I visited this time more remote locations. I felt like going back in past when I lived as a child in a small town in Romania. Only that it was much crowded. I traveled from airport about 70km to my destination and it was all the way an inhabited terrain. Only later, when we went on the mountains, I have seen less population.

I was very impressed with the status of cultivated fields. Any parcel worthy for cultivation was filled with crops. Except river banks where vegetation was wilde and mountain forests themselves, I could not see any unattended land. It made me feel a bit sick as I realized how much desolation is in landscapes back home. I did not carried a camera this time due to some wrong assumptions, but I promise to come back with photos after a future visit.

People were very friendly and many mentioned they heard before about Romania (Luomania as chinese say). I was very impressed and though it will be very difficult to return the honor they did to us in full.

Monday, August 20, 2007 4:46:38 AM (GTB Daylight Time, UTC+03:00)    Comments [0] 

Learning Chinese language seems not to be very difficult. But what one can do beside going to a Chinese class at home or even in China? Here is some of my experience so far BUT please keep in mind that I did not learn the language yet, only got a very good information about what I SHOULD do!

One thing is to get some Chinese language guides, materials and tools. I have, up to this moment, the following items:

- Rosetta Stone Mandarin Chinese Level 1 and 2 - it is PC/Mac based software that uses the "immersion" techniques toward comprehension and understanding the language. It is very good for learning Chinese at young ages.

- Fluenz Mandarin 1+2 DVD+CD is also a computer tool (you have to choose between Mac and PC) that uses innovative techniques to teach Chinese language for adults. It covers spoken Chinese and pinyin writing and is aimed to reach fluency in speaking Mandarin. Personally I think it is a great tool for myself.

- Sinolingua manuals published in China for English speakers. This is a written course that is very interesting and proposes a very clever approach of getting into Chinese language. It has some audio casettes as well but I was unable to find them so far. It is spitted in 3 parts that should be followed in this order:

1. Intensive Spoken Chinese is dealing with building a Chinese vocabulary of about 1000 words
2. The Most Common Chinese Radicals starts plunging into Chinese characters in a very smart way
3. Rapid Literacy in Chinese is to be taken after completing first two stages and maybe in parallel to following an instructor led class of Chinese.

- Finally for taking an instructor led class in Chinese I would opt going to China for 1 month. There are special universities that sell short packages of intensive language learning. Just Google on "learn Chinese in china" and you will find many opportunities for any budget. As I decided to do a self paced study in the first place then go to China for a class, I cannot tell who I consider best at this moment. Anyway I will follow-up on this entry at the right moment.

Therefore for the time being I will combine Fluenz + Sinolingua book 1 to get up with a vocabulary and a way to create sentences with it. Then I will study the around 100 radicals (it seems fascinating after a first glance on the Sinolingua book 2). At the end I will combine Sinolingua book 3 and a Chinese language class somewhere in China.

Last but not least, the online resources might help very well. I am glad to use http://www.chinese-tools.com as a helper to my studies.

Making Chinese friends works and helps at any moment. It is a great way to plunge into a new language as well!

Sunday, August 12, 2007 11:40:52 PM (GTB Daylight Time, UTC+03:00)    Comments [0] 

I come to a stage in house building where I intend to design and add some automation around the house. I've come searching many different solutions and seen that very few reliable solutions are available. A home automation can rely either on special data bus or PLC (power line communication) or even on both. Of course, one must search for simplicity in every aspect of life, therefore here PLC should be the winner...

For starter, X10 technology pops-up from any web search. The upside is that one can use power cabling to send commands to devices and there is no need for special cabling or routing. There is a filter to be installed at the power entrance so to reject any X10 command from or to outside the house and from here you can use any kind of device like bulb adapter, socket adapter or switch adapter to regulate light, appliances, etc. Moreover, there are security systems, doors, garage doors, blinders etc that can communicate over X10. The solution is appealing also for low cost involved over great flexibility. Intelligent devices can even run scripts. Also a wireless adapter can be used to collect commands from wireless remote controls.

The downside of X10 is it's communication protocol that does not exceed 50bps and often is not reliable, generating such problems as lag times, missed commands, etc. For more info look at http://www.x10europe.com.

I also found a local company building devices for home automation but they lack 2 things: the design of the products is not eye catching at all and they require a 4 wire phone cable to be deployed along the electrical circuits. Check them at http://www.ibs.ro

While searching more I could find better automation solutions such as KNX (http://www.knx.org/) standard that is based on use of actuators. Now the installation of this kind of home automation is more professional as all executing devices (actuators) reside in the power panel and it is more easy to connect all with a single bus that can reach higer speeds such as 9600bps. The catch is that one needs to do separate cabling for every circuit likely to be an automation candidate. So if you have more than one lighting system in a room, you need to design and execute separate cabling from power panel to that room. Therefore simplicity is lost and costs are boosted even more. You can really think this would be a solution only for new houses not for old ones. Even me, as I am building a new house, I am not convinced to redo the cabling system based mainly on 2 reasons: first the team of electricians installing the cabling will not understand what to do and second, I am not able to make a design to such an system by myself and there is no company or provider here to help me in a professional way.

Another solution is based on a standard named Lonworks (http://www.echelon.com/solutions/home/default.htm) and I found a solution provider near me able to assist. It supports communication over power line as X10 does (and KNX to be fair) but looks for me this is a better standard for what I am looking for. I will submit more comments after I meet this company and reach a decision.

Sunday, August 12, 2007 10:04:29 PM (GTB Daylight Time, UTC+03:00)    Comments [0] 

I got my first Garmin GPS that is not a map navigator in any way but a bicycle computer. It is an EDGE 305 model and has a cadence sensor (mounted on bike) to tell how fast you spin the pedal and a heart monitor to check and record the heart beat rate. See https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=160&pID=331 for more info.

Unlike normal bike computers, this one asks to input user profile, bike weight, tire perimeter lenght and calculates all aspects of your workout as a premium fitness equipment should do.

The package comes with software tools to record and analyze your workouts. This software works well if you buy also a map of the region you are cycling. It can be aquired also from Garmin, or - for Romania - from http://www.romaniadigitala.ro you can buy the R.O.A.D.2006 map.

Also a more performant analisys can be made with another software tool from Cycling Peaks - see http://www.cycligpeaks.com

Saturday, June 16, 2007 7:06:31 PM (GTB Daylight Time, UTC+03:00)    Comments [0] 

Travelling in China is very interesting. I only was to Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau so far. At Guangzhou you get the sensation of early 1990s when Bucharest was still a poor city, however the chinese government invested wisely in very good infrastructure. Driving is very crowded, poeple in Bucharest must not complain if they can experience this one. However in Guangzhou there are many expressways built suspended on top of old roads that carry out the tranzit traffic. City center is very cosmopolite with fancy and quite expensive restaurants. We liked an italian one, Antipasto. Here there is a picture of me with the Antipasto manager, Lily.

Hong Kong looks very much like London, only they have a strong taste for vertical development. Indeed is a good location for electronics shopping, prices are nearly half of those in Europe. 

Macau is the Asia's Las Vegas, in a very real competition for world's gambling capital fame. Even if we won some money at the casino we spent them all at bar and we got even with the resort... 

I spent only few days there, I will add more after the next visit.

Next time we will visit some more remote locations, I am very curious about villages that I learned to have more inhabitants than Bucharest, our capital city...

Thursday, May 31, 2007 10:38:07 PM (GTB Daylight Time, UTC+03:00)    Comments [0] 

I am currently building a family house in Otopeni, near Bucharest, actually very close to main Romanian airports. Anyway, it is not so close that the construction will ever be endangered by planes or airport extension plans.

The place is quiet and currently at edge of Otopeni city.

The construction started in September 2006, however we faced big problem with the construction company that delayed a lot of work due to another interest they had on a separate construction project. In fact they worked for real only 3-4 months out of 9!

In the following picture there is the current stage of the construction:

Interesting enough for people preoccupied with Feng Shui analysis, the house has a facing direction of 61° Northeast (Yin). Below is the Flying Star Chart for the house:

As you can see there is a very nice symmetry (same groups of numbers appear in an orderly fashion). Below is the Flying Star Chart applied to the both floors:

 and

The best qi comes from SW sector, right through the back door which has to be maximized in terms of open surface. Also a fountain should be placed in the backyard as well as inside at the first floor. Some trees should be placed in same area to calm down the wind and back doors and windows should be left open as long as possible. Now this is the Feng Shui recommendation, I must see what security can be applied to accommodate it.

As a result of the house architecture, it has beneficial effects on inhabitants for the next 57 years to come, having in mind that the main entrance should be switched to another door after first 37 years.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007 9:36:17 PM (GTB Daylight Time, UTC+03:00)    Comments [0] 

On May 1st I had a day of biking at mountains. The scenery is great and the air is just fit for a good biking.

We left from Cheile Butii pension and we had three portions of road: stone road for 700m, asphalt for 7km and again stone road for the rest of the trip. Below is a map of the route.

And next is a picture of the vertical profile of the route.

Therefore you can see a very good route for refitting yourself - after some 20 minutes of going down and a good warming climbing the mountain was quite extorting. However the best scenery just came with the lake and the middle of the trip was extremely nice.

Returning home put some constant effort into the legs so the rest of the day was dedicated for a good relaxation.

Some photos with the scenery will follow in the next post.

Thursday, May 10, 2007 4:28:03 AM (GTB Daylight Time, UTC+03:00)    Comments [0] 

Building www.vencu.ro was quite easy and enjoying experience.

I have an account with www.shanje.net for my business and I still can create 70 websites with no additional payment as far as disk space and monthly bandwidth is conserved.

Therefore the idea of vencu.ro family website. The hosting company supports ASP.NET 1.1 or 2.0 that is already familiar to me. However on the Internet one may find very good tools for free to fit such a need as mine: a website with simple CMS and a blog application. Based on recommendation from my friend and future neighbor Aurelian I discovered the 2 packages:

1. My Web Pages Starter Kit from http://www.codeplex.com/MyWebPagesStarterKit based on ASP.NET 2.0 used to build www.vencu.ro
2. dasBlog from www.dasblog.info based on ASP.NET 1.1 used to build the blog sites richardblog.vencu.ro and danblog.vencu.ro

Both kits reverted the usage of SQL server toward file system and XML structures which simplified a lot the setup. The blog application exposes RSS feeds that can be easily consumed by the main website via custom made .NET 2.0 user control.

The quality of the kits is great and the price is a very attractive zero. Learning how to deal with the applications and build the present state (12 pages and 2 blogs) took only 5 hours and main delay was caused by ftp upload speed. Finding a FTP client was included in the 5 hours and I ended-up with FileZilla, a free FTP community project at http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/. It has it's little problems with FTP site content cache but one can do it's job quite easily.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007 12:25:19 AM (GTB Daylight Time, UTC+03:00)    Comments [0]