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.
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.
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?
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:
Here’s the video. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it’ll inspire you to write by hand more often!
Join me on Instagram, won’t you?
Join me on Instagram, won’t you?
If you’re subscribed to my website, you know that you’ll get an email from me whenever I post something new. I know many of you wish I’d post more often, and for those of you that want that, I’d like to introduce you to my Facebook and Instagram pages. I’m quite active on Facebook; I post several times a day to my Facebook page. I’ve just started using Instagram regularly and I post once or twice per day to my Instagram profile.
I post a lot of photographs of homes and gardens, of interior design and I talk about various style issues that pertain to my Elegant Gentleman series of videos and articles. I’m particularly proud of my collection of curated albums of exterior and interior design. It’s definitely worth your while.
So, if you’ve been wanting to see more content from me, please join me on Facebook and/or Instagram! See you there!
Raoul Pop 