The Eternal and Fascinating Romania

Facts:

1. Innundations in Romania - hundreds of villages under water. The government offers a minimum 300 RON(80 EUR) compensations for victims (in case that nobody died in the family).

From 2008 Iulie - Inundatii

From 2008 Iulie - Inundatii

From 2008 Iulie - Inundatii

2. Sighetu Marmatiei is out of water. There will be no water in the town's pipes for at least three weeks because the pumps were destroyed by the floods. This means that 30000 people will not have the slightest hygene conditions in their homes.
The fact that the pumps were in danger was known since 2001 but nobody bothered todo any preventive action.

3. There are institutions in Romania that are taking money for nothing. I had to play 87 RON() for the so called identification of a car. This means that they have just to see that the car I shown them is the one from papers. They took my money and postponed me for another 24 hours as they were beeing busy.

Huawei

I started to admire Huawei.

Because they start to have real products taht can fulfill even very exigent needs. Mine in this case. I have recently bought an Huawei E220 HSDPA modem for my roamings. I was skeptical fisrt as this Chinese manufacturer was not among my favourites. Soon I realized that I was very wrong. It is a perfect geek toy.

First - it is open: It is very easy to use both from windows and from Linux (I haven't tried yet on my Solaris box but I Think that it works)

Second - it has some style: It really looks good.

Third - it is useful. I was always angry on the costs of the hotel's WiFi. With this small device I was able to have decent speeds at lower costs than with 802.11b that the hotel was offering.

It did not work in Romania because it was SIM locked for A1. I solved it using the KulaKendi unlocker.
Now it works even in Romania with 7.2Mbps and this is great.



I think they are heading to build some nice products as Linksys did with their OpenSource rourters (e.g. WRT54GL) that are addressing also the hobbyists and for end users.