LexArrow - it’s in your mind…

NY Times columnist David Pogue checks out the iPhone in a funny but realistic manner. Conclusions? It can be a great phone…or not…

Here’s the link

Rumors:
1. The iPhone carrier for Europe would be Vodafone
2. It will be commercialized in Europe beginning the 4th quarter of 2007 and will be available for 3G technology in 2008

After a bunch of movies of 2007 that were so bad I don’t even remember the names (except Epic Movie, the dumbest of all, too bad i didn’t check IMDB before seeing it), I was craving for a good movie and I somehow got my hands on Hearts in Atlantis. It didn’t disappoint me. It’s a story about a photographer who goes back in his home town to his friend’s funeral and starts remembering his childhood. The world spins around a strange character played by Anthony Hopkins. It has a little bit of everything and I’m not going to tell you the whole movie. I loved it and if you didn’t see it, you should.

I’ve been watching TED for quite awhile now and I can say it’s a valuable, unconventional, top notch knowledge tool.

All eyes are glued on Asia at the moment, so it’s time to go to the next wave: Africa

Below you have a video with the former minister of finance of Nigeria talking about big bucks in a “poor region”

This all started on March 18 when I gracefully closed the laptop lid with the headphones inside and cracked the display. I contacted HP and they sent me an endless list of repair centers (after a little research I found out 70% of them were repairing printers…). Finally, I go to a suitable technical center where I found out HP doesn’t offer support for my type of laptop in Romania or in Eastern Europe for that matter, simply because they don’t sell it in this region.

I got over this and tried to buy it from Germany through a friend , but surprise…they didn’t accept Romanian credit cards.

So I turned to eBay…found what I was looking for…but surprise…when I clicked to buy, it showed me I bought another kind of monitor. So I call the US company and they say it’s no problem because eBay often screws up and they will send me what I need.

Now it’s time to pay up. I thought I would have no problem using my new PayPal account, but surprise… in order to have no credit limit you must be a verified user. That means they bill me 1.5 euros and they give me a code, written on the card statement. According to PayPal this operation would take 3-4 working days. After 6 days I finally see the code type it in and…surprise…it didn’t work. So I call PayPal and after insinuating I can’t read numbers, they tell me the verification process can be done manually after I fax them a bunch of stuff and they will take care of it in 10 business days. With really no hope of getting an answer, I call my bank to check for the code and…surprise…they give me another code, which more surprisingly…WORKED!

I pay, the package leaves Newark,NJ,US on June 7 through FedEx and gets to Bucharest, RO on June 12 but I couldn’t have it then because they had to pass it through customs and I had to pay for the customs tax. So I took the package today and got home….

After unscrewing approximately 30 screws I get to “the core of the problem”, put in the new monitor and…surprise…it didn’t work…Now my face turns red, green, yellow, blue…a real rainbow. I try again and again until…(yes you are right)surprise…IT WORKED! (You can see pictures of the “process” below)

I would like to thank Bliss for being flexible in order to solve my problem. As for BCR, PayPal, eBay or even HP I don’t know which one holds more guilt. In the end, I was the idiot who broke the damn’ thing!

So my advice to you is to be careful with your things.If you still damage something, just be patient and think for solutions. In the end it will all be solved and nothing will surprise you anymore.

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Chris Messina a formerly at SpreadFirefox.com posted a video addressed to the mozilla corp. in which he speaks about the near future of the www. Altough it’s almost an hour long and has a lot of technical terms, it’s worth watching.

Special thanks to Songbird folks

This is an appeal to all Romanians to vote today. It doesn’t matter where you put the stamp, JUST VOTE!

Bellow is a video banned by the National AV Commission (ro) that advertises voting – one more reason to go.

Further details here

Have you ever had that feeling you can always do better but you settle for less? Well, I do. I thought I grew out of it and I did… for the development stage I was in. Now I’m into “another level” (or at least that’s how I feel) and I’m struggling with my old habits, but on a whole new dimension. Isn’t it strange how the same mistakes keep chasing you around in life? My point in all this is a chain of causality: if you start feeling comfortable with yourself and you don’t want to evolve that will be a waste of potential and in the end you’ll be “punished” one way or another; if you want to evolve, on the way to the next level you will have to deal again with your bad habits/mistakes you thought you got rid of earlier. Guess in the end it’s all about choice…

I know I haven’t shown living signs on the “blogosphere” , but between classes and work I didn’t have time to “add value”. Even if I have a lot of ideas I can’t just throw one in here without more thorough analysis. Moreover, I don’t think anyone would be interested in reading my “theory of the matches” as I don’t think mine would be better or more interesting than other’s. On the other hand, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel…just to look at it from another angle…

Romania’s image is improving slowly but surely from an external point of view. To back this up, The Economist talks highly about Renault’s Logan in its most recent edition and a Romanian has become president of the AIESEC NGO.

Romania, fabulous spirit!

A movie I saw yesterday caught my attention. Altough it was tough to follow as it was speaking about the dimensions of reality and quantum physics, it made me wonder about a lot of things…