The Princess Bloggeries

It’s been almost 5 years since I started my work with Fujitsu. It’s exciting to finally see some movement and official initiative to extract more profits from the North America markets.

As I see it, the challenging aspects will be in the areas of coordination between all Fujitsu subsidiaries. So far there is so limited communication between organizations within the Fujitsu group! Even thought Fujitsu is the third largets IT services provider, unless the Fujitsu companies really start working as one, this conglomerate is destined to vanish.

Life is sooooo unfair … there are so many birds on the tree outside this apartment… I keep watching them all day long from behind the transparent thing [the humans call it ‘a window’] and no one lets me outside to play with the little creatures. There are also some naughty squirrels that climb on the building vis-à-vis, drive me crazy because they apparently go wherever they like and on the top of it, they make such obnoxious sounds that I just want to bite their heads off. Maybe it’ll happen one day if they keep interrupting my afternoon nap … I need my beauty sleep so that my fur is silky and shiny … purr … I’m exhausted of so many thoughts today … purr …

There are only a few weeks left to the end of this final term of my graduate studies at UC Berkeley. Although the school experience has been great, I am feeling a bit tired. There are still a lot of work to be done until the end of the term, so I will be spending a lot more time studying in the next weeks - wish me luck !

Graduation date is set of May 21, 2006 - yay !

Petar

My “Pricing Policies” professor at UC Berkeley - Teck-Hua Ho, presented an excellent overview of the Internet Pricing Models during his last lecture. Check out Teck’s Haas faculty profile - what amazing things people work on!!

Of special interest is his study on the “Lowest Price Guarantees” - overall guarantee the lowest prices allows merchants to keep the prices higher and make more money!

I promise - after graduating I will start reading more - I am so waiting for school to be over !!

Petar

Petar and myself had an interview yesterday about the adjustment of my status. The officer was really nice, kept us less than 20 minutes in his office. He didn’t ask any stupid questions such as what is his favorite color or on which side of the bed is she sleeping He just looked at some pictures, took Petar’s tax returns and sent us home. I hope, no one hacks into their system because these people have so much private information about immigrants and citizens in their files! Anyway, I imagined it to be scarier or least similar to the storyline in the movie Green Card but I was wrong  - Thank God!

We passed with flying colors so I am awaiting any time now the little pink thing called green card in the mail!

Cheers!

A lot of words have been spoken and a lot of theories have been told about the 9-11 events but this documentary asks some legitimate questions that keep bugging me personally. If you liked Fahrenheit 9/11 you may find this movie interesting too. I think it’s better than Michael Moore’s story or maybe it just show a different/additional point of view.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8260059923762628848&q=loose+change

The producers are trying to set-up the best environment to present their new film with the subtitle Meltdown. They suceeded - everyone is melting down under the pouring rain in the Bay Area and symphatizes with Manny, Sid and Diego. The movie did great at the box office over the weekend but in my personal opinion the first movie was better (as most movies are better than their sequels). Queen Latifah’s performance as Ellis is really cute and funny and the creators came up with idea of the mammoth that thinks about herself as a possum. Her possum “brothers” are very enjoyable and have some of the best action scenes in the picture. The animation is really good and looks natural in most sequences.

Scrat takes up more screen time in this movie and sometimes it seemed overdone. Once again everything is the little guy’s fault and his obsession with the nut.

Overall it’s a good movie but there is always the shadow of the original and the comparison is inevitable. I can only recommend it - go and watch this movie yourself!

It’s a shame. We’ve been living in Northern California for so long now and we hadn’t been to Sonoma or Napa. So we decided to visit at least one of those famous places over Petar ’s spring break.

We checked into a hotel in Santa Rosa and went out to explore the country. First we went to the Kendall-Jackson winery and enjoyed their wine selection. They also offered us a garden tour. They plant herbs, vegetables, beans etc from all over the world to show out with their wines.The weather was surprisingly nice during the garden tour (the whole day it kept raining and not raining and raining and not raining and you get the picture!). Anyway, the sun was shining and we had a chance to learn some things about food and wine. Remember folks, white wine with white sauces and red wine with red sauces
At a given point in time it ocurred to us that it is our second consecutive weekend of wine tasting but the weather was so miserable overall that we decided to drown our sorrow in a second winery on the way back to our hotel. Unfortunately, it was already after 4pm and most of the wineries had closed for the day.
There wasn’t much to do in Santa Rosa - the historical district next to our hotel was fairly small - only 3-4 blocks of brick buildings. It was proclaimed to be a “drug-free” zone so we sat down in a nice coffee place feeling secure. The giant oatmeal cookie was really tasty but the coffee itself wasn’t that good. At the coffee place we did some research where to go for dinner (Thank You, Motorola for Petar’s cellphone!) and we chose a place called Nectar. At first sight the restaurant/lounge looked good and surprisingly for a Saturday night it wasn’t crowded. The food was great - tasty and really nicely presented, the service was good too and the price we paid was a bargain compared to the South Bay . We had a lot of fun and we can only recommend this place if you visit Santa Rosa area.

The next day it was pouring cats and dogs outside so we decided to visit another winery that our friend Darin recommended - The Imagery Winery before we headed home. The winery has a very interesting concept combining art and wine. All the labels for the bottles are designed specifically for each collection of wines. It is a pretty cool place although we didn’t like the wine we tasted that much. Maybe it was the weather or we just don’t understand anything from wine. Either way, the weekend was great despite the rainy weather!

… or is the world coming to an end ?!

Last month’s rainfall measured the second rainiest March in the last 150 years for the San Francisco Bay Area. Frankly, I am getting pretty fed up with the rain, but according to an article on the KRON 4 site, the rainfall will continue for the next weeks!

Svetla and I saw The Day After Tomorrow on HBO yesterday while staying at the Hyatt in Santa Rosa and maybe because of the too much rain, the movie resonated very strongly with us! For the last few years we have indeed started to see some major climate changes - there is more rain, unusually cold winters (especially in Europe), strong tornadoes and hurricanes. The US government has been turning back on the world’s efforts to address the global warming, but at least each one of us can do something as an individual.

I found this collection on tips (courtesy of http://starry-sky.com/whatif/),  that I find great - we should all do this:

• Reduce the amount of water you use. Turn off the water when you brush your teeth, shave, etc. Don’t let it run the whole time!
• You can recycle tin cans, newspapers, magazines, etc. Don’t throw these things away, recycle instead!
• Reuse things like scrap paper, shopping bags, etc. There is no need to buy new ones.
• So you’re at school or work. Why not use both side of the paper? The back side isn’t going to kill you if you use it.
• If you’re not in a room, then why is there need for a light to be on? Turn it off!
• Carpool, because the more people in one car the better. If you don’t like carpooling, then why don’t you take the bus or ride a bike instead?
• Instead of throwing things away, why not give it to good will instead?
• Compost heaps are great to have, so why don’t you make the addition to your garden?.
• Use your head, if you’re wasting water or energy then do the right thing and make it stop.

Visit the EPA site for additional info!

Petar