Vlad

Big Brother is here:

Following last fall’s reports about Google Street View cars spotted in Eastern Europe, it seems it’s NORC that’s been pushing the first Street View for Romania (and other places in Eastern Europe).

The images are at a decent resolution and they seem quite well-processed (manually edited to at least blur out vehicle registration plates). Of course, the overall look and feel is not as well polished as Google’s own service but it’s a huge step, considering the big players don’t even have decent road-maps for this area.

I don’t like politics either. I only tolerate the idea because I do believe the society needs some form of administration to keep it from reverting to pure anarchy. But reading on various blogs about the upcoming elections and how casting a thoughtful vote is a citizen’s duty, I decided to dedicate a couple of hours to documenting for this matter.

The upcoming elections are for the Romanian Parliament, and they’re using a new, uninominal system. Time to find out the culprits candidates. The Internet can’t fail on this, right?

Step 1 – What district (college) am I in?

This should be a no-brainer. According to the law the local administration must publish the list of colleges and the areas they cover. So, off to the City Hall’s website. Yuppie, they have a link related to the elections on the main page – click! No game! Just a bunch of pages with a circa 1990s design and linking to various PDFs. Not what I wanted!

Ok, I’ll just search the info. Uuuuu… Lots of results: infovot.ro, becparlamentare2008.ro, alegeri-parlamentare.ro, e-oferta.ro wtf???, various publications. None looking to be an official site. Can’t trust those, right? Right! Back to the city hall. Look they have a Links section. And they’re linking to becparlamentare2008.ro. Is that the best name they could find? A quick traceroute reveals it’s probably an official site (hosted on STS – Special Telecommunication Service, dedicated to agencies and governamental sites).

Ok, let’s dig through becparlamentare2008.ro. 1990’s design strikes back! Hooray! List of colleges – click! Bucharest – click! PDF download – oh, no! It’s a 48 pages scanned document. No OCR. Can’t search. It takes a while to find what I’m looking for but, hey! I know the college I’m in!

Step 2 – Who are the candidates?

Back to the official website. Candidates – click! Meaningless text and three links – click on the first! Bucharest – click! Parties list… I don’t care. I want the candidates list, grouped by college, not by party. It’s uninominal, I’m voting for the PERSON. Now I have to go through a list of 9 parties’ candidates plus another list of independent candidates, and other lists of minorities & all, just to find out the names of people running in my college. This annoys me!

Who built this crap? nadolu co – a small town, pretty much unknown LTD. Website claims they’re webdesigners, identity creators and SEO experts. Website is a free wordpress theme. Indeed, great designing skills. Google reveals they’ve been working for some time with the Electoral Agency. Other people praise their skills, too. Finance Ministry website is down so I can’t check their economical results. I bet they don’t have other clients but they’re still making a nice buck.

How hard is it, in 2008, to hire a decent, local web design studio and have them build a user-friendly, modern website for the Electoral Agency and the upcoming elections?

It must be rocket science!

I’ll just stop here, for what’s worth here’s what I had in plan to do after finding out the candidates names. Instead, I’m blogging. Hooray me! The Internet has failed on this one.

Step 3 – The candidates’ message

Step 4 – Candidates’ backgrounds and proven track record

Step 5 – Digesting the information

Step 6 – Decision

£35k = (UK£ 35) * Boltzmann constant = 7.13872141 × 10^-22 m² kg s^-2 K^-1 U.S. Dollars

Wtf?

Vio insisted so I went to RoCS Web 2.0 Conference. To sum it up:

• Justin talked about enterprise social network and Intranet 2.0
• Laurian talked about semantic web and people thought it was a bit too technical.
• Vio talked about GWT, Task Writer and Zebra Melody.
• Bobby talked about Yahoo’s APIs and YDN. He insisted web services/APIs are a fast way to kick-start a project and dodged questions about Jerry Yang’s departure.
• Todi talked about Silverlight and BizSpark
• Mihai was way too much fun. Yeah, and he talked with an accent. About Adobe Flash, Flex and AIR.
• Aura made a demo of Virtual Bucharest (in SL).

I found out I know way too many buzzwords and traffic is a mess around noon.

Ok, so you buy your stuff on the Internet. And get it delivered to you via a courier service. Or you’re using one for work-related shipments. Or some friend just sent you a package. How do you know where it is and how long it will take until it’s delivered? Well, you go the courier’s site, enter the shipment reference number, or AWB, or whatever… and you see it’s track log. Simple, right?

Not quite… First you have to figure out the courier’s site (that’s generally easy). Then you have to find where is the packing tracking section (yes, there are still big couriers that don’t have it on the first page). But you manage through all this only  to find out you have to do it all over again each time you need to check the same package.

No more! Really!!!

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