Destitute animals at Sofia ZOO

Two days ago I went to the Sofia Zoo to have a nice stroll among nature. It was nice like every time I go there. There were plenty of children with their parents, sun was shining, grass was green :) etc. One thing made bad impression on me howsoever.
Some of the animals were very miserable. They were looking hungry and missing elementary necessities. That is unpleasant of course, but that is the situation in Bulgaria in all aspects of life.

The prices of entrance ticketsfor Sofia Zoo are as follows:
1BGN(50 euro cent) for adults;
0.5BGN(25 euro cent) for children above 7 years of age,students,military etc.
Free for children below 7 years of age

These prices are hilarious. I think they should be 3 times more. And the money should be spent for food and improvements.
It is a good practice companies to adopt animals at the zoo. This is good for them as a marketing strategy but is good for the animals too.

Here are some pictures I took. Pictures of thirsty brown bear, risking her life for some drops of water, bald camel, begging racoons/lama,dirty pond and skinny tiger. I couldn't take a shot of the lion, cause the king does not deserve to be seen in such a pitiful condition.

Problems with Measure Up tests.

I got strange problems with Microsoft Press Training Kit. They were crashing in almost all use cases that I tried. When starting a test with a timer I used to had this exception:




I got other exceptions when I wanted to score my test too:




Measure Up Support gave me this as a solution:

Hello,

This error indicates there is an incompatibility issue between our test and the settings on the PC. In the control panel, please double click on the icon labeled Regional Settings. Please choose English (United States), and click the box that says "use default properties for this input locale."

Alternatively, in the regional settings, look at the Currency tab. If it is set the decimal symbol to . (dot) instead of , (coma), that may be enough to get it working properly.

If the trouble persists, try setting the keyboard language layout to English (United States). In the control panel, double click on the icon labeled "Keyboard". Then click on the tab labeled input locales. Select the Add button. And then choose English (United States) as the input locale.

Thank you
Tammie
Customer Support Specialist

Obviously their tests run good in US only :). This is an example for how much important it is to implement globalization.
The good part is that that solution works.

What is AVI Chunk Viewer and AVI Splitter?

Some days ago I had a strange problem. While I was watching some series a window popped up with a strange graph. It was some "AVI Chunk Viewer"(ACV) which was telling me that my video was out of synch with its audio or something like that. It was quite annoying. As an option ACV offered to start some tool named "AVI Splitter" on the .avi file. I checked the web for a solution but what I found were lots of people complaining and wondering WTF ACV is.

Today I found that the problem is in the K-Lite Codec pack I've installed on my PC.

I'm not a guy who installs applications like "next->next->...->finish", but this codecs are horrible for me(look at the screenshot below and especially at the codec names).

You can rid of ACV with reinstalling the pack or with a witty K-Lite Tool called Codec Tweak Tool located at: Start menu -> All Programs -> K-Lite Codec Pack -> Configuration. Scroll down until you see AVI Splitter under "Disable the following filters" section, and check it off. I did it with all the filters that had "splitter" in their names :).

Here is the Codec Tweak Tool:


I almost forgot:
I found out this solution thanks to a guy with nickname Squirrel from this forum.