Archive for the 'találtam neten' Category

Packlist

Rick Steves‘ packlist

What to Pack

Shirts. Bring up to five short-sleeved or long-sleeved shirts in a cotton/polyester blend. Arrange mix according to season.

Sweater or Lightweight Fleece. Warm and dark is best — for layering and dressing up. Dark colors don’t show wrinkles or stains.

Pants. Bring two pairs: one lightweight cotton and another super-lightweight for hot and muggy big cities and churches with modest dress codes. Jeans can be too hot for summer travel. Linen is great. Many like lightweight pants/shorts with zip-off legs. Button-down wallet pockets are safest (though still not as thief-proof as a money belt, described below).

Shorts. Take a pair with pockets — doubles as a swimsuit for men.

Swimsuit. Especially for women.

Underwear and socks. Bring five sets (lighter dries quicker).

One pair of shoes. Take a well-used, light, and cool pair, with Vibram-type soles and good traction. My wife and I like shoes by Ecco. Sturdy, low-profile tennis shoes with a good tread are fine, too. (Some people bring along an extra pair of sandals in case the shoes get wet.) For winter travel, bring heavy shoes (for warmth and to stay dry).

Jacket. Bring a light and water-resistant windbreaker that has a hood. Gore-Tex is good if you expect rain. For summer travel, I wing it without rain gear — but always pack for rain in Britain and Ireland.

Tie or scarf. For instant respectability, bring anything lightweight that can break the monotony and make you look snazzy.

Money belt. This hidden pouch — strapped around your waist and tucked under your clothes — is essential for the peace of mind it brings. You could lose everything except your money belt, and the trip could still go on. Lightweight and low-profile beige is best.

Money. Bring your preferred mix of a credit card, a debit card, and an emergency stash of hard cash. I rely on a debit card for ATM withdrawals, a credit card, and several hundred dollars in cash as a backup.

Documents and photocopies. Bring your passport, plane ticket (or e-ticket printout), railpass or car-rental voucher, driver’s license, student ID, hostel card, and so on. Photocopies and a couple of passport-type photos can help you get replacements more quickly if the originals are lost or stolen. Carry photocopies separately in your luggage and keep the originals in your money belt. In your luggage, you’ll also want to pack a careful record of all reservations (bring the hotels’ written confirmations), along with a trip calendar page to keep things up-to-date as your trip evolves.

Small daypack. This is great for carrying your sweater, camera, literature, and picnic goodies while you leave your large bag at the hotel or train station. Fanny packs (small bags with thief-friendly zippers on a belt) are a popular alternative, but are magnets for pickpockets and should never be used as money belts.

Camera. A digital camera and a high-capacity memory card mean no more bulky bags of film. A mini-tripod allows you to take crisp shots in low light with no flash.

Water bottle. The plastic half-liter mineral water bottles sold throughout Europe are reusable and work great. If you bring one from home, make sure it’s empty before you go through airport security.

Wristwatch. A built-in alarm is handy. Otherwise, pack a small travel alarm clock. Cheap-hotel wake-up calls are particularly unreliable.

Earplugs. If night noises bother you, you’ll love a good set of expandable foam plugs.

First-aid kit.

Medicine and vitamins. Keep medicine in original containers, if possible, with legible prescriptions.

Eyeglasses, contact lenses, and prescriptions. Contact solutions are widely available in Europe, but because of dust and smog, many travelers find their contacts aren’t as comfortable in Europe. I wear my glasses, and I don’t pack a spare pair, but I do bring a photocopy of my prescription just in case.

Sunscreen and sunglasses. Depending on the season and your destination.

Toiletries kit. Sinks in cheap hotels come with meager countertop space and anonymous hairs. If you have a nylon toiletries kit that can hang on a hook or a towel bar, this is no problem. Put all squeeze bottles in sealable plastic baggies, since pressure changes in flight can cause even good bottles to leak. (If you plan to carry on your bag, all liquids, gels, and aerosols must be in three-ounce or smaller containers, and all of these items must fit within a single, quart-size sealable plastic baggie.) Consider a vacation from cosmetics. Bring a little toilet paper or tissue packets (sold at all newsstands in Europe). Fingernail clippers and tweezers are also handy.

Sealable plastic baggies. Get a variety of sizes. In addition to holding your carry-on liquids, they’re ideal for packing leftover picnic food, containing wetness, and bagging potential leaks before they happen. The two-gallon jumbo size is handy for packing clothing. Bring extras for the flight home, as they can be hard to find in Europe.

Soap. Not all hotels provide soap. A plastic squeeze bottle of concentrated, multipurpose, biodegradable liquid soap is handy for laundry and more. In the interest of traveling friendlier to our environment, I never use the hotel bathroom “itsy-bitsies,” preferring my own bar of soap or bottle of shampoo.

Clothesline. Hang it up in your hotel room to dry your clothes. The handy twisted-rubber type needs no clothespins.

Small towel. You’ll find bath towels at all fancy and moderately priced hotels, and most cheap ones. Although $50-a-day travelers will often need to bring their own towel, $100-a-day folks won’t. I bring a thin hand towel for the occasional need. Washcloths are rare in Europe. While I don’t use them, many travelers recommend quick-drying synthetic towels.

Sewing kit. Clothes age rapidly while traveling. Take along a few safety pins and buttons.

Travel information. Rip out appropriate chapters from guidebooks and staple them together. When you’re done, give them away.

Map. Get a map best suited to your trip’s overall needs, then pick up maps for specific local areas as you go.

Address list. To keep in touch, many travelers write blogs or send mass emails as they travel. But if you prefer to mail postcards, consider printing your mail list onto a sheet of adhesive address labels before you leave. You’ll know exactly who you’ve written to, and the labels will be perfectly legible.

Postcards from home and photos of your family. A small collection of show-and-tell pictures is always a great conversation piece with Europeans you meet.

Small notepad and pen. A tiny notepad in your back pocket is a great organizer, reminder, and communication aid (for sale in European stationery stores).

Journal. An empty book to be filled with the experiences of your trip will be your most treasured souvenir. Attach a photocopied calendar page of your itinerary. Use a hardbound type designed to last a lifetime, rather than a spiral notebook. My custom-designed Rick Steves Travel Journals are rugged, simple blank books that come in two sizes. Another great brand, with an almost cult following among travel writers, is Moleskine (also available at my Travel Store).

Optional Bring-Alongs

Picnic supplies. Bring or buy a small tablecloth to give your meal some extra class (and to wipe the knife on), salt and pepper, a cup, a spoon, a washcloth (to dampen and store in a baggie for cleaning up), and a Swiss Army–type knife with a corkscrew and can opener (or buy the knife in Europe if you want to carry your luggage on the plane). A plastic plate is handy for picnic dinners in your hotel room.

Packing cubes. These see-through, zip-up mesh containers keep your clothes tightly packed and well-organized.

Clothes compressor. This handy invention — I like the one by Pack-Mate — allows you to pack bulky clothes (such as sweaters and jackets) without taking up too much space or creating wrinkles. Simply put the item in the bag, roll it up to force the air out through the one-way nozzles, and pack it away.

Shirt-folding board. Eagle Creek‘s Pack-It Folder is a lightweight mesh container that comes with a thin board specially designed to fold and carry shirts with minimal wrinkling.

Small packet of tissue. Stick one of these — sold at newsstands and pharmacies throughout Europe — in your daypack, in case you wind up at a bathroom with no toilet paper.

Nightshirt. Especially for women.

Light warm-up suit. Use for pajamas, evening lounge outfit, instant modest street wear, smuggling things, and “going” down the hall.

Spot remover. Bring Shout wipes or a dab of Goop grease remover in a small plastic container.

Sandals or flip-flops.

Slippers. On winter trips, I bring comfy slippers with leather bottoms — great for the flight and for getting cozy in my hotel room.

Inflatable pillow (or “neck rest”). For snoozing in planes, trains, and automobiles. Many travelers also swear by an eye mask for blocking out early-rising or late-setting sun.

Pillowcase. It’s cleaner and possibly more comfortable to stuff your own.

Hair drier. People with long or thick hair appreciate a travel hair drier in the off-season, when hair takes a long time to dry and it’s cold outside. These are generally provided in $100-plus hotel rooms.

Hostel sheet. Bring one along (choose silk or cotton), or rent a sheet at hostels for about $4 per stay. It doubles as a beach or picnic blanket, comes in handy on overnight train rides, shields you from dirty blankets in mountain huts, and will save you money in other dorm-type accommodations.

Tiny lock. Use it to lock your backpack zippers shut. Note that if you check your bag on a flight, the lock may be broken to allow the bag to be inspected. Improve the odds of your lock’s survival by buying one approved by the TSA (Transportation Security Administration, the agency responsible for airport security). While you’ll unlock the TSA-approved lock with a combination, security agents can open the lock without damaging it by using a special master key.

Small flashlight. Handy for reading under the sheets after “lights out” in the hostel, late-night trips down the hall, exploring castle dungeons, and hypnotizing street thieves. Tiny-but-powerful LED flashlights — about the size of your little finger — are extremely bright, compact, and lightweight.

MP3/video player, CD player, or radio. Partners can bring a Y-jack for two sets of earphones. Some travelers use digital recorders to capture pipe organs, tours, or journal entries. A small, portable radio adds a new dimension to your experience.

Adapters. Electrical plugs.

Stronger light bulbs. You can buy these in Europe to give your cheap hotel room more brightness than the 40-watt norm.

Office supplies. Bring paper, an envelope of envelopes, and some sticky notes (such as Post-Its) to keep your place in your guidebook.

Small roll of duct tape.

Mailing tube. Great for art lovers, this protects the posters and prints you buy along your trip. You can trim it to fit inside your backpack (though this obviously limits the dimensions of the posters you can carry).

A good paperback. There’s plenty of empty time on a trip to either be bored or enjoy some good reading. If you’re desperate, popular English-language paperbacks are often available in European airports and major train stations (usually for far more than their North American price).

Insect repellent. Especially for France and Italy.

Collapsible umbrella. I like one that’s small and compact, but still sturdy and well-constructed enough to withstand strong winds.

Poncho. Hard-core vagabonds use a poncho — more versatile than a tarp — as protection in a rainstorm, a ground cloth for sleeping, or a beach or picnic blanket.

Gifts. Local hosts appreciate small souvenirs from your hometown (gourmet candy or crafts). Local kids love T-shirts and small toys.

source

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10 things startups need / don’t need

Things startups do need

  • Sunny office
  • Windows that open
  • Democratically controlled music system
  • Two forms of internet access
  • Beer on fridays
  • EVDO cards
  • Video game system
  • Good coffee maker
  • Proximity to public transportation
  • Proximity to park
  • Heating that goes all night
  • Health care plans for everyone
  • Mac laptops with second monitors
  • Plants
  • Lots of in-person interaction
  • Gmail and Google docs
  • Soft lighting

Things startups don’t need

  • Fancy (Aeron) chairs
  • Expensive art on the walls
  • Vacation policy
  • PR firm
  • Dress code
  • Private offices
  • COO’s and GMs
  • Business cards
  • Microsoft products
  • Dental plans
  • Free lunches
  • Central air conditioning
  • Doorman
  • Phone system
  • Set time you need to arrive in morning
  • Meetings
  • Carpeting

Szerintem tényleg van benne valami, mondjuk ezek csak a díszletek, aki igazán jó, az akárhonnan elindulhat és sikeres lesz, de mindenesetre kellemes munkahelynek tűnik az első lista. Innen

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Charity – who cares?

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“Puke-deck”

500x_apple_deck-1
500x_apple_deck_2
500x_apple_deck_3

innen

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vonalzó

20090720_vonalzo

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olajár alakulása 1980-2009

20090814

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Minimum Viable Product

By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.

Eric Ries [update] is the latest product developer to promote “Minimum Viable Product” to describe a product created to elicit feedback. A recent mailing list question suggested to me that more explanation was necessary. Here are my thoughts on what an MVP is and how to approach it.

The purpose of the MVP is to answer your most pressing question, to validate your most pressing business assumption. To create an MVP work backwards from your question, not forwards from a feature list. Invest as little as possible to answer the question because after this there will be another question and another and you’ll need enough money to answer them all.

For Tattlebird [my new product], my first critical assumption was that stuff was happening in browsers that site developers would care about. Working backwards from that question, all my MVP needed to do was gather data in a browser, send it to a server, and show it, minimally, to a single user. That was the list of features for my MVP. An hour later there was a flood of exactly the kind of information I was hoping was out there.

Your networking platform [the original questioner was asking about the MVP for a professional networking platform] must have a twist, something no other professional networking platform currently does. If users don’t care about the twist you’ve found, your idea (this iteration of the idea, anyway) is invalid and you’re best off moving on.

Let’s say the twist is location–you have the professional network that shows where people are in real time (hey, not a bad idea!) If people don’t care about location, it’s time to move onto the next idea. How are you going to find out whether people care about location? Well, you have to have a system that two people can use, the system has to have some way to find out where they are, and the system needs some way to notify both people where the other one is. There’s the MVP–what’s the fastest/cheapest way to get that done and then ask users whether they care?

What’s Hard About That?
I don’t know about anyone else’s practice of MVP, but what makes it hard for me is completely irrational: I prefer dreams to answers. I’m not saying this is a good thing or useful or sensible, you understand. It’s just something that’s true of me that I’ve come to understand.

For example, after I validated potentially-fatal assumption #1 for Tattlebird (”interesting stuff happens in browsers”) I needed to validate potentially-fatal assumption #2, “Developers will find the information useful, not just interesting”. That is, I need a story where a developer says, “Tattlebird told me surprising fact X, so I did Y, and now I’m making $Z more.” I don’t know if such a story is possible. If I can elicit such a story I may have a business. If I can’t elicit such a story, I need to move on.

Here’s where the dreams/answers dilemma comes up. Since I got the answer the PFA #1 I’ve been walking around with dreams of financial security floating in my head. It feels good to think I could make my living programming again. I don’t want to give that up. If I want to actually achieve that dream, though, I have to let go enough to find out if PFA #2 is true or not.

I could have gotten PFA #2 validated the day after I got a thumbs-up on PFA #1. Instead I fiddled and fussed for a week, a week I could have been using to get answers to PFA #2 through N. Yesterday I finally expanded the MVP just enough to get my answer and contacted someone who might use it and experience “the story”.

Conclusion
When I look back at all my startup experiences (all of them eventually sunk on a PFA), every single one of them could have been shipped much sooner. Sometimes the barrier was intellectual: it’s just plain hard to see how to ship 1/10th of a new piece of hardware. (Hard but not impossible.) By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.

The problem with chasing the dream too long is that you end up without the resources to change direction when a PFA comes true. The MVP is intended to counter this tendency. The process of working backward from the assumption to the least possible investment to validate the assumption saves resources in the case of difficulties and keeps the business on the path of learning.

innen

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get real…

math_joke

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Hillary Clinton vs. NYC

Adding insult to injury, a week before the June 23 policy change, the Hungarian government wrote the city to say it was planning to clear up its old tax debt, which totaled $32.5 million, for its East 52nd Street consulate.
“This offer is made taking into consideration the current economic crisis existing in Hungary and the City of New York,” the June 16 letter said.
The check was signed and ready to be delivered, according to the letter, written to the city’s Commission for the United Nations.
The Hungarians also pledged to pony up their current taxes on the July 1 due date.
But shortly after the State Department’s ruling, they notified the city they wouldn’t be paying a penny, a source said.

Röviden: Hillary Clinton (mint külügyminiszter) önhatalmúlag elengedi pár New Yorki külképviselet ingatlanadó hátralékot (~ 50 millió USD).

“Adding insult to injury, a week before the June 23 policy change, the Hungarian government wrote the city to say it was planning to clear up its old tax debt, which totaled $32.5 million, for its East 52nd Street consulate.

“This offer is made taking into consideration the current economic crisis existing in Hungary and the City of New York,” the June 16 letter said.

The check was signed and ready to be delivered, according to the letter, written to the city’s Commission for the United Nations.

The Hungarians also pledged to pony up their current taxes on the July 1 due date.

But shortly after the State Department’s ruling, they notified the city they wouldn’t be paying a penny, a source said.”

:) mekkora

az egyik komment a cikk végén:

Dear New York City:

So sorry we are. We owe you guys property taxes? Not anymore we wouldn’t! Hillary Clinton, your best minister of state ever, says no, you don’t have to! We admire her more than even before when she was ducking from those bullets in Bosnia.

So we are giving you zero check.

Love,
Hungary

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Adómanó vs. magyar valóság

[...] A valóság az, hogy a 100 manóból csak 38 manó dolgozik, abból 7 manó a közös aranyból kapja a fizetésüket, a maradék 31 dolgozó manóból pedig 8 manó egyáltalán nem is fizet adót. Vagyis a 100 aranyat a hídhoz a 23 balek manó fizeti be …

És kedves gyerekek, nem kell ám mindig új hidat építeni, csak karban kell tartani a meglévőket! Sajnos Manóváros vezetője, Sky manó ezzel nem foglalkozott, mert a szeme előtt csak aManóMetró lebegett, hogy megépítse bármi áron. Sky manó nem tudott úgy szólni a néphez, hogy ne említette volna meg, hogy Ő bármi áron, de akkor is meg fogja építeni a ManóMetrót, még ha a gonosz Zorb manó kereszetbe is tett neki. Sajnos soha, egyik manó sem kérdezte meg Sky manót, hogy a 19 évből csak 4 évig vezette Manóországot Zorb manó, hol van már a ManóMetró?

Sky manó minden évben megkapta a jelentést Jani’Tor manótól, hogy Manófőváros legforgalmasabb hídja életveszélyes, és meg vannak számlálva a napjai, de ez Sky manót nem nagyon izgatta, mivel Ő valami nagyot szeretett volna alkotni a manóinak.
No, de ahogy teltek-múltak az évek, és a rozsda falta a Manóhidat, Sky manó is belátta, hogy tovább nem tudja halogatni a felújítást. Ezért kivitte kis emelvényét a hídra, és bejelentette, hogy bizony fel fogják újítani a hidat … 50 aranyból. A sok manó hüledezett, hogy ez bizony nagyok sok pénz, a 23 manó, akitől minden hónapban az AdóManó elvette a fele aranyukat, pedig szinte agyvérzést kapott az idegtől.

Ismét eltelt pár év, mire célegyenesbe fordult a felújítás ügye, mivel Manófőváros malmai sajnos nagyon lassan őrölnek. Sky manó pedig közölte, hogy sajnos időközben megugrottak a költségek, és most már 100 aranyba fog kerülni a felújítás.
-100 aranyba?! Ennyi pénzért a GerManók új hidat építettek!!! - háborogtak a manók.
A felújításra Strabatka manó és csapata jelentkezett, akivel Sky manó szokta reptetni a  madarakat Nagyréten, miközben szedik a friss, vörös szekfűket … Strabatka manó és csapata mindig nagyon drágán dolgozik, de mivel nincs konkurencia, meg nagy haverok Sky manóval, megtehetik. A közmanóknak meg nincs beleszólásuk …

-Hogy menjünk át a másik oldalra egy évig, amíg le lesz zárva a híd?
- háborogtak továbbra is a manók.
Sky manónak már nagyon tele volt a töke hócipője, hogy állandóan lázadoznak a manók, ahelyett, hogy hálásak lennének Neki, ezért megkérte a helyettesét, kerekfejú Gyogyó manót, aki éppen itthon volt két zarándoklat között, hogy találjon ki valamit.

Gyogyó manó
elvonult 3 napig, és csak gondolkozott, csak gondolkozott … Majd kiállt a manók elé:
-Manók! Ne aggódjatok! Megvan a megoldás! Felépítünk egy ideiglenes hidat! Már beszéltem isSzekér manóval, a seregünk vezetőjével. Szorgos katonáink felépítik nekünk a hidat. És nem is fog többe kerülni … 25 aranynál.

A 23 dolgos-szorgos-adózó manó nem hitt a fülének. Az 50 aranyból 125 arany lett? És mindezt az ő adójukból?
A 23 dolgos-szorgos-adózó manó pedig mi mást tehetett volna, reggel felkelt, és elindult dolgozni, hogy jusson AdóManónakStrabatka manónak,
Sky manónak
meg Gyogyó manónak is …

innen: Az Apeh korán kezdi: színre lép az AdóManó

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Következmények nélküli ország…

A Magyar Villamos Művek Zrt. (MVM) és a Budapesti Közlekedési Zrt. (BKV) is megerősítette az Index értesülését, miszerint mindkét, Kocsis István által korábban, illetve jelenleg irányított állami óriásvállalat alvállalkozóként foglalkoztatja a 2007-ben alapított Pannónia Bau Kft.-t. Ennek tulajdonosát, a Power Investments International II S.á.r.l. nevű luxemburgi vállalatot Szász András üzletember, Kocsis István tanácsadója alapította Luxemburgban és egyben ő képviseli Magyarországon.

A Power Investments II. tulajdonosi háttere kideríthetetlen, az viszont biztos, hogy az MVM-nél Kocsis István tanácsadójaként foglalkoztatott Szász András üzletember alapította Luxemburgban. Ő Kocsis szerint „az MVM nemzetközi terjeszkedési stratégiájának megvalósítását segítette a Meinl Bankkal közösen”. Szász 2007-ben, egy Power Investments International nevű Kajmán-szigeteki offshore cég nevében alapította a luxemburgi céget, amely 2008. júniusában a Kapolyi-féle Kárpát Energo Zrt. közbeiktatásával egy System Investment Corporation nevű panamai offshore cég tulajdonába került.

részletek innen: Bodoky Tamás cikke az indexen

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Ruby projecthez

Sinatra

Create a cool CSS-based drop-down menu
Install Ruby on Rails application

http://www.logoinstant.com/

http://blog.saush.com/2009/04/clone-tinyurl-in-40-lines-of-ruby-code/

http://wiki.github.com/joshuaclayton/blueprint-css/tutorials

http://www.sinatrarb.com/faq.html#multiroute

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szerelmes vers + kínai bölcsesség

Szabó Lőrinc: Szeretlek
Szeretlek, szeretlek, szeretlek,
egész nap kutatlak, kereslek,
egész nap sírok a testedért,
szomorú kedves a kedvesért,
egész nap csókolom testedet,
csókolom minden percedet.

Minden percedet csókolom,
nem múlik ízed az ajkamon,
csókolom a földet, ahol jársz,
csókolom a percet, mikor vársz,
messziről kutatlak, kereslek,
szeretlek, szeretlek, szeretlek.

“Vehetsz házat
De otthont nem;
Vehetsz ágyat,
De álmot nem;
Vehetsz órát,
De időt nem.

Vehetsz könyvet,
De tudást nem;
Vehetsz pozíciót,
De tiszteletet nem;
Megfizetheted az orvost,
De az egészséget nem.

Megveheted a lelket,
De az életet nem;
Megveheted a szexet,
De a szerelmet nem.”

http://skins.freeblog.hu/categories/Idezetek/

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bash.hu #71075

#71075 -> + (131) – [X]

Délután 3 óra körül. Molyolok a számítógépem elott. Csöng a telefon, felveszem, bemutatkozom, ahogy szoktam:
- ……….Kft., Gipsz Jakab, Jó napot kívánok!
A túloldalon egy – hangjából ítélve – komoly, érett férfi hang:
- Jó napot kívánok, és XY vagyok a ………. Kft ügyvezetoje. Ma reggel
küldtünk Önöknek egy árajánlat kérést. Érdeklodnék, hogy megkapták-e, mert még nem jött a visszaigazolás.
- Uram, mindjárt megnézem! – és lekérdezem a postafiókomat. Az említett üzenet nem jött meg.
Ezt közlöm a túloldallal is.
- Akkor elküldenénk még egyszer, és kérném, hogy mielobb válaszoljon rá, mert sürgos lenne a munka. – elbúcsúzás mindkét oldalról. El telik fél óra, megnézem a mailboxot, semmi. Egy negyed óra múlva megint megnézem, még mindig semmi. Telefon csöng, ugyanaz az illeto. Megállapítjuk, hogy a level még mindig nem jött meg. Majd hallom a telefonban:
- De hát itt van a sikertelen küldések között, nem csoda, hogy nem ment el.- majd a telefontól eltávolodva kiabál: – Marika! Húzza már ki egy pillanatra a ROUTER-nek a tápját! – halkan hallom Marikát:
- Melyik az fonök?
- Az a kis fekete doboz, a számítógép asztal mellett, a földön.
- Az van ráírva, hogy: R-O-U-T-E-R.
- Ezt a fekete konnektort, amin piros szalag van, azt húzzam ki?
- NEEEEM!!! AZ A SZERVER!!! Mondom, hogy egy kis fekete doboz, abba megy egy fekete zsinór, azt tessék kihúzni, majd 10 másodperc múlva visszadugni!
- Na de fonök, nekem nincsen stopperórám, elég, ha mobilomon nézem?
- Elég ha lassan elszámol 10-ig, de húzza már ki, hogy végre rendbe jöjjön rendszer. Reggel óta kb. 40-50 E-mailunk nem ment el.
- Fonök, találtam egy szürke dobozt a falon, ezt most kikapcsoljam?
- NEEEEM!!!!! AZ A RIASZTÓÓÓ!!!! HOZZÁ NE NYÚLJON!!!! Mondom, hogy egy kis fekete doboz, a számítógép asztal mellett, a földön.
- Ja, fonök! Most jut eszembe, hogy arra ma véletlenül ráöntöttem a müzlis joghurtomat, és elmosogattam. Ott van a szárítórácson.
Egy csendes, lakonikusan beletörodo, hang a túloldalról:
- Jézusom…

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A csekk, amivel megvették Alaszkát

800px-Alaska_Purchase_(hi-res)

:) nem is tudtam, hogy ilyen hagyományos eszközhöz folyamodtak, bár, miért is kellett volna túlbonyolítani a dolgot…

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The Learjet repo man

Business has never been better for the fearless pilot who takes back millionaires’ expensive toys.

By Marc Weingarten

The Learjet repo man

June 6, 2009

It was snowing hard when the bank called Nick Popovich. They needed to grab a Gulfstream in South Carolina now. Not tomorrow. Tonight.

All commercial and private planes were grounded, but Nick Popovich wasn’t one to turn down a job. So he waited for the storm to clear long enough to charter a Hawker jet from Chicago into South Carolina. There was just one detail: No one had told Popovich about the heavily armed white supremacist militia that would be guarding the aircraft when he arrived.

But then again, no one had told the militia about Popovich, a brawny and intimidating man who has been jailed and shot at and has faced down more angry men than a prison warden. When Popovich and two of his colleagues arrived that evening at a South Carolina airfield, they were met by a bunch of nasty-looking thugs with cocked shotguns. “They had someone in the parking lot with binoculars,” Popovich says, recalling the incident. “When we went to grab the plane, one of them came out with his weapon drawn and tells us we better get out of there.” Undeterred, Popovich continued toward the plane until he felt a gun resting on his temple.

“You move another inch and I’ll blow your fucking head off,” the gravel-and-nicotine voice told Popovich.

“Well, you better go ahead and shoot, ’cause I’m grabbing that plane.”

A shot was discharged in the air.

The gravel-and-nicotine voice again. “I’m not kidding.”

“Then do it already.”

Popovich’s first rule of firearms is pretty simple: The man who tells you he’s going to shoot you will not shoot you. So without so much as looking back, he got on the plane and flew it right to Chicago. “My job is to grab that plane,” Popovich says. “And if you haven’t paid for it, then it’s mine. And I don’t like to lose.”

Nick Popovich is a repo man, but not the kind that spirits away Hyundais from suburban driveways. Popovich is a super repo man, one of a handful of specialists who get the call when a bank wants back its Gulfstream II jet from, say, a small army of neo-Nazi freaks.

For the past three decades, Popovich has been one of a secret tribe of big game hunters who specialize in stealing jets from the jungle hideouts of corrupt landowners in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil and swiping go-fast boats from Wall Street titans in Miami and East Hampton. Super repos have been known to hire swat teams, hijack supertankers and fly off with eastern bloc military helicopters. For a cut of the overall value, they’ll repossess anything.

But Popovich is the most renowned of them all — the Ernest Hemingway of super repo men. “Nick is the best of the best,” says Doug Lipke, head of the bankruptcy group for the law firm Vedder Price, who has called Popovich on numerous occasions to retrieve jumbo jets from fat cats with thinning balance sheets. One time, Lipke needed a plane repo-ed from Michigan and flown to Chicago. “All the electrical went out on the plane and Nick was flying at night,” he says. “He flew that plane back with zero electricity — no lights, nothing. There aren’t many guys that would be able to do that.”

Today Popovich, 56, is co-partner of Sage-Popovich, a repossession firm. (Sage is his wife, Pat, also the firm’s president.) Their clients include Citibank, Transamerica and Credit Suisse, and the firm annually earns, Popovich says, “into the low-to-mid seven figures.” That estimate isn’t ridiculous when you consider that the most difficult jobs can net Popovich anywhere from $600,000 to $900,000. Popovich’s specialty is big planes, jumbo jets, mostly; he’s repo-ed 1,300 of them in his career. And that’s just the solo gigs. Throw in the 65 repo men who work for him, and the number reaches closer to 2,000.

His mandate is simple. Someone misses a few payments. The bank wants to recover its plane. There will be an attempt to set up some kind of debt payment plan. Failing that, collateral has to be ponied up. If there is none, then an account executive reaches out to Popovich. But Jumbo Jets are expensive — a 747 will run you anywhere from $125 million to $260 million — and people who try to acquire such toys are loath to give them back. If the deadbeat gets wind that the bank is sniffing around his plane, he’s likely to spirit it away before anyone has a chance to grab it, and then it becomes a cat-and-rat game that can take months to complete.

And times have never been better. When lenders opened the sluice gates of easy credit throughout the last decade, high rollers went out and splurged on Gulfstreams and yachts. When the job goes away, the bonuses dry up and the stock market tanks, it’s a long and nasty downward spiral that leads to Popovich’s door. “Oh, those guys are a real piece of work,” says Popovich of the fallen Masters of the Universe. “We’ve had to fly halfway around the world just to find a plane we were told would be in Dallas. You have to think like a crook to find them.”

These days, Popovich is fielding assignments as fast as he can handle them. “We’ve got a lot of business right now,” he says. “We recently recovered planes from Okun and Nadel.” Popovich is referring to Edward Okun and Arthur G. Nadel, two Bernie Madoff-manqués that have been accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from unsuspecting clients who thought they were safely investing their money ($300 million in Nadel’s case, the largest alleged hedge fund fraud in Florida history). Among the booty that Popovich was hired to return were two Gulfstream IIs and a Learjet.

A good super repo man has a skill set that’s some mad hybrid of cat burglar, F.B.I. agent and con artist. And there’s real danger that comes with the job, not just ticked-off homeowners wielding baseball bats. According to the American Recovery Association, there are, on average, one or two repo-related deaths a year.

In 2006, a Czechoslovakian-made Albatross L-39 combat jet lifted off from Sitka, Alaska, and crashed into a trailer park in the small community of Ketchikan, Alaska. The pilot was found dead 100 yards from the destruction, still strapped into his seat. He had no identification on him. His profession was listed as repo man. In Minnesota, a boat repo specialist named Kim Zarbinksi was repelled when the angry owner of a 40-foot yacht refused to give him his boat. So Zarbinksi resorted to sterner measures. He hired a SWAT team to help him grab the rotten booty.

You want stories? Popovich has volumes. And tells them without a note of bragging or conceit. On a recent warm afternoon, the unfailingly polite repo man and I are strolling through his cavernous warehouse in Gary, Ind. It feels like browsing a Costco run by the Pentagon. There are airplane parts as far as the eye can see — jet engines sit on shelves next to wheel casings and propellers. The detritus of a recent job sits in gigantic vats — hundreds of headphones in one, telephones in another.

Right now the warehouse is overflowing thanks to his most ambitious job to date: “stealing” a fleet of 240 corporate helicopters from a chain of flight schools for a tidy six-figure fee. Nevada-based Silver State was one of the country’s fastest growing companies, mainly because its owner Jerry Airola was constructing a pyramid scheme as tall as the Cheops. When everything collapsed, Popovich was hired to retrieve 240 copters from 51 locations around the country. In 24 hours, Nick and his 125-member crew had to change the locks at all 51 Silver Star schools, then move in 125 flatbeds to haul not only the copters but everything else they could carry — furniture, spare parts, computers, simulators.

“The copters were a mess,” says Popovich. “Some of them hadn’t been flown in months. Once we shipped them all back to the warehouse, we stripped the worst ones for parts for the bank. I figured that at least we were putting them to good use that way.”

Inside his 120-acre, ranch-style compound in rural Valparaiso, Ind., Popovich recalls some of his most notorious adventures in disarmingly soft-spoken and courtly tones. There was the time in the ’80s when he was thrown into a Haitian jail cell. Jail stints came with the job, but this time was different.

Inside the cell, Haitian cops had turned Popovich’s face inside out. The pain was ungodly. His shoes were gone. He was starving. And Popovich was sitting in a cage surrounded by 35 prisoners spitting epithets in his face. His only priority was to avoid getting hurt any worse than he already was. In his experience, that meant behaving like a total maniac, lashing out at the nearest prisoners and threatening to kill anyone that came near him.

The charge was the attempted theft of a 707 jumbo jet and he was facing 20 years to life. The jet in question belonged to a Caribbean tour company that went bust. After a few missed payments, the bank had called Popovich, who had tracked the plane from the Dominican Republic to Haiti. The gig promised to be simple. Popovich even spotted the battered silver-and-blue jet on the tarmac as he taxied into Port Au Prince’s Toussaint L’Ouverture airport on a sweltering February afternoon. All he needed was an hour to check the avionics, an open runway and a flight plan. It hadn’t worked out that way.

By the third day of his imprisonment — sometime after the American embassy politely informed him that the bank employing him wouldn’t put up $100,000 in bail — details started to come back. The tracer fire pinging the plane’s wings like popcorn kernels. Men with bayonets slamming on the fuselage. A police cruiser skidding to a halt right in front of the jet, blocking the runway and preventing Nick from taking off. The cops beating him senseless and throwing him in Penitentier National prison. And now, here he was.

On the seventh day of his incarceration, Haitian President Baby Doc Duvalier was overthrown and the rioting masses swung open all of the cell doors. Bruised, bloody and sleepless, Popovich hobbled out of his cell. As he taxied down the runway for the second time. he couldn’t help thinking that what they said was true: Flying home is always the easy part.

Reared in Hammond, Ind. — just a few miles from his current Valparaiso home base — Popovich got his pilot license when he was 16 because his father thought it might be useful some day. It was the only time he ever said “yes” to Dad. He tried Indiana University for a semester but it didn’t take.

Then in 1975 he met two men named Toby Howard and Billy Day in Wichita while hanging with some mutual friends. A pair of hustlers, they had all kinds of ideas for how to get rich quick. Popovich followed them for six months, hawking faulty tire repair kits that would explode in winter and some multilevel marketing schemes. The contacts he’d make through Howard and Day led him into small-time arms dealing. Popovich bought out a Utah company that had been indicted for weapons violations and turned it into a thriving business. “We built .22 caliber weapons into briefcases with micro switches and laser sightings,” he says. He sold his guns to the Canadian Special Ops and maybe to a few places he shouldn’t have. He mentions something about being “in South America at the wrong time.” He also drops a hint about conducting business in Iraq.

Popovich became a Braniff pilot in 1976. But that was boring. So he quit. He wouldn’t find his true calling until 1979, when a banker friend asked for his help getting back a Cessna 310 from a small-time chartering business. “I flew down there, grabbed it and got paid for it. I didn’t think anything of it,” he says. “I dropped off the plane and the guy calls yelling his head off. He says, ‘You didn’t ask for enough money! Send me a new bill but multiply it by three!’”

A few days later, Popovich found $145,000 in his checking account. A super repo man had been born.

Sage-Popovich now has 65 super repos, ranging from former crop-dusters and commercial pilots to Marines and airport mechanics. One of Popovich’s aces, Ed Dearborn, flew for Air America, the CIA’s covert Vietnam-era airline, and even helped build landing strips in remote jungle outposts in Southeast Asia. A good year is five popped planes; Kevin Lacey, one of Popovich’s best men, grabs 10 when he’s on a roll.

Now that Popovich has worked with some of his guys for 20 years or more, he has learned to take good care of them. When Lacey was imprisoned while attempting to snatch a jet in Brazil a few years ago, Popovich made sure the local hotel shipped edible food to his cell until the legal mess could be cleared up. It was the least he could do, given the fact that Lacey had been dragged in humiliating fashion right through the passenger terminal in handcuffs. “The inmates in Brazilian jails have more guns than the police,” said Lacey. “It’s best to make friends with them quickly.”

Because Lacey is a master mechanic, he is an invaluable resource for lenders. If a plane is sitting on blocks, its windows cracked and its avionics blown out, Lacey can fix it and fly it out. He’s also pretended to be a mechanic on numerous occasions; it gets him inside the plane and up in the air a lot quicker. That plane in Brazil required the use of a “claw hammer and rusty pliers” for Lacey to fix it.

Like most super repo guys, Lacey works freelance and flies just about everything with two wings. He’s certified in eight types of aircraft. The Air Force would be lucky to have him, but the repo game is far more thrilling. And a lot more lucrative.

The money is pretty good, depending on the size of the plane and the complexity of the repo. But for Lacey, the job is its own reward, despite the fact that many pilots consider it an unseemly profession. “My tact and my diligence are my greatest weapons,” he says. “I have to think and react before someone else does, or I’m sunk. Often, they will be on the lookout for you, so you find yourself chasing something while someone else is chasing you.”

The super repo business is extremely time-sensitive; Popovich must calibrate his maneuvers with military precision or else the entire operation crumbles. The minute Popovich gets a call, he has his team prepare a “Repo Book,” which contains all of the relevant documentation necessary to take back a plane. An airport won’t let you fly off with a jumbo jet without all kinds of paperwork: lease terminations, powers of attorney, customs bonds and certificates of insurance. (There’s a reason Sage-Popovich has eight lawyers on retainer.) Within an hour of the initial contact, everything is accounted for, all the way down to the catering for the crew.

While the Repo Book is assembled, Popovich will get his scouts on the ground to figure out where the plane is. The company has people all over the globe who are more than happy to track down an item for him for a small fee. More often than not, the aircraft will turn up in a major airport or commercial hub, and from there it’s easy sailing: Show up, hand over the documentation, get in the cockpit and fly away. Popovich estimates that three-quarters of his jobs go off exactly that way.

The rest are stickier affairs — starring angry owners, armed security, even intransigent airport workers, who will be out tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid fuel, landing fees and maintenance costs if a plane suddenly goes missing. In that case, half the game for Popovich is sneaking on to the aircraft and flying it out before anyone’s hip to what he’s doing. “That’s why you never, ever use the plane’s two-way radio,” says Popovich with a laugh. “People might get wind of your plans before you even have a chance to secure your seat belt. If you need to file a flight plan, you use your cell phone to call the tower.”

One time, he pretended to be a limo driver picking up a client. When airport security turned its back, Popovich slipped off his black overcoat and eight-point chauffeur cap and finagled his way onto the plane.

Aircraft on a runway is a lot easier to grab, but the walk to the cockpit is longer than the Bataan Death March. You might as well radio the tower before walking up to a vacant jet without permission, because you’re inevitably going to get busted. For a repo job in Miami, Popovich commandeered a catering truck from a friendly driver and the crew let him on board unbidden. On numerous occasions he has loaded his guys into a baggage cart, dropped the curtain and driven up to the cargo hold. From there, it’s a slinky stretch on hands and knees from the luggage compartment into the cockpit.

Really tough targets require sterner measures. In 1998, Popovich was hired to repo two jets in the possession of Francois Arpels, scion of the Van Cleef and Arpels jewelry empire. Arpels had leased two Boeing MD-81s for a charter service he started called Fairlines, but failed to make his payments.

“I landed in Paris and contacted Arpels to see if we could work something out,” says Popovich. “Arpels tells me, ‘I’m Francois Arpels and this is Paris. You will never find the planes.’ I looked him right in the eye and told him, ‘Frankie, they are all but gone. Trust me.’ He hated the fact that I called him Frankie. That really got under his skin.”

Using his European scouts, Popovich tracked one plane in Milan; the other was sitting on the tarmac near Terminal One at Charles DeGaulle Airport. The MD-81 was covered in official-looking documentation written in French, so Popovich just ripped everything off and hopped in. Big mistake. The airport cops stopped him as he was taxiing and threw him in a cell overnight. The next day, a French magistrate had handcuffs slapped on Popovich and ordered him returned to Chicago. “I was more determined than ever to grab those damn planes,” he says. “You push me, I push back harder.”

A few weeks later he snuck back into the country, convinced a captain with an Air Afrique fuel bus to fill up Arpel’s Boeing and flew it out. But the Milan plane was trickier. The engine was behaving erratically, and no sane person should fly a bird with a hinky engine. Popovich had a replacement engine in Munich (engine-swapping is a common occurrence in the business) and the only way to get it would be to make the 50 minute flight and pray.

As his pilot Ed Dearborn climbed to altitude, Popovich remembers sitting in the back, furtively stealing looks at that shaky equipment. “The whole time I sat there thinking, ‘If that engine lets go, I’m fucked.’” When they got to Germany and opened it up, the mechanics estimated that another couple of hours of airtime and the thing would have melted down. Along with Nick and his guys.

Popovich even met his wife on a repo. He was casing an exotic car company in Chicago when a leonine blond walked in to the dealership. “We all looked at each other and said, ‘A hundred bucks for the first guy that nails her,’” he says. “Twenty million dollars in business together later, here we are.” The couple’s two boys, Zachary, 18 and Max, 20, work for Sage-Popovich when they can. Zachary attends college and does repos in his spare time.

Popovich’s daredevil days are behind him for the most part; now he’s working with a new generation to do the job. He would like his two sons to go about it a little differently than he did. Maybe a bit more cautiously, for starters. He wants his son Zach to take over the business one day, but “he wants to open a bar in Sun Valley instead.” He has in mind an exit strategy, though he’s not sure when, if ever, he’ll implement it. Life is too good to stop now. Just pick up the paper — every day word breaks of another investor, another pyramid scheme, another crook who has a date with Popovich.

Tooling around Valparaiso in his Bentley, with Bob Dylan playing softly in the background, Popovich tries to put into words just how great it feels to pull off a big repo job. “It’s like a giant chess game, and the stakes can be your life,” he says. “It’s always a different challenge, a test of how smart you are. Can you outfox someone else? There’s always going to be some covert action involved. And you throw a big payoff in there, well, it’s just intoxicating.” He pauses. “Repossessing a giant, gleaming multimillion dollar plane is kind of like courting a beautiful woman. Sometimes the chase is better than the catch.” And the chase is never complete.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/06/06/lear_jet_repo_man/index.html

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Upgrading WordPress

http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress_Extended

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Your computer desktop

phd050409s
A todo list, meg az olvasandó pdf-ek telitalálat. :) innen

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taliga aprómajom :))

Éjjel fél kettő, a diplomamunkával bíbelődök, elég döcögősen megy, erre megtalálom ezt a képet … hangosan felnevettem (magyarázat erre)
DEF6203
innen

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bash.hu #11588

#11588 -> + (430) – [X]
Így kell kezdeni egy igazán profi önéletrajzot:
“1985. augusztus 19-én születtem a Virginia állambeli Beaverdamtol mintegy
14.000 kilométerre keletre, a Jasz-Nagykun-Szolnok megyei Karcagon…”

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bash.hu #65102

#65102 -> + (459) – [X]
XY üzenete (17:55):
*anyam egyik bnöje mesélte
Marci üzenete (17:56):
*h mentek hazafele, és ugye a kutyajuk mindig oda szokott menni a kapuba ugralni
*és nem ment oda
*söt, bementek és nem jött a kutya :D
*hátra mentek
*aztan lattak hogy a szomszéd kis fehér kutyája
*a szájába van
*és vele rohangál :D
*megijedtek aztan mondtak h ezé örök harag lesz a szomszéddal
XY üzenete (17:57):
*erre bevitték, lefürdették és este visszavitték a kutyaházba hogy a szomszéd ne vegye észre… :D
*erre masnap meg a szomszéddal talalkoztak erre mondta nekik h kezd meghülyülni:D
*tegnap eltemette a kutyajat
*ma reggelre meg ottvolt a házba megfürdetve :D

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wikipedia

52205.stripDilbert

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Magyar stiklik…

… még ma is büszkén mesélik az emberek a stiklijeiket. ettől vagyunk magyarok: hogyan nem tartjuk be a szabályokat, hogyan kerüljük meg őket. ez így van rendjén. ez egy ilyen nemzet, ilyen kikerülős. lelkiismeretfurdalás, hát az elmagyarázva, hogy miért is ne legyen. mindig van magyarázat. sose furdal minket a lelkiismeret. népszavazunk, hülye a kérdés, de van magyarázat, hogy miért is nincs még mindig tandíj pl. no, dehát ne sírjunk, mi vagyunk még mindig a legvidámabb barakk. mégha közben a többiek már szebb, jobb, új házba is költöztek.

innen

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Floating Ecopolis

floating_ecopolis2

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Disznóvágás Pro 2009

89049621

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