I have always found it extremely unfair that none of the Bulgarian masterpieces of architecture and sculpture are listed among the seven wonders of the world. It suffices for a man to travel for a few days in my country to make sure that we have given something to the world too, and that we built artefacts that make foreigners tremble in awe and fear.

Led by my patriotic duty, I decided to make a list of seven wonders built by the Bulgarian creative genius – those buildings and monuments which will remain for ages to come.

1. The monument in front of the National Palace of Culture

This stately monument to this day is a mystery to art scholars, and they continue to see new sense and even newer nonsense in its proud body. The rusty fixtures symbolize the naked skeleton of our glorious past, the crashing sound of falling tiles reminds of the terrible battles that our ancestors fought, and the phallus bulging towards heaven is an unambiguous message to our enemies. But most puzzling is the caption: “Oz koi o adne v oi za vo oda toi ne u ira”. According to some historians, this is probably an ancient bulgarian swear phrase addressed to Byzantines.

2. The Kardjali municipality building

Note this majestic ship which accommodates the municipal administration of Kardjali. There’s no such office building anywhere in the world – even in traditional maritime countries like Britain, Spain or the Netherlands.

Where is this proud vessel headed to? The bright horizons of communism? Or quiet ports of ethnic tolerance? Questions that our children will surely ask themselves while standing before the walls of this magnificent architectural masterpiece.

3. Chateau Sandanski

Ever since the Rennaisance, Bulgarian masons have been known to blend architectural landmarks in mesmerizing landscapes. This skill is still alive today. A typical example of this symbiosis is the building with the aristocratic name “Chateau Sandanski”. It towers with all its splendor at the foot of the proud Pirin Mountain, and finely blends into the charming landscape. Building and nature are in such a perfect harmony that the question arises – where does the human construction end, and God’s creations begin?

4. “Founders of the Bulgarian state” monument in Shumen

Asparukh‘s Bulgarians are depicted with so much concrete that people are wondering how they have crossed the Danube without drowning. If Bulgarian kings had hidden behind the thick walls of this mindless thing, they would never fall under either Byzantine or Ottoman power.

I looked for a long time at this monument in order to understand what the message of its authors was. I finally found it. The message reads: “During communism concrete was cheap.”

5. Kremikovtzi Steel Company

Is there another capital city in the world, next to which a metallurgy giant towers with enormous clouds of smoke, and even more enormous debts? The poet Lubomir Levchev once asked “How much is a ticket to Kremikovtsi”. Today we already know the answer: the ticket for getting there is worth far more than the company itself.

6. The saucer of Buzludja

One day, when intelligent alien creatures visit our planet, they would first land at peak Buzludja, to see how this flying saucer arrived at the heart of the Balkan Mountains. Judging by this monument, Dimitar Blagoev was not a socialist, but an ufologist. We salute you, comrade Alf!

7. The flying panels

Almost twenty years have passed since socialism fell, but socialist architecture still surprises us. Today the famous concrete panels already live their own life and sometimes, caught by the wind, they happily fly in the skies to the joy of citizens. This happened in Stara Zagora a few months ago. A panel chose freedom, proudly flew from the sixth floor and smashed the car parked below. This unexpected flight gave happiness not only to the owners of the apartment, who discovered an open panoramic view they had never seen before, but to all the neighbors, whose hearts were filled with the cozy warmth of gloat at the sight of the crushed car.

With these seven wonders we can not only obscure alleged monuments such as the Egyptian pyramids, but we can also start a new aesthetic concept that the highest beauty lies in idiocy.

We know that science and art can be allies. We need far more women in politics. We need a religious view that embraces nature and does not fear science; business leaders who know and accept ecological and spiritual limits; political leaders who have spent time working in schools, factories, or farms and who still write poems. We need intellectual and academic leaders who have studied both history and ecology, and like to dance and cook. We need poets and novelists who pay no attention to literary critics. But what we ultimately need most is human beings who love the world.
- Gary Snyder

I have always been using Google as my favorite currency conversion tool. You can try that yourself – for example, if you insert “100 GBP in USD”, it will show you the value of $100 in pounds sterling.

And so I was happy to learn that the XMLHTTP ActiveX control, which is very popular among web developers, can be accessed from Excel’s VBA macros too. That control is basically used to retrieve data from a HTTP server.

So it actually proved very simple to code an Excel macro that would connect to Google, get currency exchange rate data, parse it and put it in a cell.

Here’s the function that does the actual job:

Function GetCurrencyRate(Currency_1 As String, Currency_2 As String)
    Dim XMLhttp: Set XMLhttp = CreateObject("microsoft.xmlhttp")
    url$ = "http://www.google.com/search?q=1+" + Currency_1 + "+in+" + Currency_2

    XMLhttp.Open "GET", url$, False
    XMLhttp.send ""

    Result$ = XMLhttp.responsetext

    CBegin% = InStr(Result$, "<font size=+1><b>") + 17
    Result$ = Mid$(Result$, CBegin%)

    CBegin% = InStr(Result$, " = ") + 3
    Result$ = Mid$(Result$, CBegin%)

    GetCurrencyRate = Val(Result$)
End Function

As long as Google keeps the same page design, this function will work perfectly. Now any macro can call the currency exchange rate retrieval function and use the results. Here is the solution I chose for my case – an Auto_Open macro, which would automatically fire up when the workbook is opened, get the US Dollar / Euro exchange rate and put it in the F9 cell on Sheet 1:

Sub Auto_Open()
    R = GetCurrencyRate("USD", "EUR")
    Sheets("Sheet1").Range("F9").Formula = Str$(R)
End Sub

Unfortunately, this feature doesn’t work so smoothly with post titles in Cyrillic. They would confuse the code which generates the “Slugs” which are included in the friendly URL, resulting in a bunch of meaningless characters, or – even worse – broken URLs.

I just wrote a WordPress plugin which takes care of that. It automatically converts your Cyrillic post titles in phonetically equivalent Latin slugs. I have created it with Bulgarian transliteration in mind, but it should be compatible with Russian and other languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet.

Download here: Cyrillic Slugs 1.0

That’s why it’s very strange to see how dumb can these guys be sometimes. This article in Business 2.0 shows some examples of extraordinary stupidity at top levels of management. Fun, eh?

I admit it, I can’t live without music. Right now I’m in the process of extracting audio from my CDs and putting it all on one DVD for easy access, and while doing that I found out that I’m pretty tired of most of my favorite bands. It’s not that I like their music less — I still love all my albums — but I’d appreciate something new.
A nice thingy I just discovered is pandora.com – it lets you enter a song/band you like, and starts suggesting similar music. As strange as it sounds, it seems to work very well for me! And it has good quality streaming too.