I got a break in my blog yesterday (changing my Scorpions on Poland ! entry into a list of penis enlargment, viagra etc. links). I think it was a SQL Injection attack done by a robot.
Tip od the day: update your wordpress when the new version comes out.
Thanks to Paweł for spoting it !
UPDATE: Thanks to General Electric I know that this weird fella is a Pseudoscorpion or polish Zaleszczotek. Heh! They happen to be useful because they eat pests. Good I didn’t kill it.
Some time ago we had windows (part of the building, not OS) changed in our flat. It was damn cold, so we spent whole day closed in bathroom.
After some time this strange little fellow walked around our wall…
And a movie with this thing walking and waving his tongs !
ANYONE has any idea what the heck is that ?!
NOTE: This post has a movie inside and from now on feed with entries should be recognized as a podcast. Do not hesitate to add it to your iTunes.
Finally our team managed to meet. And I’m not talking about meeting on AIM, only-for-oldies IRC or anything virtual. We realized that we’re made of flesh, bones, blood and all those things that a human is made of.
For me it was also first time to meet our not-so-new boss, Bob. He turned out to be a huge, huge guy. Like two meters or so… hard to tell from AIM usually :-). We had a really good time, lots of laughing, Adam playing with *things* in restaurants, James talking with his nice texan accent, Przemek not talking at all, Rysiek trying to fix some weird JSF stuff, Paweł being a bit to serious and Rebeca (Bob’s wife) trying to tidy this crazy bunch of geeks up.
We looked like tourists sometimes…
There was also Mark Newton, but had to leave ( 
) soon and I haven’t even got a chance to shoot him with my camera.
From JBoss side I met few new guys (Emmanuel, Thomas Heute, Stefan Trojanowski who turned out not to be Polish, but Macedonian - yes - they end with -ski as well and Sasha Labourney) and got a chance to talk with well-known Julien about food, especially foix gras, and joke about .ORG <-> Portal stuff as always :-).
Antwerp itself was something between Kraków and not-so-big-and-very-ugly medium town in Poland - old town with outstanding Cathedral is very very nice. Outside full of blocks of flats in it’s ugliest way. Just look at those:
It’s not what i expect from Western Europe :). Anyway. The funniest part was when we decided to visit some crazy metal café. There was a huge skeleton hanging, music I don’t usually listen too played, anorectic black, pierced waitress etc. Bob started turning into a vampire…
So James invented clever Plan B - In Case Of Vampires . We had a really good laugh there :-). Some of us survived.
Work-wise we made a huge improvement so in all fields the trip was a success.
Oh - and this happened when we tried to buy tickets in Brussels 
After almost 2 years of working at JBoss (a division of Red Hat 
) i have few thoughts I’d like to share.
First of all having nice job, especially such nice as JBoss, is very important. And very nice. It’s both money and doing what I like. I wish everyone such a position in life
There is tho a little but. Those are 2 years of a hard work. Combined with studies, now with working on my MSc, it’s something that really makes you exhausted. And not having 3 months of vacations like I used to doesn’t help :).
The thing is… suddenly (yesterday) something hit me. I’m not so excited about Computer Science like I used to. I mean… I have SJCP, i went for JBoss Advanced training. I use Java every day. I get exceptions but almost always I know why. I solve same problems every day (mostly making Labs work with newer version of JBoss Portal ). It’s not the same feeling I had when i was in secondary school. Those times I would write completely unneeded stuff just for fun. And it was fun fun.
So what did i do ? I decided to write plugin for Beagle to index messages of Kadu. Beagle is indexing system (something like Google Desktop, but deaply integrated with Linux environment), Kadu is the best Linux Gadu-Gadu client (polish IM system). Believe me how was i surprised when i found out that Beagle is written in Mono (.NET for Linux). OH YEAH ! Finally i found mountain to climb. C# i hardly know, founding out history structure for Kadu (guessing to add three zeros for “Received” and “Sent” time). I felt great. Again The Feeling I forgot. Plugin still doesn’t work, but who cares !
So the conclusion is… in my opinion there is no chance to be a good computer scientist if you don’t have this passion. You have to forget about the labor you do every day. Make yourself a little vacation. Just one day. Write something for fun. Discover some silly computer language out there. Do it for yourself :). This wont make you good engineer as is, but without it there’s no chance.
And finally to stop the boredom. What is marriage ? I have to pictures:
Just after married:
Month later:
Stupid legislation. And i mean it. Totally ridiculous.
Here’s the link
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070301/tv_nm/newyork_word_dc_3
And short explanation: New York city council banned use of the N-word. They say it ain’t good to use it in songs, stand up comedies, write it on walls, in your scrapbooks, ask whats up nigga etc etc etc.
Two things:
1) USA claims itself to be the most freedom-of-speech country in the world.
2) What is even better they just banned it. Yes. That’s it. No more acts. No penalties. Nothing.
And that’s where we, polish, have something in common with them. We also like creating laws, that have no administrative acts (one of the many examples is Act of Profession of Psychologists - it just exists, but without anything that would drive it). I mean - guys - we are Tiger of Europe and stuff, but give me a break ;-).
So what is racism ? Is banning any using of anything going to help ? I don’t think so. People will just laugh. At least I will.
What does it mean ? That every country is just the same. Every bunch of idiots, that rule it, just create some irrational legislation. It doesn’t matter if you’re a continent-wide country as USA or small one like Poland :-). And that’s nice.
One told me once that his relationship is equal. He take turns with his wife about everything - me cook, you cook, me clean, you clean, me do the dishes, you do the dishes, me give you money to spend, you take my money and spend, me asks bank for bigger credit on VISA, you use this credit and so on and so on.
We, at that time, had an argue that relationship doesn’t have to be equal by dividing everything into two. I told him you can have your role assigned to number of things and your wife can have a role assigned to number of things. They don’t have to interfere… we didn’t get to any point. Magda was still oppressed. I ate that frog… then we have nice laugh with my wife about this… anyway. One of the things i do at home is cooking. This probably makes me look little bit gay (happy) but I’m not very macho-type (gosh… this even made me laugh now thinking about myself describing this way ).
I’d like to give you a nice recipe that i used last time we threw a dinner for our parents :). The dish is Beef Roulades Polish Way in Wholemeal Bread. It’s something *very* easy and quite impressive looking. That’s something you could call Polish Cuisine (which is not really clear. It’s not like Italian where you can name pasta right away…).
Beef Roulades Polish Way in Wholemeal Bread
Ingredients: 1/2 kg (~ 1 pound) of boneless beef, salt, pepper, 1 dry roll (bun), 1/2 glass of milk, 1 tablespoon of butter or margarine, 1 onion, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon of flour, 2 tablespoons of oil or margarine, 1 small glass of broth, 3 dried mushrooms, 1 medium size wholemeal bread (square or rectangular).
Wash the meat and dry it, remove skirts and cut to 4 slices. Every slice club(i have no idea if this is the right word - probably not) lightly, cover it with salt and pepper on each side. Drench the roll in milk, crush the milk and mop it up with butter or margarine. Peel the onion, carve it and add it to roll with butter. Wash and brew the egg for few seconds. Put the egg into roll with butter and onion, add salt an pepper to make it tasty. Cover every beef slice with prepared mass, roll it and clip it with toothpick or white cotton filament. Cover every roulade with flour and fry it on hot oil for few minutes on every side. Pour broth, add washed, drenched for 20 minutes and carved mushrooms. Stew the meet for about an hour until it gets soft. Cut wholemeal bread on 3/4 of it’s height, put out the crumb, making kind of baking tin with walls being around 1 1/2cm (0.6 inch )thick. Put roulades inside the bread and pour sauce. Cover it with bread lid and put into oven at 220*C (430*F) for 30 minutes. After baking put it on platter. Cut just before serving. Serve with season salad. Bon apetit !
Of course nobody did a picture of it so unfortunately no pics today. Maybe I’ll do one other day.
Side note: Writing this recipe showed me how my English vocabulary sux in kitchen. If you’re native and reading it - you’re probably laughing your ass off. Well… i guess kitchen is one of this place where languages hardly interfere ;-).
I was accused yesterday for being too politically correct.
I thought about it - and YES. I am.
Few days ago National Health Service in Scotland have sent this “Fair For All - The Wider Challenge” paper to every hospital in Scotland stating that nurses and other health care professionals should avoid using words “Mum” and “Dad” as they are too “homophobic”. Right word for describing them now are ‘governor’, ‘parent’ or ‘carer’. Also they should post posters in hospitals that would stop this ridiculous model of Male+Female+Kids family. Unfortunately my guardians are both heterosexuals so I had worse start and I’m really ashamed of that. As recompense I’m calling my wife “Madzik” for a long time… and it’s masculine. Thanks God !
To go further I asked my wife to change our relationship to a nice triangle to make it at least half-homosexual, but she wouldn’t allow me :-(. She’s so homophobic !
As an addition perfect family poster (It’s licensed LGPL so you can use it in Your hospital now !)
Some links:
We had this party… theme was “literature characters”. Surprisingly almost everyone dressed up.
Here’s the Dream Team
I’m Jankiel, Adam is Braveheart and Jacek is Last Samurai (?). Yeah… we look ridiculous. But it was fun !
Anyway… there’s something to say about Poles… lately there’s this big scandal about antisemitism in Maciej Giertych’s brochure. He wrote something about Jews asking themselves for holocaust by making Ghettos and such crap. Yeah - he’s a moron.
But what is important there’s still something wrong about Polish thinking about Jews - even among my closest friends. The thing was - under my hat i had Kippah. What’s a big deal ? Almost *everyone* asked me “where did you get it ? Your inlaw ? Where did he get it from ?”. But this wasn’t just a question. This was kind of question with this big fear to hear too much. Or to know too much about my family. It’s sick.
Shalom guys !
Hello guys,
This is my first blog post. Yeah… finally managed to create one. And it’s on Ash Wednesday :).
That also means the end of carnival. I’ll show you some pics soon.
Cheerio guys,
Tomek
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