If you were wondering where I was since my last blog post here, you are not following me on Twitter :). And you should because I’m there all the time.

However it’s not Twitters fault that I’m not posting regular blog posts here. The reason for my lack of time to maintain this blog lies in the fact that I started a new blog called Iznajmljivači 2.0 where I do all the writing about tourism related topics (about which you would know everything if you followed me you know where). Any way this new blog, other work that I do for Constructive Code and Kruna and still ongoing college education left me little or no extra time to maintain this blog

This doesn’t mean I’ll will shut it down, it just means that I’ll write on it very rare and only when something important happens. Until such posts I suggest you redirect your attention to Iznajmljivači 2.0 blog, which is written in Croatian, and to follow what I’m up to on Twitter.

Until next time… Bye

If you remember I talked about a new project called WhyCroatia and how great it is. In the mean time this project was covered number of times on television (during main daily news), a lot of people and news portals wrote about it and evan the Croatian minister of tourism and his department saw the potential of this project and helped it in some way (and started something similar but different enough). They also added a prize contest for the best uploaded video to encourage even more people to post their reasons and help spread the buzz about Croatia.

Well, yesterday they announced the best videos and on my big surprise my second video for WhyCroatia from Webada won the #1 place! To see the whole video click here.
As I didn’t receive my prize on a stage (Oscar style) I’ll use this opportunity to thank every one who participated, watched, enjoyed, rated and voted for this video.

I also suggest that you check out other wining videos. They can be found here.

And if you are sad because you didn’t participate, well, don’t be. The first round is over but you can still upload new videos, and as a little birdie told me it looks like there are some prizes planned for the best summer videos as well.

So what are you waiting for. Go, shoot some footage, trim it a little and send it to WhyCroatia. Who knows, maybe by helping Croatia you’ll help your self (in more than one way).

Until next time. Bye.

It somehow came sooner this year! I was completely unprepared and it caught me by surprise. And at the end I didn’t really feel like anything has changed.
You are not sure what am I blabbering about? Well yesterday I celebrated my 23rd birthday (Yes, I’m that old already :) ).

I made quite a few big and life changing decisions in the past year, shifted my priorities a little and changed the way I look and approach some things and situations. Hopefully all for the better, but time will tell if I made the right decisions.

I realized, evan if it doesn’t seem that way all the time and I’m bitching a lot, that I am “living my dream” and doing exactly what I like doing with the people I love and respect. I’m glad I’m not one of those people who don’t see and appreciate what a good life they have. Hopefully I’ll never be that way. This is the reason why I don’t have much expectation for the year ahead (and because I usually end having them all the year :D ).

The only thing I regret this birthday is that non of my closest friends were able to come to the celebration because we were miles apart, but that’s work and life for you.

For my ending line I would like to quote a birthday wish from a good friend:

Don’t look at yourself as a year older, look at your self as a year smarter!

This year Ivana and I decided to go somewhere for International Workers’ Day.
Because we had only 3 days available for this short holiday weekend we had to “limit” ourselves to Croatia. Our first idea was to visit Dubrovnik, but at the end we decided to go to Fužine. Every time I was going to/from Rijeka I was impressed with the view of Fužine from the highway bridge so we finally decided to visit this small town.

We planned the trip pretty fast and booked an apartment near the center of Fužine and near all the restaurants we wanted to visit (at the end it is all about the food :) ).
Besides the cave “Vrelo” and the Bajer lake we didn’t plan to see anything else in those two and a half days that we were meaning to stay there.

So let me tell you something about:

1. Fužine

Some basic information about Fužine can be found here.
I thought this town would be bigger that it really is. And maybe it looks big when you look at the maps but Fužine is mostly compiled from streets with family houses so there is nothing special to see there.

The center of Fužine is a small square with all important things you need to visit and see located there except the lakes and the cave. Anyway this square was perfect for Ivana and me as we like to mingle around and we could do this perfectly without walking to much :). The other great thing there was a small river coming from the lake through the center of Fužine, and one bar and a restaurant have their terraces right next to it, which is great and we loved it a lot.

There are also quite a few walking paths, once you find them, if you are into that kind of stuff.

2. Cave “Vrelo” and lakes

I love seaside, lakes and rivers, so I immediately loved the lake view from our apartment and the view from the top of the hill in Fužine to the lake and the bridge going through it. Unfortunately, except the stunning view there isn’t anything else to see or experience there.

You can walk alongside lake cost but that looses meaning after couple hundred meters. If there were only some coffee shops or some other type of some entertainment available there :).

The second lake wasn’t evan easy to find but luckily google saved the day and we were able to enjoy it as well.

If you are coming to Fužine, or you are just passing by, you must visit cave “Vrelo”!

It was discovered in 1950 by accident. The cave is 4 million years old and 300 meters in length. Maybe because this was my first visit to any cave ever I really liked everything there was to see inside (small well and rivered coming from it, stone cave ornaments and the cold :) ). The only downsides were the length of the visit (about 20 minutes all together) and the constant water dropping from the celling on my gadgets ;).

3. Food

We always welcome the opportunity to try something completely new or rare to us and all restaurants in Fužine were serving at least couple of such dishes. At the end we didn’t have the courage and/or the heart to eat the Bear goulash in restaurant Bitoraj so we decided to settle with fried frogs and filled oyster mushrooms in restaurant “Arnika” as our special dishes. All other meals we had were quite normal :).

The prices were reasonable and acceptable for us (two students at this point :) ), and the service was also great.

I’d just like to compliment the food presentation in Lovački Dom “Arnika”. If you, for example, order “Hunter’s goulash” for two it will be served to you in a small pot which hangs from a stand and under which there is a little fire keeping it all warm. Unfortunately I was not able to take a picture of this but it looked great and very hunter authentic, trust me on this.

As a closing note I would like to say that the weekend was perfect to see everything we wanted to see and try everything we wanted to try. If we stayed longer we would not have anything else to do there. So I would recommend Fužine as a great weekend resort no matter the season.

And if you are interested you can find some photos that Ivana and I took over the weekend on my MobileMe photo gallery.

I’ll keep this blog post as simple and short as possible.

Couple of weeks back Borja started a new project called WhyCroatia? The purpose of this project/site is to gather all kinds of videos posted by tourist in Croatia and off course Croatians them self on why anyone should visit our country. As you can see on WhyCroatia site there a lot of good reasons uploaded already ;).

I personally think this is a great project and would like to use this opportunity to ask anyone who has at least one good thing to say about Croatia to make a video out of it and post it there.

You can go and see my contribution to the whole project as well here:

http://www.whycroatia.org/whycroatia-609

I higly suggest you watch the video in HD so you won’t have blurry images ;).

And don’t forget to spread the buzz about WhyCroatia! :)

It’s finally happened… VELUMrent was released two weeks ago and my company can finally start doing real business :). This is the reason why my free time has fallen down to none again. I thought it would be easier to write content for VELUMrent website, easier to promote it and easier to get new potential leads. But I was a bit too optimistic and now I see how much work you really have to do in order to get things done right (right in my own opinion off course). But I’m not complaining as I really enjoy all that work I do and can see almost immediate results of my actions at this stage so I can correct potential mistakes as I go.

The only concern I have is that I won’t have enough time or creativity for all the work that still has to be done.

I also have exams next week that I would like to pass so I’ll have to spear some time for studying as well (oh man :/).

I would also appreciate if you could provide me with some feedback about the site and VELUMrent so I can correct mistakes, improve the content and make other modifications that would make them better in the future.

That would be all for today. Now I’m going to get some constructive work done (hopefully) :).

First I’ll just provide you with a link to last week’s TV show Xica that covered MacPiva event in Varaždin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvSCAdUXkso&feature=channel_page

And now back on topic. This weekend I was on Pašman on a triple birthday party. My Mom, sister and friend Mirko were celebrating their birthdays together. I went there on Friday and came back home yesterday sometime after midnight. I’ll just say that I had a wonderful, offlinish (just made this word up) and relaxing time.

The only thing I’d like to highlight from those three great days is the sea food that we enjoyed. Mirko is a local fisherman (one of the best on the island if you ask me) and what he has brought for us to eat was just amazing. There was no fish or squid that wasn’t fresh and under 1 kg. If you know anything about sea food I don’t need to tell you more in order to appreciate this fact.

I’ll embed some of the photos right here in the post so you can quickly see them, and to see all photos of this birthday party please visit this online gallery.

Here is another small gallery where you can see Mirko’s catch from last summer just to get an idea what a good fisherman he is.
Hopefully this summer I’ll catch him do his fishing thing on camera so you can see how great this looks.

The only downside is that I neglected a lot of work over the weekend that is catching me up today :).
So of I go… Bye!

It was a looong weekend because of the Mac event organized by Mac users in Varaždin.

I was excited about the whole thing so much I could not evan sleep the night before. And despite my high expectations the whole event turned out to be even better and caught me by surprise.

The whole thing started when BJ boys (how everyone popularly calls them these days) picked me up in Križevci so we can go together to Varaždin. During our 1 hour trip the only subjects we were talking about were Apple, Macs and Mac users.

Once we came to Green Pub (where this Mac event was held) the mayhem began :). Believe it or not, all that most of us were talking about were Macs and how to use a Mac in our daily routines.
There were many different types of Mac users there. Some were into photography, others into music, we also had programers and much more. So you can imagine how wonderful it was (for a Mac and Apple fan and user) to see and hear how everyone of them uses their Macs. I even learned some other stuff not-Mac-related from some of the users (much of that was about photography).

The best thing was the openness of the people there. After the initial handshake, with the people I didn’t already know, the conversation just started as we knew each other for years and not minutes. It was amazing.

I’m also glad some windows users came and asked some questions about the Mac platform. I hope we were not influenced by beer to much at that time and that our answers pushed them a step closed to becoming new Mac switchers.

At one point there were more than 30 people in the room and about 9-10 MacBooks of all sorts on the table. Almost everyone had some Apple hardware (iPhones, iPods of all generations, MacBooks and even 4 Apple remotes ;) ).

I think it was about 5 when the official MacBeer event was over and everyone went home. Then a small group of us went to the originally booked bar for this event and had an after party. As now there was a smaller group of us we naturally connected even better (like this was possible) and had an even better time. I only remember I was laughing almost all the time because of some jokes that were passed around :)!

Once the after party was over Bj Boys, BlackShtef, Ficho and me went to dinner. It turned out to be as funny as the after party and because we had such a good time we decided to have a second after party as well.

After we circled Varaždin about 5-6 times we went for some additional beers and partied until midnight. Then Ficho sent us home and the rest is history!

The conclusion is that it was the best gathering of any sort I’ve ever attended (and a lot of other people agree with this as well), and that a lot of people that I only knew by their virtual personalities are even better when you meet them in person. I would also like to congratulate everyone who participated in organizing the whole thing - You’ve done a great job from choosing a location, creating flyers, posters, backgrounds, making sure we had something to eat and drink and have a great time.
We loved the whole thing so much that we started to think about organizing something similar soon, but which will involve some meet :).

With this I’ll end my MacBeer report, and if you are interested in more check all the photos from that event.

You can see all my photos taken that day here:

http://gallery.me.com/darkokontin#100256

And here are the photos of everybody else who uploaded them afterwards:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/madness_photo/archives/date-posted/2009/03/16/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vanja-gavric/sets/72157615335787540/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/buffy10/sets/72157615238902485/
http://gallery.me.com/lukasucic#100116
http://gallery.me.com/filip#100033
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanbrezakbrkan/sets/72157615265152552/

If I missed someone’s gallery please let me know and I’ll include it in the list.

Ok, that is enough spamming (again) for today :) God bless all Mac users and their Macs!

C u!

EDIT: New gallery is up: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomislavlijovic/sets/72157614617359098/

I almost forget to let you know about this event. So everything you need to know about it can be seen on the flyer above and in this topic on MacKorisnik. The only thing You need to do is to get there tomorrow :)!

Next week, once all the photos, videos and tv shows (yes there will be a tv coverage as well) are uploaded I’ll write more about how it was and link to all those resources.

C U tomorrow!

This is going to be the last week I’ll work for Polar before I take a leave for undefined period of time.
The reason why I’m taking this leave, after three years of continues work for them, is because of couple of reasons:

1. I’m working on my own project at the moment which requires my full attention so all my investments don’t get wasted.
2. The global recession is affecting Polar as well and there isn’t a lot of work as there was before. So for the same work (in hours) I receive less income. So it stopped being cost-effective for me.
3. I really need to relax a little and stop working on so many work intensive fronts at the same time. This way I hope I’ll have more time for my self and also some extra time to catch up with my studies and exams :).

I’m also kind of sad because I won’t be working there on a daily basis. Working for Polar became my routine, and it is hard to shake off such routines. But I’ll mange somehow :).

However if you have some interesting projects and you are interested in hiring me or working with me on them please do let me know.
Why? Because I’ve got a feeling I won’t enjoy the free time so much as I think I will :)!

Bye