When you disrupt dishonest businesses, you expect to read a lot of dirt about yourself. That includes that your traffic is not what you say it is, that you blackmail people, that you lie for a living. I am used to this, because i hear it every day, from different people.

Bogdan Gavrila is such a person. His dishonest business got disrupted. He got angry. He got fired. Now he tries to get a new business started. He isn’t doing so good. Who’s to blame? ME! So he wrote a long post saying that I lie, cheat and blackmail people. Proof? Oh, no. Repeating the words “liar” and “blackmailer” is enough for him.

I am glad somehow. Being able to provoke such powerful reaction means i hurt him and his shady business (did a mention that, as head of Intact Interactive, a local interactive agency, he paid one of his personal sites 35.000€ out of a 100.000€ guaranteed contract, even if he sold only 5.000€ worth of advertising on it?).

I am not the truth holder. I am just a blogger. If you want to invest in Romanian internet or just want to know what’s going on, i recommend asking Vivi (Octavian Costache, works at Google), Dragoş Novac (has it’s own company and people outside Romania have heard of him and his partner, Alexandre Almajeanu), Alex Visa (used to work for Traceics Canada), Lucian Despoiu ( owns a Digital Agency), Alex Brie (webdeveloper, works for a French company), Dan Berte ( free spirit and idea man), Marius Pahomi (works for a MediaEdge:CIA), Vlad Stan (angel investor in several projects), Antonio Eram (has a micropayment service), Sergiu Biris (owns the local YouTube, with Alexis Bonte), Cristian Manafu (event organizer) and Bobby Voicu (blogger, used to work for Yahoo, now has his own startup). I don’t agree with some of them, but they have a good reputation, as opposite to people like Claudiu Gamulescu (well-known spammer, has speaking gigs in East-European conferences) Bogdan Gavrila, Magda Zander, Cristi Petriceanu (believe it or not, this guy head IAB Romania, and we headed a ad-selling company that has a 2-million euro debt to publishers) and people like them. They will give you a fair view of what is going on in this little corner of the web.

I know, I should write more often in english about what’s going on in .ro

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

I am so relaxed. So peaceful. Because, basically, I have everything i ever wanted. And it’s pretty scary.

I should not have bought that car.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

If LeWeb was sponsored by the French Parliament, organised by a student groupt nobody ever heard of and announced five weeks before it happened would any respectable French blogger attend?

What if, 2 weeks before the presidential elections, Mr. Sarkozy would give a political speech? Would they come?

What if behind the event was a blogger nobody likes, because he is a real sleaze and untrusted person? What if you would try to fight a spam site and he would call you a member of the Securitate, would you attend? What if you found out that he stole the content of one of your sites and when to mention the source, he would play it dumb, would you come?

Would any of your American friends come? (i guess we found the answer to that one when the only important person on that list was you)

So, please, don’t judge.

That’s some of the reasons not one respectable Romanian professional blogger attended the event.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

I am so happy over my new Renault Megane Sedan. So happy. Diesel, 2008, 1.9D engine. Leather. Even a custom nameplate. It’s one of the cars I’ve always wanted. Because, compared to bmw or audi, it’s discreet and powerful.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

In case anyone asks, zenphoto is a piece of sh*t script! It keeps giving me blank pages for no reason. Just like that. I did not do anything to it and it crashed.

So I spent a few hours moving a lot of my pics to photobucket. I was paying for 25Gb of space and using only 300mb. And I do understand why services like PhotoBucket are making money. Because people want to put their pics there and do not worry about the script being hacked (happened two times with zenphoto) or something going wrong.

And 25$ a year is a good deal.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

Relocated to Brasov, closer to Bucharest, because there is where almost all the business is these days. The city is nice, still a lot to discover.

Had a car accident, the car was pretty damaged, but i escape unharmed. Now i am shopping for a new car. I am sticking with Renault, because of the price and the service. And because I really love Megane Sedan.

Got a new Canon 500D with a new lense. Pretty good, but not too much to shoot these days.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

We really need debates in Romanian schools. We need to teach ourselves the art of argumentation. What can be said and what cannot be said. Acceptable arguments and arguments that make us look dumb.

No, i am not talking about the retard that understood from this post that my only life purpose is to buy a car. I am talking about entering the battle of the minds with arguments like “his eyes are weird” (that is true, from my accident the eyes are a little pushed back) and “he is so thin” (always been like that) in order to prove is superior thinking.

I would like some fact-based arguments when we are fighting. Or at least a quiet surrender.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

- Hello, your credit card will be billed with 24,95$ for our services.
- No, actually, because I cannot access your server for 3 weeks.
- Yes, we have banned some IPs from Romania.
- And why are you still charging my Romanian credit card then?
- Well...

Hello Lomag.net

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

Stefanos from Pestaola.gr caught on camera with his card full. Not very professional of him.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

I finished reading for the second time “When Giants Walked The Earth”, a Led Zeppelin biography by Mick Wall. It’s the third i read and probably the last. The guy paints the band in se second half of the book as a group of losers who are too busy drinking and fucking than making music. The problem is that it got stuck in my head and now the music doesn’t feel the same.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

So, last night we were out drinking. Some German guys, some French guys and me, the Romanian kid. We go to some German place to eat, we eat and then we go to a bar.

We have some drinks and then Pascal sees the cute geek-looking German girl sitting at the bar. So he says something about an ad he sees in her magazine. She gives him the "fuck off" look and goes back to his reading. Pascal does not quit, gives her another compliment and the girl slaps him with the magazine. The bartender comes around asking if there is a problem and some cunt also steps up thinking that he may be of help to the poor girl. I am telling them in English that we are from other town, while Pascal is startled, because he does not understand what he did wrong. So we buy the girl a coffee and fuck off to our beers.

Half an hour later we are at another bar, where a live band is playing some balkan Bregovici sort of music. One girl just grabs Stefan by the hand, saying she knows him, although it's her first time in Berlin. Pascal is dancing with three brunettes, i am schmoozing a blond with short hair and nice boobs. She does not speak anything but Russian and German. So we are dancing and having a good time. The girl is all over Stefan, Pascal is making the girls laugh and my blonde is sweating heavily. by now we're drinking vodka and looking for something else to do.

This is where the movie ended for me. I woke up at my hotel a couple hours ago.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

So I get a call from a girl at HTC office. She says she will send me the latest HTC phone, for a review. The phone arrives and I was expecting HTC G1 or Magic. The white looking gadget was HTC Hero, just launched worldwide. I double-checked and yes, I had in my hands the Hero, not the Magic.

That was a month ago. The Magic arrived today.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

I will be attending IFA in Berlin again.

On the 4th I will be at the Bloggers Forum in salon4/5, wearing a brown “no one cares about your blog” t-shirt. I hope it will be better than last year, because that one sucked. And I hope more time to play with gadgets.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

Women are such an easy prey sometimes. All you have to do is not to be obvious. Instead of staring at her big big big tits, look at her beautiful face. She will smile and if you are charming enough, you will get her phone number and then have plenty of time to stare at her tits.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

Because they are slow.

On Sunday, I was on a bus from Danube Delta to Bucharest. I got a tip about a hot video. I managed to post the news a few hours ahead of the newspaper boys, who were sleeping or did not have the news. While I was on a bus, mind you. My nokia e71 helped a lot, since I can post on my blog from it.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

Romanian sites have found a very good way not to get banned by Google for spamming. And spamming hard. They become Google certified something. Certified for using Google apps. Certified adsense users. Whatever. And no matter how many times you report them to Google, they are still alive and spamming today. Because everybody, including Google, likes money.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

50 years of communism had impregnated deep in the conscience of Romanians. For example, bragging is not something we like. I cannot say on my blog I am doing well, because people will take that as an insult.

What do you mean you are doing well? That is outrageous! I am not doing well! You don’t deserve to do well, you suck!

And this is Romania

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

Husband of a distant cousin just bought a 20.000€ Hummer H2. He lives in England and works for a telecom company. And because he can’t get a loan to buy a house, with the economic crisis going strong, he bought a Hummer. That’s courage!

I am still in doubt about buying a car. I got the money, but I’m not very convinced i should put them in a car.

© 2009 vali petcu. All rights reserved.

It’s so good to see you can still do things to make your parents smile, even if you are 29 and you think they have seen it all.

© 2009 vali petcu .com. All rights reserved.

Sort of.

After a short vacation to Venice, i am in Oradea, preparing for TIFF (Transylvania International Film Festival). Romania hasn’t change much, but i like Transylvania better than Muntenia, people are more relaxed and a few hundred years of Austrian occupation shows.

© 2009 vali petcu .com. All rights reserved.