Expat In Romania

Not something I do very often, but I'm going to momentarily stray from the things I typically write about. In case you haven't heard, the tech blogosphere is clamoring to report on the public firing of an AOL employee by CEO Tim Armstrong during a company-wide conference call aimed to boost morale following layoffs. This article contains some background, a transcript, the audio recording, and all the gritty details about what should be a non-story. Here's why I believe it to be one of the most brilliant inbound marketing scams we've all come across. 1. Tim can't stop talking about Patch. "You should be using Patch...Patch is amazing...Patch feeds and clothes you....bow down to the great Patch!" The whole time he was going on about it I was thinking, "WTF is Patch?" You already know I was all over Google searching for 'Patch' the moment the recording ended. I only got results when I refined the search to 'Patch AOL' though...

This happened in May. It was long time coming and now I feel as though I've crossed a major item off the 'places to see' list. I mean, here I am, writing about living in a former communist state, trying to dispel many of the typical Western/North American stereotypes about this part of the world, while I'm still sitting in my comfort zone hesitant to visit our similarly afflicted neighbours. Long story short, an old friend from Toronto wanted to combine his Serbia trip with a Cluj visit. That done, we left Cluj in a rented Dacia Logan for the brutally long drive to Jagodina, Serbia, where he grew up. My first impression of Serbia was that things pretty much looked like they do in Romania; rough around the edges. The people, too, reminded me of my fellow Romanians; worried about life. It was only the language that I wasn't getting, but after a couple of days, I'd picked up some useful words: dobre den, hvala, and most importantly, zhivili!  Hello, thank you, ...