here and everywhere

It looks like my blog broke through some kind of a popularity or at least visibility threshold in the blogosphere: spammers now think it's a good enough website to advertise their junk on.

Last weekend i got about 20 spam comments on this blog, and while deleting them one by one, i realized that some earlier comments that i didn't check the URLs for were also spam. When reading about blog spam i always thought of people putting usual email spam "content" in the comments so that they are very easy to recognize and delete. I never imagined that spammers are actually making sort of relevant comments on the entries and use the URL field only for their spam URL to get better search engine ranking. Amazing how far these suckers go... Out of the 20 spam comments only one was very obviously p o r n related spam, all the others were spam URLs disguised as regular friendly comments.

Anyway, i was looking for a solution to the problem, here are two links i found useful:
Movable Type gurus' post about comment spam and possible solution on Six Log
mt-blacklist is a new MT plugin that uses a blacklist of frequent spam URLs to filter comments before they are posted. I will install it today.

Update 10/20:
I installed MT-blacklist, hopefully it will help. I also found a very very VERY helpful thread in the MT support forums with lots of good ideas to prevent blog and guestbook spamming.
Also take a look at Junkeater.com, nice spam prevention service for free. I will be implementing this as well on my sites soon.

Sunny afternoon

Today was fun. I met Chris for the first time and we wandered around, took some photos and looked in a few bookstores, three of my favourite things to do. I finished a roll in my Lomo, but then promptly discovered that the shutter doesn't open at all - which makes me very sad. I already miss my dear Lomo.
(Chris, i hope you don't get your copyright lawyer to knock on my door Monday morning... :) )

The looking in a few bookstores part of the afternoon cost me $110 in the end, but i have 5 cool new books to dive into:
Hey Nostradamus by Coupland (duh, like i hadn't mentioned this book at least 10 times in this blog so far)
How to Be Alone and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Swedish Reflections by Judith Black (a collection of essays about Sweden to satisfy my sverige-mania
A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford - Chris recommended this

Wifi happiness ^2

The neighbor closed the wifi connection two days ago, so that was my brief piggybacking adventure. I signed up with FatPort, a local wi-fi provider, and am actually surfing through them right now, at Harbour Centre in Vancouver. It's a 11Mbps connection, very fast.

WiFi happiness

Ignore the rant below. I came home after work, and booted my new laptop to play with it. Windows comes up and there's this lovely little popup notifying me that i am now conneceted to the internet wirelessly. I did not even touch the darn network settings, i did not do anything. My laptop just connected.

I guess somebody in the neighborhood has a wireless LAN and they don't have any security features enabled on it. The sygnal is very weak, but when it's there, it's really quick.

Now, i will research what the community verdict is on using other people's wifi. I don't intend to use it for downloading 1gig movies, so i hope whoever blessed me with this connection doesn't mind. I have no idea how to even try finding out where this is coming from...

Any thoughts on whether this is a big no-no, or not, please share in the comments!

I miss my blog :(

No entries for a month... wow. I so miss blogging. During the day i am working and can't blog, evenings i am without a net connection, weekends I am busy hanging out, and also without a net connection. There are photos to post, impressions and happenings to share and links to link to, but no time and no place to do it. :(

On a happier note, i just bought a laptop yesterday! I now have my own computer and soon i will subcribe to wireless internet access, so when i have time to go to a cafe that has a hot spot, i will be able to blog again. I can't wait! see you then!

Working woman

I was last employed by a company in January 2001. I was last working in a full time job in 1999. No wonder it's so strange to be back in the full time workforce!

The first week was great, work is interesting and challenging, the atmosphere is nice, and my boss is great to work with. Seeing a North American company from inside is fascinating, so much is done differently than at home.

The cafeteria is amazing, and very damaging to my weight loss plans.
Working full time also means that i am dead tired when i get home and the last i want to see is a computer screen ... and so my blog suffers.

Still no access to the scanner, so still no lomos. Tomorrow is illuminares, the Vancouver lampion festival, which should be really exciting lomowise.

Culture shock

I am not kidding when i say culture shock. Everything is so strange here - even the toilets are foreign. I visited here twice before, but it's still a huge culture shock!

What's the most striking difference between here and Europe are the sizes: everything, EVERYTHING is bigger here. The trees, the mountains, the milk bottles, the roads, everything. The funniest are the food item sizes, like the 4 litre milk bottle, and the 5 kg rice box. They're so strange.

The scenery is beautiful, i can't stop admiring the mountains, the green everywhere and the clouds (lots of lomo material).

Update

I arrived in my new temporary (till November) home in Vancouver, BC, Canada on Thrusday. I am beginning to overcome my jet lag, which is good considering i am starting work tomorrow.

Before i left i had my last 2 rolls of Lomos developed and the results are nothing short of extraordinary. I am totally excited and can't wait to share them, but the scanner here is not working currently, so it may be a week or so from now that i will be able to post them. I want to decorate this blog with my new sky shots, they are sooooooo beautiful. I love my Lomo. Oh, and the sticky shutter-like problem was solved by the new batteries, so no more worrying whether the pics would come out OK!

Updates might still be sporadic until i truly get into the rythm here, tomorrow if my first day at work - which is exciting!

Harry Potter saturation

There's a good article on the Guardian site about the negative side-effects of the Harry Potter marketing phenomenon.

Yesterday while browsing for books on amazon.com i noticed their "harry potter meter" on the right sidebar. It displayed the running number of copies of the 5th book sold on amazon.com. I refreshed the page a couple of times in an hour and it just climbed, and climbed and climbed. Last time i looked it stood at 812000 something. And that's just amazon.com. Amazing. (Today the meter is gone, maybe they got into some legal disputes on it.)

The Guardian article quotes Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, who swam against the flow and did not sell his soul to marketing managers. He retained the right to his characters and thereby saved C&H for eternity, as two silly cartoon characters with unbeleivable wisdom about life, funny cynism, and an appreciation for the little things that count in life. He says:
"Worse, hype like this sows the seeds of its own creative destruction. Bill Watterson, a famous American cartoonist, fought against merchandising for years. 'When cartoon characters appear on countless products,' he used to argue, 'the public inevitably grows bored and irritated with them, and the appeal and value of the original work are diminished. Nothing dulls the edge of a new and clever cartoon like saturating the market with it.' "

I can't help but feel this for Garfield and Snoopy. The characters are on everything from mugs to glow-in-the-dark pillowcases, and became just another famous character that decorates store shelfs. When you see Garfield stuff in stores, you don't think of the real beauty of the comic strip. You think of the cute character. And you don't buy the mug or the 157th decorated pencil because there's no point in buying it - not counting hardcore collectors of course. So in the end Garfield becomes just another pointless product on the shelf that lost its real, original and unquestionable value in the race to create a value in the marketing sense. The original Garfield - the fat, funny, lazy cat with a personality - gets buried somewhere, and its real value is now a thing of the past, nostalgia even. Same with Snoopy. They get reduced to a decorative item. To the level of Hello Kitty merchandise, being there for the cuteness factor, nothing else.

Now, back to the Harry Potter marketing phenomenon, the same thing happens to *the book*. If you got hooked on the HP books when the first one came out, was enchanted by the story and the world of HP - you're lucky. Because then you can appreciate the real value in the book. If you arrived to the world of HP after the hype got out of control, there's a chance that you become grinded up by the Harry Potter machine, and get alienated from the book and the world of HP, left with the feeling of redundancy and annoyance seeing the 400th harry potter special on TV, reading the 500th article in the press and seeing the 674th shopwindow dedicated to the little wizzard. And in the end, the real loser are the kids - robbed of a great childrens' book that had the potential to really open the world of reading to them. The thing with getting lost in a book is that everybody has their own Harry Potter in their personal movie theater. And by making Harry Potter so standardised and so ubiquitous, people are robbed of this image too. Your Harry Potter gets dimmer and dimmer, and gets replaced by the corporate version.

And it doesn't stop here. The Guardian article talks about the effect on childrens' books that get neglected and tossed into the storage room because of Harry Potter taking over childrens' markets everywhere. About the effect on small bookstores who lose out because of the book sold in unbeleivable quantities - and so large discounts - at superstores. And the questionable size of the book: 766 pages for a children's book?

For an ending, i'll quote the article again because this couldn't have been said any better:
"J.K. - an intelligent woman - had choices, despite the pressures. She could have insisted on less marketing, less security and less hype. And just as she didn't have to do it this way, nor do we. So this weekend, if your child asks for Harry Potter, take him or her to the bookshop and try and find something just as good that isn't the centre of a multi-million pound industry. Let's desaturate ourselves."

blogstalking

And again a very enjoyable entry from lancearthur. I feel like a stalker linking him for the second time in a week or so. :) Anyway, his entry reminds me of two things:

1. San Francisco has the weirdest climate i have ever seen, when i was there in August 1999 it was as if i were here in Budapest in March. Nice weather, but coat and longsleeve T-shirt time. Of these i had one (1) longsleeve T-shirt and zero (0) coat with me on that Pacific coast trip, which means i actually wore that one T-shirt the whole week of my visit there. It is my fave T-shirt by the way, so i didn't mind. It would have been good to have 2 though. Point is: he is right. Bring a coat. And 2 longsleeves.

2. Making the first step on a crush (i realize i haven't used that word for years. am i getting old?) is the most painful experience ever. Or maybe, you need to be burned several times to actually be able to appreciate that one v e r y s p e c i a l time when your move actually works out good and you find your soul mate? Ok, then, it was all just the practice, and all is well. Although i probably will never recover from the humiliation caused by a certain love letter with underlined quotes from The Little Prince... Argh... shivers.

To-do list

To-do list before leaving for Canada:
- have Lomo camera repaired (it seems to have the infamous sticky shutter problem)
- decide on how many cameras to bring
- get ebay things wrapped up and update address on necessary online registrations
- clean out clutter from my room to make place for any stuff they want to store in here until i come back in November
- decide on what to bring to Canada: books, knickknacks, photos, bags, clothes
- decide on final thesis subject and compile needed research stuff
- wrap up nervousness.org projects and exchanges
- go to dentist and have 3 aching teeth done (yikes)
- get prescriptions from doctor and buy necessary medicine (but first figure out what i need)
- buy insurance
- buy plane ticket (do i have my priorities messed up a bit in this list?)
- tell parents what to do with bank account, cell phone bills, etc while away
- collect snail mail and email addresses for postcards and travelogues
- clean up computer and configure it for easy parent-usability

Blog birthday

I can't believe i AGAIN missed my blog's birthday. On June 6th, this blog celebrated (or rather... didn't) it's 2nd birthday.

Coupland news

Hey, Nostradamus! has its own website (with mailing list and contest!)

Uk cover art for "Hey, Nostradamus!"

Coming up in 2004: 2 new books!!! Souvenir of Canada 2 and Super City (scroll down to "2004") - i am especially thrilled to see Souvenir of Canada 2, i loved his nonfiction books as much as his fiction.

Slacking and usability

I really need to make that new, more photo-based template for my site, because this one is just not right for posting photos. I am totally in awe of the new photojunkie design, i love its look, how it emphasizes photography, but is still a hybrid blog. Definitely an inspiration.

This whole needing a new template made me think of really how the usability and design of a system or tool you're using determines how and how often we use it. Posting photos in the current movable type system is a pain, even though the upload feature and automatic thumbnail creation is a helpful gesture, but still, i need to click too many times and cut and paste too many times to post my photos the way i want them to be. So i start slacking and not posting as much as i would want to, because it's just too complicated.

My last ever exam (not counting the big final graduation thing next January) in this college is tomorrow, and then i am free to do whatever i want to, and this is what i will do.

A guinea pig and a mini american eskimo?

According to googlism Kati is...
kati is a master of funny and absurd tales and a barnstorming user of paint brush and tusche
kati is hungarian*
kati is busy rehersing
kati is quite mature for her status*
kati is great for anniversaries and other romantic evenings*
kati is a dedicated
kati is not suitable for inexperienced owners*
kati is on the move*
kati is a very good riding teacher as well as friend
kati is jól érezte magát közöttük*
kati is certainly right; there are precious few contenders for the fan of the month
kati is my step
kati is one of the best songs
kati is very cute*
kati is the administrative brains behind the mediacircus
kati is the business*
kati is color
kati is an artist who attributes her self taught label to the old famous trial and error technique
kati is cautiously optimistic*
kati is a girl*
kati is an educated librarian but an endless passion for writing drove her into advertising
kati is an honor roll student and a choir member
kati is seated at a table with books spread out in front of her*
kati is a witch
kati is grateful for having been raised in two countries where she was exposed to different cultures and afforded the ability to speak two languages fluently
kati is a most accomplished chef and prepared feasts that fit the needs of every member of the family
kati is astounding*
kati is recovering and healing nicely
kati is pretty to look at*
kati is quick to affirm
kati is a small
kati is proving to be a very intelligent pup who is easy to train*
kati is an outgoing*
kati is a mini american eskimo
kati is always striving toward innovation*
kati is to explore countries far from the maddening tourist resorts in the company of friends*
kati is our rhyming poet
kati is going to be a guinea pig
kati is perfect to invite to your party where unforgettable memories will be made for you and your guests*
kati is more than happy to answer any your questions you might have or receive your comments regarding any helpful information you may wish to share*
kati is very aware of the fatigue level of new mothers*

* true

I have my VISA!

Iit's finally official: i will be living and working in Canada for 4 months starting in July, i got my VISA today. I have been wanting to go abroad to work or study for about a decade now, so i'm very very very very happy and looking forward to it!

I haven't been writing or posting photos here that much lately because i was going back and forth between the Canadian embassy in Vienna and my home in Budapest for 3 weeks now to get this VISA, and i didn't have time to sit down and blog. I have about 20 new lomo photos to post, but they are in Budapest, and i am in Vienna until Sunday so that's when i can post them. They are great though, so worth the wait. :)

I am also working on a new site design, i want to make the photos a separate section, but still integrated into the blog itself. I really like the current design (although i have to fix the error some people get of the left panel overlapping into the middle panel) , but it doesn't highlight the photos enough.

Yes to the future

Today Hungary voted a firm YES on joining the European Union. Finally, there're no more question marks left: we will officially be full members of the EU on May 1st, 2004.

The turnout was very disappointingly low: 45.56% of eligible voters cared enough about the cause to go and cast a vote: 84% said Yes, and 16% said no. It's an overwhelming majority, that is very good and reassuring to see, but i still can't understand how people can stay at home when the issue is such an important one, that will affect your future, even if you don't go to vote. People say that people were sure of the positive decision, so they didn't bother going. But what kind of a screwed up argument is that?

Anyway, cheers for our future in the EU! :)

ABBA spontaneity

I watched a VH1 special about ABBA's fans today and now the ABBA Top 10 is on, and i am listening to it in the background. The TV is behind me and the music is a comfortable volume. I just found myself typing an email while dancing with my feet and moving my shoulders, and singing along to Super Trooper.
I just realized that this is probably the only music in the world, that really grabs me and grooves me and moves me, any time, any day, any volume, any setting. There are lots of classic disco tunes that i like, that i will sing along to, that will uplift me, but ABBA is the only thing that immediately captures me, subconciously, no matter what mood i am in and what place or time. Amazing, really, what these 4 people did to music!

Happy Springtime!

Last weekend i went out with Bence and a few friends and at night when going home we were freezing, it was -2 C (28 F). Since Tuesday, the weather took a complete turn, and now it's spring and beauuuuuuuuuuuuutiful! Sun, blue sky, and 20 C (68 F). And all this happened about overnight, very dramatic change. While i applaud the change, i can't stop wondering if these abrupt changes in weather in recent years are all a part of a big picture, that is not so beautiful ecosystemwise? :|

So how do i celebrate spring? Cleaning my windows to actually be able to see the wonderful new world through them, wearing spring clothes, leaving the windows open for hours and hours, admiring the beautiful blue of the sky (and lomoing it), and coloring my hear chestnut reddish-brown. :) A new haircut is also coming soon. It's always the first spring-celebration thing i do after cleaning the windows. Happy Springtime!

War

I am really pissed at Bush. As much as i would hate living under Saddam in Iraq, this is definitely not the way he should be dealt with.

Hungary is supporting the US in the sense that we provided our air space for fly over and some iraqi opposition people are being trained at the US base in Hungary, but in general, the country is against this war, no matter how many times Ari Fleisher mentions Hungary in "the list of the willing". In today's briefing he said that 1.18 billion people were a part of that coalition. Well, he is wrong. While the givernment of Hungary decided to open up air space, the majority of Hungarians, including me, are definitely not supporting Bush's personal war game, thank you very much.

Canadiana

It's official - only pending a visa application, that is - i will be spending almost 4 months in Vancouver, Canada starting from July. I am very very very excited.

Ever since i could make sense of maps, i have been dreaming of living abroad. Age 14 i decided i want to spend a high school year abroad. Didn't work out. Age 17 i wanted to work in a volunteer program abroad. Didn't get the scholarship. Age 21 i wanted to spend a semester abroad. My ******* school vetoed it in the last minute. And now after months of organising it and waiting for the decision, i got the OK to spend my internship in Canada. The extra joyful part of it is that my sister lives there with my family, and i only see them every 1-2 years, and now i will spend months with them. Yay!

Here is the top 5 things i am looking forward to seeing/doing:
1. Going on a whale watching trip like i did 4 years ago when i was there to visit. An experience i will never forget and can't wait to relive.
2. Spending hours in the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens.
3. Going to Granville Island and browsing the lovely shops and market there.
4. Riding the Sky Train and enjoying the view.
5. Flying to Vancouver and getting to see the arctic icy ocean, the vast flat areas in Northern Canada with the ocassional plume of smoke signaling people living in the middle of it, the Rockies, and finally the beautiful descent to Vancouver with the open sea to the west, the bustling city underneath, the huge volcanic Mount Baker to the south and the snowy mountains to the north.

Cold :(

Just 5 weeks after my last one, i am again suffering from a cold, and i am sooooo fed up with being sick all the time! I am feeling miserable.
:(

Fake blogs are bad

It was bound to happen.... some genious marketer at Pepsi came up with an advertising campaign based on fake blogs and paying bloggers with T-shirts to promote their new drink. I don't think it's gonna work, for obvious reasons... First, blogs are there to break information manipulations like this. Secong, blogs are about honesty and people and their thoughts and feelings and whatnot that they *want* to express on their little place of the web.

A few weeks ago the largest portal in Hungary started running a blog sponsored by Axe, the deodorant maker. They run entertainment related news in a semi-blog-like fashion, and i am totally annoyed by it. First, blogging in Hungary is not common at all, so people will get a bad and completely false impression of the word blog by it, and second it's not even a blog, so why call it that?? It's so annoying.

030303

Today while sitting on the train and wishing i was home already, i stared at my train ticket and the date 03-03-01, when i purchased it. I noticed that in a few days the date will look 03-03-03, which will be very very cool. And only now, half a day later, while checking out other blogs, did i realize that that very cool date is actually today. Just one more piece of evidence that long and boring train journeys are bad for your brain.

Salon blues

Oops, the end of Salon? SFGate reports that salon can't pay it's rent, and is in deep financial trouble... meaningful quote from the article: "Salon reported a loss of $1.3 million on $1.1 million in revenue in the last quarter of 2002. (...) Over the years, Salon has accumulated losses of $81 million."

Yikes. I loved Salon, even though i stopped reading it regularly quite a while ago... but i just cannot comprehend how they could let those figures happen. I once worked for a dotcom who burnt through 3 million US$ cash in half a year and then went bust because investors stopped putting money in it. The key phrase being "investors stopped putting money in it". After 3 million. Not 81 million.

Blog conference finally in Europe too

Finally, a blog event happens near my part of the world. BlogTalk - A European Conference on Weblogs in Vienna, May 23-24. They are also accepting paper submissions about all things blogging (which will be reviewed by Rebecca. Note to self: accelerate thesis topic brainstorming and try to come up with a suitable topic that will be suitable for both the conference and the thesis. (more on this later today - i have to go to class)

Google buys Pyra

Just a few months ago i wrote about how the Google guys have done it again: put a twist on a basic web service and brought it to a new level (Google News). Reading today's news of Google buying Pyra Labs, i can't even imagine what new possibilities this opens for the blogworld.

Google has been excellent at indexing weblogs and making sure that the voices of blogs were being heard no matter what you are searching for (see my previous thoughts on this). I am looking forward to seeing what comes out of their working together with the pyra team.

A few years ago the big big innovator company of the net was amazon.com. For a few months, even a year now, that award no doubt goes to the Google team. I think I would pay them to be able to work for them. ;) It must be fascinating (and exhausting).

Give peace a chance - at home first?

I wanted to go to today's anti-war demo in Budapest, but my afternoon nap turned out to be more powerful than my urge to go. I woke up when the demo was almost over, so i didn't go. It turns out, my gut instinct to sleep was right.

The antiwar protest in Budapest turned into chaos and ridiculous fights and throwing snowballs (yes, s-n-o-w-b-a-l-l-s) on the speakers of the event. Reading the reports, i felt like it was April Fool's Day... it's just too bizarre to be really happening.

I don't really want to go into politics here, but this is again a day when i am really sorry to be living in a country that is not mature enough to join a worldwide action chain on such an issue - an issue that - for this day at least - should unite people from across the complete political spectrum to say no to war, to violence. The organizers used every media outlet and every opportunity during the week to emphasize that this demo will be against war and violence and NOT against political ideas, parties or movements. But it seems like our little country is not yet grown-up to think in terms of the big picture. :(

For a few weeks now,

For a few weeks now, I have been wondering how come google indexes my blog much faster and more frequently than my other websites, and why it makes sense at all for Google to index all blogs in the first place when the content changes so frequently. What i didn't realize is this: it's not the individual blog's content that is important for Google, but the links in the blog. With every single link in the blog we "vote" for a site in the google rankings (google analyzes both the relevancy and the popularity of a page before it ranks it in its search results), as explained in microcontentnews' Googleloves Blogs article. One more pieve of evidence to the power of blogging. No, blogging will not make us bloggers journalists, no, our blogs will not earn us fortunes, but they do influence the web, and what gets found on the web 150 million times a day.

Here is an eye-opening article

Here is an eye-opening article if you're against fur (like i am) from the NY Times: "The unintended consequences of the war against fur have hurt the livelihoods of thousands of Canadian Natives, and have enticed them to replace their lost incomes by welcoming into unspoiled areas the oil, gas and mining interests they once opposed." It certainly puts things into another perspective but i still wonder what to do now?
A report comes to mind that i saw on CNN's Global Challenges last week about wildlife works, a business founded in San Francisco that saves the environment on another continent and turns a profit (they created a wildlife sanctuary in Kenya, put an eco-factory in there where the local residents - who were poaching the endangered animals before ww came - work on ww brand clothes that are sold in US stores and on the internet. Ideas like this would be the only solution to the problem, because surely, reversing everything and going back to making fur trendy to save native Canadians and their land from oil monopolies is not a very smart way to solve the problem.

Yet another explanation to why

Yet another explanation to why i hate SUVs and the people who use them:
"Many of the accidents being reported on the Long Island Expressway involved SUVs. WCBS TV station was reporting that SUV drivers often spin out of control because their four-wheel drive vehicles give them a false sense of security. Some New York area schools were reported closed, according to WCBS." - from CNN

I am very very happy

I am very very happy to hear that the US authorities actually punish people who pick up and keep Columbia shuttle debris... "There also are 17 open investigations of people who have supposedly tried to sell shuttle debris on the Internet auction site eBay." (from CNN) It's just amazing to realize how low people can actually go...

Just to underline my last

Just to underline my last thought posted just below, a few lines from Laurel Clark's last email from Columbia:
"Thanks to many of you who have supported me and my adventures throughout the years. This was definitely one to beat all. I hope you could feel the positive energy that beamed to the whole planet as we glided over our shared planet."

Buzz Aldrin (1 of the

Buzz Aldrin (1 of the 3 austronauts in the Apollo 11 crew that first stepped on the Moon) wrote an editorial in the NY Times today about Fear and Flying.

Columbia's accident is a horrible tragedy and there are no words to describe the horror and sadness. But instead I feel better if i think about how happy these 7 people were in their 16 day mission. How they could realize their dream. How they contributed to science and space exploration. I watched the footage CNN showed of their inflight interviews and satellite conversations and they all looked so happy and content and proud. Especially Ramon, and Chawla, and i am glad that those images are stuck in my brain. If i think about Columbia, that's what comes to mind, and it always will.

The most chilling thing i

The most chilling thing i read online since 9/11 blog reports:
"Brandon Carl Vedas, 21, takes a mix of drugs (methadone, klonopin, etc) while in front of his webcam and chatting on IRC. He overdoses, and dies with the webcam still on." (from Overdose on IRC? @ metafilter. And - sadly - it's apparently not a hoax.) It reminds me of instances when i had to get my friends out of trouble, talk them out of drugs, alcohol and get them medical help. I cannot possibly understand how things can go *this* bad without anyone noticing (friends, family), and feel sorry for the parents of this guy. But also, i can't help but think of their tragic role in their child's death... i mean, there must have been signs... 360mp methadone??? I don't know. It's hard to read, and hard to digest.

There is a real life

There is a real life magazine dedicated to sneakers. People are weird. :) Although... if i think about it. I would buy a magazine about IKEA furniture any day. I am weird, too. :)

A blog entry from Israel

A blog entry from Israel beginning the year 2003: {from This Normal Life}
And in any case, I don’t really believe that the gas masks are going to work anyway. I’m sure that chemical weapons of mass destruction seep in through the skin.

“You have to wear long sleeves,” Amir chimes in when I arrive home.

“Didn’t you learn how to use your gas mask?” asks Merav.

The kids had a lesson in school. They practiced putting them on, taking them off.

“They even taught us how to give the shot,” adds Merav referring to Atropin, the drug that is supposed to counter the effects of a chemical attack. “You stick it in your thigh really quickly, like this.” She makes a jabbing motion with her hands. “Then squeeze down slowly. It doesn’t even hurt.”

Oh. My. God. Welcome to the 21st century.

Christmas Eve

It's 12.47am on christmas day. Why is it that this evening seems so tranquil and calm? After dinner i looked at my christmas presents a bit, but then came back to my room and did stuff that i didn't do for the past month or so, i picked up nervousness LMAOs and worked on them, i posted to mailing lists i neglected lately, and when i got sleepy instead of picking up all the day's stuff from my bed and dumping it on the floor, i started putting everything to it's own place, without having to remind myself to do so. I stopped at the bookshelf to pick up a random book and read a bit. Then put it back. Things that i rarely do on normal days. But why is that? Maybe it's the thought in the back of my mind that this evening IS the evening where you don't have to worry about anything, because you can't do anything else than be home and be happy. No public transport to go somewhere with, no stores open to go to, no friends to call to go out, etc. I am posting this in order to somehow create a reminder for this moment. I hope i can remember this feeling during the rest of the year, the 364 days when the evenings are not so tranquil.

Happy christmas! This is my window in its holiday clothes:

I am reading Sylvia Beach's

I am reading Sylvia Beach's book on her Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company. I just found this lovely description of what the little eclectic shop is about by someone who stayed there once: Paris Shakespeare & Company

Interesting intelligence/learning ability test: LDRC

Interesting intelligence/learning ability test: LDRC - Home - Projects - Multiple Intelligence Inventory, although my scores didn't reveal anything new... i am weak in Maths and good in languages and visual things. And i am a slacker in sports and can't sing well. :)

Linguistic 42
Mathematics 33
Visual/Spatial 47
Body/Kinesthetic 35
Naturalistic 38
Music 35
Interpersonal 40
Intrapersonal 38

I finished Hornby's About a

I finished Hornby's About a Boy yesterday, and i loved it! I have never read a book after seeing the movie made of it before, but this time, i was pleasantly surprised, and the book was even more enjoyable than the movie. At certain points the story develops differently, but that's not what made it so funny and readable, but the writing, the language. Because 80-90% of what i read on the web is US-based, it felt so good to read British English again! I used to read a lot of English style and teen magazines and knew all the British slang, but lately i fpund myself using American English all the time. This book brushed up my language again.

Next book is "Fateless" by Imre Kertesz (see previous entry). I am of course reading the original Hungarian book, not the English translation and i am glad i do, because the writer himself said that the current English translation is very poor quality and he wouldn't be surprised if upon reading his book in English, people would be wondering how a book like that could have got the Nobel prize. The book will be re-translated and a new edition will be published in the future.

The Google guys have done

The Google guys have done it again, they got a really basic need (the need for up-to-date news in several subjects and regions on one page) and stripped off all the superfluous and unnecessary things that we had to put up with so far when we had to rely on other sources to satisfy this need. It's the same affect as it was when Google replaced Altavista as *the* search engine. Altavista was OK in the beginnings, but then it grew into a huge and unusable monster that did everything else, BUT searching efficiently. Now here's Google News for us. Only news, from several sources, clean layout, no ads, no superflouos design. And... to top it all, there are no human editors behind all this, just a computer algorythm. I can't stop admiring what Google does.

Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian

Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian author won the Nobel Prize for literature yesterday. The book is Fateless, a striking account of the Holocaust in Hungary, the events drawn from Kertesz' own life. He was one of the few Auschwitz and Buchenwald refugees who survived the horrors of the Holocaust. Only two of his novels have been published in English, Fateless (see above) and Kaddish for a Child Not Born. These jumped to the top of amazon's bestseller lists within hours of the announcement, Fateless was #1, currently #2, the two editions of Kaddish... also both in the top 25 (#10 and #22 at the moment).

Now this will finally - hopefully - put Hungarian literature on the shelves of bookstores around the world, because it has been very neglected so far. In Germany and Austria, Sandor Marai (Embers, Memoir of Hungary, 1944-1948
) has been leading bestseller lists recently, and Peter Eszterhazy's (in stock at amazon: A Little Hungarian Pornography, She Loves Me) books have also recently been published in German. But that still leaves much of the Hungarian classics in the shade, so i will mention a few names here hoping that you will check them out:
My favourite poet ever is Dezso Kosztolanyi, and while amazon doesn't seem to have any of his poetry in stock, read one of his novels, Anna Edes to get an insight into a slice of 20th century Hungarian history. If you ever come across Kosztolanyi poems, read and absorb them!
Krudy Gyula and Zsigmond Moricz are also some of my top picks for entering the world of Hungarian literature.

If you are familiar with

If you are familiar with Budapest, you know that it has lots of bridges... 9 exactly. One of these is the perfect venue for suicidal people to go and try to jump. It's a beautiful bridge, painted a lovely green color, with a beautifully curved metal structure. It's very easy to climb up all the way to the top, it's essentially just a walk up a ramp, which is wide enough so you don't get wiggly, and not steep at all. Until the end. The last third of the ramp gets steeper and steeper. You can see a photo of the bridge here (opens in new window).

I can imagine walking up. You walk, it's nice, you see the magnificent view of the city, you walk, and the top is so close, and you never realize that it gets harder to walk. And then you're there.

Then you sit down and get second thoughts. You realize that this is not a good idea after all. You decide to come down. But it looks sooooooo steep now. No way would you make it down. The cars and trams are zooming by below you. And then - because you took your mobile phone for backup in case something holds you back from jumping - you call the Fire Fighters. They arive within a few minutes, ambulances, police, firemen all start running around like little ants 100 meters under you. You are sorry for the whole mess by now.

Then two firemen briskly walk up to you on the same ramp, the same way, one of them even without a rope attached, just himself like you did about 20 minutes ago. They get to you and ask you standard questions. Then they lift the crane up to you and you get into the basket and down to the ground.

This is what i witnessed from below the bridge's ramp on my way home just about an hour ago. I think it may have been a guy who just walked up there because he wanted a bit of adventure and hang out there for a little while, and then realized that he can't get down. But he also may have wanted to commit suicide. When i walked across the bridge he was sitting on top, not standing like they usually do, and he looked like he is talking on a mobile phone.

This happens about once each month on this bridge. Do they *think* of the suicide aspect when they design the bridges nowadays? This of course is a bridge that was built 1896, so i guess it wasn't a consideration then... but is it today?

This day in history: 1940

This day in history:
1940 - John Lennon was born
1975 - his son, Sean Lennon was born
1980 - I was born. I see a pattern here... :)

Today is the last day

Today is the last day ever that i can say i am 21. Tomorrow i turn 22. I have no positive or negative feelings about the age, it's just a birthday. In fact, the whole day will look like more of a completely ordinary day than a birthday... Bence is in France, so we will talk on the phone for about a minute, that's all, my friends are busy with school and whatnot, so no partying in sight, so... what's left? I will probably go out for dinner with a friend or something.

I saw the Royal Tenenbaums

I saw the Royal Tenenbaums this weekend! (I fell like i will get movie overdose if i watch another movie in the following month... The past two weeks i saw 4, four, vier, négy, quatro movies!) It was a hilariuos movie, sooooo much fun! And of course Ben Stiller delivered yet another of his BRILLIANT comical performances, he was so made for this role. If you haven't seen it yet, go see it!

Here is a little puzzle

Here is a little puzzle for you... how many ikea things can you find in my room?

I was looking at National

I was looking at National Novel Writing Month yesterday but decided that i would never be able to come up with a coherent storyline that runs 175 pages and is also somewhat interesting so that people would actually read it. However, i could maybe do decently with just character descriptions. Which is exactly what this interactive novel is about. A very cool idea. I wonder if i could come up with a similar concept that would be cool for a novel (NaNoWriMo)?

As a complete sidenote reading, seeing, saying, hearing the "word" NaNoWriMo *always* makes me think of Nanaimo, the name of a SkyTrain station in Vancouver. Which is kind of nice, because i alwys get this feeling that i am teleported to the moment when i was travelling the SkyTrain and the announcer announced NaNAImo. In this very cool accent and emphasising the NAI part. It always sounded so interesting so the moment and the sound and the whole experience just stuck in my mind, even thought the last time i was there was January 2001.

Oh, i have a new

Oh, i have a new addiction: read about The Game Neverending at caterina's blog the other day and signed up to be a tester. Oh, boy. I have to say it. It's better than Sim City. There - i said it. It's only in alpha testing, the whole game will be available in 2003, but it's so much fun, i am addicted and i have only been playing for a day. :)

I broke my record: i

I broke my record: i saw 3 movies in the last 8 days. Amazing. Haven't been that much to the cinema in the last year or so ... seriously.

Minority Report - OUCH! It was such a mistake! Up until last Sunday i thought that Hollywood can only once in a lifetime can make as bad a movie as "Contact" was (i saw it on TV once). Well, they proved me wrong. The story was lame, full of the worst movie cliches, pointless and often downright ridiculous (so many and so obviuos plot mistakes in a movie designed to bring in millions of $$$? how deep can they sink in frugality?).

Crush - it's a fun movie to relax to on a Friday afternoon. That's all. Oh, and Andie MacDowell is still gorgeous.

About a Boy - funny, sweet, and a decent *acting* performance by Hugh Grant for a change. I loved it!
The local listings mag reviewer said that the book is actually funnier than the movie, so i bought it right after i saw the movie, and he was right! This is my first time reading a book after i saw the movie made from it, and it's an interesting experience. I am guessing how i would have pictured the characters had i not seen Hugh & Co first.

There are so many powerful

There are so many powerful memories from this day a year ago. I chose one of them to tell here to remember the day and those who died.

A few days or even a week after the attacks i was browsing around the web looking at cat photos - i think i was looking for a certain breed's pictures. And then suddenly, i came to a site, that was taken down by the owner and a message was posted with a photo of two adorable kittens who lived in one of the offices of the WTC and perished in the buildings. That was the second time i cried because of September 11th. The tragedy of these small animals is so horrible in itself, but what really hurts is the knowledge we have. The knowledge that those kittens' death is just a tiny portion of the horrible things that happened.

The current IKEA ad running

The current IKEA ad running on Hungarian tv channels is soooooo cool and adorable! You can see it here.

Through Slate's Cartoonist Index i

Through Slate's Cartoonist Index i came upon this:

So very true.

I wish we had something

I wish we had something like this in Hungary... Vegetarianism is sooooo foregin to most of the society here.

You must have heard about

You must have heard about the floods sweeping across Europe... well, Budapest wasn't spared, but after the great flood of 1873, our great-great-great granddads built tall walls along the danube that withstand a 10 meter flood. The one we had this week was 8.5 meters, and the city didn't have any serious problems, but there were quite a few unusual scenes (and the water level did break all previous records, and outside Budapest the little towns and villages alongside the river are very badly swamped).

Click here for a few photos i took on Saturday and Sunday. {opens in a new window}