optimiced | en

It was almost winter in the Borissov’s Garden, a few days ago, but today Spring can be felt stronger and stronger in the air and the birds start singing on the trees, thinking of Love…

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! :-)

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:

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…

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?

(more…)

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:-)

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;-)

You asked for it - so here it is! Michel with a twin - again! (See also this post: The Double Michel - inspired by Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir)

The tutorial?

You’ll have to wait a bit more - it’s cooking right now:-)

Everybody is talking about the new Microsoft Windows Vista OS.

Meanwhile, I didn’t write about a lot of interesting things which happened lately - the light show in Sofia on New Year’s Eve, when Bulgaria became officially a member of the European Union; the climb to Vitosha mountain with friends, to Cherni Vryh (2290 m), a few weeks ago - January 13th, to be precise (and the unpublished photos from this climb, too); the concert of the Dublin City Workingman’s Band in Sofia (on January 26th, in NDK, Hall #2); and I didn’t even write a post, explaining what is the real Yahoo! logo, and what is the one that I have drawn myself.

Shame on me!:-)

Instead of writing, I was ill for some time, because a nasty flu coming from France (or so they said) caught me; and I was working, working a lot. This is what happened and I hope that I’ll have again some time to update my blog; meanwhile, let’s return to the subject of this post:

Windows Vista or MacOS X? I don’t know, frankly.

But here’s a nice picture on the subject (click to enlarge):

:-)

PS Some say The WOW starts now! and some say that it already started; for my part, I don’t believe something so revolutionary happened; time will show:)

I am not sure why, but here am I, signing up for a Technorati account:)

Technorati Profile

:-)

Note: I guess, it’s because the link to Technorati was within WordPress ;-)