Video Log

A few pointers on men’s personal hygiene

Video

I held off on making this video for some time, because I’m not comfortable talking about these things in public (in private is another matter — I love to laugh at a good potty joke among friends), but I keep seeing (or rather smelling) people whose body odor and lack of bathroom etiquette leaves a lot to be desired, so I had to get these things off my chest. 

Feel free to send this post to anyone whom you think might need to “get the message”. You can watch it on my YouTube channel or below.

It’s become somewhat of a yearly tradition for me to share photos of our garden with you. Here then is this year’s selection of spring photos. I hope the flowers bring as much joy to you as they do to me.

I feel blessed every time I take a walk through the garden. I particularly like to walk through it in the evenings, because it helps me unwind from our typically busy days. It’s our little corner of heaven. It requires upkeep, to be sure, but the payoff is grand.

This spring not many flowers escaped our little Sophie’s eager hands. Her passion is to collect daily bouquets of assorted flowers of all sorts of shapes and colors, and that means most of the flowers are to be found on her playtable inside the house, not in the garden, at least this year. We’ll see how we fare during the next seasons.

Places

Springtime in our garden

Gallery

We visited Timisoara for business recently. I took my camera along and we set a bit of time aside to walk through the historic district and take photographs.

It was a sunny, breezy Saturday afternoon and lots of people were out and about, enjoying the beautiful weather and the youthful, cheery atmosphere of the city.

There are also a couple of shots of the streets at night in here, taken from our hotel’s balcony.

Places

Photos from Timisoara’s historic district

Gallery
Thoughts

Electricity in Romania

Here’s what I keep saying to every friend and acquaintance who visits my house: you definitely need a voltage stabilizer if you live in Romania.

voltage-stabilizer

Around midnight last night the current started fluctuating wildly. Our UPS units were going crazy, clicking and kicking on and off, trying to contain the power fluctuations and cutoffs. After quickly shutting off all important equipment in the office, I went to see the voltage stabilizer down in the basement. It was going nuts as well trying to keep the current to our house stable, its arms moving quickly back and forth across the copper coils, barely containing the madness. I shut off all current to the house, fearing the stabilizer would burn out.

As I write this, it’s past noon (the following day) and the current still isn’t back on. Oh, it’s been back on and off sporadically, but nothing reliable to speak of. And I found out from one of our neighbors that the scrambling and bungling Electrica (that’s the power company) employees reversed the polarity on one of the phases in the neighborhood, which means they potentially burned out some people’s electrical appliances. As a matter of fact, another neighbor said his heating furnace shorted out and almost caught fire from all the electricity problems during the night.

This is part of the price one pays for living in Romania. It’s a beautiful country, but as they say, caveat emptor.

You may recall unreliable electrical power was partly to blame for a massive data loss that occurred to me a few years ago, before I replaced all wiring and fuses in the house and added the voltage stabilizer. The Drobo units I was using then simply didn’t have the capability to keep the data uncorrupted when experiencing multiple power failures within a short amount of time. They’d simply lose track of some bits, and then the corruption would spread across the drives, eating more and more data, to the point where the Drobo would cease to mount. Nowadays, Drobos come with built-in batteries that allow them to safely complete data operations and shut off in case of a power failure, and they also have some algorithms in place to ensure that data corruption is kept at bay, but it’s hard to trust a device meant to keep your data safe once it’s lost about 20% of your most treasured data, isn’t it?

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A Guide To A Good Life

The case for cursive handwriting

Video

I’ve been meaning to do a video about cursive handwriting for a while, and I’ve also been asked by a few of my viewers on YouTube to do it.

Before you watch the video, I want you to know some of the benefits of handwriting:

  • It works the brain in ways that typing cannot achieve. Every little movement of the fingers and the pen as they form letters on the paper requires many neurons to fire, whereas typing requires much less effort once you learn where the keys are. This article explains it in more detail.
  • You put more emotion, more feeling into handwriting, and this can be seen in the strokes, the thickness of the lines, the size of the letters and so on. When you type, none of that can be seen, unless you say it with words.
  • All of this mental exercise that is required for regular handwriting helps to develop children’s brains and also staves off conditions such as dementia in the elderly.
  • Beautiful handwriting and calligraphy can be admired as art, and they can also be read. A page typed on the computer and printed out is just that: a printed page.
  • Studies suggest that taking notes by hand improves retention of the subject matter.
  • There is a feeling of charm that occurs when one handwrites. I can’t put into words the satisfaction that I get when I put a fountain pen to paper and form beautiful letters. It’s almost hypnotic.

Here’s the video. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it’ll inspire you to write by hand more often!