The Uefa Europe League final was this wednesday, and the city who hosted this event was the capital of my country, Bucharest. I have to admit, I was a bit proud of this, since this was the biggest event ever hosed by my country.

I usually don’t stress too much about this kind of things because, let’s face it, this country is crap. I mean, not the country itself, but the people running it. As some say: Romania is a beautiful country, too bad it’s populated. I say that as well.

We have a lot of beautiful things: we have the Carpatians, we have the Danube delta, we have Transilvania with all its stories about Dracula and all, but we just don;t know how to take advantage of it and put them too good use. The reason tourism is so crap in this country is because the mentality of the Romanian entrepreneur is to take as much money as possible from the German tourist and offer as little as possible. No wonder Bulgaria’s seaside is full of romanians and they get our hard earned money: they know how to treat their customers.

Anyway, I digress form the main topic of this post.And that is the fact that I am proud to be living in this country. OR, at least I was on wednesday, when over 130 countries were watching a footbal match which took place on National Arena in Bucharest.

But, all of those are now in the past, and I jsut want to make enough money so I can get out of this country.

I am not a big football fan. Never was, never going to be. I am not a fan of any of my local teams, and I don’t even like watching football that much. I probably am not the typical man. But there are a few exceptions of course.

I am an avid fan for only one football team out of all the European championships: and that is FC Barcelona. I’v been a fan of them ever since 1998 when I started playing FIFA 98, the computer game. Since then, I watched all the matches where Barca was playing. Maybe not all of them, but the major ones, at least.

Tomorrow night Barca is playing against Chelsea in the quarter finals of Uefa Champions League. Big game no doubt, and I sure hope they will win it, especially since they are playing at home, on Camp Nou.

Real Madrid lost their game against Bayern Munchen tonight with 1-2. Which made me happy, of course. Maybe this will bring their morale down a little bit for their match Saturday evening, against Barcelona. Another reenactment of the “el classico” will take place on Saturday, and of course I will not miss that game either. Looking forward to it. Hopefully Barca will win. If they do, they will reduce the difference between their rivals and there will be only one point left which will separate Barca from the leader, Real Madrid.

I am confident they can do this.

Viva Barca!

I am a pretty active guy and I enjoy playing may sports. My favorite ones are tennis, bascketball and table tennis. if the latter one is available all year round, the other two can be played only during spring and summer, when the weather allows it.

They sure are fun and especially tennis where you pt to work all your muscles. All sports do this, I guess, but I don;t know, I have a soft spot when it comes to tennis. It is jsut so relaxing. As opposed to table tennis, where I often times get mad when I miss a shot or lose a point because of some stupid mistake on my part.

Recently a friend of mine has bought some cool accessories for his playstation console. he bought two move controllers which allows you to play sports inside, on your PS3.

We played table tennis, and I was surprised of how realistic everything was I even got sore muscles after 2 hours of playing. Crazy stuff. Didn’t expect it to be so much fun. Of course, it doesn’t beat the real thing, but still, it is an awesome alternative for those rainy days or winter months.

Not much longer though until I start playing tennis outside once again, but until then, I keep myself in shape with some PS3 table tennis.

I got a new toy today, thanks to my dear sister. It was such a wonderful surprise, and I would play with it all day long. Yes I am not a kid anymore, but when it comes to this, I think anyone would agree with me. You simply cannot keep your hands off it, and would like to spend all day long holding it and playing with it.

What toy is it? Well, it’s not the ordinary toy you would think of. It is a very cute, wonderful baby girl. Yes, my sister gave birth to a wonderful baby girl a few days ago and she is so cute. I hold her in my arms for almost an hour, watching everything she does, and I must tell you, I didn’t get bored at all, not one minute. She makes you laugh with her face expressions and the small gestures she does.

Of course, the minute she started crying like crazy and wouldn’t; stop, no matter which way I would turn her, I handed her over to my sister, so she could take care of her. Feed her, change her, whatever it was that needed to be done, I was definitely not the right guy for it.

It just dawned on me tht I am not ready to have a baby, just yet. Some would sy I am at that age when I should be thinking of starting a family, settling down and all that boring stuff. I am ok the way I am right now, don’t need all that. There is plenty of time for that later. So far, I just enjoy my life the way it is, without any worries, without stress, without any persons relying on me to feed them and provide for them.

And it is a good life.

I remember when I was little I got so excited around big holidays such as Christmas and Easter. My parents would trick me into thinking that I have to build some sort of nest for the Easter bunny, so it has a place where to leave the presents in. Fortunately that didn’t last too long, as I only did that once.

Nowadays I lost all that excitement. I don’t find Easter (or Christmas for that matter) to be such a special time of the year. I don’t want to have anything to do with it anymore. Yes, it is still fun to sit at the table, together with the whole family, but there isn’t that spark anymore, if you know what I mean. I need to change something. I miss those times when I went to church and everything was less complicated.

I wonder if going to another country, just to visit, during these holidays, will change my attitude. I definitely need to change something, and perhaps the scenery is just the thing that needs to be changed.

Anyway, I am planning on taking some days off this Easter from all my work and just spend some quality time. Maybe enjoy some nice bike rides through the park, or if it rains, I will play some video games. I never did get the chance to play the last part of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. So this might be just the perfect time to do so.

Happy Easter to everyone!

Online stock trading was a mystery to me two years ago. I knew I wanted to be more involved in the market, as I was tired of the old fashioned way of buying and selling.

I wanted more control.

Researching online brokers was confusing at first. There were a number of big players, and some smaller ones.

I was determined not to make my choice for online stock trading based only on the fees charged for stock trades or for options trades.

I wanted to check the financial stability of the company. This took some investigation, but eventually I got the information that I wanted. For those companies that I couldn’t find information on their financial status to my satisfaction, I decided to pass on entirely.

Then I checked to see how many companies had complaints against them, and in what number. Some had many, many complaints. The larger companies had complaints, so I had to take into consideration the number of clients or customers that they had.

When I finally did narrow the choices down, I chose two, and I opened accounts at both. For a full year I kept both accounts open, and then gradually I sold down my positions in the one company and moved to using only one.

I’ve been happy since. I’ve really been glad I have the online account now, as I want to be able to monitor my positions very closely due to the volatility in the markets.

So far, so good. I know what I’m dealing with as far as trades and time and real time.

It’s been quite a roller coaster.

I was not proud of having to file for bankruptcy, but people in town were reading about it like it was some type of sporting event. It was scary. Greenberg bankruptcy was the headline in the local paper, and it was the lead story on the local cable news as well and the local television and radio outlets. I was suddenly more famous than I wanted to be. It was really a problem. I had hoped to keep it quiet, but the media had dug the story out. Or rather, the story was fed to them by someone who wanted to do me further harm. I never wanted to file at all, but things just got beyond my control. I had no choice. If I didn’t file I would lose everything.

Thirty years of hard work would go down the drain. It probably will anyway. Then there was Sarah, the news anchor at the television station. She kept badgering me to go on TV and become famous. When I reminded her that I was already famous, and that is why my bankruptcy filing was a story, she didn’t seem to get it. She literally was camping at my doorstep. The station had pulled an RV in front of my place and she was spending 24 hours a day there, waiting for me to come out. I stayed in most of the time, and was able to sneak out the cellar door once. But then they staked that door out, too.

I don’t really understand why sports teams have the names that they do. What exactly do Bulls or Cubs have to do with the city of Chicago? Or the New Orleans Hornets?

I realize the Jazz used to play out of New Orleans and that made sense, but then they moved to Utah. At least, the Los Angeles Angels makes sense. Los Angeles is the city of angels after all. But before they were the California Angels, which doesn’t make as much sense, though the name does have nice ring to it. New York Knicks, I understand. Knicks is short for “knickerbockers,” which is a term for New Yorkers.

Boston Celtics makes sense since they’re a lot of Irish living in Boston. Orlando Magic makes sense since Disney World is down there and Miami Heat is self-explanatory. The name I really hate is the Los Angeles Lakers. Are there even any lakes in Los Angeles? It’s right near the ocean. I know they were originally the Minneapolis Lakers and Minnesota is full of lakes, but I reserve the right to be annoyed. If I am a sports fan, then I have the right to criticize. It is my money and that of other fans who pays the players, coaches, referees, and more.

It is really funny to see the different paths people take after college. One of my good friends from the journalism school took a totally different career path than I did after graduation. I sought out to become a journalist, and my friend Evan opted for law school. We had met our first year in the journalism school, and we hit it off when we realized we were both avid sports fans. We ended up taking all of our journalism classes together. He is now a Brooklyn Bankruptcy Attorney. It is really funny for me to think of him as a lawyer. To me he will always be the guy who would decide he had enough class in a given day and walk back home and not go to his next class, despite already being on campus for it.

Our other friend Zack could never understand that. He always figured it was one thing to not want to go to campus to go to class, but he could not fathom already being on campus and not making the effort to go to class. Zack jokes all the time that Evan could have two meetings in a day with clients, but he will not go to the second one because he wants to go take a nap.

One of my favorite things about going to Cubs games is how suddenly every single person sitting around you is your new best friend and person to debate sports with. Last week I was at the game and ended up chatting the entire game with a guy who is from Chicago, but is now a Cincinnati bankruptcy lawyer. He was telling me all about how the Reds have such a nice stadium in Great American Ballpark, but that they really struggle to fill it since the team is so bad. He was saying how with Dusty Baker there now that there is a renewed sense of hope. We joked about remembering the same case for the Cubs when he first came to Chicago, and how disenchanted the city became with him.

I told him I liked Dusty for the fact that he was a great motivator and was able to get the most out of his players, but that he was a terrible game day manager and that he could not manage a pitching staff to save his life. He agreed with me and added that he also did not like how he never got angry. We both agreed that sometimes a team needs a Lou Piniella type freak out.