Three wishes

This is a translation of one of my old posts over at Freeblog where I used to blog in Hungarian. Let me live with the opportunity that I can share my opinion here in English, in the hope that I’ll get more interesting comments.

I was thinking a lot about the following question when I was a teenager: what if I had three wishes that I could use for anything? This is a very common question in tales, but I think it’s worth thinking about it with an adult mind, too. As a teenager I could think of the following wishes:

• Let there be no diseases on Earth
• Let there be no wars on Earth

This is the only two that I can remember, but I’m sure that there were more.

Interesting. What is interesting is not that I didn’t take it into consideration what my wishes would cause as a “side-effect”. For example, if there will be no sick people then doctors, nurses, those working at pharmacies, etc. will not have their jobs. Even more, it would probably have the undesired side-effect of accelerating the process of overpopulating the Earth as the average lifespan of people would become longer. The idea of not having any war would likely to have the same result, too. But as I said, it’s not this what is interesting. I would say that it’s even natural for a young man to think such a naive way. A teenager like what I was more than a decade ago can’t think ahead so that he would foresee the impact of these wishes. I didn’t have the experience nor the ethos that could have made me think a bit more complex.

What is more interesting, though, is that I think the same way even today. I would even add that people not work for money but for everybody’s happiness and prosperity. Yeah, one might say that I’m even more naive than I used to be. Sigh, might be true.

What else is interesting then? It’s the fact that whomever I asked about this question thought about him/herself at first. With the exception of some minority, of course. The first wish, in their opinion, would be “spent” for money. Then came a big house, challenging work, etc in the list. I’m sure that everybody could continue. Even myself …

Hence the question: is it only me who’s so naive that I think of others, too? I mean, I would rather think about others than myself. And you know, I’m a bit proud of this. My experience shows that whomever I talked to about this topic and shared my opinion after he had shared his, that person became a bit more silent. As if my opinion had made him think a bit more deeply about the topic and revised his opinion a bit so that he wouldn’t be so selfish. Of course, the reason I ask this question from people every now and then is NOT that I would like to abash them. On the contrary, I’m just looking for like-minded people.

I wish I could find more …

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Cats are different

We moved from a place near to Budapest to a place near to Szeged. That’s something I’ve already written about. A lot of things are different here, but what surprised me the most is cats.

We don’t have cats. We don’t really like them. Most of our neighbours  had cats at the place where we lived. I don’t know if cats leave their dirt at the place where they live (because I’ve never had a cat), but they do in the yard next to the place where they live. I don’t like to collect other people’s cats’ dirt. I don’t like having to go out to check for dirt in the yard before I let children play there. Here it’s different. It’s one thing that this place is very sandy. Thus it’s easier for cats to bury their dirt. I saw a cat burying its dirt here and it really surprised me the special attention that it paid to do it properly.

Another thing is when we leave the dumpster out for garbage trucks to collect and empty them. Some people leave plastic bags only, some put plastic bags next to their dumpster. In any case, the cats at the old place always used their nails to open the bags looking for something they could eat. It was annoying to see how fast the street became dirty because of this. Here? No plastic bags will be even touched by any cats, but left as is. Are they not hungry? Do they have more to eat in such a small village where we live? Don’t know. Just that cats are different.

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Conference on Open Source in Szeged

I attended a conference today, where the topic was Open Source. Its web page is at Szabad Szoftver Konferencia – you already know that presentations were in Hungarian. I especially liked the ones that were about

• Open Source and our beloved Hungarian tax authority, APEH. It turned out that this authority doesn’t accept the fact the software can be free of charge and can’t cope with the case when a company gives support on such software. Etcetera, etcetera.
• Open Szeged – it’s a grandiose initiative that we should make Szeged an Open Source centre or even more that I don’t even dare to write down here. Grandiose or not, I agree with the intent of making a better use of the resources and talent pool that are available here.
• Android for developers – even though the topic was not new to me (hey, I even wrote about it in a book) it was interesting to hear about it from a Linux developer’s point of view.

What I didn’t like is that the conference was a bit disorganized, at least in the beginning. Then the presentations were allowed to take at most 20 mins, which was a good eye-opener, but since they followed each other very closely there wasn’t too much time to discuss with the speakers in public. I think there could have been a 5 mins Q&A session allocated to each talk.

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Moving

People change the way they live every now and then. It’s very rare that somebody lives the same way as he/she had lived years or tens of years ago. This time, I changed the way of my life.

About a decade ago, my then-girlfriend/now-wife and I decided to try it out what life in Budapest looked like. We moved from Szeged to Hungary’s capitol. It was a brave step at that time and we didn’t regret it. Then after couple of years we moved into our new house outside but next to the capitol, because we wanted a family with kids and that that home be outside of the big-big city. Now we have a big family and our relatives are far away. Besides this it has become more and more cumbersome to travel between A point and B – wherever those locations are. Once again: Budapest is a big city.

We thought it was time for another brave step: to move back to Szeged. School, kindergarten, friends, neighbours, workplace – all left behind. Not forgotten, but 200 km away from Szeged. It’s a very big change, in my opinion. We chose a village (yes!) that we found an ideal place to live, find a rent (yes, since it’s very difficult to sell our house in the middle of a global crisis), new school/kindergarten/workplace (of course, latter was the first we had to arrange) and “that’s it”. In quotation marks: that’s it. Simply: we’ve changed the way we live.

I hope we won’t regret it. So far so good. It was not a sudden decision, but certainly one that has had pros and cons alike. We’re working on the pros to be dominant.

Keep fingers crossed!

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Hungarians

It often happens when I meet people who don’t really know much about Hungary and Hungarians that I need to introduce them us. Besides geographical and some historical data I tend to favour the following story/saying:

“Hungarians are said to go through a revolving door last, but come out of the building first.”

I’m absolutely unsure whether this really describes us well, anyway, I also attach the following explanation. We are said to be tricky and innovative when it comes to finding out/exploiting the weaknesses of a system. We don’t hurt rules (at least not more than others), however, we like to make use of those little holes in the system that nobody has ever thought of.

By the way, there’s another story about us. It’s said to have happened during World War II when the most influental scientists were working on the atomic bomb in the US. Oppenheimer decided to have a break during a meeting and went out of the room. Then somebody from the group said: “Okay, at last we can talk in Hungarian”.

So we’re smart, we’re tricky. Let me finish this post with a story that happened to me just today. I wanted to buy some food for dinner in a store. I collected all the things I wanted to pay for and took my place at the end of the queue at check-out. Unfortunately, there was only one line and other people came behind me soon. The cashier became nervous and rang the bell indicating it to his co-workers that somebody should come and help him out by letting people pay at another check-out desk. Anyway, as I could predict all the people behind me started to compete with each other who would be the first, second, etc. in the new line. They didn’t even think about that they should let those fellows to form the second queue who had been there for a longer time. This would never happen in Finland, for example: when a queue is formed and it gets split up the original order of people is always kept. Isn’t that obvious? For us, Hungarians, it’s not. Sometimes I wish we were not that tricky.

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A new blog

Hi all,

This is Gabor Torok’s new blog. I’ve had two so far: one is professional and I use it to express my thoughts on anything related to mobile. The other is anything that is not related to my profession. Oh, and by the way, it’s written in Hungarian.

Why did I decide to start another one? Well, for two reasons: one is that I’ve just suspended the activity on my professional blog for reasons described here. The other reason is that I will discontinue my private blog on freeblog.hu – it’s simply so low in quality that I wonder how I could insist on it so far.

Hence, I thought I would give a try to WordPress. I’ve already used it at two different sites and I was really satisfied with the quality of it. And by the way, it’s one of the most popular blogger engines – I can’t really lose with using it.

Finally, why in English? Who said that I will write only in English? I might change between Hungarian, my native language, and English – who knows? And who cares?

Anyway, the point: welcome to my new blog, leave a comment, your thoughts are always respected.

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