outside sunday

Claudiu | 29 August 2005 | 82659.73 | | 3 Comentarii 

Today, the NanoMA team organizaed a visit, first to the Turda salt mine. It was a great experience for me, since I never was on a salt mine before. I want to test the theories with ‘different good air’, and it really was a starnge smell in the air. When we got back to the surface, the air from here was hot and dense, compared to the one in the mine.
Then, we all go to the Turda Keys, hicking through the forest. After that, we all have a large and consistent dinner at a nice old-fashioned country restaurant (Leghia). The way back to the hotel was very filled with good mood.

nanoma

Claudiu | 27 August 2005 | 82654.27 | | Comentează 

A week has passed since I’ve attended to NanoMA summer school. So far, so good, some interesting talks, good food at Napoca Hotels. The funniest moment happens yesterday, when a german teacher started to snored during a talk. We all have a good laugh. During these days, I’ve distributed Ubuntu CDs to the participats, and they were happy to receieve them.
I’ve also submitted my files for the master, at the Physics Faculty, for the Computational Physics departament.

post office

Claudiu | 20 August 2005 | 82635.11 | | 1 Comentariu 

I was very excited when I got a ticket from the postal service announcing me that I have a packegae from Holland. It could only be Ubuntu, so I jumped on my bicycle and ran to the local post office. Here, surprise, I had no packegae, if I want my CD’s, I have to go to Arad, local county main town. How stupid can this be? I received packages from outside the borders before and I could always get them from my local post office. But now I have to go 50 kilometers and modify my departure to Cluj schedule just because the postal workers are to lazy. Stupid stupid stupid system

greenpeace

Claudiu | 18 August 2005 | 82629.65 | | Comentează 

I got no answer from Greenpeace Romania. Meanwhile, the news presented another demonstration of this punks against Cernavoda. At least now I’m sure what they are: a few teenagers with no horizon, trying to make as much noise as possible, for somebody to watch them. They want to be heard, although they have nothing to say. They protest, althought they don’t really care about what are they protesting against. Like Cartman would say: “Damn hippies!”
And I finnaly understand how blogger-via-mails works: last message waits in their mailbox until I send another message, so the last one would not be published until I send another one. I must say, I don’t really understand why it works like this, but at least it works. Hooray.

another hit

Claudiu | 14 August 2005 | 82618.73 | | Comentează 

Damn my tiny small harddisk! I was forced once again to remove my Linux instalation, due to limited size. Tiq brought me tones of music, plus a Nightwish concert, so I was forced to make room… by removing the Linux partition. And I worked so much these days to make me a perfect instalation. I feel so bad.
I havae ound a great site this days, www.iaea.org, take a look, a lot of publication and books freely available. Also, after a long, long time, www.cne.org is online, a very nice website of Cernavoda Nuclear Power Plant.

linux power

Claudiu | 12 August 2005 | 82613.27 | | Comentează 

A few days now, I switched to Linux, again. My favourite distro remains Slackware, although Radu suggested Debian Sarge. Maybe I’ll try it, 2 DVD of binaries and apt-get are two main advanteges, but until then, I’ll stick to good old Slack. Simple, secure, fast, easy to configure. I’ve compiled 2.6.11 kernel and updated KDE to 3.4. For email, I now use KMail, looks more polished than Thunderbird.
Tux Magazine appearedrecently and today I download it. Manga Parfait stop suggesting Suse and Mandrake to new users, finally!
About the trip to seaside, there are three things that impressed me almost to tears: the view of the sea merging with the sky at the horizon; Mark, the dolphin in captivity at Constanta delphinary, and Calandria, the core of a nuclear reactor from Cernavoda Nuclear Power Plant. All this stuff touched me.
A few days ago I saw a news about Greenpeace Romania protesting against Cernavoda running. I don’t understand why. Nuclear energy is safe and clean, opposed to clasic coal one. At Cernavoda you have only 30 cube metres of leftovers per year. There are hundreth of thousands of tones of CO2, SO2 and other garbage that came out of clasic coal power plants, in the open air, un-monitorized. I simply cannot understand… I send them an email, but no one reply for now… I’ll wait…

discovery is safe

Claudiu | 9 August 2005 | 82605.08 | | Comentează 

Discovery landed safely. I must admit, I am anoyed to be so stressed when an orbiter lands. Discovery, after 1 billion dollars spent to fix it, should have a smooth mission, and we should not all stand and keep our fingers crossed and praying.
Well, the good thing about all this is that people all around the globe is wathcing the space programs very intrested now. I think last time when this happens were back in the ’70s. We need all this support, NASA need this to continue the space prgrams, to drag more funds, to fly further and safer. Unlike the US army, NASA deserves much more money.
Fly, don’t fight!

the return

Claudiu | 6 August 2005 | 82596.89 | | Comentează 

Today I’ve returned from the seaside. The way back was very boring, I tried to sleep all the way back, in the train. Little success. Back at home, trying to read my mail, a strange message told me that no valid certificate could be found while connecting to gmail. Also, some strange errors appeared in the system. They I realised that my system date was 6 september 5183. Damn, I just changed my bios battery, could a 1 week pause create such an effect?… And during this time, my dad played on my computer… Strange…
I heard about Discovery trying to get also home. Hope they succed, because NASA already canceled all the space flyghts for undetermined time. It’s a shame they couldn’t fix the problem during this last months. My faith in NASA is in constant descent.
Starting from tomorrow, I will prepare a full report about the trip on Cernavoda Nuclear Power Plant (I’m still VERY enthusiastic about this!). If the guys from NPP have nothing to object, this document will be soon available for dowloand in my website. By the way, 60 years ago, a bad, bad thing happen. This times makes me ashamed for being a physicist.
I’ve just discover Google Earth. Still, I cannot see any difference between this soft and NASA World Wind, I think they are using the same image servers. I don’t know why, but my version of NASA WW doesn’t work any more, so I’m stick with Google new soft. Today I tried Google Video Player, but I cannot make it run.