I happen to agree
via Novinite.com
100 year anniversary of Bulgarian Independence
Today marks the century point since the declaration of Bulgarian independence in 1908. Obviously it is a holiday here, but with the usual low-key Bulgarian outlook. From Focus - "Bulgaria celebrates the 100th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence today. Exactly a century ago, on 22 September 1908, the independence of the country was declared at the Church of the 40 Martyrs in the old Bulgarian capital of Veliko Turnovo."
In Bulgaria, you'd better pay your stand tax...
I went to my usual fruit market yesterday and noticed someone in a new position that was clearly not an official place in the market. Today when I went to the market, I found only this debris where the seller formerly was.
Finishing Cyclops and it's off to Greece
"Cyclops" wraps up this week. 300+ shots of a humanoid creature are done. And finally the dog days of August can be enjoyed. We're off to Greece tomorrow. The next time I'm posting will be from a beach sipping a fine bottle of local Greek beer.
Trademark ... Not
Not much of a post... just a rant. Believe it or not, Bulgaria has some interesting rules on intellectual property. Shocking I know. As you may know, I have a publishing company. Eastern European Concepts and Consulting. Or EECC for short. I was able to get a .bg domain quite easily for this company because according to Bulgarian rules you can only have an Internet domain if it is your name or your company's name. However, I also wanted an Internet domain that was more appropriate for publishing comics. I wanted the domain www.comics.bg. In order to get this domain I either had to publish a magazine entitled www.comics.bg or trademark the name www.comics.bg. Absolutely stifling rules, but them are the rules. So last year we applied for the trademark. And then we started publishing a magazine entitled... www.comics.bg.
Last week, I received my official rejection letter from the patent and trademark office of Bulgaria. Now I have a month or two to continue using comics.bg. After which I will now need to show my continued publication of www.comics.bg over the last year.
The .bg domain names are some of the most spam free domains around, now you know why.
Plovdiv Adventures
The wife and I celebrated 5th year wedding anniversary on Saturday, and to celebrate right we took a trip to Plovdiv. Plovdiv is an ancient city in southern Bulgaria. Colonized by the Romans and occupied by a virtually everybody else over the millennia ... it has a hell of a history. The history is for another time, we were celebrating our marriage and we needed to get our party on. I arranged for hotel reservations in the old city which means ridiculous tiny roads with huge holes and giant rocks that you can't drive a car over. After virtually becoming wedged between thousand-year-old walls, a souvenir seller took pity on us and told us that it was not possible to drive to the hotel we are going towards. Mainly because there's a giant boulder 50 m up the hill and around the bend. She was right. However she said there was another lovely hotel around the corner that we could get the car to. We went, and the facilities lived up to the promise. Bizarrely, it turned out we were in a boutique hotel with avant-garde furnishings. Every room is painted a different color. (We stayed in the green room..not pictured). It was called Hotel Belleville. the facilities include an outdoors garden with a fountain and rooms featured in a fashion hotel magazine, for which the owner is more than eager to give us copies. We had a nice time and not one business related e-mail or phone call. Bliss...
