June 2012 Archives
Sat Jun 30 13:57:49 EEST 2012
Life was easier when Blackberry and Apple were just fruits
Sad but true fact Life was much easier when BlackBerry and Apple were just fruits!.
I don't know about others but I have difficulties to adjust my body to the fast pace life has taken. Life would was easy and more fun without all this technology. Now even going to a pub you can't escape the "doom" of technology. If the tech hype continues the way it does or something drastic doesn't happen I guess all people on earth will get completely crazy ...
I thougth about how this techno-mambo jumbo can be stopped on a wide scale and the only idea I have is a weapon that blocks all tech equipment world-wide. I hope someone will develop it soon and press the destory button SOON ! :)
Thu Jun 28 22:05:19 EEST 2012
How road signs evolved / short history of roadsigns
As a person interested in history and antrophology. Just recently on my last trip to Romania as I travelled a very interesting question poped up in my mind - How it happened that RoadSigns we use on every street highway and practically everywhere on the road came to be. Interestingly now with the standartization of road signs often the most popular road signs are used as a basis for development on other popular prohibit or allowance signs, we read on airports public institutions, pubs and mostly everywhere.
So in short I did a short research on Road Sign History, just to find out once again that the ancients, were wiser than we think. The first road signs probably came to existence with the existence of humanity, however officially, there was no standartization of using signs to point on road locations travellers before it was introudced in the Roman Empire. In Rome a pillars on the roads were placed to point to major road arteries leading to Rome and various important empire city centers.
During the middle ages, milestones pillars were no longer used, but for practical reasons wooden markers placed across european cities instructed tradesman and travellers to major city important centers and were used to show a general road direction leading to nearby city.
The wooden signs practice had been in use until the first International Road Congress meeting that occured in Rome in 1908. On the meeting a four standard pictures were selected to note the basic for road signs further development. The need for the meeting was the large increase of roads across european artery cities. The road signs developed on the meeting were bump, curve, intersection and railroad crossings. With the creation of first cars and the boom of the car producing industry the need for road signs lead to the development of todays international road symbols. The signs were quicky spread to America and in 1960, the road signs become universal in America and almost everywhere all around the developed and developing world.
As of today 2012 it can be said road signs exist all around the civilized world. Though most of road signs are identical across all countries around the world today still some road symbols varies from country to country. I remember seeing some very unique road signs during my travelling through Serbia, 2 years ago.
Wed Jun 27 16:34:48 EEST 2012
Three Ways to Reduce Addiction to Mobile Phone ( GSM ) use
1.: Don't use a ring tone or use a short landline phone ringtone on incoming calls
In the past, we all had a local stand line phones, most of the landline phones rung using a very specific ring sound which was almost identical on all phones around the world. This ringing tone used was following some telephone standards. The result was everyone could distinguish a ringing phone in a room or closed space and tell for sure, this sound is generated by a phone. Nowdays with the boom of cellular phone ringtones, there is almost noone who uses a standard old-fashioned telephone ringtone as a ring melody.
The consequence of this is in our minds we start loosing the boundary between whether communicating on the phone or communicating without it.
In younger people this boundary between phone line and a physical communication is more evident than in adults (as youngsters has grown in society where mobile was used everywhere). The implication of this is more and more people are starting to perceive mobile communication as so natural as the person to person communication. Spending big part of the day talking over the phone mostly senseless things, not being consciously aware that this is done due to a heavy phone addiction and repeating behaviour trait stored sub-consciously.
Today everyone chooses a custom mobile phone ringtone melody (popular or impopular) song and sets it up to be a standard incoming call signal. As you can guess there are consequences on the mind, as the ringtone set is heard ten times or more a day during each and every phone call. The result is just like with alcoholics or drug addicts, the more you take from a certain "good" the more attached you become to it. Hence the more we listen to a certain song chunk daily on incoming calls, the sub-conscious becomes dependent on hearing this sound at least a number of times daily. If a day passes without no-one calling us and we don't hear the ringtone indicating a call the sub-conscious stored dependency starts popping up and we could start feeling lonely and we feel like calling someone (and we often do). Obviously this is dependency and even if someone might argue me this is a severe addiction which as every other addiction could be very dangerous and hard to fight.
As I prior said due to the fact that the phone use dependency is built in our minds starting with the phone ring melody, we can reduce this dependency by switching off the phone ringtone completely or at least changing it to a unique beep which is not likely to be heard or seen somewhere in your surrounding environment.
By setting the ringtone to some popular song we see on (TV, Radio or Internet on daily basis) this might become a trigger for us to associate hearing this sound with talking on the phone and hence make you increase the time you spend on the phone ,,, so be careful ,,,,
2.:: Stop Mobile Beeps and sounds on menu navigation
All new mobiles sold on the market are configured to have buzzling sounds on events and various beeps on keypad lock / unlock and menu navigation.
This sounds are there mostly to make you more alert and concentrated on using your mobile and often as a consequence whether one uses his mobile his awareness is comletely taken by the phone screen (you're totally "absorbed" by the phone use).
Besides designed to alert you the Managers and CEO's who decided to have a heavy beep sounds on mobiles made it having probably something else on mind? The beeps on keypad navigation makes the user emotionally and sub-consciously attached to the Cell Phone. The idea here is like in popular music streamed on radios and TVs and mostly everywhere .... The more you listen to a song, the higher the mind trait it leaves in you, so later when one hears a music pattern or a whole song, which he / she listened already thousands of times this brings back "good" old memories. It is very simple actually our minds are constructed in a way that the mor certain "information" is heard / saw / smell the bigger the mind influence this leaves on us. Back to the mobile sounds, the more you use the mobile phone with turned on sounds, the more addicted and mind stucked the beep and melodies during use of the cell phone becomes in the mind. For example many people take a look at their mobile automatically (without being consciously aware) and do the activity of (unlock) and (lock) the phone screen not knowing they do it automatic. More or less we all do such an auto-mated learned behaviour because of the subconscious dependency that is built in our minds. Whether we lock and unlock the mobile phone almost robotically, we do it because our sub-conscious mind plays a trick on us and "force" us to do a previous learned activity (association in our mind with the unlock / lock beep sound).
3.::: Use your mobile in different ways
Any modern mobile is quite advanced in functionality and there is more than one way to initiate a phone call. E.g. the mobile has a shortcut buttons assigned to do quick phone calls, quickly evoke SMS menu etc.
Learn them and occasionally use the shortcut buttons instead of the menu navigation. Our minds like changing patterns and doing things different.
Even if you have no chance to do a things via a certain menu, you can always change the position of the phone screen to different distance to eyesight
You can for example type on the keypad following the menu steps by watching from left or right eye periphery or you can use the menus with your phone screen turned backwards If you're used to type on the keypad or touch screen with right hand try doing it with the left hand :)This will take time but the fun worths it. Plus the most valuable thing in using the mobile in different ways each time is there is no specific inflicting pattern associated in your mind and hence the depepdency set in your sub-conscious mind on phone use is lesser.
Actually there are too many various "hacks" one could come up with on how to use mobile as differently as possible. It is up to your imagination. Though using the mobile "each-time-different" can be sometimes more time-consuming it surely makes your phone use amusing.
Mon Jun 25 17:36:51 EEST 2012
Negative impact of Cell Phones (GSM) use on individual and society
We all live in an age, where cell-phone communication has become a standard part of our daily lives. As with everything new adopted in basic human life. GSM tool inclusion in our life had a severe impact on both individuals and in summary to whole society groups and nations.
The benefits out of having an instant "channel" for communication to anyone else in the world are indoubtfully numerous. However as present tosicety is learned to mostly thing in one direction, most people didn't have a clear understanding on the negative impact of this little communicators on our mind body and soul.
1.; Negative impact of mobile phones on body level
Whenever we talk over the phone especially when picking up incoming calls or initiating out-going ones, the GSM device has to connect to the closest network cell "dial up" and wait for initialization of remote or local connection. The levels of radiation waves during the two mobiles connects up is higher. Therefore if one moves the phone near his ear listening for the status of call the amount of radiation that enters our brains is slightly higher. The extra-radiation whether mobiles are connecting is also few times more whether our phone is ringning, hence it is unhealthy to put the phone near our ear before we press the Answer Call button.
2.;; Negative effect of continuous mobile phones use on human brain
Knowing about the increased radiation on connection initialization thanksfully one can protect himself by simply not putting the mobile headset near ear on call initialization. Though this "problem" can be partially solved, next comes the health brain damage (tumours) which according to some researches are higher among people who do frequentlong phone call conversations. In long phone calls the brain is exposed for a longer time to the flowing waves making the peer to peer call possible. According to some medical researches, a long and frequent phone calls could be a reason not only for brain cancers but also other misfunctions or damages in normal brain cells functioning.
3.;;; The bad impact of Cell Phones on nervous system
Another health issue which the daily phone use and the constant exposure to mobile network cells radio frequency radiation affects generally our nervous system.
Unexpected phone calls early in morning or late at night are a cause for increased bodily stress and even the fear sometimes for an incoming phone call are a cause for many types of neurological disorders diagnosed by psychiatrists.
Even when we sleep at night the mobile phone periodically connects to the nearest mobile cell generating some almost undetectable "waves contamination". This constant waves air flow caused by the mobile network cells positioned all around cities is not usual thing for our bodies. This also has some influence on our nervous system as the nervous sysm tends to be a bit more alert because of the waves constantly passing the body. The natural reaction of our bodies nerves is to try to balance itself. As nervous system of different people is not equal some people's nervous system is more prone to having difficulties to balance the disbalance created by the increased number of mobile air waves.
The result of this to many people is in increased sleeplessnes and hardships to get asleep (according to research taken place in American Academy of Sleep Medicine.).
4.;;;; Lost of social and ethical behaviour in people
There is lately observed a huge shift from a face to face communication to peer to peer (p2p) on the phone. The cellphones breeds a culture of socially group detached people (the communication over phone is rarely a conference) but rather consists of communication between two persons (peer to peer). The p2p communication is not only a primary mean of communication of people exposed to heavy phone use. p2p Communication is a primary communication in Skype, Google Talk and mostly all modern available communication medias and softwares.
As more and more people spend nowdays more time on the mobile than in real communication, this makes them introverted and isolated and increases the inability to deal with real human f2f interaction. In other words continuous phone use re-trains us to communicate with others via the mobile. Besides that according to numerous researches about 40 to 50% of visual communication whether a phone call is used is lost (this also makes negotiation or expressing over phone harder and at least twice longer than in real communication).
The influence of the decreased social abilities cause of the phone use has also an impact on ethical behaviour of people too. The increased lost of communication abilities makes even daily real communication vague and lacking accepted social norms and ethical values. Next to that comes the huge problem of over-simplification of communication. As the line communication over the phone loose half of the communication as well as sometimes there are quality of voice over the network interferences. People are doing their best to simplify the communication adopting short command like like phrases and talking in a slang.
5.;;;;; Addiction to mobile phone use
The use of mobile phone often has a short beep sounds, whether you work on the keyboard receive a phone call or look for some mobile functionality staring at the screen. We're wearing the mobile everywhere with us so often we do check the mobile screen quite un-consciously (by addiction). Checking the mobile screen to see what time is it has become almost an instinct and an automated learned behaviour.
The continous use of mobile phones makes many people mobile addicts. There are huge amount of people I've observed who speaks everyday for few hours (whether everytime they feel lonely they call someone in order not to feel lonely). The mobile phone addiction in youngsters is slighly higher than in adults. Probably the most mobile dependent addicts are kids who were given a mobile to use since there very early years.
Anyways there are tons of adults nowdays who cannot even think to be able to live without mobile and even cannot understand: how can anyone think that life could be possible without a cell phone. This kind of thinking is a direct trait showing an addiction and dependency on the phone such people have.
Sat Jun 23 18:40:17 EEST 2012
The brief story of information and how we come to be at where we are
We're living at a times, where information has become more valuable than money and gold. Though we're living in a such a wild changing times, still it is not easy to answer in onefold clear way what is information.
The more the world and humanity developed the more meanings information word accepted.
While checking some interesting videos on the net, I've come across a video representing in a very brief form the history of information.
The Story of Information and how we come to be at where we are now
We're living at a times, where information has become more valuable than money and gold. Lest that living in a such a wild changing times, still it is not easy to answer in onefold clear way what is information.
As you can see from the video, the more the world and humanity developed the more meanings information word took up.
At the end end of the short presentational video there are few questions asked:
I did a quick research on the newly heard words and came to know meme concept. A meme is an "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.". The theory lists some interesting information like replication of personality (propagation) from one person to another etc. etc. However the general content of meme's theory puts Christian faith, religions and all kind of people beliefs in the graph of being just a continuous meme's patterns which are transferred from a person to person (generation to generation). Therefore according to memetics (as the meme's science is called), Christian faith and even my Orthodox Christian faith is just an informtion transmitted similarly to genetics information and the laws against:; sexual morality, bestiality, adultery, castration etc. are just a taboo and makes not sense and is just they claim is a information transferred from family generation to next generation until today.
Obviously the whole "theory" of memetics as a science is not true and is just a world view of Mr. Richard Dawkins in a book called The Selfish Gene (1976). It is well to be said Dawkins a follower of the fairy tales of Charle's Darwin's Darwinism.
Modern science however is seriously questioning Darwin's materialist world view. There are plenty of scientific researches which has prooved the existence of spiritual realm and hence some of the claims memetics are standing on a shaky grounds.
Concerning the second question in the video how many zeros are in an yottabyte the answer according to FreeFactFinder.com is:
So having in mind the yottabyte equals 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes if in bytes it would have 2 zeros :)
But if by zero is meant the number of values which could become zeroes then the answer would be 24 zeroes. This of course is in bytes in zettabytes the zeroes are only 0 or 3 i.e. (1024 zettabytes) :)
Moving back to the 3rd video question What is a one thing that can escape a black hole?. The answer is "WHO KNOWS ??".
The BlackHoles are a matter of science based on a huge theory base, there are plenty of discussions by some scientists still doubting if black holes really exist ,,, even if we assume blackholes exist noone can tell if the blackhole would suck up all matter (including light) or some specific kind of still un-researched matter or energy can get out... In short the question imposed is completely ridiculously funny ;)
The more the world and humanity developed the more meanings information word accepted.
While checking some interesting videos on the net, I've come across a video representing in a very brief form the history of information.
The Story of Information and how we come to be at where we are now
We're living at a times, where information has become more valuable than money and gold. Lest that living in a such a wild changing times, still it is not easy to answer in onefold clear way what is information.
As you can see from the video, the more the world and humanity developed the more meanings information word took up.
At the end end of the short presentational video there are few questions asked:
- Who coined the term MEME
- How many zeros are in yottabyte?
- What is a one thing that can escape a black hole?
I did a quick research on the newly heard words and came to know meme concept. A meme is an "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.". The theory lists some interesting information like replication of personality (propagation) from one person to another etc. etc. However the general content of meme's theory puts Christian faith, religions and all kind of people beliefs in the graph of being just a continuous meme's patterns which are transferred from a person to person (generation to generation). Therefore according to memetics (as the meme's science is called), Christian faith and even my Orthodox Christian faith is just an informtion transmitted similarly to genetics information and the laws against:; sexual morality, bestiality, adultery, castration etc. are just a taboo and makes not sense and is just they claim is a information transferred from family generation to next generation until today.
Obviously the whole "theory" of memetics as a science is not true and is just a world view of Mr. Richard Dawkins in a book called The Selfish Gene (1976). It is well to be said Dawkins a follower of the fairy tales of Charle's Darwin's Darwinism.
Modern science however is seriously questioning Darwin's materialist world view. There are plenty of scientific researches which has prooved the existence of spiritual realm and hence some of the claims memetics are standing on a shaky grounds.
Concerning the second question in the video how many zeros are in an yottabyte the answer according to FreeFactFinder.com is:
2^80 = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes = 1024 zettabytes.
So having in mind the yottabyte equals 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes if in bytes it would have 2 zeros :)
But if by zero is meant the number of values which could become zeroes then the answer would be 24 zeroes. This of course is in bytes in zettabytes the zeroes are only 0 or 3 i.e. (1024 zettabytes) :)
Moving back to the 3rd video question What is a one thing that can escape a black hole?. The answer is "WHO KNOWS ??".
The BlackHoles are a matter of science based on a huge theory base, there are plenty of discussions by some scientists still doubting if black holes really exist ,,, even if we assume blackholes exist noone can tell if the blackhole would suck up all matter (including light) or some specific kind of still un-researched matter or energy can get out... In short the question imposed is completely ridiculously funny ;)
Fri Jun 22 15:49:11 EEST 2012
Tricks of the supermarket trade or how supermarket lie to you to buy more than you need (My few memories on government food stores in communism times)
I've personally always hated super markets from the very early days I entered one. Here in Bulgaria we've been somehow partly lucky not to have supermarket due to the different philosophy of the communistic regime in which we lived until 1991. The philosophy of then governing communist back then was to distribute food in local middle size or small stores owned by the government. The food has to be approved by governmental body and heavily checked if it matches the governmental set standards. The variety of food we were offered in the stores was very little. Most of the small stores (which were owned by the government) only contained basic products like;;;
bread, youghurt, milk, meat, butter, lemonade, beer and few more,
This was done probably intentionally and was a result probably of our long years Orthodox Christian faith which (has saved us and preserved over the centuries). Orthodox Christianity has always teached for simplicity. Even though the communist party rejected the faith and even did severe persecution against the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. The people on the top elite who were planning the communism had been a descent of an orthodox christian raised up living and therefore the philosophy of simplicity was inherited (even genetically) so the way the COM party behaved based on its leaders and the governing decisions about the nations belonging to communism (Russia, (Yugoslavia) - Serbia Koso , Bulgaria, Greece, Egypt etc.) were in a material expression in conjunction with the Christian tradition of simplicity (i say material because Orthodox Christian Church even visiting back then in the countries was usually prohibited and the Com. party did their best to ruin up the believe in Christ in people).
In communism the local suburb grocery stores, were the only "points" of distribution of food. Since buying and owning a car took at least few years of waiting and big money for it. Not more than 10 to 20% of families owned car and owning a car was considered to be granted mostly to people belonging to the then governing communistic elite or the Communist Party.
The public transportation was encouraged because according to communism so called "geometry" which was a main drive for how the systems in communistic countries should work it was estimated public transportation is cheaper and more environmental friendly than if a car is given to anyone, also public transportation (trains, bus-es) etc. did a good thing in the aim of the party to exersice higher control and surveilance over the population.
Because of that existence of big super-market was scarce and the culture to go and buy from a shop with your own family car was not existing.
The equivalent of nowdays mall shops (big retail stores) was usually located on the city center and the size of this shop was much smaller and the variety of products one can find there was only few. Hence the customer didn't have so much options to choose between, neither had to spend too much of time on choosing, the com party wanted the people to work more and buy less, so spending time in stores was not encouraged.
With the entrance of democracy and the moving up of large super-market food and good retails shops like Metro was among the first ones which entered the "freed" market. It was really a bizarre experience for us the ex U.S.S.R belonging people to enter such a large sized stores and to face such a big variety of choice.
Before that in communism we never saw such stores even on the TV, since the TV was governed by communistic party and only information which was useful for the establishment and protection of the regime was projected on the only available National TV channel.
Sorry to distract a bit from the major topic of this post, but I thought this is necessery to explain before continuing because it is important to understand that unintentinonally the communist gave us an advantage to have a different view on things than Western free world, a view which is in many things contrary and more correct (in terms of hard logic) than to Western Europe.
My first encounter with a super-market was only about 8 or 10 years ago and I believe many people who lived in the province of Bulgaria and other ex-communist countries did for a first time experience super-markets approximate 10y. ago.
With the increase of products on the market for us people who lived up to our 8 to 12 years (young age) in communism it was a great shock, since we were raised in a society based on some communist false ideology and suddenly the markets were opened and the products variety to choose between become extremely high.
All previously said to be good and true in communism time was said to be anti-freedom and many people did their best to destroy as much as possible mostly everything somehow connected with previous communistic time.
My homeland Bulgaria as a result of this become a very hard to live place and we were forced to adapt in fast paces and learn things on how we have to live like democrats for a very little short of time.
One severe "damage" most of the growing people in Bulgaria in communism had was the hardness and inability to make choices.
For many people between the age of 25 to 35 it is very hard to make choices even for small things.
This was a direct consequence of a long years (45 years) of communist propaganda, and few generations who lived in a non-freedom respecting regime which conditioned and prepared a specific plan and place for every individual living in the country.
Seeing communism as the ultimate evil and manipulation to make us dependent we didn't know that in the free democratic world the manipulation and conditioning in society was heavy too.
"The Programming" of western society through institutions, stores and order in society was a fact and in a sense the only difference between the Democratic world and communistic world was one of the worlds seemed to have a larger frame in which the individual can work and live, whether the communistic regime seem to be more restrictive.
One main thing used to condition people choices and buying behavior and make them over-consume to make the democratic economy constantly growth was big super-markets. Though they were privately owned and not like in communist country, the only drive behind each shop was PROFIT, PROFIT and agian PROFIT.
Higher profits would mean higher consumptions, higher consumptions means higher production and more work places opened as well as more expenses for working individuals would mean bigger necessity to work more and earn more, because though the sallaries incomes were high in the free world. The individual necessities there were even increasing too.
Since the about 1950s 1960s the super-markets started entering the "free" democrat countries world. As a result the small shops which were prior a main food and beverage distribution source started closing, because they couldn't be a concurrence to the big "brothers" super-markets which were able to buy higher quantities of goods in lesser price and therefore sell many of the goods in much lower prices than the little grocery stores.
The result with the years was a huge shift in people buying behavior from local groce and open markets to buy everything from the big super-markets. The big store chains had to be in a fight for customers all the time, so businesses involved started customer wars and tried their best to "steal" customers from each other. In this financial wars a main thing that most super-market chains and malls did was constant optimization of efficiency of both buying and reselling to the end customer. This is a 3 step business process actually.
1;;; They buy from the commodity producer
2;;; They prepare the food for the store (packaging, cleaning up whatever)
3;;; They put it in a certain way in the store and organize the store in a way to always sell more and more
As a result a huge number of tricks were employed by each and every super-market aiming to deceive the customer to ever buy more
The deception of the client in store is very tricky and smart organized so it cannot really be called a lie but its rather a tricky smartness.
Since the super-markets entered in my country too and the tiny grocery stores are mostly closing unable to compete with the large super-market 'money making machines'. Even I am sometimes forced to buy stuff from super markets. Since here in Bulgaria the culture of purchasing from super-markets is not so strong yet. In order to be able to consume the little grocery stores. Many large super-markets started investing in making the little groceries their retail shops with their brand or (sometimes a new make up brand).
By doing so the little grocery stores loose their authoritarity and independance and become dependant on the big super-market on the type of products they will sell, this obviously means this strategy of the big super-market in the long run will lead the little grocery stores we still have to ruin up. This is obvious because if the small grocery stores start selling the exact same products (brands) of the big super-markets, there will be nothing left to make the little grocery unique. Neither the variety of products choice inside or pricing will be any different from super-market. This will mean the tiny grocer will be no different from the big super-markets in terms of product and prices and therefore. The clients which now are loyal to small grocery stores like me will then have not such big motivation to buy from small super-markets, since everything inside is somehow similar (not to say) the same as with big supermarket the only difference would be the lesser variety which is obviously a good reason why the customer would definitely prefer to buy from the large supermarket ...
On the video below I found in youtube while researching on the topic of supermarket psychology, they explain some of the probably thousands of tricks the super-market chains employees to trick the user to exponentiolly consume their goods.
Old Tricks of the SuperMarket Trade
As you can see the video is presenting a reality of the tricks which was used in the 1960 and now technology and knowledge in the field has largely increased and since they there are surely many new trick 'developments' which are working for the masses of customers daily.
Seeing all this is very precious information, since being informed one can escape the bad "tricks and traps" pawn in the markets.
All the information about the communistic regime and the 'shopping system' there was mentioned priorly because I wanted to explain a bit of the difference of then and now to point you to my opinion that the Western buying model and expectation to sell more based on the tricks are probably not working very well here in the ex-communistic countries, especially with the older generations and the one like me which somehow grow a small part of their youth in communism.
The reason is we have a different 'social programming' than westerners. Also the different spirituality (The orthodox Christian faith) plays another role. Also there is a difference in the type of buying behaviour. In Bulgaria there is no culture to buy once or twice per week. People have culture to buy daily, though this is starting to change slowly these days.
For a bit more of videos and a bit of my thougths on my research on Super Market Psychology check my previous post containing educational videos on how the supermarkets cheat you to buy more
The topic is actually very huge and I'm sure what I'm saying is just the 'tip of the iceberg'. As I'm a firm opponent of big industries and large business I'm firmly against the buying from big stores any goods. The reason is that simply by doing so one makes the already RICH people even more RICHER. By increasing the richness of a certain small group of people daily, we as society are un-consciously somehow involuntarily letting them increase the financial control that is already there in some degree to the society.
As democracy's main drive is money this means that by helping the large business-es marge and become even BIGGER, we're doing something against ourselves and our interests as society.
I don't think that any ordinary citizen in the free world want to live in a fully controlled one World State (one world country), similar to the ex-communism I lived through, so I think people concerned about our freedoms should oppose the big businesses according to the society level they're in. Even if we're not in position to change things with money, we as society are in a position to change ourselves and our understanding of world, our desires and our behaviour. If we change our value system in a way, where money are not a top priority and the highest value the outcome will be positive in both spiritual terms and overall world state.
The modern day however wants us to falsely believe that we're divided, helpless and money dependent. This is a big delusion which we're constanty repeated. Just like with the super-market this big super-market company owners were able to convince us through time that super-market is better than the grocery stores, because of the less money spending advantage. Even if in the past there were possibility to spend less via supermarket nowdays spending less by using the supermarket instead of the small groce-store is a BIG LIE. Even if one spends less in super-market on certain products, the amount of related products he is cheated* to buy in store highly exceed the simply money one would spend on even higher priced products in the small groce.
The outcome results from the super-market is also a big waste, as I lived in the west I've seen most of the households are buying more than they need, spending more than they need, cooking more food and more frequently than necessery and throughing large portions of food in the garbage (e.g. a huge amount of food waster).
If it was possible that people were aware they are buying all this non-sense food because of deception, they would have bought less, the super-markets would bought less and distribute less and the food (waster) remaining could be distributed to poor-er countries to help the starving kids and suffering people in Africa.
Helping the suffering and starving, we would have helped each other as it is a nowdays well known that even on molecular level the whole world is connected, therefore helping our poorer brothers and sisters is actually helping ourselves ***
bread, youghurt, milk, meat, butter, lemonade, beer and few more,
This was done probably intentionally and was a result probably of our long years Orthodox Christian faith which (has saved us and preserved over the centuries). Orthodox Christianity has always teached for simplicity. Even though the communist party rejected the faith and even did severe persecution against the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. The people on the top elite who were planning the communism had been a descent of an orthodox christian raised up living and therefore the philosophy of simplicity was inherited (even genetically) so the way the COM party behaved based on its leaders and the governing decisions about the nations belonging to communism (Russia, (Yugoslavia) - Serbia Koso , Bulgaria, Greece, Egypt etc.) were in a material expression in conjunction with the Christian tradition of simplicity (i say material because Orthodox Christian Church even visiting back then in the countries was usually prohibited and the Com. party did their best to ruin up the believe in Christ in people).
In communism the local suburb grocery stores, were the only "points" of distribution of food. Since buying and owning a car took at least few years of waiting and big money for it. Not more than 10 to 20% of families owned car and owning a car was considered to be granted mostly to people belonging to the then governing communistic elite or the Communist Party.
The public transportation was encouraged because according to communism so called "geometry" which was a main drive for how the systems in communistic countries should work it was estimated public transportation is cheaper and more environmental friendly than if a car is given to anyone, also public transportation (trains, bus-es) etc. did a good thing in the aim of the party to exersice higher control and surveilance over the population.
Because of that existence of big super-market was scarce and the culture to go and buy from a shop with your own family car was not existing.
The equivalent of nowdays mall shops (big retail stores) was usually located on the city center and the size of this shop was much smaller and the variety of products one can find there was only few. Hence the customer didn't have so much options to choose between, neither had to spend too much of time on choosing, the com party wanted the people to work more and buy less, so spending time in stores was not encouraged.
With the entrance of democracy and the moving up of large super-market food and good retails shops like Metro was among the first ones which entered the "freed" market. It was really a bizarre experience for us the ex U.S.S.R belonging people to enter such a large sized stores and to face such a big variety of choice.
Before that in communism we never saw such stores even on the TV, since the TV was governed by communistic party and only information which was useful for the establishment and protection of the regime was projected on the only available National TV channel.
Sorry to distract a bit from the major topic of this post, but I thought this is necessery to explain before continuing because it is important to understand that unintentinonally the communist gave us an advantage to have a different view on things than Western free world, a view which is in many things contrary and more correct (in terms of hard logic) than to Western Europe.
My first encounter with a super-market was only about 8 or 10 years ago and I believe many people who lived in the province of Bulgaria and other ex-communist countries did for a first time experience super-markets approximate 10y. ago.
With the increase of products on the market for us people who lived up to our 8 to 12 years (young age) in communism it was a great shock, since we were raised in a society based on some communist false ideology and suddenly the markets were opened and the products variety to choose between become extremely high.
All previously said to be good and true in communism time was said to be anti-freedom and many people did their best to destroy as much as possible mostly everything somehow connected with previous communistic time.
My homeland Bulgaria as a result of this become a very hard to live place and we were forced to adapt in fast paces and learn things on how we have to live like democrats for a very little short of time.
One severe "damage" most of the growing people in Bulgaria in communism had was the hardness and inability to make choices.
For many people between the age of 25 to 35 it is very hard to make choices even for small things.
This was a direct consequence of a long years (45 years) of communist propaganda, and few generations who lived in a non-freedom respecting regime which conditioned and prepared a specific plan and place for every individual living in the country.
Seeing communism as the ultimate evil and manipulation to make us dependent we didn't know that in the free democratic world the manipulation and conditioning in society was heavy too.
"The Programming" of western society through institutions, stores and order in society was a fact and in a sense the only difference between the Democratic world and communistic world was one of the worlds seemed to have a larger frame in which the individual can work and live, whether the communistic regime seem to be more restrictive.
One main thing used to condition people choices and buying behavior and make them over-consume to make the democratic economy constantly growth was big super-markets. Though they were privately owned and not like in communist country, the only drive behind each shop was PROFIT, PROFIT and agian PROFIT.
Higher profits would mean higher consumptions, higher consumptions means higher production and more work places opened as well as more expenses for working individuals would mean bigger necessity to work more and earn more, because though the sallaries incomes were high in the free world. The individual necessities there were even increasing too.
Since the about 1950s 1960s the super-markets started entering the "free" democrat countries world. As a result the small shops which were prior a main food and beverage distribution source started closing, because they couldn't be a concurrence to the big "brothers" super-markets which were able to buy higher quantities of goods in lesser price and therefore sell many of the goods in much lower prices than the little grocery stores.
The result with the years was a huge shift in people buying behavior from local groce and open markets to buy everything from the big super-markets. The big store chains had to be in a fight for customers all the time, so businesses involved started customer wars and tried their best to "steal" customers from each other. In this financial wars a main thing that most super-market chains and malls did was constant optimization of efficiency of both buying and reselling to the end customer. This is a 3 step business process actually.
1;;; They buy from the commodity producer
2;;; They prepare the food for the store (packaging, cleaning up whatever)
3;;; They put it in a certain way in the store and organize the store in a way to always sell more and more
As a result a huge number of tricks were employed by each and every super-market aiming to deceive the customer to ever buy more
The deception of the client in store is very tricky and smart organized so it cannot really be called a lie but its rather a tricky smartness.
Since the super-markets entered in my country too and the tiny grocery stores are mostly closing unable to compete with the large super-market 'money making machines'. Even I am sometimes forced to buy stuff from super markets. Since here in Bulgaria the culture of purchasing from super-markets is not so strong yet. In order to be able to consume the little grocery stores. Many large super-markets started investing in making the little groceries their retail shops with their brand or (sometimes a new make up brand).
By doing so the little grocery stores loose their authoritarity and independance and become dependant on the big super-market on the type of products they will sell, this obviously means this strategy of the big super-market in the long run will lead the little grocery stores we still have to ruin up. This is obvious because if the small grocery stores start selling the exact same products (brands) of the big super-markets, there will be nothing left to make the little grocery unique. Neither the variety of products choice inside or pricing will be any different from super-market. This will mean the tiny grocer will be no different from the big super-markets in terms of product and prices and therefore. The clients which now are loyal to small grocery stores like me will then have not such big motivation to buy from small super-markets, since everything inside is somehow similar (not to say) the same as with big supermarket the only difference would be the lesser variety which is obviously a good reason why the customer would definitely prefer to buy from the large supermarket ...
On the video below I found in youtube while researching on the topic of supermarket psychology, they explain some of the probably thousands of tricks the super-market chains employees to trick the user to exponentiolly consume their goods.
Old Tricks of the SuperMarket Trade
As you can see the video is presenting a reality of the tricks which was used in the 1960 and now technology and knowledge in the field has largely increased and since they there are surely many new trick 'developments' which are working for the masses of customers daily.
Seeing all this is very precious information, since being informed one can escape the bad "tricks and traps" pawn in the markets.
All the information about the communistic regime and the 'shopping system' there was mentioned priorly because I wanted to explain a bit of the difference of then and now to point you to my opinion that the Western buying model and expectation to sell more based on the tricks are probably not working very well here in the ex-communistic countries, especially with the older generations and the one like me which somehow grow a small part of their youth in communism.
The reason is we have a different 'social programming' than westerners. Also the different spirituality (The orthodox Christian faith) plays another role. Also there is a difference in the type of buying behaviour. In Bulgaria there is no culture to buy once or twice per week. People have culture to buy daily, though this is starting to change slowly these days.
For a bit more of videos and a bit of my thougths on my research on Super Market Psychology check my previous post containing educational videos on how the supermarkets cheat you to buy more
The topic is actually very huge and I'm sure what I'm saying is just the 'tip of the iceberg'. As I'm a firm opponent of big industries and large business I'm firmly against the buying from big stores any goods. The reason is that simply by doing so one makes the already RICH people even more RICHER. By increasing the richness of a certain small group of people daily, we as society are un-consciously somehow involuntarily letting them increase the financial control that is already there in some degree to the society.
As democracy's main drive is money this means that by helping the large business-es marge and become even BIGGER, we're doing something against ourselves and our interests as society.
I don't think that any ordinary citizen in the free world want to live in a fully controlled one World State (one world country), similar to the ex-communism I lived through, so I think people concerned about our freedoms should oppose the big businesses according to the society level they're in. Even if we're not in position to change things with money, we as society are in a position to change ourselves and our understanding of world, our desires and our behaviour. If we change our value system in a way, where money are not a top priority and the highest value the outcome will be positive in both spiritual terms and overall world state.
The modern day however wants us to falsely believe that we're divided, helpless and money dependent. This is a big delusion which we're constanty repeated. Just like with the super-market this big super-market company owners were able to convince us through time that super-market is better than the grocery stores, because of the less money spending advantage. Even if in the past there were possibility to spend less via supermarket nowdays spending less by using the supermarket instead of the small groce-store is a BIG LIE. Even if one spends less in super-market on certain products, the amount of related products he is cheated* to buy in store highly exceed the simply money one would spend on even higher priced products in the small groce.
The outcome results from the super-market is also a big waste, as I lived in the west I've seen most of the households are buying more than they need, spending more than they need, cooking more food and more frequently than necessery and throughing large portions of food in the garbage (e.g. a huge amount of food waster).
If it was possible that people were aware they are buying all this non-sense food because of deception, they would have bought less, the super-markets would bought less and distribute less and the food (waster) remaining could be distributed to poor-er countries to help the starving kids and suffering people in Africa.
Helping the suffering and starving, we would have helped each other as it is a nowdays well known that even on molecular level the whole world is connected, therefore helping our poorer brothers and sisters is actually helping ourselves ***
Thu Jun 21 15:39:43 EEST 2012
Color Psychology - Color Mind Programming or how big companies boost their sales and make up your mind
As I've pointed earlier there is plenty of "secretly" kept and less known by public research on how colors influence us daily. The biggest companies are heavily taking advantage of what is found and known for colors impact on our minds (psyche). Actually there is a whole branch in psychology which deals with impact of colors perception on us. Besides companies, many modern governments are well aware of the many facts on how citizens percept colors and use this in color 'installment' in government offices and government institutions.
There is no universal knowledge on how colors completely affect us as every human on earth is very unique and saying this or that color has this or that impact on indivirual or group is not 100% accurate. However there are general traits nowdays formed especially with globalization and unification of TV ads and big companies corporate image, a unification started on how different nationality people perceive colors.
Nowdays in developed countries there are more and more people who perceive certain colors in similar fashion. Therefore every serious top marketer should carefully study colors and their relation with ancient time people believes and understanding on what each of the 'rainbow' colors symbolize. Most likely because there is no completely unified understanding of colors between various individuals may companies like Google and Microsoft started using all the rainbow colors in their basic company logos and branding. This trend is being observed for many other physical goods as well as is starting to get more and more heavy adoption by websites branding on the internet.
The study of color programming is one major field to be known by anyone truly willing to understand why certain big store chainslike Carrefour, Lidl, Billa, MediaMarkt - in western europe or TechnoMarket, TechnoPolis (MediaMarkt copied tech equipment by shops here in Bulgaria) are decorated inside the way they are. I personally didn't like the concept of color programming since from Spiritual point of view it is a big evil. Trying to manipulate people perception to do something you would like to in general is very evil from spiritual point of view. A mixture of rainbow colors in a natural environment for example flowers in the wood or wild mountain place is one thing, but making it artificial and placing it in certain pre-desired order is totally another. Besides that the colors in the natural environment are natural and therefore the impact on us even if colorful is very much better than if it is done with a certain intention like in the big supermarkets stores, fast just food companies - McDonalds, Burger King etc.
The research on color mind influcence - Color mind programming is a controversial science. Nowdays many big businesses however use this as a granted science, even whole business sects with some mambo-jambo believes universities, children garden and schools in modern countries have employed the use of some type of color programming aiming to influence their pupils, students (organizational members - you call it).
Color mind programming and heavy use on advertisements on the TV, the Internet, Stores and mostly everywhere are however starting to took their tolls. The high increase in mental problems and dumbness in developed and some undeveloped countries as well as the increased number of people who go insane because of too much color programming is reality. The believe that mental programming is one of the ultimate tools to influence somebody and push him to do things you want like consome more of a product or generally consume (buy) more goods creates another severe issue it makes people to constantly over-consume (eat more than the body needs) and this increases the number of over-consumption evoked diseases ...
But color programming doesn't stop with just the material (physical) surrounding world it is a concept highly employed in online based marketing. Online business is seen on so many top used websites, social networks like take for instance (facebook). It is so spread that even the software primary vendors like Microsoft, search engines Google Inc. have already heavily employed the color programming as a basis of their products.
There is another reason why most vendors nowdays issue their physical or 'virtual' products so colorful using all the colors of the rainbow. The reason is the fact that as a kids through animation, cartoons, toys and surrounding environment we have been exposed already even from our very youth age to a kind of color programming through kids toys we've been given by our parents). Hence the young years color programming became a basis for a future time color programming. The colorfulness of our kids years are already sub-consciously stored in our minds, so almost naturally there is a feeling of joy to pop-up once we see something childishly colorful.
Wed Jun 20 23:38:20 EEST 2012
Trip to Romania ( TTA ) - Few of my impressions from Ro-Mania :)
I just came home from a short 4 days trip to Romania. I'm truly impressed by the beauty, the people goodness and their piety.
Over the last few years, I've visited Romania numerous times, most of the times I just crossed by car while traveling to Holland. My impressions the previous years were quite good already but I didn't have the opportunity until now to see how the country looks "from within" - I mean how the life flows there etc.
I've heard quite a lot of BAD thinks about corruption (from european parliament critics in new) and gipsy like people and plenty of bad stuff over the years.
This is all lies, the country people are not corrupt, they're just smart and find plenty of ways to earn money. For instance while I was traveling there were Romanians people selling raspberries brought by the nearby woods, the raspberry selling is not entering the treasury of the country and this is considered by the European Union corruption and a crime :)
Well talking about police, they're a bit corrupt and stopping you for no reason sometimes to ask if you can give them some coffee or cigarettes but i wouldn't put this police act as corruption it is rather an act the patrol police do in order to find some extra cash near the low sallaries received for serving in police :)
Well anyways my trip to Romania here are few of my travel notes. The whole travel Route was Bulgaria - Romania, the aim of my travel can be classified as business trip, since I was travelling with a relative's husband who was their to transfer some physical goods (a kind of logistics). The wohle trip started from my hometown Dobrich; we went through Silistra and Ruse and then the so famous Danube bridge. The roads in Bulgaria are not perfect and some regions were full of road holes, but this is normal since we have a harsh winter here and now a road recovery works are in progress on the roads. Crossing the Danube bridge, there is a custom police and they charge something like 23 BGN (Bulgarian levs) for crossing it. Then there is a border police check which as most people who travelled by bus or car over borders (out of Schengen) knows pretty well. You have to hand in your ID and it is checked by a policeman and if you're not in the list of WANTED CRIMINALS they let you go. Some 500 meters or a 1 kilometer after that is the Romanian border police which (since not part of Schengen yet checks your traveller ID again).
In Romania we travelled through Gurgevo which is one of the closest cities to Danube river bridgeroad and one of nearest romanian cities to Bulgaria.
Our first destination was a place in Romania called Targo Mures, to go their our route passed through the side road of Bucuresht - Bururesti as Domneles (misters) calls it.
As I'm trying to live an Orthodox Christian life the most striking think from the moment we entered Romania to the one we went off it was the number of Churches, Crucifix and religious references one can see by just crossing the country roads.
Many villages in Romania had 2 or 3 Churches a small chapels a Cross on the road sidewalks etc. Even many Romanian houses almost everywhere had a Christian Cross on top of the house or on the house door. Putting a Christian cross on top of your home is something I myself has thought of and wondered why Christians did not put here in Bulgaria and other Christian countries seeing this being a reality in RO-MANIA was unexpected.
Other from my impression is that Romanian people work hard and a lot of them live in the village, owning a small land to grow vegetables and animals (sheeps and cows) mostly. While driving we saw on many places shepherds with large herds of sheeps, people mowing and generally many people who seemed to be working hard to grow their own food. This really made sense since here in Bulgaria grievously animals are rarely grown by country people and most people are living in cities (our rural population is very small).
Growing myself vegetables and having sheeps and living a village life is one of my dreams so seeing so many people growing big portion (if not all of their food on their own) especially in this crazy super-market times is really something that gives me hope, we're not completely doomed yet.
Biggest part of Romania is Orthodox Christian, while the deep central part and the western part is Roman Catholic. Nomatter the differences between the two the people in both parts seemed to live in piece. The western part was visibly more developed than the eastern.
In my observations the western part of Romania is highly influenced by Hungarian culture and architecture, while a lot of Hungarians live their today. We went through Sigishuara which seemed to be mostly Roman Catholic though I saw some Orthodox Church too on the city center. Sigishuara is amazingly beautiful. The people we met all throughout the trip was extremely friendly and always wanted to help and threated us like true Christians, something one can rarely see happening nowdays ...
Most of Romania we travelled is mountain covered and the air was extremely clean, so when you're even breathing you feel very different and alive if compared to whether in my hometown.
Brasov is one of the big cities in Romania but its construction is not too much concentrated, the city is quite scattered consisting of neap houses up to few stages per hight. Generally in Romania I haven't seen too high buildings almost anywhere, in Bucurest there are some but still they're not so tall as the blocks in Bulgaria or some other ex-communist countries.
Something interesting about Brasov is that near it is Transilvania and a castle in a small village (or town) called Bran, the castle is dating back from the 12 century and is told to be the original castle where Count Dracula lived. Perhaps the region is filled with Vampire stories but unfortunately my knowledge in Romanesco was so poor so I couldn't get into contact to locals to ask for that (neither I had the time to).
Bran castle was restored a couple of times and has been a host for the royal family of Romania (many Romanian kings, princesses) through the middle ages in Communistic time it was abandoned and just recently it was turned to a cultural museum (probably part of UNESCO).
The castle is located on a high rock and near it is a beatiful garden and an old times mention. In the castle there are plenty of objects left and traditional princess dresses, pictures, a cinema room, an ancient torture room and plenty of other medievel furniture.
The price was normal 25 LEU (the romanian currency), this equals to something like 6,5 EURO.
During our way back from Bran we travelled through another mountain region - Sinaia.
The prices of food in the super-markets in Romania are quite almost same like in Bulgaria and if compared to western europe many products can be considered even cheap. The quality of food I found to be quite satisfying. A lot of people in Romania are still selling home made yellow cheese and natural grown products in villages as well as I've seen plenty of this street old fashioned tradesman which I like so much on the streets. The country roads especially the central ones and highways were quite good too. Well there is a lot to be said but unfortunately I don't have the time to prolonge this post anymore. In the mountain areas there were some sinaguture for monasteries according to what I've heard from some priests here in Bulgaria in Romania currently they have 7000 Orthodox Christian MONKS! ! ! The number is amazing high just for a comparison in Bulgaria as of time of writting we have not more than 300 monks.
Our trip thanksfully was safe and every romanian we met or ask anything was more than welcome to us and tried his best to help us. Finally it was time and we hit the road back to Bulgaria through Danube riverbridge - the bridge road is a bit better than before some holes are filled in but still there are plenty of holes.
We had to pass through the Romanian Customs and pay a fee for passing by and later were checked by Bulgarian border police - thanksfully with no problems. We had to deliver some cargo to Karnobat in Bulgaria so we passed by there and then through Burgas headed back through Stara Planina (Old Mountain) which is amazingly beautiful mountain and is a must visit place for any keen on mountain tourism.
Thanks God I came back home alive and well and here I am writting this post. To sum it up if I have to grade America and being asked if it is worthy as a tourist destination I would say not only worthy but it is a real pearl you must see!
Over the last few years, I've visited Romania numerous times, most of the times I just crossed by car while traveling to Holland. My impressions the previous years were quite good already but I didn't have the opportunity until now to see how the country looks "from within" - I mean how the life flows there etc.
I've heard quite a lot of BAD thinks about corruption (from european parliament critics in new) and gipsy like people and plenty of bad stuff over the years.
This is all lies, the country people are not corrupt, they're just smart and find plenty of ways to earn money. For instance while I was traveling there were Romanians people selling raspberries brought by the nearby woods, the raspberry selling is not entering the treasury of the country and this is considered by the European Union corruption and a crime :)
Well talking about police, they're a bit corrupt and stopping you for no reason sometimes to ask if you can give them some coffee or cigarettes but i wouldn't put this police act as corruption it is rather an act the patrol police do in order to find some extra cash near the low sallaries received for serving in police :)
Well anyways my trip to Romania here are few of my travel notes. The whole travel Route was Bulgaria - Romania, the aim of my travel can be classified as business trip, since I was travelling with a relative's husband who was their to transfer some physical goods (a kind of logistics). The wohle trip started from my hometown Dobrich; we went through Silistra and Ruse and then the so famous Danube bridge. The roads in Bulgaria are not perfect and some regions were full of road holes, but this is normal since we have a harsh winter here and now a road recovery works are in progress on the roads. Crossing the Danube bridge, there is a custom police and they charge something like 23 BGN (Bulgarian levs) for crossing it. Then there is a border police check which as most people who travelled by bus or car over borders (out of Schengen) knows pretty well. You have to hand in your ID and it is checked by a policeman and if you're not in the list of WANTED CRIMINALS
they let you go. Some 500 meters or a 1 kilometer after that is the Romanian border police which (since not part of Schengen yet checks your traveller ID again).In Romania we travelled through Gurgevo which is one of the closest cities to Danube river bridgeroad and one of nearest romanian cities to Bulgaria.
Our first destination was a place in Romania called Targo Mures, to go their our route passed through the side road of Bucuresht - Bururesti as Domneles (misters) calls it.
As I'm trying to live an Orthodox Christian life the most striking think from the moment we entered Romania to the one we went off it was the number of Churches, Crucifix and religious references one can see by just crossing the country roads.
Many villages in Romania had 2 or 3 Churches a small chapels a Cross on the road sidewalks etc. Even many Romanian houses almost everywhere had a Christian Cross on top of the house or on the house door. Putting a Christian cross on top of your home is something I myself has thought of and wondered why Christians did not put here in Bulgaria and other Christian countries seeing this being a reality in RO-MANIA
was unexpected.Other from my impression is that Romanian people work hard and a lot of them live in the village, owning a small land to grow vegetables and animals (sheeps and cows) mostly. While driving we saw on many places shepherds with large herds of sheeps, people mowing and generally many people who seemed to be working hard to grow their own food. This really made sense since here in Bulgaria grievously animals are rarely grown by country people and most people are living in cities (our rural population is very small).
Growing myself vegetables and having sheeps and living a village life is one of my dreams so seeing so many people growing big portion (if not all of their food on their own) especially in this crazy super-market times is really something that gives me hope, we're not completely doomed yet.
Biggest part of Romania is Orthodox Christian, while the deep central part and the western part is Roman Catholic. Nomatter the differences between the two the people in both parts seemed to live in piece. The western part was visibly more developed than the eastern.
In my observations the western part of Romania is highly influenced by Hungarian culture and architecture, while a lot of Hungarians live their today. We went through Sigishuara which seemed to be mostly Roman Catholic though I saw some Orthodox Church too on the city center. Sigishuara is amazingly beautiful. The people we met all throughout the trip was extremely friendly and always wanted to help and threated us like true Christians, something one can rarely see happening nowdays ...
Most of Romania we travelled is mountain covered and the air was extremely clean, so when you're even breathing you feel very different and alive if compared to whether in my hometown.
Brasov is one of the big cities in Romania but its construction is not too much concentrated, the city is quite scattered consisting of neap houses up to few stages per hight. Generally in Romania I haven't seen too high buildings almost anywhere, in Bucurest there are some but still they're not so tall as the blocks in Bulgaria or some other ex-communist countries.
Something interesting about Brasov is that near it is Transilvania and a castle in a small village (or town) called Bran, the castle is dating back from the 12 century and is told to be the original castle where Count Dracula lived. Perhaps the region is filled with Vampire stories but unfortunately my knowledge in Romanesco was so poor so I couldn't get into contact to locals to ask for that (neither I had the time to).
Bran castle was restored a couple of times and has been a host for the royal family of Romania (many Romanian kings, princesses) through the middle ages in Communistic time it was abandoned and just recently it was turned to a cultural museum (probably part of UNESCO).
The castle is located on a high rock and near it is a beatiful garden and an old times mention. In the castle there are plenty of objects left and traditional princess dresses, pictures, a cinema room, an ancient torture room and plenty of other medievel furniture.
The price was normal 25 LEU (the romanian currency), this equals to something like 6,5 EURO.
During our way back from Bran we travelled through another mountain region - Sinaia.
The prices of food in the super-markets in Romania are quite almost same like in Bulgaria and if compared to western europe many products can be considered even cheap. The quality of food I found to be quite satisfying. A lot of people in Romania are still selling home made yellow cheese and natural grown products in villages as well as I've seen plenty of this street old fashioned tradesman which I like so much on the streets. The country roads especially the central ones and highways were quite good too. Well there is a lot to be said but unfortunately I don't have the time to prolonge this post anymore. In the mountain areas there were some sinaguture for monasteries according to what I've heard from some priests here in Bulgaria in Romania currently they have 7000 Orthodox Christian MONKS! ! ! The number is amazing high just for a comparison in Bulgaria as of time of writting we have not more than 300 monks.
Our trip thanksfully was safe and every romanian we met or ask anything was more than welcome to us and tried his best to help us. Finally it was time and we hit the road back to Bulgaria through Danube riverbridge - the bridge road is a bit better than before some holes are filled in but still there are plenty of holes.
We had to pass through the Romanian Customs and pay a fee for passing by and later were checked by Bulgarian border police - thanksfully with no problems. We had to deliver some cargo to Karnobat in Bulgaria so we passed by there and then through Burgas headed back through Stara Planina (Old Mountain) which is amazingly beautiful mountain and is a must visit place for any keen on mountain tourism.
Thanks God I came back home alive and well and here I am writting this post. To sum it up if I have to grade America and being asked if it is worthy as a tourist destination I would say not only worthy but it is a real pearl you must see!
Sun Jun 17 08:46:44 EEST 2012
After a loooongg, looong waiting finally a New Version of Skype 4.0 is out - Skype 4 on Debian GNU / Linux short review
After about 3 years of no new version for GNU / Linux finally Skype has released a new version of Skype.
I thought already there will be never a new skype version out for GNU / Linux, since the moment Microsoft purchased skype.
Now suddenly and quite in quiet the new version of Skype 4.0 is out for download from Skype's website. The latest Skype download for Linux is to be found here
As of time of writting this post there are Skype 4 versions for following Linux-es;;;
I thought already there will be never a new skype version out for GNU / Linux, since the moment Microsoft purchased skype.
Now suddenly and quite in quiet the new version of Skype 4.0 is out for download from Skype's website. The latest Skype download for Linux is to be found here
As of time of writting this post there are Skype 4 versions for following Linux-es;;;
- Ubuntu 10.04 32 / 64-bit (probably would work fine on latest Ubuntus too)
-
Debian 6.0 Squeeze 32 / 64-bit
- Fedora 16 / 32 bit
- OpenSUSE 12.1 32bit (only)
- 1. a new Conversations View where users can easily track all of their chats in a unified window.
Those users who prefer the old view can disable this in the Chat options; - 2. a brand new Call View;
- 3.Call quality has never been better thanks to several investments we made in improving audio quality;
- 4. Improved video call quality and extended support for more cameras.
- new Linux skype are:
Most likely the Ubuntu release of skype 4 will work flawlessly on Linux Mint and other debian derivatives.
The original Skype 4 version release by Microsoft is found here
The release mentions, Skype 4 is supposed to have 4 major advancements and the gap in interface and usability with latest Mac OS and M$ Windows Skype versions is now filled.
The four major changes said in the announcement are;;;
Some of the minor improvements in those
- improved chat synchronization
- new presence and emoticon icons
- the ability to store and view phone numbers in a Skype contact's profile
- much lower chance Skype for Linux will crash or freeze
- chat history loading is now much faster
- support for two new languages: Czech (flag:cz) and Norwegian (flag:no)
Just like with prior Skype releases 2.0 and 2.2beta this release comes with almost same list of non-english language support ,,,
Seeing those announcement, I've hurried to download and test skype 4 on my 64-bit desktop running Debian 6 Squeeze.
Once downloaded to install the pack skype-debian_4.0.0.7-1_amd64.deb I used the usual dpkg -i i,e,;;;
noah:~# dpkg -iskype-debian_4.0.0.7-1_amd64.deb
.........
.....
Just like the release announcement mentions the first initial launch of Skype 4 took about 3 or 4 minutes doing something (probably sending half of my hard disk data to Microsoft
:) ) along with importing the prior skype data and chat history :)The minimum software dependencies for correct operation of Skype are:
Qt libraries; D-Bus; libasound and pulseaudio
Here are few screenshots of Skype 4 to give you an idea what to expect:
The Skype Options is almost identical to Skype 2.2. One interesting new feature I've noticed is Skype WIFI
Unfortunately to use Skype WIFI you need to have purchased skype credits.
Another notable difference is the organization of Skype Chats, which is more like in the good old times of mIRC and IRC chat clients
Here is also the list of Skype emoticons including bundled with Skype 4:
The "look & feel" of the new interface gives the impression of seriously improved Skype client stability too.
There was a minor trouble with the voice recording (microphone) with Skype 4;
To make the microphone work properly I had to raise up the mic volume from PulseAudio settings in Skype options.
Well that's all the only unpleasent thing for this new skype is it is using KDE's libQT and seems not to have a native interface for GNOME via GTK2. If we put away this I guess this version of Skype is much more stable and therefore I would recommend anyone to update.
Of course we never know if this new updated more stable Skype release is not filled up with backdoors or does not transfer all our conversations to microsoft but we didn't know that even when Skype was not Microsoft's so and since it is not a free software I guess it doesn't matter so much.
As you can guess Microsoft has imposed centralization on Skype protocol so connecting the peers is now done by Microsoft servers this news is another intriguing one.
According to one recent article from May 1, 2012 Microsoft Skype replaces the Peer-to-Peer P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft - You can read the intriguing article here
In short that probably means that by changing this nowdays microsoft probably now logs all chat sessions between Skype users, even it is likely the calls between users are recorded too. We all know Microsoft imperialism pretty well so I guess this is not a big news .....
This new release of Skype if it is significantly more stable than it is prior releases would certainly have serious positive implication on the development and adoption of Linux for the Desktop. So far I'm sure one of the obstacles of many manufacturers of notebooks and comp equipment to ship with Linux was the lack of a stable and easy to implement skype release for Linux.
Well that's all folks. Enjoy the New Skype Cheeres ! :)
Sat Jun 16 14:07:10 EEST 2012
Human Modern Progression a move forward to Degression
I've been thinking about our modern day progression and what our "progressed" society looks like in reality.
We think we have progressed, we have built machines that serves us well (computers). We plan for a bright painless easy future day by day. This bright "perfect" society future is nothing more than the dream of communism in its complete form.
But in what sense we have actually progressed ?? Everyone who really sees what happens around us notice the big changes we experience. On the surface it looks like our life has become much easier with all this technology surrounding us. The number of computers which is said to help us to leap towards this bright future increases day by day. With this however increases the need to support technology. Suddenly it happens that the old believe that computers are just a tool to make our life earier becomes a modern day slavery. Most of the developed or under development countries people are nowdays almost full time spending in front of the computer screen on the internet. We put our lifes in the mercy of man-created computers and it has become impossible that we live or exist independetly without them.
Computers are everywhere around us starting from the work Desk, at hand with a notebook, ipad, mobile phones, cars, airplanes. There is rarely to see any technology we use which works with not some kind of primitive or advanced computer embedded ,,,
In the rise of computers as we know it computer was just a tool to help us along with the other overall thought and inventions development. Now from just being a tool to help us progress Computers become the common ground on which almost everything in life works.
I'm sure many people who started learning computer technology 15-20 years ago (like me) never imagined computers will integrate so heavily in our daily activities as they eventually did.
We use computers for the sake of planning which in "spiritual language" is predicting the future or prophecise what is about to come in the short future. In reality what we do mostly even not realizingly is to try to predict and modify the future through technology.
This concept is also existing in most sci-fi movies, made in last 60 years. Mobile phones revolution give the humanity a tool through which telepathy we've seen in so many SCI-FI is reality. The mobile phone is just a platform through which (phone calls) or better said voice telepathy has become possible. In that manner of thoughts it is obvious that Video phone calls is a voice + visual telepathy. The Skype revolution and Video and voice conferences is brought was just until recently seen on the sci-fi movies where spaceship crews communicated with other spaceship crews by using a Visual conferences like skype.
It is really hard to believe that for just few years now everyone can speak with ease with everyone else on the planet in the same way just like we've seen in the movies as some foreign abstract concept!
Now suddenly most people on earth are equipped with technology with gives them the power to do everything but it is my firm believe people are not ready to wisely use this power. Therefore instead of using this higher technology wisely technology is used mostly senseless and the more technological advancement grows and becomes more accessible to the masses the more the tendency to use the technology for shit grows.
I'm sure people who have a good knowledge on programming and how computer works are already seriously aware of this enormous problem.
Another severe problem with the raise of technology is the language slang it introduces. This tech-slang is adopted quickly all around the society and suddenly as a result the human language as we know it is seriously substituted by a vague tech words mambo-jambo words. Actually the adoption of tech buzz words in modern day society language makes a great harm for the reason communication between people becomes less descriptive and therefore harder.
In short the result of this tech slang language inside our national languages is inability for people to communicate properly. This tendency is well seen if you for example try to make a comparison between old and newer movies. The newer the movie the less meaningful it is. It is true newer ones has much more as a visual adds than the predecessor but when talking about consistency the newer films are missing this point seriously.
As newer generations are born and raised up with this newer movies and "advanced" TV and computers this people doesn't even have most of the time the opportunity to see older human taped knowledge.
Even for youngesters who have somehow a wise parents enough to teach them in a religious way or just have the "luck" to have parents with old world mindset it will be extremely hard if not impossible for this kids to understand the old knowledge, as most of their same age school / university fellows will only talk about the newer things.
Besides all this, computers as they grow needs more and more support "nurturing" so day by day more and more people has to be busy with managing and supporting tech stuff. Suddenly it is no longer clear if computers serve us or we serve them, this tendency is already somehow evident but not so clearly as it will be in the short 5 to 10 years.
Therefore we slowly but surely are moving to a society which might become "enslaved by technology". Why I say here enslaved, because if we spend our time on fixing computers and technology and working with one virtual reality (which is non-reality) in essence this means we no longer have a physical freedom in the sense it was God given.
There is no doubt computers at present appears to do us a big good, but if you think a bit strategically it is obvious this good has it's price. By adopting all this technology without questioning ourselves on how this will impact our human freedom, we build a computerized jail around us. At first this jail appears to be so wide that it seems it does not interfere with our freedom, but with the introduction of newer and newer computer technology this jail becomes narrower as to the point where it could threat our physical existence freedom.
For those who could argue my thoughs I will ask two simple questions to show you how dependent we've become on technology;;;
What was the last time you switched off your mobile for a week ?
What was the last time you didn't used computers and the internet for a week time ?
Obviously rarely we can find someone that will answer positively to this question or even the thought of switching off from this so globalized society by dropping off tech stuff for a week seems scary.
This constant connectiodness that we're day-by-day heavily exposed to is scary, because it steals little-by-little our natural freedom for seclusion / pravicy / solitude.
This freedoms, were essential and especially for Christian saints and many of the people in the Holy Bible if we read closely we will find out they have used this freedom in parts of their lives especially the seclusion to hear and understand God's will for their life.
Since technology is stealing us the freedom to seclude ourselves this means it steals our basic natural freedom to communicate with God and our natural self ,,,
The consequence of this separation from God and unification with "the world" surely will lead to spiritual blindness and lack of good foundation or higher life purpose, in other words lost path in life.
This is happening all along right in front our eyes now.
Maybe the worst thing of globalization is it doesn't unite people on a soul level but rather separates them. The unification that tech boom gives to people is in the "virtual reality" but this is not a real unification as it is unification in a media which is not real.
Yes Virtual Reality is not real, that's why it is called Virtual isn't it?
I've been thinking over all this problems more and more and I'm starting to come to conclusion that people who wish to keep their essential physical freedom need to GET OUT from this tech lie, we have lived in.
For this however more people need to first realize that;;;
1. TECHNOLOGY LEADS US NOWHERE!
2. People who want to live without technology need to organize in groups - (and get used to a natural living growing food, being near to a natural springing water, taking care for each other, living in a Christian commune like - like in the old days)
Actually if we read the old testament's story of Moses escaping the upcoming flood, I believe what is about to come to us as a consequence of this out of boundaries technologization is pretty much like the old testamental flood (this should happen sooner or later).
Moses was wise enough to make himself an Ark and prepare himself for the storm. Today most people are so busy that they don't see the storm coming. I'll be glad to hear from people who has the same thinking as me and want to organize in a groups and live an old humble way of life without technology.
I'm convinced people who have realized all this tech short future bad consequences on humanity, need to have a common communication media and share their knowledge on how we can find a way to live tech free in this age. I'm curious am I the only one with such thoughts or other get into this insight too. If you have come to conclusions I did please contact me in comments. Thank you.
We think we have progressed, we have built machines that serves us well (computers). We plan for a bright painless easy future day by day. This bright "perfect" society future is nothing more than the dream of communism in its complete form.
But in what sense we have actually progressed ?? Everyone who really sees what happens around us notice the big changes we experience. On the surface it looks like our life has become much easier with all this technology surrounding us. The number of computers which is said to help us to leap towards this bright future increases day by day. With this however increases the need to support technology. Suddenly it happens that the old believe that computers are just a tool to make our life earier becomes a modern day slavery. Most of the developed or under development countries people are nowdays almost full time spending in front of the computer screen on the internet. We put our lifes in the mercy of man-created computers and it has become impossible that we live or exist independetly without them.
Computers are everywhere around us starting from the work Desk, at hand with a notebook, ipad, mobile phones, cars, airplanes. There is rarely to see any technology we use which works with not some kind of primitive or advanced computer embedded ,,,
In the rise of computers as we know it computer was just a tool to help us along with the other overall thought and inventions development. Now from just being a tool to help us progress Computers become the common ground on which almost everything in life works.
I'm sure many people who started learning computer technology 15-20 years ago (like me) never imagined computers will integrate so heavily in our daily activities as they eventually did.
We use computers for the sake of planning which in "spiritual language" is predicting the future or prophecise what is about to come in the short future. In reality what we do mostly even not realizingly is to try to predict and modify the future through technology.
This concept is also existing in most sci-fi movies, made in last 60 years. Mobile phones revolution give the humanity a tool through which telepathy we've seen in so many SCI-FI is reality. The mobile phone is just a platform through which (phone calls) or better said voice telepathy has become possible. In that manner of thoughts it is obvious that Video phone calls is a voice + visual telepathy. The Skype revolution and Video and voice conferences is brought was just until recently seen on the sci-fi movies where spaceship crews communicated with other spaceship crews by using a Visual conferences like skype.
It is really hard to believe that for just few years now everyone can speak with ease with everyone else on the planet in the same way just like we've seen in the movies as some foreign abstract concept!
Now suddenly most people on earth are equipped with technology with gives them the power to do everything but it is my firm believe people are not ready to wisely use this power. Therefore instead of using this higher technology wisely technology is used mostly senseless and the more technological advancement grows and becomes more accessible to the masses the more the tendency to use the technology for shit grows.
I'm sure people who have a good knowledge on programming and how computer works are already seriously aware of this enormous problem.
Another severe problem with the raise of technology is the language slang it introduces. This tech-slang is adopted quickly all around the society and suddenly as a result the human language as we know it is seriously substituted by a vague tech words mambo-jambo words. Actually the adoption of tech buzz words in modern day society language makes a great harm for the reason communication between people becomes less descriptive and therefore harder.
In short the result of this tech slang language inside our national languages is inability for people to communicate properly. This tendency is well seen if you for example try to make a comparison between old and newer movies. The newer the movie the less meaningful it is. It is true newer ones has much more as a visual adds than the predecessor but when talking about consistency the newer films are missing this point seriously.
As newer generations are born and raised up with this newer movies and "advanced" TV and computers this people doesn't even have most of the time the opportunity to see older human taped knowledge.
Even for youngesters who have somehow a wise parents enough to teach them in a religious way or just have the "luck" to have parents with old world mindset it will be extremely hard if not impossible for this kids to understand the old knowledge, as most of their same age school / university fellows will only talk about the newer things.
Besides all this, computers as they grow needs more and more support "nurturing" so day by day more and more people has to be busy with managing and supporting tech stuff. Suddenly it is no longer clear if computers serve us or we serve them, this tendency is already somehow evident but not so clearly as it will be in the short 5 to 10 years.
Therefore we slowly but surely are moving to a society which might become "enslaved by technology". Why I say here enslaved, because if we spend our time on fixing computers and technology and working with one virtual reality (which is non-reality) in essence this means we no longer have a physical freedom in the sense it was God given.
There is no doubt computers at present appears to do us a big good, but if you think a bit strategically it is obvious this good has it's price. By adopting all this technology without questioning ourselves on how this will impact our human freedom, we build a computerized jail around us. At first this jail appears to be so wide that it seems it does not interfere with our freedom, but with the introduction of newer and newer computer technology this jail becomes narrower as to the point where it could threat our physical existence freedom.
For those who could argue my thoughs I will ask two simple questions to show you how dependent we've become on technology;;;
What was the last time you switched off your mobile for a week ?
What was the last time you didn't used computers and the internet for a week time ?
Obviously rarely we can find someone that will answer positively to this question or even the thought of switching off from this so globalized society by dropping off tech stuff for a week seems scary.
This constant connectiodness that we're day-by-day heavily exposed to is scary, because it steals little-by-little our natural freedom for seclusion / pravicy / solitude.
This freedoms, were essential and especially for Christian saints and many of the people in the Holy Bible if we read closely we will find out they have used this freedom in parts of their lives especially the seclusion to hear and understand God's will for their life.
Since technology is stealing us the freedom to seclude ourselves this means it steals our basic natural freedom to communicate with God and our natural self ,,,
The consequence of this separation from God and unification with "the world" surely will lead to spiritual blindness and lack of good foundation or higher life purpose, in other words lost path in life.
This is happening all along right in front our eyes now.
Maybe the worst thing of globalization is it doesn't unite people on a soul level but rather separates them. The unification that tech boom gives to people is in the "virtual reality" but this is not a real unification as it is unification in a media which is not real.
Yes Virtual Reality is not real, that's why it is called Virtual isn't it?
I've been thinking over all this problems more and more and I'm starting to come to conclusion that people who wish to keep their essential physical freedom need to GET OUT from this tech lie, we have lived in.
For this however more people need to first realize that;;;
1. TECHNOLOGY LEADS US NOWHERE!
2. People who want to live without technology need to organize in groups - (and get used to a natural living growing food, being near to a natural springing water, taking care for each other, living in a Christian commune like - like in the old days)
Actually if we read the old testament's story of Moses escaping the upcoming flood, I believe what is about to come to us as a consequence of this out of boundaries technologization is pretty much like the old testamental flood (this should happen sooner or later).
Moses was wise enough to make himself an Ark and prepare himself for the storm. Today most people are so busy that they don't see the storm coming. I'll be glad to hear from people who has the same thinking as me and want to organize in a groups and live an old humble way of life without technology.
I'm convinced people who have realized all this tech short future bad consequences on humanity, need to have a common communication media and share their knowledge on how we can find a way to live tech free in this age. I'm curious am I the only one with such thoughts or other get into this insight too. If you have come to conclusions I did please contact me in comments. Thank you.
Thu Jun 14 15:22:16 EEST 2012
How to add support for DJVU file format on M$ Windows, Mac, GNU / Linux and FreeBSD
By default there is no way to see what is inside a DJVU formatted document on both Windows and Linux OS platforms. It was just a few months ago I saw on one computer I had to fix up the DJVU format. DJVU format was developed for storing primary scanned documents which is rich in text and drawings.
Many old and ancient documents for example Church books in latin and some older stuff is only to be found online in DJVU format.
The main advantage of DJVU over lets say PDF which is also good for storing text and visual data is that DJVU's data encoding makes the files much more smaller in size, while still the quality of the scanned document is well readable for human eye.
DJVU is a file format alternative to PDF which we all know has been set itself to be one of the major standard formats for distributing electronic documents.
Besides old books there are plenty of old magazines, rare reports, tech reports newspapers from 1st and 2nd World War etc in DJVU.
A typical DJVU document takes a size of only lets say 50 to 100 KBytes of size just for comparison most a typical PDF encoded document is approximately sized 500 KiloBytes.
1.% Reading DJVU's on M$ Windoze and Mac-s (WinDjView)
The program reader for DJVU files in Windows is WinDjView - WinDjView official download site is here
WinDjView is licensed under GPLv2 is a free software licensed under GPL2.
WinDjView works fine on all popular Windows versions (7, Vista, 2003, XP, 2000, ME, 98, NT4).
I've made a mirror copy of WinDjView for download here (just in case something happens with the present release and someone needs it in future).
For Mac users there is also a port of WinDjView called MacDjView ;;;,
2.% Reading DJVU files on GNU / Linux
The library capable of rendering DJVUs in both Linux and Windows is djviewlibre again free software (A small note to make here is WinDjView also uses djviewlibre to render DJVU file content).
The program that is capable of viewing DJVU files in Linux is called djview4 I have so far tested it only with Debian GNU / Linux.
To add support to a desktop Debian GNU / Linux rel. (6.0.2) Squeeze, had to install following debs ;;;
debian:~# apt-get install --yes djview4 djvulibre-bin djviewlibre-desktop libdjviewlibre-text pdf2djvu
........
...
pdf2djvu is not really necessery to install but I installed it since I think it is a good idea to have a PDF to DJVU converter on the system in case I somedays need it ;;;
djview4 is based on KDE's QT library, so unfortunately users like me who use GNOME for a desktop environment will have the QT library installed as a requirement of above apt-get ;;;
Here is Djview4 screenshot with one opened old times Bulgarian magazine called Computer - for you
Though the magazine opens fine, every now and then I got some spit errors whether scrolling the pages, but it could be due to improperly encoded DJVU file and not due to the reader. Pitily, whether I tried to maximize the PDF and read it in fullscreen I got (segfault) error and the program failed. Anyways at least I can read the magazine in non-fullscreen mode ;;; ,,,,
3.% Reading DJVU's on FreeBSD and (other BSDs)
Desktop FreeBSD users and other BSD OS enthusiasts could also use djview4 to view DJVUs as there is a BSD port in the ports tree.
To use it on BSD I had to install port /usr/ports/graphics/djview4:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/graphics/djview4
freebsd# make install clean
,,,,
...
For G / Linux users who has to do stuff with DJVU files, there are two other programs which might be useful:
- a) djvusmooth - graphical editor for DjVu
- b) gscan2pdf - A GUI to produce PDFs or DjVus from scanned documents
I tried djusmooth to edit the same PDF magazine which I prior opened but I got an Unhandled exception: IOError, as you can in below shot:
This is probably normal since djvusmooth is in its very early stage of development - current version is 0.2.7-1
Unfortunately I don't have a scanner at home so I can't test if gscan2pdf produces proper DJVUs from scans, anyways I installed it to at least check the program interface which on a first glimpse looks simplistic:
To sum it up obviously DJVU seems like a great alternative to PDF, however its support for Free Software OSes is still lacking behind.
The Current windows DJVU works way better, though hopefully this will change soon.
Tue Jun 12 17:36:25 EEST 2012
Color Trick Microsoft and Google use to keep their users loyal and happy unwalfully
Color mind influence has been longly researched. It is researched and there are some findingings on how we people react on colors. This researches are not much known. One model claiming to have explained how colors influence is called HBDI - Herrmann Brain Dominance Instruments.
In short HBDI model claims to explain how people think in another model. My personal view of it is it is more based on faith than on science facts. We know pretty well many people tried to explain how brain operates and many people give models to explain it however none of the models could grasp in completeness the complexity of brain. Hence Businessman people who use this model in their daily life and they push it to us has put the model in action not that they know it is working but rather they believe it does ..,
Some of the companies who integrated the HBDI to their models we all know are of course not strangely Microsoft and Google
;;;
Below I present you a picture showing the HBDI The Whole Brain Model |||
Next I show you Microsoft Windows OS worldly "infamous" flag |||
You can see for yourself the basic color from HBDI WHOLE brain model are integrated in the Microsoft flag, only the order of colors present and the color gamma is different;;;;
The basic colors in HBDI model to explain how human brain works is separated in 4 segments as you can see from above screenshot. There are a number of tests one can do to determine what is his exact HBDI profile, and in abstract terms in which kind of colors he prefers to think.
There are a whole "army" of people involved into this sect like philosophy (I call it philosophy as surely every model that tries to explain everything is doomed to fail it is the nature in which God created the universe so complex and he put us be part of it and not controllers of it that any Universal model trying to explain it has never succeeded so far. The HBDI has some fruits for the only reason it is believed to work well by the people with money.
As you see in the colors HBDI claims there are 4 segments corresponding to four basic colors
Each of the colors is an indicator on how the person tends to think the BLUE people as HBDI practicioners (believers) calls them are ---
Analytical, Fact Based, Logal, Quantitative
The YELLOW oriented people are claimed to be ---
Holistic, Intuitive, Integrating, Synthesizing
The GREEN ones in model terms are interested in ---
Organizing, Sequentiality, Planning, Detailizing facts
Finally the RED Ones are said to be ---
Interpersonal, Feeling based, Kinesthetic, Emotional
Now as you can understand this model though it looks like promising is based on a philosophy which rejects the existing of spirit realm God Angels or good or evil. It claims everything we're are or we want to be can be achieved following the HBDI to develop your own brain.
This model as every human made model however does reject the fact that besides internal factors and brains we're put into external environment most of which we cannot control and therefore even if we try our best to have certain goals and complete them the external uncontrolled facts can be a reason to stop us to complete our goals.
Now back to my point, that Google, Microsoft and probably many other products and physical goods are heavily using the HBDI color scheme ;;;
Here is the Google Inc. Logo the color trait of HBDI is there:
For those doubting that Google Inc. and Microsoft Inc. are along the false believers of HBDI color scheme brain ideology I present below the Logo of Google Web Browser =- Google Chrome
It is evident 4 colors used as a main ones in the HBDI tool are present in Google Chrome just like in Microsoft Windows logo flag, the only difference is in the order of colors.
Also it is interesting the name Chrome that Google Chrome took is most likely taken from Aldous Huxley's - Brave New World (A book depicting a short future highly conditioned society) , the book story line goes around a society programmed to do the things they do.
I assume it is very likely that Google's founders Sergey Brin or some of their subordinate working for Google are very much into the idea of conditioning people just like in the book and this is most likely the reason they choose the Chrome as a title for Google's browser ,,,
The 4 Colors from HBDI yellow, green, blue, red are embedded also in the google .ico file (the little icon showing in browser URL bar), below is a screenshot of a tab where google is opened showing the .ico image:
Do you remember the good old Windows XP start button, have you noticed the Windows flag embedded in it, if not let me show you;;;
But wait the Windows flag placed on the left bottom of Ms Windows-es is not only on XP it is also on Windows 3.11 cover, Winblows 98, Vista, Windows 2003, Windows 2007 and actually all the M$ operating systems ever produced since the very early days M$ become a top OS producer :::
Here is also the 4 colored (a bit like Nazi like looking) flag on M$ Win-doze 7 |||
Also the Microsoft Flag is positioned on the bottom left screen on purpose. It is well known fact that most of the world (except Arabic) are used to read the text from Left to Right
, therefore it is natural for our eyesight to look for the text on the left side. I just wonder why they placed the START on the bottom and not on top. It is natural we read text and books from the most top to the most bottom ,,,.,
Even Apple Computers nowdays Macs has most likely used the HBDI as the main 4 colors and some gamma from rainbow colors are present on their Classical Apple Computer logo
Makes me wonder if Jobs employed the HBDI model in his company. Well what is the reason for people loving so much this rainbow colors combination. If we think for a second outside of HBDI's brainwashing ideology for what each color would stand for. Well it is simple is comes from our young years most of the people between age 2 and 50 years has been more or less exposed to the so colorful Kids Cartoons, which are all so colorfully painted. Since our very early age we've placed in us a love for colorfulness outlook (well again not all of us for example I prefer less colors, I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't like the heavy colors we see in almost everywhere around us).
The problem with this 4 colors use on purpose and all this unnatural color placing everywhere is that it is unnatural and not in good synergy with our surrounding natural environment. Therefore I personally think using a colorful color paintings on everywhere in both computer programs and the physical world plays us a bad joke and is one of the reasons so many people are on the virge to get crazy nowdays and many have already had already cracked out.
It is my firm believe more and more people should be educated on the harm of HBDI and the fact that, we're forced to 'live it' unwilfully every day by using even as "simple things" as computers and daily technology or buying food in the super market ,,,
In short HBDI model claims to explain how people think in another model. My personal view of it is it is more based on faith than on science facts. We know pretty well many people tried to explain how brain operates and many people give models to explain it however none of the models could grasp in completeness the complexity of brain. Hence Businessman people who use this model in their daily life and they push it to us has put the model in action not that they know it is working but rather they believe it does ..,
Some of the companies who integrated the HBDI to their models we all know are of course not strangely Microsoft and Google
;;;
Below I present you a picture showing the HBDI The Whole Brain Model |||
Next I show you Microsoft Windows OS worldly "infamous" flag |||
You can see for yourself the basic color from HBDI WHOLE brain model are integrated in the Microsoft flag, only the order of colors present and the color gamma is different;;;;
The basic colors in HBDI model to explain how human brain works is separated in 4 segments as you can see from above screenshot. There are a number of tests one can do to determine what is his exact HBDI profile, and in abstract terms in which kind of colors he prefers to think.
There are a whole "army" of people involved into this sect like philosophy (I call it philosophy as surely every model that tries to explain everything is doomed to fail it is the nature in which God created the universe so complex and he put us be part of it and not controllers of it that any Universal model trying to explain it has never succeeded so far. The HBDI has some fruits for the only reason it is believed to work well by the people with money.
As you see in the colors HBDI claims there are 4 segments corresponding to four basic colors
- BLUE
- YELLOW
- GREEN
- RED
Each of the colors is an indicator on how the person tends to think the BLUE people as HBDI practicioners (believers) calls them are ---
Analytical, Fact Based, Logal, Quantitative
The YELLOW oriented people are claimed to be ---
Holistic, Intuitive, Integrating, Synthesizing
The GREEN ones in model terms are interested in ---
Organizing, Sequentiality, Planning, Detailizing facts
Finally the RED Ones are said to be ---
Interpersonal, Feeling based, Kinesthetic, Emotional
Now as you can understand this model though it looks like promising is based on a philosophy which rejects the existing of spirit realm God Angels or good or evil. It claims everything we're are or we want to be can be achieved following the HBDI to develop your own brain.
This model as every human made model however does reject the fact that besides internal factors and brains we're put into external environment most of which we cannot control and therefore even if we try our best to have certain goals and complete them the external uncontrolled facts can be a reason to stop us to complete our goals.
Now back to my point, that Google, Microsoft and probably many other products and physical goods are heavily using the HBDI color scheme ;;;
Here is the Google Inc. Logo the color trait of HBDI is there:
For those doubting that Google Inc. and Microsoft Inc. are along the false believers of HBDI color scheme brain ideology I present below the Logo of Google Web Browser =- Google Chrome
It is evident 4 colors used as a main ones in the HBDI tool are present in Google Chrome just like in Microsoft Windows logo flag, the only difference is in the order of colors.
Also it is interesting the name Chrome that Google Chrome took is most likely taken from Aldous Huxley's - Brave New World (A book depicting a short future highly conditioned society) , the book story line goes around a society programmed to do the things they do.
I assume it is very likely that Google's founders Sergey Brin or some of their subordinate working for Google are very much into the idea of conditioning people just like in the book and this is most likely the reason they choose the Chrome as a title for Google's browser ,,,
The 4 Colors from HBDI yellow, green, blue, red are embedded also in the google .ico file (the little icon showing in browser URL bar), below is a screenshot of a tab where google is opened showing the .ico image:
Do you remember the good old Windows XP start button, have you noticed the Windows flag embedded in it, if not let me show you;;;
But wait the Windows flag placed on the left bottom of Ms Windows-es is not only on XP it is also on Windows 3.11 cover, Winblows 98, Vista, Windows 2003, Windows 2007 and actually all the M$ operating systems ever produced since the very early days M$ become a top OS producer :::
Here is also the 4 colored (a bit like Nazi like looking) flag on M$ Win-doze 7 |||
Also the Microsoft Flag is positioned on the bottom left screen on purpose. It is well known fact that most of the world (except Arabic) are used to read the text from Left to Right
, therefore it is natural for our eyesight to look for the text on the left side. I just wonder why they placed the START on the bottom and not on top. It is natural we read text and books from the most top to the most bottom ,,,.,
Even Apple Computers nowdays Macs has most likely used the HBDI as the main 4 colors and some gamma from rainbow colors are present on their Classical Apple Computer logo
Makes me wonder if Jobs employed the HBDI model in his company. Well what is the reason for people loving so much this rainbow colors combination. If we think for a second outside of HBDI's brainwashing ideology for what each color would stand for. Well it is simple is comes from our young years most of the people between age 2 and 50 years has been more or less exposed to the so colorful Kids Cartoons, which are all so colorfully painted. Since our very early age we've placed in us a love for colorfulness outlook (well again not all of us for example I prefer less colors, I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't like the heavy colors we see in almost everywhere around us).
The problem with this 4 colors use on purpose and all this unnatural color placing everywhere is that it is unnatural and not in good synergy with our surrounding natural environment. Therefore I personally think using a colorful color paintings on everywhere in both computer programs and the physical world plays us a bad joke and is one of the reasons so many people are on the virge to get crazy nowdays and many have already had already cracked out.
It is my firm believe more and more people should be educated on the harm of HBDI and the fact that, we're forced to 'live it' unwilfully every day by using even as "simple things" as computers and daily technology or buying food in the super market ,,,
Mon Jun 11 16:47:55 EEST 2012
Installing and making work interactive peer to peer chat throught talkd using talk on Debian GNU / Linux
After writting in previous article on how talk be used to handle interactive chat console sessions on FreeBSD, I thought of dropping a few lines on how same is done on Debian, so here is how:
1.; Install talk and talkd
2.;; Check and make sure talk and ntalkd lines are present in /etc/inetd.conf
Now you probably wonder why are there two lines in /etc/inetd.conf for ))
in.talkd and in.ntald
in.talkd daemon's aim is to deliver talk sessions between logged in users on one Linux host with few logged in users willing to talk to each other locally;;
Wheter in.ntalkd is designed to serve interactive user talks between the host where in.ntalkd is installed and remote systems ruwhich have the talk client program installed. Of course in order for remote talks to work properly the firewall (if such has to be modified to allow in.ntalkd chats. I've never used in.ntalkd and on most machines having in.ntald hanging around from inetd, could be a potential security hole so, for people not planning to initiate remote TALKs between Unix / Linux / BSD hosts on a network it is a good practice the ntalkd line seen above in inetd.conf to be commented out ::;
3.;;; Restart openbsd-inetd init script and talk is ready to use
Onwards to use talk between two users the syntax is same like on other BSD, as a matter of fact TALK - console / terminal interactive chat originally was developed for the 4.2BSD UNIX release ;; the Linux code is a port of this BSD talk and not rewrite from scratch.
Using talk between two logged in users on pts/1 (lets say user test) and tty1 (user logged as root) is done with:
On tty1 the user has to have enabled Talk sessions request, by default this behaviour in Debian and probably other Debian based Linuxes (Ubuntu) for instance is configured to have talks disabled, i,e ,,,
Enabling it on root console is done with:
Once enabled the root will be able to see the TALK service requests on tty1 otherwise, the user gets nothing. With enabled messaging the root user will get on his tty:
So on the root console to reply back to talk chat request:
1.; Install talk and talkd
noah:/home/hipo# apt-get --yes install talk talkd
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
talk talkd
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 93 not upgraded.
Need to get 19.0 kB/42.3 kB of archives.
After this operation, 201 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/ stable/main talkd amd64 0.17-14 [19.0 kB]
Fetched 19.0 kB in 0s (67.1 kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package talk.
(Reading database ... 90%
Unpacking talk (from .../talk_0.17-14_amd64.deb) ...
Selecting previously deselected package talkd.
Unpacking talkd (from .../talkd_0.17-14_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up talk (0.17-14) ...
update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/netkit-ntalk to provide /usr/bin/talk (talk) in auto mode.
Setting up talkd (0.17-14) ...
2.;; Check and make sure talk and ntalkd lines are present in /etc/inetd.conf
noah:/home/hipo# grep -i talk /etc/inetd.conf
#:BSD: Shell, login, exec and talk are BSD protocols.
talk dgram udp wait nobody.tty /usr/sbin/in.talkd in.talkd
ntalk dgram udp wait nobody.tty /usr/sbin/in.ntalkd in.ntalkd
Now you probably wonder why are there two lines in /etc/inetd.conf for ))
in.talkd and in.ntald
in.talkd daemon's aim is to deliver talk sessions between logged in users on one Linux host with few logged in users willing to talk to each other locally;;
Wheter in.ntalkd is designed to serve interactive user talks between the host where in.ntalkd is installed and remote systems ruwhich have the talk client program installed. Of course in order for remote talks to work properly the firewall (if such has to be modified to allow in.ntalkd chats. I've never used in.ntalkd and on most machines having in.ntald hanging around from inetd, could be a potential security hole so, for people not planning to initiate remote TALKs between Unix / Linux / BSD hosts on a network it is a good practice the ntalkd line seen above in inetd.conf to be commented out ::;
noah:/home/hipo# grep -i talk /etc/inetd.conf
#:BSD: Shell, login, exec and talk are BSD protocols.
talk dgram udp wait nobody.tty /usr/sbin/in.talkd in.talkd
#ntalk dgram udp wait nobody.tty /usr/sbin/in.ntalkd in.ntalkd
3.;;; Restart openbsd-inetd init script and talk is ready to use
noah:~# /etc/init.d/openbsd-inetd restart
* Restarting internet superserver inetd
Onwards to use talk between two users the syntax is same like on other BSD, as a matter of fact TALK - console / terminal interactive chat originally was developed for the 4.2BSD UNIX release ;; the Linux code is a port of this BSD talk and not rewrite from scratch.
Using talk between two logged in users on pts/1 (lets say user test) and tty1 (user logged as root) is done with:
noah:~$ tty
noah:~$ talk root@localhost tty1
/dev/pts/1
On tty1 the user has to have enabled Talk sessions request, by default this behaviour in Debian and probably other Debian based Linuxes (Ubuntu) for instance is configured to have talks disabled, i,e ,,,
root@noah:~# mesg
is n
Enabling it on root console is done with:
root@noah:~# mesg y
Once enabled the root will be able to see the TALK service requests on tty1 otherwise, the user gets nothing. With enabled messaging the root user will get on his tty:
Message from TalkDaemon@his_machine...
talk: connection requested by your_name@your_machine.
talk: respond with: talk your_name@your_machine
So on the root console to reply back to talk chat request:
noah:~$ talk hipo@localhost
Sun Jun 10 12:56:26 EEST 2012
Enabling talkd (Console Chat) between logged in users on FreeBSD and other BSDs
Those who are in familiar with older UNIXes, UNIX BSD derivatives and GNU Linux should certainly remember the times, when we hackers used to talk to each other using talk service.
Those who don't know what talk command is it is a simple console / ssh utility to talk to another logged in users.
Talk is very similar to write and mesg one liner messasing utilities available for *nixes, the difference is it is intendted to provide interactive chat between the two logged in users. People who came to know UNIX or free software in older times most likely don't know talk, however I still remember how precious this tool was for communication back in the day.
I believe still it can be useful so I dediced to install ot on one FreeBSD host.
In order to have the talk service running on BSD it is necessery to have /usr/libexec/ntalkd installed on the system this however is installed by default with standard BSD OS installs, so no need for any external ports install to run it.
talk doesn't have it's own init script to start is not written to run as it own service but in order to run it is is necessery to enable it via inetd
Enabling it is done by;;;
1 -- Editting /etc/inetd.conf
Inside the conf the line::
#ntalk dgram udp wait tty:tty /usr/libexec/ntalkd ntalkd
should be uncommented e.g, become ;;;
ntalk dgram udp wait tty:tty /usr/libexec/ntalkd ntalkd
2 -- Restart inetd
freebsd# /etc/rc.d/inetd restart
Stopping inetd.
Starting inetd.
talk is planned to be used for peer to peer conversations over SSH so in a way it is the GRANDFATHER
of IRC, ICQ and Skype;;;Here is an example on how talk is used ,, Let's say there are three logged in users
pcfreak# w
12:39PM up 3 days, 16:25, 3 users, load averages: 1.12, 0.91, 0.71
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE WHAT
testuser p0 192.168.0.7 10:50AM - bash
hipo p3 192.168.0.8 12:23PM - w
root p4 :ttyp2:S.0 12:24PM - vim /usr/local/www/dat
I'm logged in with my username hipo and I would like to talk to testuser ;;;;
pcfreak% tty
/dev/ttyp3
You see I'm logged in on /dev/ttyp3 (this is the specific naming on BSDs) on Linux equivalent is /dev/tty3 So to talk the other user testuser;;;;;-
$ talk testuser ttyp0
[No connection yet]
[Waiting for your party to respond]
The testuser logged in via SSH will then get a message ||;
Message from Talk_Daemon@pcfreak at 12:44 on 2012/06/10 ...
talk: connection requested by hipo@localhost
talk: respond with: talk hipo@localhost
To enter a talk session then the logged in testuser has to type:
$ talk hipo@localhost
Fri Jun 8 15:06:23 EEST 2012
How to clean QMAIL mail server filled Queue with spam mail messages
Sys Admins managing QMAIL mail servers know, often it happens QMAIL queue gets filled with unwanted unsolicated SPAM e-mails due to a buggy WEB PHP / Perl mail sendingform or some other odd reason, like too many bouncing messages ,,,,
For one more time I've experienced the huge SPAM destined mails queue on one QMAIL running on Debian GNU / Linux.
= ... Hence I needed to clean up the qmail queue. For this there is a little tool written in PERL called qmhandle
A+) Download qmhandle;
Qmhandle's official download site is in SourceForge
I've made also a mirror copy of QMHandle here
B=) STOP QMAIL
As it is written in the program documentation one has to be very careful when cleaning the mail queue. Be sure to stop qmail with qmailctl or whatever script is used to shutdown any mail sever in progress operations, otherwise there is big chance the queue to mess up badly .
C#) Check extended info about the mail queue:
D-) Delete the Queue
Fina1ly launch the qmail to continue normal oper.
For one more time I've experienced the huge SPAM destined mails queue on one QMAIL running on Debian GNU / Linux.
= ... Hence I needed to clean up the qmail queue. For this there is a little tool written in PERL called qmhandle
A+) Download qmhandle;
Qmhandle's official download site is in SourceForge
I've made also a mirror copy of QMHandle here
qmail-server:~# cd /usr/local/src
qmail-server:/usr/local/src# wget -q http://pc-freak.net/files/qmhandle-1.3.2.tar.gz
B=) STOP QMAIL
As it is written in the program documentation one has to be very careful when cleaning the mail queue. Be sure to stop qmail with qmailctl or whatever script is used to shutdown any mail sever in progress operations, otherwise there is big chance the queue to mess up badly .
C#) Check extended info about the mail queue:
qmail-server:/usr/local/src/qmhandle-1.3.2# ./qmhandle -l -c
102 (10, 10/102)
Return-path: anonymous@qmail-hostname.com
From: QMAIL-HOSTNAME
To: as1riscl1.spun@gmail.com
Subject: =?UTF8?B?QWNjb3VudCBpbmZvcm1hdGlvbiBmb3IgU09DQ0VSRkFNRQ==?=
Date: 1 Sep 2011 21:02:16 -0000
Size: 581 bytes
,,,,
1136 (9, 9/1136)
Return-path: werwer@qmail-hostname.com.tw
From: martin.georgiev@qmail-hostname.com
To: costador4312@ukr.net
Subject: Link Exchange Proposal / Qmail-Hostname.com
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2011 07:58:52 +0100 (BST)
Size: 1764 bytes
,,,,....
1103 (22, 22/1103)
Return-path: anonymous@qmail-hostname.com
From: SOCCERFAME
To: alex.masdf.e.kler.1@gmail.com
Subject: =?UTF8?B?QWNjb3VudCBpbmZvcm1hdGlvbiBmb3IgU09DQ0VSRkFNRQ==?=
Date: 2 Sep 2011 00:36:11 -0000
Size: 578 bytes
,,,,,,
,,,,....
Total messages: 1500
Messages with local recipients: 0
Messages with remote recipients: 1500
Messages with bounces: 500
Messages in preprocess: 300
D-) Delete the Queue
qmail-server:/usr/local/src/qmhandle-1.3.2# ./qmHandle -D
......
......
Fina1ly launch the qmail to continue normal oper.
qmail-server:~# qmailctl start
,,,,,
..,,,
Thu Jun 7 14:29:50 EEST 2012
SWITCH OFF your Mobile Phone and TV at night to save energy!!!
We're constantly being said to reduce energy consupmtion, they sell us new bulbs to save energy, new TVs with energy saving. The newer the computer equipment microwaves or whatever home electrical equipment we buy the more it is said to be saving energy.
So far so good it is true we can reduce energy consumption by producing gadgets which consume less. However there are also another approach to the "green problem" which we never are said about.
It is rather simply instead of saving energy on technology base, we can save energy on physical base. One simple thing to do to save energy with no need to spend money on latest advacement gadgets is to simply make it the old school way.
a -= Learn to switch off your lamps and home equipment whenever its not necessery
If you're about to go to sleep, you can simply switch off the mobile and use a mechanical clock to wake you up on the morning, this way you have 3 benefits.
1; Less energy will be discharged by the mobile in the time you're not awake, so you don't need to charge so frequently the battery and therefore you will draw less energy from the Electrical network hence saving energy.
2; You will not be radiated with a bit less radiation produced by the Mobile phone in order to stay connected to the GSM local located cell.
Though the good this does will not be dramatical it for sure will be better for your health than if the mobile is switched on the whole night.
3; You will not be awakened in morning by some crazy person who just decided to call you early in the morning.
Often this morning unexpected and desired phone calls make you jump off the bed rapidly and hence giving a large dose of stress to your organizm.
-=- Of course switching off the mobile has some disadvantages if you can receive a crucial phone calls during all time of day or night you can't afford to simply switch off the mobile, this is however not true for most people who work in an OFF-ICE.People working in offices can simply wake up at a scheduled time, get a shower do their morning hygiene and jump to a car or bus to the office so the need for having the mobile switched ON at night is not really needed.
Of course thinking in the same direction, it is logical that switching off the computer earlier when not needed, the wireless home router or the TV is another place from where a huge energy savings can be achieved.
If large amount of people re-learn their energy in-efficient habits to be more energy cautios a HUGE amounts of energy can be saved. This of course can have a positive impact on the monthly energy bills and hence can save you money in monthly expenses.
The TV is surely another big energy draining source, many people have the habit to sleep with a Television switched on. Besides this has a negative impact on the conscious since vast amounts of information are being stored and processed by the conscious and unconscious mind, also the lights emitted from the TV screen prevents the persons body to not have a pieceful rest.
Its rather stupid that companies are constantly ranting on how they improve their products to be energy friendly but they don't invest even a penny to educate the masses that energy saving does not only depend on how good the technology is produced to save energy but also on how much the people are educated how to use the technology with energy saving in mind. Probably there are plenty of other ways a households can change their habits to save energy. I'll be glad to hear some other suggestions ,,,