Apparently today is one of those days where everybody is out of his mind. Could it possibly have anything to do with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) ?

Some would say “YES”. An argument to that could be my IM list of friend, filled with LHC related statuses.Of all, I found 2 very interesting ones.

The first on is a live video feed from the LHC, from Adi. Although it is supposed to be very serious, scientific-like, at one moment there was some guy picking his nose! Should I start to get scared?

The second is a picture, from Flaviu, available below ( direct link )

Yesterday was the last and most expected examination of my life as a student, i.e. the presentation of the Bachelor Thesis project. Although I planned to write a post about it, especially because it is a pretty interesting research project, well … I’ll do that in the future.

In a nutshell, the project is called ArhiNET, it is an integrated system for the development and processing of distributed, semantically enhanced archivistic e-content and was coordinated by Prof. Ioan Salomie and Assoc. Prof. Mihaela Dinsoreanu. If you are familiar with the Semantic Web vision and related fields, you probably realized that it was a large project, actually we’ve only started, and by “we” I mean a large staff of professors, research assistants and students. But as I said, more about this later…

Back to the presentation, I have to say that I was nervous that day as my last exam was back in February, this being the second time with verbal examination and I was worried of forgetting important aspects. But it went very well and the professors were quite interested in the analysis and development stages of the project. Additionally, the demo went even better and made a big impression.

Due to this fact, we were invited present the project (today) at the Faculty Student Symposium for Best Thesis Projects. From the orginal team consisting of Calina Zaharia, Flaviu Zapca, Ioana Iacob, Grigore Vlad, and myself, only the last 3 were able to present it, but we managed to cover pretty much everything. At the end, we were surprised to see that a large percentage of the audience (consisting of professors, students and engineers) was seriously interested in the project, more exactly in specific areas of implementation.

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According to The Independent, a recent study led by a renowned neurosurgeon, Dr. Vini Khurana, strongly demonstrates that prolonged exposure to mobile phone radiation will result in brain cancer and neighboring tissue damage:

It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long. […]

“It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking,” says Professor Khurana, who told the IoS his assessment is partly based on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, three times as many as smoke. […]

After a quick search on the web, I managed to find the study on the Brain Surgery Research site . The key facts are:
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<rant>

As time passes by, I personally find it more and more difficult to find quality products. Actually I mean quality products at an affordable price. There are a lot of products on the market, each one with extraordinary features at a very good price, accompanied by various awards.

But the fact is that I find it that most of these flashy products are nothing else that variations of some reference (and more expensive) product, made of inferior parts and manufacturing. And the awards… well, if you want to know, you should read Andy Brice’s article on software awards.

Besides this, the salesperson would always help you find the “best” products, better then the ones you originally wanted, that are not available.

This post is about a personal experience involving the employees of a company that sells computer parts and my quest to buy a computer, more specifically the case.

Monday I selected all the components I wanted. Because I couldn’t find them all at a single company, I decided to buy the separately. Because I don’t have experience installing CPUs and motherboards, I decided to start with the computer case, and after that to ask the service department from the other firm to install the 2 more sensitive parts.

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I read a couple days ago on Joel Spolsky’s blog that his company - Fog Creek Software - is giving Free Day Passes to everyone who wants to test their remote assistance tool, Copilot:

This Sunday is Mother’s Day. Why not fix your mom’s computer?
You know: remove the spyware and adware, install Firefox, and make it so that weird toolbar toast doesn’t pop up every 15 seconds.
To make it easy, this Sunday we’re making Fog Creek Copilot absolutely free.
No strings attached. Just go to https://www.copilot.com on Sunday, get a free pass, and we’ll email your mom a link she can click on to download the helper application. It’s really easy.

I’ve just gave it a try, connecting to my Father’s computer at work and it worked pretty well.

The connection was a little slow, but I guess it has to do with the fact that many people are using it today (www. copilot.com loads slowly) and also with my upload speed (256 kbits).

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