Thoughts

Are you subscribed to the right feed for my site?

A lot of my readers are still subscribed to the standard site feed, at

http://www.raoulpop.com/feed/rss2/

but that may become inactive, as I’m making some changes on the server side, so please make sure you’re subscribed to

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Raoul

which will continue to stay the same for the foreseeable future. Check your feed readers and make the change so you can continue to receive updates from me.

By the way, I’d like to apologize for the frequent and recent server outages. I’m looking into what’s causing them. They started happening as soon as I upgraded to WordPress 2.9. I’d hoped they’d go away with 2.9.1, but they’re still here… I made no other changes on the server side before or immediately after the upgrade, so the only thing I can think of is that 2.9.x has some issues. I disabled all but three essential plugins: Akismet, FeedBurner FeedSmith and WordPress.com Stats, and while my server crashes less frequently now, it still does.

It’s the strangest thing though. The server doesn’t run out of memory, my other sites stay up, Apache stays up, mySQL stays up, and yet raoulpop.com goes down. I’ve tried tweaking and re-tweaking Apache2 and PHP5 and mySQL settings to no avail. The only thing I need to do to bring my site up is to reload Apache2, but it is a very annoying thing indeed. If I had to deal with this thing long-term I’d schedule a cron job to restart Apache every once in a while, but I’ve got something in the works that should eliminate the need for that.

If anyone is having this problem and you’ve got it solved, I’d love to hear how you did it.

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Places

Espresso at Pensiunea Stejarul

A few days ago, on Tuesday, we’d woken up early to drive to Cluj, and we were passing a place I’d often wanted to stop at, but never found the time. The place is called Pensiunea Stejarul, and they’re open 24/7. The setting for this restaurant is quite beautiful. It’s high up on the tallest hill outside the city of Tarnaveni, in the middle of an oak forest.

That day, we had the time. It was freezing outside, it was snowing slowly, we were driving slowly, and wanted to stop and take in the scenery for a bit. So we did. I had an espresso, and Ligia had a tea. My N95 refused to focus properly, and all the photos I got were rubbish. This was the best of the lot.

The espresso was almost great. Much better than this one, but not among the best I’ve ever had.

This is what the restaurant looks like from above, courtesy of Google Maps. And this is their exact location.

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Places

Espresso at Hotel As

The photo you see below doesn’t tell the whole story, but I like photographing espresso cups, what can I say…

It was a little past 6 o’clock in the morning this past Thursday, we’d been driving all night, it was snowing and freezing outside, there was black ice on the road, and we needed some warm breakfast. We stopped at a hotel/restaurant called Hotel As, on E60, between the villages of Tureni and Copaceni, north of Turda, in Transilvania, Romania.

We had scrambled eggs, I had the espresso, Ligia had a tea, and we walked around the restaurant looking at the beautiful paintings they had on the walls, depicting quaint medieval streets and buildings. Unfortunately the waiter couldn’t tell me who the artist was, and didn’t have any contact information for him/her. We wanted to buy one of the paintings.

I suppose I need to rate the espresso: it was barely decent — nothing special, but at least it had a modicum of caffeine to keep me awake. Got a screenshot of the hotel from Google Maps below, and this is their exact location. We’ll probably stop there again at some point in the future — if for no other reason than to look at the paintings once more.

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Thoughts

A crash test between a 1959 and a 2009 Chevrolet

In the 50 years since US insurers organized the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, car crashworthiness has improved remarkably.

Demonstrating this was a crash test conducted on Sept. 9 between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu, which you can see in the video embedded below.

In a real-world collision similar to this test, occupants of the new model would fare much better than in the vintage Chevy, which was surprising to me. I wash shocked to see that supposedly rock-solid car literally come apart at the seams, explosively, as if it were built of plastic. The crash test was conducted at an event to celebrate the contributions of auto insurers to highway safety progress over 50 years.

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Thoughts

Cine este fericit?

Cheia este sa decidem sa fim fericiti in ciuda problemelor din viata noastra. Vedeti slideshow-ul (PPS) atasat aici.

CINE_ESTE_FERICIT.pps

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