My things

 

Yesterday, we finally moved into our unfinished house in Chișinău. Today, life continued more or less as expected: another day of renovation, technicians, moving belongings, cleaning and discovering just how much work we still have ahead of us. Unfinished house, unfinished business. At least we are now living in our own place. That makes all the difference, even when the day begins with somebody arriving to disconnect the gas supply. We knew this was coming. The gas technicians had been scheduled to reroute the external gas pipes so that we could continue work on the outdoor deck. It was one of those jobs that had to be completed before the next phase of construction could proceed. And so another Saturday began, not with a leisurely morning, but with more construction work. The Soviet approach to gas pipes One of the things that continues to attract my attention in Moldova is the way certain installations have traditionally been arranged around buildings. ...

Friday, 16 October 2026. Another small milestone in our life in Moldova: we have finally moved into our own house in Chișinău. There is just one minor detail. The house is not finished yet. Not even close to being completely finished, actually. There is still renovation work to do, construction material to remove, outdoor areas to complete and a seemingly endless collection of small problems waiting for attention. But we have reached the point where we can live here. And after months of renovation, temporary arrangements and travelling back and forth, that is a considerable achievement. Until now, we have been staying with Vita's parents in Dumbrava while the work on our house continued. They have been accommodating us, but living in somebody else's home, even with family, is not quite the same as having our own space, our own routines and our own little comforts. So we made the decision to move in, unfinished house or not. A house does not need...

After several articles examining individual pieces of my C++ event-planning model, it is time to move to the object that brings almost everything together: the Document . This is one of the most important architectural ideas in the application, and it is also one that has been in the back of my mind for many years. I remember the way older Apple productivity software treated a document as more than a stream of text. You could work inside one document and place different kinds of content into it: text, tables, calculations, graphics, images and other elements. The document was the thing the user understood. The technical implementation of the individual elements was secondary. Before writing this article I went back and researched that memory, and it turns out that I was remembering several related Apple ideas. AppleWorks was probably the clearest historical example. It brought word processing, spreadsheets, databases, drawing, painting and presentations into one int...

Tuesday, 13 October 2026, was a rather special day for us. After spending so much time travelling between my in-laws' house and our place in Chișinău, we had finally decided to move our basic belongings back into the city and spend the next few weeks living in our own house. The renovation work has been a long process, and although there are always things left to organise, improve or finish, we have reached the point where the house is sufficiently comfortable for us to use it properly. It was not exactly a grand moving day involving furniture removal companies and enormous boxes, but it was nevertheless an important little milestone in our return to life in central Chișinău. A moving day dictated by traffic On Monday evening, we had already started preparing everything we thought we would need for the following few weeks. Clothes, personal belongings and the usual assortment of things that somehow become necessary whenever you move between two places. Our original plan...

Based on a LinkedIn post originally published on 31 March 2026 Headline economic numbers often appear more conclusive than they really are. Gross domestic product is a good example. A country’s nominal GDP may rise substantially over a decade, creating the immediate impression that the economy has become proportionally larger and more prosperous. But nominal GDP combines two effects: changes in the quantity of goods and services produced; and changes in their prices. If prices rise while production remains unchanged, nominal GDP still increases. To understand what has actually happened, the headline needs to be decomposed carefully. Economic interpretation begins when the headline number is separated into price effects, real output, population, expenditure components and demographic obligations. Nominal GDP and real GDP answer different questions Nominal GDP measures production using current prices. It is useful for understanding the monetary size of an economy, tax bases, debt ratios ...