General – optimiced

Posted on 7/April/20247/April/2024 by Michel

Your children don’t belong to you…

“Your children don’t belong to you. You’re on borrowed time with them. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a better human being; not to build a mini version of you and all your deflated hopes and dreams. Help them become the best them, not the best you.”

~Source: unknown (although I’ve seen this quote also appear in TinyBuddha, Instagram, and a few other places)

Actually, this quote appears to be a shorter paraphrase of one of Khalil Djubran‘s poems, “On Children”. (Check it out.)

There’s a lot of truth in these words. 💖

Posted on 4/January/20105/January/2010 by Michel

Burj Dubai – 818 m high and ready!

Burj Dubai (or, as how I prefer to call it, the “New Tower of Saruman” ;-) will be officially inaugurated today!

I’ve read the info in Sarthak Singhal‘s blog, who in his free time likes to travel a lot (and in his other time works as Adobe engineer for the Adobe Fireworks amazing graphic design app;-).

(photo of the Burj Dubai tower, a few months before it was finished)

I didn’t even believe that they could finish this gigantic construction (is the world at crisis or?…), but looks like the tower is a fact and is high the amazing 818 metres (2’684 ft)!

The ceremony can be watched live today on www.burjdubai.com, if you’re curious… :)

(UPDATE @ 1010/Jan/01: Tower was renamed at the opening, and its height confirmed to be 828 m!)

Posted on 26/October/2007 by Michel

snafu vs. fubar

What is snafu? This is an acronym for “situation normal, all f***ed up”.

What is fubar? This is an acronym for “f***ed up beyond all recognition”.

Both are military terms. I’ve met them for the first time in this interesting article at CNN.com I’ve dropped at by accident:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/personal/10/22/o.panic.button/index.html

Two short excerpts from it I liked the most:

This is what happens when we hang on to expectations in the face of crisis, and it can turn a snafu into an utterly fubar situation. Working when you’re sick, you end up in the hospital. Rushing tasks after a slowdown, you drop or break or miscalculate something crucial. Pushing yourself beyond emotional limits, you lash out and damage a relationship.

and:

I followed them to downtown Boston, where, switching strategies one last time, I caught the subway home. Staying loose and flexible not only got me through a snafu but proved I could run for six straight hours. After that the marathon was a cakewalk.

It’s worth reading! :-)

Posted on 10/September/2007 by Michel

Mike Davidson switches from Movable Type to WordPress

Yep, that’s right.

That Mike Davidson has recently switched from MT to WP.

I see more and more bloggers switching over to WordPress.

A few years ago Movable Type didn’t have rivals. Now things are changing.

Movable Type was free. Then it became paid, unless you wanted to use a free (partially limited in its use) copy.

Then WordPress appeared on the horizon, it was open source, it was free and it became one of the fastest developing blog platforms on the market.

Now and then, I see people switching over from Movable Type, from Blogger/Blogspot and from other blog engines to WordPress.

Now Movable Type released a brand new free version (4.0), open source, too… will this be enough to keep it on par with growing WordPress?

To be frank, I doubt it…

It’s interesting to see how things change so fast on the Internet. And for now, I am a (still) happy user of WordPress… actually, I use it since the creation of my blog optimiced in January this year:-)

Finally (but don’t take this seriously, please, this is just a joke, and an excuse for me to master a bit more Adobe Fireworks;-), here’s a graphical representation of what happens to Movable Type currently:

Posted on 30/July/2007 by Michel

I don’t have to wear this badge anymore:)

Some may remember when I published a short entry on the possible (and scary) fate of 6 Bulgarian nurses and a doctor, convicted to death penalty by the court in Lybia.

I am happy that they are now back home, in my country, all safe and sound, after more than 8 years spent in a distant prison… Things could go better, things could go worse… “All is well that ends well”, and I think, this is one of those cases:)

I write now quite rarely in the English version (not enough free time), but I hope this will change soon:) Anyway, just wanted to ‘close’ this subject, 7 months after my initial post about it…

Posted on 21/February/200721/February/2007 by Michel

The End of Winter (which never came)

So winter never came to Bulgaria this winter… and now it’s almost gone.

No, the photo above is not mine, and it is not from some park in the city I live in… It’s just a thumbnail of a very nice winter paysage by Joshua Bryant (click thumbnail to see in its original size on Joshua’s flickr account). I almost envy him that he had had such a winter – snow and all…

I look now outside of the window. Everything is bathed in sunlight, it is almost 20 degrees Celsius outside, no snow, no wind, and the trees will start to blossom soon, I guess. Lots of days in January, February, even in December, were like this one. I’m a cyclist and the whole winter I was able to ride without problems, without freezing, without the usual battle with snow and ice on the roads… So I should be happy. Or should I?…

It is strange, not natural, somehow. Usually, during winter in Sofia, there are lots of cold days, with snow, fog, freezing wind, temperatures dropping way below zero degrees C… and now?

Posted on 18/February/2007 by Michel

Comet McNaught says Goodbye

Lately I wanted to say a couple of words about the comet McNaught. What decided me finally was this extraordinary photo, published on the 12th of February on the APOD website (click the thumbnail to see it in its original size). The shot was taken in New Zealand, at the end of January. You can also see part of the Milky Way – our home:)

This comet was called by many “the most photogenic comet of our time” и “the great comet of 2007”, and not without a reason.

Now the comet moves away from the Sun and the Earth, but it still can be seen in the Southern hemisphere. Not a long ago was published a photo in which the tail of the comet stretched on almost the whole Southern sky – its lenghth was 150 million kilometres, or approx. 1 astronomical unit (AU)!

You should also see one incredible montage from 3 photographs of the photographer Antti Kemppainen!

Enough about Space for today… Now I go to the window – it’s true that the comet cannot be seen anymore from our latitude, but I can at least wave to it with my hand, right? :-)

____________
Note: The Astronomy Picture of the Day, supported by NASA, is a very valuable resource – on this website every day is published one photograph or image/illustraion of our Universe, together with a short explanation by a professional astronomer. Some photos, especially those made by the Hubble telescope, littereally can take your breath away with its beauty and depth… and they make you realise, how small we are, people:-) I visit it often – there’s always something to see and discover:-)

Posted on 14/February/200719/February/2007 by Michel · 1 Comment

Happy St. Valentines’s Day… or sort of:)

First, happy St. Valentine’s day to everyone;-)

Sorry for the dark accompanying image, but I couldn’t restrain myself – this artist (a recent discovery of Ani’s, btw) brought me to tears from laughing with his black humour, but maybe my it’s just due to my fatigue (too much work lately), the tries of the French flu to get hold of me a second time this winter, and my slightly dark mood…

We exchanged already a couple of presents with Ani (including a very interesting book by Bernard Werber) and plan to have a great evening, supper and all and pondering upon the meaning of the Universe over a cup of orange juice (the reason being my recent vow for no caffeine/wine/tanine/beer for one week;-)

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Category: General