Veni | Вени

I can highly recommend to go and watch “Pan’s Labyrinth“. It’s a great movie (and rightfully was awarded some of the Oscars this year).
But here’s a warning – if you are not in a good mood, don’t go there. And if you are in a good move, be prepared to come out of the theater with lots of sadness in your heart; that is, of course, if you have a heart.
It’s a great, sad, tragic movie. It’s definitely worth seeing.

If you are in the USA, and if you are interested in investing in new markets, with high revenues, you should come to the Investment Opportunities in Bulgaria forum.

The keynote address will be given by Rumen Ovcharov – minister of economy and energy, and member of the Internet Society.

Bulgarian Ambassador to the USA Elena Poptodorova will open the confernece.

It will take place at the Metropolitan Club, 1 East 60th Street New York, NY 10022, from 10 a.m. till 2.30 p.m.

The evening before, March 8th, there will be a meeting at 7.30 p.m. with the Bulgarian community at the Consulate General of Bulgaria in New York (121 East 62nd street).

Remember the movie “Snakes on the Plane”?
Well, see for yourself the movie “Rats in the Restaurant”. That’s at a local KFC/Taco Bell in New York’s Greenwich Village. Shame, shame on them! (note: if you don’t like rats, you’d better not watch that movie!)

But the impudence which the rats show worldwide makes me just wonder – why not just take care of them with more cats? Or with some programs for making them sterile? With so many

You can read more about the case at WCBS-TV.

Last year, around Easter, I went to the Grand Canyon – my first ever visit to this wonderful place. We went down about 2 km. This was not a problem, although the view is somewhat scary, regardless of the fact that the road is built in the rocks, and is supposed to be safe. However, on the way up I felt awful. I was breathing heavily, and had to stop every once in a while. The reason? I was too heavy. Long were gone the days when I was hiking on the Vitosha mountain by Sofia.
Read more…

If you are interested in what ICANN does, you will find different interesting articles at the official ICANN Blog.

Illa writes about the fact that there’s no St. Valentine on February 14th. There has been such a saint until 1969, but the Catholic church has decided there’s not enough evidence the saint really existed.

That brought me to the thought about other holidays, created in the US, mainly. There’s a Mother’s day, a Father’s day, and many others days (see for example St. Patrick’s day). In my youth, in Bulgaria we celebrated 8th of March as the International Women’s Day, and June 1st as the Children’s Day.

I believe that some of those holidays are being explored by the card- and envelope-producing companies to make tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. People love showing attention. Even more – people love being shown attention. Therefore you can enter any farmacie in the US, and you will find a section of pre-arranged post cards for different occasions – birthdays, Mom’s and Dad’s days, just saying “thank you”, etc., etc. See Hallmark’s site for more…

What the cards do, is that they prevent people from thinking. Instead of making their own wish, people buy cards with wishes, created by the marketing departments of the big card-making companies. And the addressee feels obliged to respond with another card. Thus makes also the US postal service stay in business.

So, it all comes to the numbers, at the end of the day.

Happy St. Valentine!

Is it by chance that the letter “L” is missing from Google’s logo (or it’s because “Love” starts with it???)

click on the picture to see the full size:

On a second reading, may be the strawberry represents a very stylish “L”?

(Valeri wrote about the Bulgarian Google, I guess they take the same logo everywhere)

I’ve been using Cingular for about two years, and I have some observations about this GSM (cellular, as they call it in the US) company.

It’s a very good company. It improves constantly its coverage.

What I like most is the fact that it has great customer support. I don’t know how they pick their employees, but I know why they are so good. It all comes with the management. I have been in touch with several people from the executive management, and each and every of them has proven to be a real professional. I must note that Larry Carter – Senior Vice President – Sales Operation, has been among the most impressive and responsive executives I know. He is running his duties at perfection, not usual at other [such] big companies. Nathaniel Brown is also quite an impressive and efficient person at Cingular.

I am quite happy with the new phone from Cingular I’ve been using in the last couple of months.

It’s a Cingular 8525 (an HTC branded phone). It has everything a phone must have – camera, 54 Mbps wi-fi Internet access (that is, you can use it for free at publich hot-spot locations). Here’s some techical specs:

* Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE for global use (you can use it worldwide, in any country); Tri-band UMTS/HSDPA;
* 128MB ROM / 64MB SDRAM
* Samsung 400MHz Processor
* Sliding QWERTY keyboard
* 2.8″ QVGA 320×240 64K Color LCD Touch Screen
* Push to Talk capable*
* Bluetooth v2.0
* Integrated WiFi (802.11b/g)
* Micro SD expansion slot for greater storage and expansion
* 2.0 mega-pixel camera with built-in flash and video capability

It has a sliding keyboard, so you can use to write memos, notes, tasks, send text messages (SMS), etc. Here’s a tip: if you are in the USA, send a text message to 46645 (GOOGL), and ask whatever you want – you will get a message with all the information you need. You can ask 46645 for anything, from movies and times, to weather, food, etc. Basically you can ask that service almost whatever you can ask Google itself.

So, thank you, Cingular, and thank you Mr. Carter for all you are doing. Please, keep up the good work now that you are at&t.