There’s a Light in My Eyes

It might be premature to say this, but I think it’s because spring love is in the air 🙂

Too Much Coffee

English Translation of Romanian Town Names

With apologies to non-Romanian speakers, I’ll post something hilarious a friend sent me today. I’m adding some explanation for English speakers, although something makes me think this can’t be as funny for them as it is for us.

Afumaţi – Neversober
(“afumat” means “smoked,” which is our slang for “drunk”)

Urlaţi – Gimme Some Noise
(this comes from the word “urlet” = “scream”)

Constanţa – The Steadiness
(“constant” means the same in both languages)

Slobozia – A Very Wrong Local Tradition
(I’m not going to translate this one 🙂 )

Călăraşi – Silly-dressed Folks on Horses
(“calare” means “on horseback”)

Piteşti – Youdohide
(“a piti” means “to hide”)

Oneşti – The Sincere
(“onest” = “honest”)

Huşi – Shoo
(“ushi” is our onomatopoeic word for “shoo”)

Buhuşi – Boo
(pretty obvious)

Satu-Mare – The Rather Roomy Rural Community
(“sat” = “village”; “mare” = “big”)

Slatina – Slut Tina

Târgu Frumos – The Aesthetically Pleasing Bazaar
(“targ” is an older name for “town” but it also means “fair, market”)

Buzău – Really Fat Lip
(“buza” means “lip”; “buzau” sounds like an augmentative)

Năvodari – Networkers
(“navod” = “fish net”)

Dor Mărunt – Miniature Melancholy
(“dor” = “longing”)

Voluntari – Town of Unpaid Assistants

Ze Wind Gear

In other words, I stimulated the economy 🙂 Quite a bit, lately.

New Yorker Overload

Help! The New Yorker is taking over my life! I can now see that the gift subscription I got from Alt.L and Ctrl.Alt.L was a plot to get control over my time, mind, and soul. To the rest of my friends, if you guys love me, please DO NOT give me a gift subscription to The Economist, too. All I need to stop going to work are two heady weeklies. Thank God Time has a more manageable size, but I’ve been neglecting it lately. As for poor Fast Company and Wired, I’m two or three months behind on each… My apartment’s floor is littered with magazines, books are waiting patiently in ever-growing piles, and I only have two or three weeks left until I can no longer count on my bus commute for reading time. Because, in case I haven’t told you a thousand times yet, I’ll be biking to work. Yaay for cardio, sigh for my brain.

May I ask, again, why the day is not 36-hour long? I could easily continue to read, work, do stuff for 4-6 hours after I come home, but then I’d also like to sleep for 8. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that I’d go to sleep at 1 or 2 am, which means I’d be in the office at noon. Well, that wouldn’t work for me. I’d like it to be dawn when I get to work, so that I can enjoy that one extra hour of peace and organize my day with a freshly rested brain. I’m a morning person but once in a while I’d like to be a night owl. Why, oh, why can’t I have the cake and eat it, too?

Light at the End of the Day

I left from work at 5:30 and, lo and behold, it wasn’t pitch dark outside anymore. I picked the bike from its annual tune-up and had a pleasant ride home. My new gear is waiting anxiously, too: a nice wind jacket, a fleece jacket, wind pants, serious gloves, a fleece hood, a fleece tube, all ready to keep me warm.

Today was gorgeous but I’m bracing for another wave of cold that starts Saturday. I’ll be braving it on the bike. Wo-hoo!

Multiple Inboxes in Gmail

Add extra lists of emails in your inbox to see more important emails at once. The new lists of threads can be labels, your starred messages, drafts or any search you want, configurable under Settings.

To get this feature, go to Settings in your Gmail account and select the Labs tab. Enable Multiple Inboxes (you have to scroll down a bit to find it).To configure it, go back to Settings and to the newly created Multiple Inboxes tab. As explained by the developer on the Official Gmail Blog, “you can configure what you want to see, as well as set the number of messages displayed and the positioning of your panels from the Multiple Inboxes section under Settings.” I haven’t tried it yet but I can’t wait.

And the icing on the cake? The developer is Romanian: Octavian “Vivi” Costache. 🙂 Good job, Vivi!

Another cool feature that I’ve just discovered but have been wishing for for some time is the possibility to delete messages in a thread. Well, turns out you can do that by clicking on the arrow next to “Reply.”

(From Bucurenci)