It’s here, isn’t it?

By Dragos ILINCA | Published: June 3, 2009

You will exist in physical isolation.
People will be all around you, but they’ll all be oblivious of your physical existence, and you of theirs.

You will communicate your thoughts as a stream, following strict rules. That will constitute your role in making this new reality possible. If you don’t participate, you don’t exist.

You will experience reality through the streams of others “around” you, also connected to the machine.

People interacting with the media you push will be participants in the same “event”.

New media pushed at you from a conceptual “afar” will constitute “other” events. This will create the illusion of space.

You will only exist in the moment, the only way possible with any stream. The past must make way for an ever flowing new.

The only reality you will experience is that of constant momentary stimuli.

You cannot disconnect. Everybody else is still connected. There is no other reality outside the machine, as there’s nobody out there to grant it to you.

Disconnecting is disappearing from “The Reality”.

Welcome to the matrix. We’ve been moving towards this for decades. We’ve been waiting for you.

Posted in Now Culture | 2 Comments

Second Week Of Training

By Dragos ILINCA | Published: February 13, 2009

I was in Bucharest during the second week of training.
My schedule was different than the routine I had in London. I barely realized
that because of this, I skipped a run.

S: 3mi
M: 4mi
S: -
L: 6mi

The 6mi run seemed incredibly easy. On the last mile, I felt as if I could continue running for at least a few more miles.

Deceptively simple, yet the short 3mi run on the third week seemed incredibly hard. I have no idea what’s going on and why that happened, but it seems I should not underestimate the long runs anymore.

Food

I have not paid attention to the fool I ate and when I ate it and this seemed to take its toll.
Sometimes I ate something right before running, such as an orange. This made me feel so bad during the run that I felt I was going to vomit. At other times, I just ate 4-5 hours before running and this left me little energy for the run.

It seems that the best thing – for me at least – is to eat a carb-rich meal 2-3 hours before the run.

Warm up

Stretching seems to help before the run. After the run, it’s a no-brainer, but before the run, it’s my favorite way of warming up.

One of the best things worth doing before the run is joint warm up. I use the Pavel Tsatsouline program called “Super Joints”. Done right, the techniques “warm up” your joints and act as a stretching and gentle cardio work-out.

Posted in Adventure | Leave a comment

The First Week Of Training

By Dragos ILINCA | Published: February 6, 2009

Everything started Friday, the 23rd of January. Vladimir and I went for a run. One lap of the Greenland Docks seemed like such a long distance. We started at a pretty fast pace that, by the end of the run, had got even faster. I never paid any attention to the distance or the time it took us to complete a lap.

The book said that before starting the official training, one must be able to run non-stop for 30 minutes. Let’s try that, I thought. 30 minutes of running ended-up being 2 laps of the Greenland docks, about 3 miles. It felt pretty hardcore. I had not run in over a year.

Yet having got that out of the way, I felt a lot more confident in my capabilities. Sure enough, I did the runs of the week feeling better and better, both physically and psychologically. The first run was 3 miles, the second 4 miles, the third 3 miles and the fourth 5 miles. I had never run 5 miles in my life. And the truth is, it’s easier than I thought.

You seem to learn a lot about yourself and about your body in just a few runs.

You feel like competing, especially if you run alongside somebody. You tend to run faster and faster and miss the point of all this. Running alongside somebody is great for motivation, but you should forget about competing and your ego. The purpose is to do your runs as planned, to finish them feeling good consistently. You’re not supposed to burn not so that your ego feels good.

After a mile or so, you enter a state of flow, where everything just happens. You’re on autopilot, nothings hurts and nothing requires conscious effort. You just run and not think about it at all. And somehow you get tired a lot less than during the first lap.

The right equipment is important: shoes, t-shirt, socks. Maybe a wind-proof jacket. Not carrying a watch also makes sense. In a training like this it’s the consistency that matters. Finishing your runs every time you’re supposed to and doing as many of them as possible is what it’s about.

Posted in Adventure | Leave a comment

Reykjavik, Day 1

By Dragos ILINCA | Published: September 25, 2008

8am and so much for sleep. We had to pick up our rental car from SIXT at 10 am. I remember being so excited about that a few months ago…to cover the whole of Iceland’s Ring Road in just a week. Now I felt like an idiot for committing to pick the car up so early in the morning.

After a huge breakfast we made our way to the Hilton Hotel, where the SIXT office was. Again, we were met with a great smile and “There’s a small problem”.

We had asked for a Citroen C4. The people who had previously rented it were kind enough to hit it, so it was not rentable at this time. They offered another C4 with an automatic gearbox. We looked puzzled at each other: none of us had ever driven an automatic before.

“It’s easier actually”, she said. I don’t know whether it was the fact that she did not sound convinced or the fact that we were going to drive on some steep gravel roads that kept us skeptical.

In the end, we settled for a Ford Focus with a manual gearbox. Give us a manual anyday!

It was at this time that I realized I had discovered one of the traits of Icelanders, a trait I would come across over and over again. Problems don’t affect Icelanders. They just do their best to find a solution and move on. Problems are going to crop up from time to time anyway, so why take them to heart? Just solve it with a smile on your face and move on.

I did not know what to make of it at first: it was annoying, because nothing seemed to happen according to plan. It was also very refreshing to see people solving problems instead of complaining, which is what most Europeans do :)

We decided to visit the local Zoo. It looked more like a small farm that a full-featured zoo, with only local animals “on display”. This made me feel like having taken a trip to the countryside, it was a much more personal and quiet experience, rather than entertaining.


Photo by VisitIceland

We walked around the small streets, saw Hallgrims Kirkja, entered some shops, the usual cheesy tourist agenda that everybody abides to in order to get into the city spirit. All in all, interesting and relaxing immersion into the Icelandic experience.


Photo by Oli Haukur

Next day, we were going to escape the city limits and go for the Golden Circle, as they call it: Thingvellir (the rift), Geysir (the geyser), Gullfoss (the two-step waterfall).

Posted in Adventure, Travel | 1 Comment

First Night in Reykjavik

By Dragos ILINCA | Published: September 24, 2008

It was 22:30 in London. I was making my way to a train that would take me to Stanstead Airport. From there, RyanAir would get me to Berlin by 9am the following day.

A full day of walking around Berlin, feeling sleep deprived and a 3 and a half hour flight later, we touched down in Keflavik, Reykjavik’s international airport. It was 23:45 and I hadn’t slept for about 40 hours. We covered the 45 km to Reykjavik by bus, in what seemed a couple of minutes, as I slept most of the journey.

We reached our hotel in the end, and the receptionist greeted us with a friendly “You see, there’s this situation…”

“That sounds promising”, I thought to myself.

They had overbooked our room, as every respectable hotel does. Seriously. The only solution that they could come up with was to send us to another hotel in their network. A 4 star hotel right in the very center of Reykjavik, for the same amount that we had paid. Fine by us :)

Making our way to the Plaza Hotel on the cobble-stone streets of a cold Friday morning gave us the first opportunity to interact with some Icelandic people heading home after a night of hard drinking. We came across guys munching on their hotdogs (really popular snack in Iceland) and girls so drunk that they could barely stand. Interesting, but nonetheless helpful and friendly crowd. We followed their directions and we found our hotel in no time. A drunk girl even escorted us some of the way and acted as a guide, explaining us different things about the landmarks we were passing by.

Finally, some sleep.

Posted in Adventure, Travel | Leave a comment

Heima – At home

By Dragos ILINCA | Published: July 24, 2008

Last night I watched Sigur Ros’s documentary called “Heima”. It’s currently ranked the number 1 documentary on IMDB. I had some expectations and what I got was totally different.

The documentary is about Sigur Ros’s tour of Iceland. They played a series of free, unannounced concert throughout their home country, Iceland. The documentary focuses a lot on Iceland, which is great. We are shown performances of the band throughout the country, but while the music plays, we see glimpses of Icelandic landscapes and life.

Heima is more of an emotional journey than anything else. The documentary does not show the concerts in detail, nor Iceland’s most famous sights that you might expect to see. Instead it tries to provide us with a window to the band’s, and Iceland’s soul.

The scenery is beautifully supported by the music in what’s an active attempt to let you experience the warm feelings you’ll get on going to Iceland and having a taste of the landscape. So glad I’m going there this year.

Here’s the trailer:

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Virtual Vacuum

By Dragos ILINCA | Published: July 22, 2008

I remember one night, a few months a go. It was about 10 pm and I was at home. I had not written an article I was supposed to publish that day, so I was working on it on my laptop. I don’t usually work that late but this was an exception. As my eyes left the monitor and looked across the room, I saw it in all its glory. It was the virtual vacuum.

What I saw was not that spectacular, nor uncommon, but it somehow resonated deeply. It was Diana, sitting on the sofa, reading something on her laptop. Although we were in the same room, just feet away, we weren’t really there. Our minds were caught in the virtual vacuum.

That is true loneliness to me.

Being surrounded by people, but oblivious of them. Having millions of people around us but no friends. Technology has helped us to reach more people and explode our social graph and so forth. What we got, however, is not what we expected.

The Internet helped us broaden the pool of people that we interact with, but it rarely helped deepen connections we already had. Au contraire. The virtual vacuum sucked us in so hard that some of us lost focus of cultivating offline relationships. And now we’re left with no true friends in the real world, but with dozens of pseudo virtual friends.

Mind you, it’s not technology’s fault. It our fault. It’s what we let it do to us. The Internet is not bad, nor good. It’s the way some of us use it that’s at fault.

One of the symptoms of this virus is the fact that few people speak their minds face-to-face. The Internet has taught us to create personas, MySpace profiles, blogs that show us the way we want to be. And we’re comfortable speaking our minds from behind those personas. However the persona thing si playing tricks on us. We don’t do the work we need to in order to really BECOME the people we want to be. That’s why I’ve met dozens of people that would not walk up to someone they want to meet. But they would add that person to their Friends on Facebook. Someone might swear at you on their blog, but tell you face-to-face that it was only a joke.

It seems ironic then, that we’re living in the midst of the greatest era for self-help books. People are more interested that ever in doing and achieving. And it’s true. They are interested. They buy the books. Some of them even read them. Few take the steps required to actually achieve. And even fewer focus on BECOMING. And it’s this becoming that’s the most important thing and the hardest.

The Internet has helped us get what we want NOW in some areas. But if we can have it ALL NOW in these areas, why couldn’t we have everything NOW, period? Like the character we wish we had, the friends we wish we had, the fame we wish we had, the money we wish we had, the self-respect we wish we had. Some of us, clearly, think we can have it all NOW, while most of us think we should.

It’s this very paradigm that’s leading us into the virtual vacuum more and more and that’s making our social lives more and more barren. And the worst part is that it has the snowball effect: seeking for shortcuts in the virtual vacuum makes us more and more inept in the real world, which makes us seek even more shortcuts in the virtual vacuum.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Just testing Twitter updates from uberVU

By Dragos ILINCA | Published: June 30, 2008

Twitter updates from uberVU

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Gregg Bleakney: From Alaska to Chile, biking

By Dragos ILINCA | Published: June 3, 2008

bleakney.jpg

Meet Gregg Bleakney. Avarage software salesman, in his 30s. Why should we care? Because he pedaled the whole Pan American Highway, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. This trip took two years of hardship, peril, adventure and self-exploration. Many could say “2 years, that’s a lot”. Or “That’s too dangerous”. Or “He threw it all away to go on some mid-life crisis trip”. I think that he did probably the best thing he could have done. Yes, it took two years and it was dangerous. And yes, he passed up on two 9-to-5 years. But he LIVED for 2 years. You see, when you were a kid, curiosity might have given you that inside tingle to just go and explore. Your parents surely told you not to go too far away from your house or your playing spot. But you did that anyway. You went a little farther than allowed. Then farther and farther. Just for the hell of it. Chances are nothing bad happened. Or at least nothing permanently life changing for the worse. And I bet you felt good about yourself. Because you overcame some limits just by your own will and power. Now fast-forward 25 years later. Why don’t you do that anymore? Why don’t you do something adventurous, just for the hell of it? I know, because you’re a grown up now. You have responsibilities. People expect things from you. You have to have a job and make a living. You have to buy that new house. You can’t act childishly. Or can you? Gregg Bleakney lived in 2 years more than most of us in 10 years. Think of it this way: Nobody wants to die. If you were faced with the choice of living 60 years versus 120 years, you’d probably choose the latter. Unfortunately you can’t make that choice. But you can live in 2 years more than others in 10. And that’s kind of getting to make that choice.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

What happens when people communicate face to face

By Dragos ILINCA | Published: May 21, 2008

We all feel on an intuitive level that when we talk face to face with somebody, a lot more than the words bouncing back and forth is being communicated. There’s been a study that has been quoted by lots of people regarding this fenomenon.

The study says that communication is made up of:

55% body language
38% tone of voice
7% words

Unfortunately these numbers have been taken out of context, as they are true only when people are communicating about their feelings and likes/dislikes.

Nevertheless, it seems something does happen when two people communicate face to face. A study from the University of Pennsylvania showed that when two people interact, as much as 10,000 units of information flow between them every second. What you talk about with somebody is only the tip of the iceberg. The huge majority of the communication is taking place subconsciously.

That’s why, it seems, evolution has created the “first impression”. First impressions are a pretty good assessment of somebody’s personality in just a few seconds. What’s most impressive about first impressions is that most of the time they are right on the money.

When you meet somebody online and manage to “connect”, you don’t have the “luxury” of the first impression. So my advice is to actually meet people in person. A first impression can be created quickly, and it will help you know more about that person intuitively that what you found out by IM or Twitter. It might take more time this way, but the ROI, so to speak, is much greater. Online communication has its place, but it should not replace offline communication.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments