Horia is a boy name, goddammit!

I know it ends in an ‘a.’ I know I have long blond hair. I know I’m thin. I know I grab guys’ asses a bit too often. I know I can’t grow a damn beard. But before saying ’she’ when you mean me, you could do a little googling, eh? Just to see what kind of a name ‘Horia’ is.

And no, I’m not a she-male!

Here’s to good friends and old habits, to sweat and elbows, and old friends and good manners.

Here’s to new friends, and lips I don’t want to kiss, and easy laughter, pretty smiles and checkered shirts. To dark beer and blond hair, to good coffee and strong wind, to cold showers and warm, long walks.
Here’s to endless talks and strong bitter drinks, to the family you have and to that which you choose; to the younger you and the older counterpart.

Here’s to good music and strong arms on weary legs, to soft hands and rapid blinks. To cheep beer and murky water, and to being alone, and to other things that matter.

Thank you.

I told you about my wet dream about twitter search and geolocaton.

Last week, Google brought onto us a new set of options for the search interface.
You can now filter your results by type (all, video, bla-bla) you can select to view images from found pages or use the wonderful Wonder Wheel.

The thing that gave me an adrenaline rush was the option to filter results by time and time frame. My favorite: ‘recent results!’
It’s like twitter search, only better. Imagine this in sets. Clearly, you can get updates from twitter, but the result set from Google includes that of twitter search(and many more for that matter)

It gets better. You can sort your results by date or by relevance. Read: pure Google power, brought to you in real time!

If you use Opera, this will make sense to you:
You can create a custom search that links directly to the Recent Results section. Just use this as the URL
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=opera&rls=en&tbo=1&tbs=rcnt%3A1&q=%s&btnG=Search
My keyword is ‘now’ but you can use whatever you like.

What I’ve learned from this is that my wet dream might just come true.

Also, someone at Google reads my blog.

Trash is everywhere, right?

One of the many problems that come with living in a city, small or big, is the trash. The bigger the city, the more littering that takes place. Simply living in a more civilized country does not mean that you get less garbage on the streets, or that people don’t flick away stuff they don’t need anymore.

Without meaning to insult any of the leading tourist attractions in Europe, I humbly propose a  new system to take care of the tons of garbage that populate the streets of any metropolis.

Hire more drudges, have more sweepers on the street. Then measure the amount of trash they bring in. It doesn’t matter if it’s dust or tin foil or plastic bags. If it’s on the street and it shouldn’t be, it’s rubbish.

Then, give out bonuses to said workers based on how much trash they bring in. Naturally, there would be a base salary and a minimum quota. But after that, it’s every broom for itself. This would motivate sweepers to be more thorough in their work. And this is just Phase One.

Phase Two is easy, really. Increase the citizen tax to compensate for the huge bonuses you’re giving the cleaners. It will only take a couple of years until people understand that the more they litter, the more they pay. This will encourage the citizens to be more “environmentally aware.” This will also make them hound others that litter, as they’d feel as though they’re picking up the check. City officials would have to make this tax very obvious, have huge notices on the tax forms, and anywhere else that’s relevant to this issue.

Until the people pick up on this, you can use some of the cash flow to install more trash bins around the city. The thing is that you’d need to pay the public garbage pickup team a bit more, since the weight of the trash collected from the bins would increase over time. All city officials need to do is not make a fuss about that tax. Everything should be fine then.

You’d get the people to do the cleaning for you, before any actual cleaning needs to be done.
Also, for a while, you’d be offering more jobs. Firs with the brooms, and then with the pickup crews. Then there’s also the good PR of having a very clean city.

Win-win-win, anybody?

My friend / client / boss just told me about a disturbing piece of news.

We were speaking of wars just the other night, and today, she tells me that Russia is going for the Arctic and its oil.

Naturally, I confirmed everything with a simple twitter search.

So, will there be blood or just oil?