A friend of mine, who knows I am an avid gamer told me of a review he once read for a game called Chess. I was not able to find the original review, so I decided to write my own and let people know what they are getting into if they decide to purchase the latest entry in the tactical board games genre...

   Just recently I gave an in-depth reply on a forum to a question that I know I have answered before. When you need to give the same lengthy answer more than once you should write an article to save your keystrokes and just link the article the next time someone asks the same question. This particular question was:

   "If I am involved in a web project where I get to make the decision about the technology stack why would I choose .NET. Why would I choose a stack that costs money, makes the project dependent on a vendor (updates, new versions, etc.) instead of use PHP, Python, Ruby or Java. I don't see any serious technical advantages of ASP.NET and the communities of competing technologies are usually bigger and more helpful."

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   Update: Check my follow-up article "Why I Will Never Buy Dell Again"

   In the past year my old laptop which is more than four years old manifested some serious problem. While the internals were still usable (Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz, 4GB RAM, nVidia 8600M) the machine was almost literally falling apart. This is why I was eagerly awaiting Windows 8's release and the hardware that comes with it...

   Recently I witnessed several discussions where people expressed their disdain for the song of the year – Gangnam Style. If you follow the music tag on this no-blog you will probably get a good impression of the kind of music I like even if you cannot read the text in Bulgarian. Based on this you may expect that I will join the resistance and hate Gangnam Style but the fact is that I am a big fan and there are several reasons for this...

   October 4th and 5th saw the 2012 edition of what is in my opinion the best IT conference in Bulgaria – DevReach . While the price tag of €110 (with Super Early Bird discount) is somewhat high for Bulgarian standards it is definitely worth it. The organizers provided plenty of different drinks and food in the coffee breaks and there were coupons for lunch. The conference was held in the halls of Arena cinema in Mladost, Sofia so the screens the sessions were projected on were really large and the seats were very comfortable as they were intended for watching movies. There were booths for several sponsors with some games where people could win prizes ranging from stress balls to iPads and HTC 8X smartphone. This conference also has the greatest amount of world-renowned speakers of any Bulgarian conference though I definitely prefer many local speakers to some of the overrated celebrities. During breaks tweets with the #devreach tag were displayed on the screens which provoked people to tweet about the conference even more...