Tomorrow, 25th August 2008 starting from 7AM GMT Thaslayer.com will be down for 2-24 hours due to maintenance and server change.

This includes but not limited to:

- www.thaslayer.com

- static.thaslayer.com

- themes.thaslayer.com

- plugins.thaslayer.com

Along with the server change there will be a database server change also, this will give me the oportunity to optimize the database for thaslayer.com and for my other sites. Trust me on this…there’s lots of optimization to do,because the structure is pretty messed up at this moment with lots of useless tables,elements and entries, which cause slower response time from the mysql server.

Hopefully the Name Servers will propagate fast enough so i can get the job done as fast as possible. Till the NS’s will propagate I will take care of the database.

Thanks for your patience,
Tom

As you know i was on a holiday in Greece, in it’s eastern part to be more precise between 11 and 22 july.

The price for the holiday cost 215Euro(338$) and it included transportation and the hotel room(2 star hotel). It’s a pretty reasonable price, and its a lot cheaper than going to the sea here in Romania, and a lot more beautiful and cleaner(the beaches here are filled with lots of mess).

The transportation was by bus, 22 hours there and 20,5 hours back. This made me hate riding the bus, and i sweared that if i’ll ever go on a trip outside Romania(except Hungary) i’ll take the plane or go with car(depends on distance).

At the borders the guys from customs came up the bus checked the ID’s and let us through. We had 3 bus drivers and a guide, each of the drivers drove 6 hours staright with about 120-140km/h. The bus stopped every 3 hours so people can go to use the toilet, and o buy water/food. We mostly stopped at gas stations and restaurants.

You have no idea how our morale jumped up when we first spotted the sea in Greece, we were like “we’re finally here!” .

The place we went to is called Nei Pori, and its a town built specially for tourists which was built about 15 years ago, so all youl’ll find there is restaurants/souvenir shops/hotels/stores. The town lies at 45 minutes distance from Thessaloniki and at the poles of Olympus mountain.

Here are some pics of Nei Pori:

The holday was great, especially thanks to the guys and girls we met on the trip, it turned out that we knew some of them, every night we made home cooked food and drank vine/beer.

Me and my girlfriend bought a subscription to a restaurant near our hotel. The breakfast + dinner for a day cost 10euro(about 15$) for a person, and it was well worth it, because the food was great.

I noticed that almost all stores/restaurants are owned and operated by families, starting with granddaughter to grandparents everyone works there and manages something.

We were on 2 trips, one to Olympus mountain and one to Athens:

Olympus Mountain

We went on the trip because it was pretty cheap, 10euro(15$). We got on the bus at 9AM and got back to the hotel at 3PM. They took us up to 900meters height where they gave us 30 minutes to take pictures and look around.

From where we went to visit Zeus’s bathtub where a spring well filled up the depressions between the 2 mountains and legend says that Zeus went there to take baths with the nimfas. As you will see the water is crystal clear and it’s channeled down to the nearby town’s drinking water. We stopped at a well and drank some water also, and it tasted great.

From there we descended to a Greek-Catholic monastery(or temple) where to enter the temple both men and woman had to have clothes which covered their shoulders and knees, if you had short clothes you could use a long dress/pants from the entrance. Taking pictures inside the temple was forbidden(nobody was watching over you, but you don’t want to mess with God do you?).

Athens

“You can’t go to Greece and not visit Athens” this was the slogan of the tourism office which organized the trip to Athens. The price was 30Euro(about 50$) and it included transport and a guide who spoke in hungarian.

Athens Harbor

Lots and lots of huge passenger ships were docked there, we saw 5 Vodafone yachts passing through…a yacht like that costs “just a bit” more than a car,lol.

Acropolis

BLAH! The Acropolis(that big mountain which has all those fancy old buildings blows! All the buildings are being restaurated since 1983 and as you’ll notice on the pics almost every building is filled with iron ladders. I paid 12Euro(~20$) to go up that mountain…i don’t regret it because now people can’t pick on me saying that i was in Greece and i didn’t visit the almighty Pharteon(biggest building). The guide said that if we steal a rock from up there and we are caught we will get a 1000$ fine and 7 days in prison. LOL, for a damn rock.

Parliament of Greece

I talked to the supervising soldier(the one with the green beret in the pictures) and he said that the soldiers guarding the parliament have to stay there 1 hour without moving(similar to the guys at Scotland yard in UK) and they are wearing a design of clothes which was worn in the revolution by the freedom fighters. Every hour the soldiers are changed in a very cool dance type mode. I couldn’t resist not taking a pic with one of them.

The Battle at Thermopylae

If you saw the Movie 300 than you know what i’m talking about. The only difference is that in the real story 300 spartans and 700 soldiers from Thessaloniki fought against 1,7million soldiers in the Persian army.

Bulgaria

On our way to greece we slept while we passed through Bulgaria. On our way back it was daylight so we had the chance to check it out. I know that there are rough conditions in Romania, but compared to Bulgaria it’s like heaven. Bulgaria has some very cool bridges(mostly the only thing i liked from there). All pictures were taken from the bus.

Phew, after 2 hours of writing, image selecting, resizing, and cropping i finally got to the end of this post. This post xontains the most important places which i visited, and maybe they will serve as a motivation for you to visit Greece

Guest Blogged by Tim Garcia

Well Slayer mentioned that I like to upgrade my PC every three weeks but I wish I only could do that. lol Pretty much as soon as you get a new upgrade it is out of date within a few weeks but luckily most products are not able to use the newest technologies that are out there so that gives current products a fairly long shelf life. I am always looking to see what upgrades are out there and I mostly look at Tiger Direct and Newegg to see what is new and check out the prices.

Here is my current configurations of my PC’s and wanted upgrades.

Current System: Main PC (Built system December 2007)

• OS: XP Pro 64bit

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X@ Dual Core Processor 6400+ Black Edition

• RAM: 3 Gigs OCZ Reaper Dual Channel 2048MB PC6400 DDR2 800MHz

• Video Card: 2 SLI XFX GeForce 8800GT XXX 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 Alpha Dog Edition

• Motherboard: MSI K9N SLI Platinum AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI MCP ATX AMD Motherboard

• Hard Drive: 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB Hard Drive - 7200, 16MB, SATA-300

• Power Supply: OCZ/GameXStream /700-Watt/ATX/120mm Fan

Wanted Upgrades:

• CPU: AMD Phenom X4 9850 Quad Core Processor

• HD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750GB Hard Drive - 7200RPM, 32MB, SATA-300

Current System: Secondary PC (Built Approximately 2003-04)

• OS: XP Pro

• CPU: AMD Athlon 1050.0 MHz

• RAM: 1.25 Gigs

• Video Card: ATI Radeon 9500 128MB

• Motherboard: MSI (not sure which model, too lazy to find out).

• Hard Drive: Multiple Maxtor hd’s. Max size of largest hd is 40GB

Wanted Upgrades:

• CPU: Replace with Main PC CPU

• RAM: I have 1 gig of OCZ Reaper available

• Video Card: XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX Video Card - 256MB DDR3 (maybe)

• Motherboard: MSI K9N SLI-F Motherboard

• Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB Hard Drive - 7200, 16MB, Serial ATA-300

• DVD Drive: Lite-On 20x LH-20A1L DVD±R with 12x DVD-RAM with Lightscribe

• Power Supply: ThermalTake/PurePower/600-Watt/ATX 2.2/120mm Fan

I am a big believer in AMD, MSI, XFX and Seagate products. CPU wise, Intel makes some good CPU’s but they are overpriced IMO. I think gamer’s prefer AMD over Intel and that is because the frame rates are usually higher then Intel CPU’s and that is what matters when you are playing a game. If you want to overclock your CPU then AMD is the way to go, depending if you have a good cooling system, motherboard and power supply. I haven’t overclocked my system much because I really don’t need to; there really is no game out there that my system can’t handle. I know that these upgrades that I chose are not all top of the line but like I said before, products have a good shelf life and I am getting quality and value at the same time. It will be awhile before I could actually get all the upgrades but the longer I wait the more prices will go down.

If you have any suggestions or anything else then please leave a comment, I would appreciate any feedback.

This post was guestblogged by Mihaita aka JoeDirt.

Hello, i’m Mihaita aka JoeDirt and, like Slayer said, i’m a very big fan of gadgets and mobile phones, but what he didn’t know is that i really like sports. I like to watch sports on TV and i like to play sports in real life, especially soccer, and, sometimes, basketball. I also like to jog, swim and to do physical exercise. But that’s not the point. You’ll see where i’m getting. In my city (and maybe in the hole country, who knows?) people only like to play soccer and basketball. And that’s it! Their is only a small percent who likes to jog, and to swim. I don’t get it? People here play soccer because it’s the no 1 sport, but let’s be honest, we suck at this game. You saw what Romania did at the Euro 2008… When it comes to women handball we are in top 5 world wide, still why don’t we play handball?

When i go jog i ask my friends if they would like to come with me. 99% of them will say: “Dude are you crazy? You want me to wake up at 8 in the morning to go and sweat for noting”. Ever since i was a little boy i liked sports. I don’t know why other people like to sit in a chair, drink beer and eat all day long.

PS: The Romanian Victor Hanescu won the Gstaad tennis tournament after beating the russian Igor Andreev 6-3 6-4 :).

Entry guestblogged by lorz.

This model is equipped (or rather I should say just IS) with a 8.1 MegaPixels camera, a Xenon flash, auto focus, image stabiliser and the whole range of new technologies available now.

This phone is also capable of recording videos at a VGA resolution of 640×480 with video stabilizer.

Also, in advantage comes the GPS receiver and the anti-stratch screen at a size of 2.4 inches.

The phone also includes technologies like 3G, video streaming and stereo Bluetooth, so you can listed to your favourite music without any wires.

It also comes with a 2GB memory stick, that can store about 650 pictures taken at the highest resolution.

Now the bad parts come: This camera/phone doesn’t have optic zoom… only digital. So if you want to zoom… think again! You will lose the quality of the image. And also, pictures are not so coloured, is like a TV which colour setting is almost turned off. I’ve seen the same issue on Sony Ericsson K850i.

My advice: If you have some money, don’t invest them in this mobile phone. You will rather be dissapointed of the quality of the images, and that’s because the technology is not so evolved at the moment. And I personally think that a mobile phone will never be compared to a digital camera. And that’s because they don’t want to.

When? Where?

I’ve been planning this vacation for more than 6 months, now that the finals are over it’s time for some chillout time. Starting from the point when i set Greece as a destination i never wanted to change it, Greece is just too cool.

The thing is that in about 4 hours i will be on my way there. We are going w/ the bus this means 19 hours of traveling…awww…we would have taken the plane but it costs way more and we would have had to go  down to a bigger bigger city -> extra $ for transport, so we decided to stick with the bus, if the other 48 people can handle the ride so can we.

The bus is a great quality 3 star bus, so its pretty comfortable and hopefully i’ll get my chance to sleep.

No, i’m not leaving alone. I’m going with my girlfriend, and already the idea of going to greece caused her to be very excited about it.

I won’t be taking my laptop with me, because if i do i will most probably start desgning something, so access to the internet will be pretty limited.

What about the blog?

Don’t worry i taught this out also!

While i’m gone 4 guys will be taking care of my blog, just to keep you guys on track and not give you the idea that my blog got deserted or something.

Lorz

I know lorz for about 2 years, mt him first on a romanian webmaster community, added him to my messenger list and helped him out with ideas and suggestions for his projects.

He’s an outstanding programmer, he made a custom script for his lecture website www.ciorna.com and is currently building a custom web directory www.iwebdir.net with some very cool features(suggested some myself, along w/ the domain).

Tim Garcia

Timmeeeeh! I met him on an online game called outwar , we made a crew together, and worked together to manage it(literarely we were addicts,lol). This was 4 years ago. Now we mostly chat about random stuff and tech related stuff.

He likes gaming and likes to keep his PC as upgraded as possible, he’s checkin’ for new components almost every 3 weeks.

TIm is just a cool and fun guy, i’m sure you’ll like his posts.

Joedirt

I’ve also met him on a romanian webmaster community a while bac, he really loves gadgets and phones. He’s pretty skilled in writing(saw posts on his blog) and he likes to include his feelings  about a specific item/situation in the posts.

BETng4U

I don’t think there’s anyone among my readers who hasn’t heard his name. BETng4U is one of my best friends and a pwnage coder. All the big coding jobs are handled by him, i don’t give big jobs to freelancers. BETng4U will work his ass off to get the websites up and running and debug it in the fastest manner.

Although he won’t post on my blog(his english isn’t very good) he will be managing it from the shadows , he will moderate comments and ban spammers at his expense. Just usual blog management stuff .

I really want to thank the guys above for helping me out: Cheers guys!

Also i wish everyone a great summer, and remember to keep yourself cool

Disclaimer: The Chat below represents our point of view of the situation

*Note -This being a chat on Yahoo Messenger typos may appear

Tim Garcia: what image service does yahoo use now?
eXeS slayer: huh?
Tim Garcia: nvm
eXeS slayer: flickr?
Tim Garcia: yeah
eXeS slayer: btw
eXeS slayer: did you know
eXeS slayer: that the court decided
eXeS slayer: that google has to share
eXeS slayer: w/ viacom
eXeS slayer: “the judge’s ruling that Google does need to hand over log files including the IP address and usernames of people who viewed YouTube videos”
Tim Garcia: nope
Tim Garcia: so that means they share the prfit or what?
Tim Garcia: profit
eXeS slayer: no
eXeS slayer: that means
eXeS slayer: that viacom who ownes paramount and some music label group
eXeS slayer: sued google
eXeS slayer: for  lots and lots of  money
eXeS slayer: google now has to share the ip addresses of the people who watched, uploaded the vids
Tim Garcia: hmm
eXeS slayer: meaning privacy will be violated
Tim Garcia: well ip addresses don’t really show much
Tim Garcia: cause my ip says i am in los angeles
Tim Garcia: lol
eXeS slayer: http://techdirt.com/articles/20080703/0154271581.shtml
eXeS slayer: dude
eXeS slayer: when they talk
eXeS slayer: to your isp
eXeS slayer: they find out
eXeS slayer: even what sites you browsed
eXeS slayer: http://news.cnet.com/pdf/ne/2007/ViacomYouTubeComplaint3-12-07.pdf
eXeS slayer: good luck
eXeS slayer: on readin’
eXeS slayer: lol
eXeS slayer: Page: 2/27
Tim Garcia: lol
Tim Garcia: te lawsuit is pretty much pointless
Tim Garcia: its more a political then anythign else
Tim Garcia: obviously you can’t put full movies on youtube
Tim Garcia: ok
Tim Garcia: well youtube isn’t the only site
Tim Garcia: that does this
Tim Garcia: they only went after them cause google is worth so much
eXeS slayer: true
Tim Garcia: so its political
Tim Garcia: i mean look at all the comedy skits, tv show skits on youtube
Tim Garcia: all of those are copyrighted
eXeS slayer: ya
Tim Garcia: so wtf does it matter with viacom lol
eXeS slayer: youtube
eXeS slayer: hosts
eXeS slayer: more than
Tim Garcia: politics is what is wrong with the world
eXeS slayer: 160.000 copyrighted viacom videos
eXeS slayer:viacom ownes the MTV network, produces South park and lots of other shows
eXeS slayer: wouldnm’t be profitable
eXeS slayer: to sue a broke ass guy
eXeS slayer: lol
Tim Garcia: yeah i know
Tim Garcia: but my point is
Tim Garcia: it deosn’t really matter
Tim Garcia: where it is
Tim Garcia: no matter hwo political they get
Tim Garcia: they will always get their videos posted somewehre else
eXeS slayer: ima post this up on ma blog
Tim Garcia: do it!

Its great to talk to an other tech-oriented guy about stuff that’s going on in the world, youtube is the biggest brand in the video sharing network and it’s something that entered history just as Google did.

I got this email yesterday which pissed me off, and pretty much ruined my good mood for a while:

Dear Sirs/Madam:

Good Morning.  I am writing you this message today, because it appears that the website(s): http://www.perfectlovestories.com; http://www.thaslayer.com; and http://wpthemesfree.com are harassing me online; and using my own name to advertise their website: www.perfectlovestories.com at all major search engines to get a high ranking for them.

Go to google, and see what they have done to me:  put in my name: bonnieviatorlaux

That is a terrible think to do to anyone.  That is an unhuman thing to do to an another human being…don’t you think so…who are you, and why are you harassing me????.

What have I done to you all…?  I do not understand your reasonings, so I am contacting the police to assist me in this problem with you….  They will be in touch with you for ruining me online with my online business!

Thank you for your time.  If you are not involved with harassing me, then the website: www.loveperfectstories.com is.  Your website is shown below on this person’s website, so that is why I have contact you today.

Thank you for your help in this matter; and to stop the harassment from this individual.  I have not done this person any harm to be harming me in this way…..over and over again!

May God Bless You, and help, whoever is involved in harrassing me…..

Regards,
Bonnie Viator Laux

At first I taught that its some regular spam message of notification that i won 60 mill $ on a lottery, where from more than 100 mill people i got picked,  but after reading it i noticed that its not spam.

I rewrote my reply email like 3 times, because in the 1st one i used indecent sentences, in the second indecent word, and i finally got the 3rd one written in a clean manner, lol.

Here’s My reply:

What? i’m harassing you online?

do you realize what you just said below?

i RELEASE FREE WORDPRESS THEMES -> http://www.thaslayer.com/free-themes/ which can be downloaded and used by anyone

my wordpress themes have a link back to my blog in the footer

the wpthemesfree link is added by wpthemesfree for distribuiting my theme

http://www.perfectlovestories.com is using my free Loveblog template, you can notice the footer:

“using LoveBlog theme by ThaSlayer.”

as said above anyone can download my themes and use them freely, if you have an issue with the owner of http://www.perfectlovestories.com go ahead and contact him

so, before you start making accusations make sure you mail the right guy

- Tom

In a short while the very much harassed Bonnie Viator Laux got back to me:

No, sir, I don’t know, what I did at your website, except write you a message for help…I am not familiar with word themes…..???  I don’t know how they work; please explain to me??  What did I do…??

Sorry to bother you, again; but I don’t know how to contact the owner to http://www.perfectlovestories.com   It is a mystery, as to where they are….???

I saw your website name on the bottom of their website: http://www.perfectlovestories.com ; so, I hoped that you could help me, somehow….; I am trying everything to contact them with no good results; you were my last hope….

I am very sorry, if I harmed anything in any way; I did not mean to do that; I was only trying to get in touch with the person that owns: http://www.perfectlovestories.com; and I told you that on my message, and; I thought that you would/could direct me…??  That is my only motive…

Can you help me, sir…?  I don’t think for sure….; I didn’t say that you were harassing me….; I did not know for sure, so I was covering all basis, and; I said that to you in my email message to you…that’s all!

I am a good person, and I don’t know why www.perfectlovestories.com is harassing me??  I don’t know who they are…thought that you might - could help me…that’s all…

Sorry for the bother.  If I was truly trying to do someone harm; I would not leave my email address.  The is why I can’t get in touch with http://www.perfectlovestories.com ; they are not leaving contact information on their website….

May God Bless You, Sir/Madam!

Regards,
Bonnie Laux

Okay, now really what the fuck is wrong with these kind  of people? They see a link to a website on an other website and they suddenly contact every website owner which has a link back from a specific site. Also, does she think that she’s the only Bonnie Viator Laux in the whole wide world? Jeez, these people make me sick.

I blacklisted her email:this means good bye and fair well.

Do you know what day is it today? It’s prize give away day!

Although the digicam’s box got a bit dusty the camera is in excellent shape, and with the warranty seal intat on it of course(the warranty applies world wide, because it’s offered by the producer(BENQ) and you will get all reciepts and legally signed stuff that i got from the store with it)

A total Number of 1771 IDs were gathered and they were all entered in the draw, but there can be only one winner which is gh0ul_1@[email hidden].com

I’ve sent him a mail about 5 minutes ago, and as soon as he replies i will edit my post with more details on him.

Here’s an actual print screen of the draw:

His ID number is 155, for some reason most of the IDs in the top 25 were IDs with digits between 0 and 180, most of the 1000+ IDs got to the middle of the randomly ordered list.

I would like to thank everyone for participating, and keep heads up because in about 3 weeks when i get back home from Greece(i’m leaving on the 11th) a new contest will start!

The first week of exams has finally ended and there’s just one more week to go.

This week we had oral exams and the Romanian written one. The oral exams went great, the scheduling was done in an almost flawless way, and everyone went in right on time.

Romanian Oral Exam - 9/10

I’m a great speaker, i think i could easily get hired as a spokesman at a company. To be honest i speak better romanian than hungarian(yes…i’m ashamed of it) but it’s because during my childhood almost all my friends were romanian kids and by this way i got the chance to learn it.

The examinators were cool(although the old guy could have let the chick to give me 10, he stopped the chick from giving me 10 saying: “He generalized too much”, that pissed me off a bit, but heck 9 is still a goog grade)

Hungarian Oral Exam - 9.50/10

I couldn’t have picked better subjects. Just as at the romanian oral exam the first part is a text on first sight and you need to answer to some questions and use your own words. The text associated womans with birds saying ” woman conquer men just as the birts catch their food”, heck this went smoothly. The 3rd part was to form a similar text about men. Well, i associated men with foxes(the animal) because we are sneaky and we can hook up girls in a unique way and many other bla-bla’s.

The second subject was to talk about a novel(which i knew almost perfectly) this resulting the 9.50 Grade

English Oral Exam - 10/10

Hax, if i would have gotten less than 10 i’d be pissed right now. The examinating team was formed by a young chick(about 25-26 years old) and an old teacher. Both of them were nice. When i entered they asked for my ID. My id was made 5 years ago. The young chick says: “you didn’t have spiked hair 5 years ago, it almost looks like it’s not your id”at this i’m like: “yeah…thats what the cops said,lol”(yes, i used the word lol)

In the first subject I had to talk about religion and the religiousness of people around the world, and in the second subject i had to talk about my hobbies. I ask them:“what hobby would you want me to talk about?:web design/blogging/bike jumping” The young chick said:“how about you talk about all 3″. So i did. In the end they said:“it was a bit too obvious that you will get 10″. Damn that felt good!

And now..some relaxing stuff

Also on wednesday and yesterday me and my girl friend were swirling around in the city and was at lots of tourism offices to find a good holiday in Greece. Yesterday we revised the offers and today went to the selected tour operator and paid for the holiday.

We are going to Nei Poroi(click for videos and google maps) for a 11 day holiday, from which 2 will be on the road, because the bus gets there in an amazing 21 hours(awww….why didn’t i choose to go with a plane?) where we will stay 9 days in a 3 star hotel, where the rooms look like they are apartments.

We are leaving on 11th of july and will return on the 22nd. Hopefully i will get internet access there(to upload pictures from digicam to server and to blog and manage stuff) in case i won’t have internet access i will ask someone to blog while i’m gone.

UUU…. can’t wait to get there!