vali petcu .com

That people still live in a walled garden. That they are not informed. That they jump head-first in areas they do not know anything about.

For example, everybody knows we are facing a crisis, right? Almost! Because if you ask Romanians on the street, chances are that half of them do not know about a crisis and the other half think the crisis will not affect Romania.

The weird part is that all of them watch TV and read the newspapers. So…they should be informed. Should be. Is is my responsibility to stay informed? Yea, I think that if I have savings in a bank and I work for a company I should stay informed regarding what my money are doing and what the papers are saying about my company.

I have a friend that bought on lease a very expensive car. He didn’t have any worries about paying 600€ monthly, he had a good hob. Had. A few weeks ago the company made some changes and he was fired. Now he is looking for someone to take on the lease of the car. Needless to say that car does not deserve a 600€ a month payment.

My father had some money in RON (Romanian currency) in a bank. I told him to put the money in euro in various banks. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. But why? Don’t you read the news? I do. So? Well, pay attention to what they are saying. If you look carefully, the news say in 2009 Romania will face a crisis and the RON will drop to 4.3-4.5 to an Euro (even more, some say). So, keep your money in a currency that is safer.

I am amazed that people think it is not going to happen to them. Yea, I know, but it’s not going to happen to me. Until it does.

I started writing again for blog20.ro (in Romanian about Romanian internet). I hope this phase remains longer than the last one.

I flew to Bucharest (12 hours by train, 45 minutes by plane and only 40€ more) and attended NetCamp, a conference organized by Cristi Manafu. Bucharest is a depressing city. Gray and without smiling people. NetCamp was the place to be for the Romanian internet who’s who. I like going to conferences because, despite the fact that I know quite a lot of stuff (even if I don’t show it), I always learn something new. From the doers. 

Urban Iulian, known and fined Romanian spammer, is now a senator in the Parliament of Romania. Great day for democracy, indeed.

Would you believed it if you heard it 10 years ago? Would you believe that we would have to work more every day just to get by? I always thought I would work less and the technology would work for me. Not me working more for technology. For notebooks, phones, cameras…

This is a fail for humanity.

So I was looking for “tiger attacks” on YouTube. I watched 20 videos and I did not see any tiger attack. I saw a lot of noise, a lot of pixelated video, a lot of talk and a lot of misnamed videos. But I did 20 page views and 20 video views. So I contributed to the success of YouTube, even if I left half an hour later, unsatisfied.

There is a lot of crappy content on YouTube. Just like Google. A lot of seo, a lot of stupid folk, a lot of noise. Little good or useful content. And then some people wonder why hulu.com makes 80 million dollars a year with little content, while YouTube has millions and billions of videos and views…