I joined WordCamp Sofia 2024 this weekend by responding to the call for organizers. WordCamp Sofia will be held on 24th of November in Sofia Tech Park. I’ve been out of touch with the local community for years. My last WordCamp where I was part of the team was WordCamp Europe 201 … | Continue reading
I’ll go a bit outside of the box here and link to two comic strips series which I follow: | Continue reading
It’s been awhile 🙂 I post photos of the bean soup that’s sold in the Cherni Vrah shelter as a mark of achievement that I managed to get there one more time. The mountain was moist, slippery and foggy today. It rained a bit and I even had a chance to walk in hail for … Con … | Continue reading
It rained today, the kids needed things, and I only managed to have a walk in the evening. The park was empty. It was kind of depressing, except for this fountain that spread light and color. I hope it serves some purpose other than me noticing it in the early evening. | Continue reading
Memories are not set in stone. They change and merge, slightly twist and bend the past according to our needs. I recently discovered that there was no way I played Heroes of Might and Magic 3 in high school, given that it was released 2 years after I graduated. I always thought t … | Continue reading
One of my frequent struggles when doing the 10k steps journey is the series of temptations to give up on the walk. Here’s how it works. You walk on the sidewalk, and you walk by a bus stop. The moment you’re there, a bus stops, and it goes to the co-working space. It will be … Co … | Continue reading
I keep insisting on reaching an annual average of 10K steps per day. Over the 2 years, I crawled to the goal by slowly replacing car time with walk time. The rule of the thumb is that 30 minutes of driving in the city can be replaced by 1h of walking, reducing the overall time … … | Continue reading
Last month I made an off-by-one error and posted the list on August 30th, leaving a day not covered. The Troll Mountain was read on August 31st. So technically, I read 9 books last month but this post will cover 10. Best books from last month: Worst book: | Continue reading
Photo by Vladimir Petkov – Kaladan Facebook just reminded me that WordCamp Europe in Sofia took place 10 years ago. Many great memories came back to me. As a member of the local team, I spent many hours per day in my car during the weeks leading up to the event, handling all sort … | Continue reading
The Sunday walk didn’t get to 10k steps. It rained and I had to settle with a few cat and flower photos. Last time I hiked regularly, I wouldn’t skip a week for bad weather. Couldn’t imagine going to the mountain to soak and get cold. The red flower is Begonia, taken near DCC-22, … | Continue reading
I read this book out of order. Should’ve read Dawnshard first. The world of Canticle has a sun so close that it melts the rocks and causes a constant fire storm that travels around the world with the day. A somewhat advanced civilization exists in a constant motion, running away … | Continue reading
I’m glad that there are flowers in the fall. This is Algerian Ivy somewhere in Geo Miles, Sofia. | Continue reading
This writing prompt made me think. Other than being tall and with a great hair, maybe persistence. And I strive for kindness, although I wouldn’t say I do as well as I could. Here’s a quote from an old post: Colleagues! The drop drills the stone not with force but with persistenc … | Continue reading
Not the first time I feature this bridge on my blog. It offers great views in all directions and an exhibition with empty whiteboards. | Continue reading
These books were part of my Alley of Books harvest. In a post apocalyptic world, one intact city remains habitable. Everything else is a radioactive desert. The survivors are highly dependent on a mythical high-tech building called “The Factory”. The further you go from it, the m … | Continue reading
Not sure why I like this photo so much. It clicks. | Continue reading
I walked about 3000 kilometers over the last 12 months. Walking is my exercise+meditation combo, and I plan to keep doing it. My goal is 10K steps/day. I also do some mild weekly hikes, that have recently started reaching the 20K step mark. When I started walking daily, I used re … | Continue reading
It was supposed to be a quiet day. We went to IKEA, had meatballs, got a teapot because one of our kids is drinking lots of tea. Tested all the couches. Comfy. All of that amounted to less than 5k steps, which is pretty poor for a weekend day. How do we get to 10k? … Continue rea … | Continue reading
Just wow. Late 90s or early 2000s, I was part of an IRC fan club of Terry Pratchett, called #ankh-morpork. I maintained a website built with html and iframes, dedicated to his works and the IRC channel. As part of this, I translated (poorly) a short story, a pretty grim one, and … | Continue reading
I’m not a big fan of books with short stories. Too much context switching. Context switching is hard. Makes you stop reading the book. Not all short stories are good. Some are bad. Bad stories make you want to throw away the book. Safe Enough is no exception. But it’s Lee Childs. … | Continue reading
Car Brain‘s Dilemma is a (made-up) form of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s faster to go by car but if all people don’t use cars, the average commute time would improve. How do you resolve that? I wrote a small essay on the subject of why people associate cars with freedom in 2023 | Continue reading
Arena Sofia, formerly known as Arena Armeec, is now called Arena 8888. It was quite a surprise to see the name change. 8888 self-identifies as an entertainment website but is actually an online casino. Our society is pushing back against online gambling at the moment and this con … | Continue reading
I used to have lunch in this garden – a pizza slice, doner kebab, or a sandwich. The pigeons would circle around, trying to grab a potato in a tight competition with the smart sparrows. There used to be a farmer’s market nearby where you could buy some fresh veggies on the way ba … | Continue reading
We went to Slaveykov this Sunday because of @knotty‘s comment about their visit to Sofia in the 90s. Back in the day, the square was a book market. My high school was 15 minutes walking from it so I visited it almost daily for many years. It had crowds of readers and piles of tra … | Continue reading
I visited Rome on a work trip last week. Couldn’t experience too much of it because the trip was brief and the schedule – tight. I liked their inner gardens and pretty, well dressed people. The food outside of the tourist centre was superb. I hated the car culture, the swarms of … | Continue reading
I’ve been a big fan of book fairs ever since I was a child. I hunted for comics and Karl May books, then gamebooks, then sci-fi, and so on. I usually visit them multiple times so that I don’t miss anything. Couldn’t do the multiple-visit tour this year due to my work trip where I … | Continue reading
The daily writing prompt is poking me at my weak spot. I walk every day I can and my goal is to walk roughly 2h per day or 10K steps. I believe that walking makes life better, and cars make it worse. Walking also gives material for blog posts. Here are photos from my two … Contin … | Continue reading
About 48 hours ago I spilled a glass of sparkling water on my laptop. After a very long wait, I booted it and it works! It’s not out of dodge yet, apparently corrosion issues can appear in the next 2-3 days. I plan to migrate to a backup computer over the weekend and will send … … | Continue reading
My computer took a hit. I spilled a glass of sparkling water over the keyboard. It’s now drying. I can’t work and the OCD is strong. I’ve been glued to that thing for far too long. At least I can still blog, thanks to the Jetpack app. Ps. Apparently there’s a strong chance that t … | Continue reading
I had no idea that the tech park has a supercomputer. I wonder what they do with it. You can do miracles with a resource like that. Mine bitcoin 😉 Also something with AI. | Continue reading
Bansko is changing. It used to be a small town with an old city. Then the ski zone came with thousands of new hotels, growing faster than the infrastructure. It had lots of people in the winter but was a muddy ghost town in the summer. Now the central area is expanding with paved … | Continue reading
We tried and failed to go to Vihren peak this weekend. We got to the hut. The plan was to do Vihren hut – Vihren peak, which is 3.5h and +950 meters. However, the road to the hut is closed and there are frequent busses that go to it. We missed the bus and ended … Continue reading … | Continue reading
“The Sum of All Men” is an epic fantasy set in a world where the strong and powerful can extort and extract skills from ordinary humans. The poor give up their intelligence, strength, or beauty in exchange for care and protection for themselves and their families. Once they make … | Continue reading
I take breaks. My long-term fitness goal is to do 10K steps per day on average over the course of a full year. It forces me to go out and not be attached to a screen. Do 20K steps on a good weekend day and I get a bonus – the strong desire to have … Continue reading Relaxation | Continue reading
The fall is coming. The flowers are being replaced by falling fruit. It’s less blog-worthy. The previous generations didn’t imagine a situation in which fruits will rot on the ground. | Continue reading
Within the family, I believe that arguments should be resolved before going to bed. Regarding non-family, it’s more complicated. Holding a grudge means punishing yourself for mistakes others did and unfairness outside of your control. But then, how else do we respond to the negat … | Continue reading
By distance, it has to be Kauai. It was a company meetup, one of the most epic I’ve attended. 12.9K km, 24+ hours of travel one-way. Our lead wanted to organize the best meetup ever and did one that’s very difficult to beat. It remained a good lifetime memory. Imagine you have a … | Continue reading
The AI ad generator outperformed me in Blaze. Blaze is WordPress.com’s internal ad system (Tools > Advertising). I decided to give it a try and ran 2 campaigns. The first was for a random Book post with an AI generated ad, and the second was for one of my best long reads with a h … | Continue reading
An adventure gamebook in the shape of a comic book. Best of both worlds 🙂 It has 5 sub-stories, each with 100-ish episodes. September starts strong with a 5/5 book that I would not dare to review. It’s Deadpool. I hate superheroes but Deadpool hates them too, so I think i … | Continue reading
Okay, maybe not cheese but close enough. Somewhere in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. | Continue reading
I read 9 books in August. Pretty happy with that achievement, although two of these were very short. Best books Worst books | Continue reading
Found this gem on Facebook. Fresh humor on yellow pages that barely hold. I enjoyed it very much. Not sure if it can endure another read without starting to fall apart. But the book was cool, well written, short, and brought me good memories. I finished the monumental Six of Crow … | Continue reading
I’m pleasantly surprised that things can blossom despite the dry summer. North of Sofia Tech Park, no irrigation anywhere close. This is in the park, irrigation everywhere. | Continue reading
I didn’t have a good angle to capture the vast number of stage trucks parked near Arena Sofia, but they were at least 50. So many that they made me want to visit Armin van Buuren’s show this week. What did they bring with the trucks? So curious. I may settle with reading a book … … | Continue reading
Jane Harper’s trilogy about Aaron Falk concludes with Exiles – the opposite of an epic thriller. 3 people died over the last years in a small but flourishing Australian town. It’s all written off as accidents but a body is missing and Aaron Falk will start digging. Most of the bo … | Continue reading