In 2005, you could find netcafes everywhere in Bulgaria. That’s all over now.

The independent internet cybercafes have all closed their doors. Not only in Sofia, but in pretty much every town throughout most of the country.

It seems that in just the past few years, Bulgarians have made the big switch en masse to owning a home computer and getting internet access, not unlike how the Romanian market has evolved during this same period. Advertisements are plastered all over the towns, announcing high speeds at cheap prices.

The internet providers not only put Americans to shame by offering speeds we cannot even buy, but they do it dirt cheap. 16 Mbps for 15€ in Bulgaria. Compare that to the United States, where you can only get a limp 6 Mbps and this slow crawl will set you back a whopping $40 or more each month.

And on top of it all, they provide wifi routers for all their clients by default. Yes, Virginia, a free wifi router –by default– provided by your ISP and preconfigured to be secure. That’s how it ought to be.

The economic impact should become obvious in 5 to 10 years, as Bulgaria leapfrogs from poverty to relative wealth. A strong internet infrastructure, very desirable real estate at growing (though reasonable) prices, and a well-developed tourism industry (Romanians should learn from their neighbors on this issue) all contribute to the boom.

Travel tip: Tourists can forget about finding internet cafes. They’re gone. Not just in the capital, either, but all across Bulgaria the well is dry. You can bring your iPhone or Eee PC and find hundreds of wireless connections on any given block, but you’ll also find out they’re secured.

Unless you’re in country for long period of time and get a 3G laptop modem, the typical tourist should prepare to be confined, largely, to your hotel for internet access. Make the effort to find out if any area eateries offer wifi by chance. Odds are they wont, since laptop-toting clients are still rare. If you get lucky and find one, you’re ahead of the game.

Just a quickie, folks.

I was talking with a sibling on Skype tonight who, despite my recommendations that people avoid Vista like the plague, had gotten one of those “free upgrade” CDs with a recent computer purchase and decided to finally change her new machine from XP to the latest-n-greatest offering from Redmond.

So, I decided to smugly investigate how nice the new experience was.

Her speakers worked but the microphone was broken. She could hear me talking but had to respond by typing. She described to me in some detail about her hands-on review of Vista. The end of our conversation went something like this…

And you can guess my response…

Over my headset microphone, I said, “You are coming to a sad realization. Cancel or allow?”

UPDATE

Whoa, the hits keep rolling in. Just after posting, I shared a link with another relative and she gave her own review of Microsoft Windows Vista.

Gettin’ the idea, y’all?

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Wake up and smell the coffee…

Ţi am spus eu! Now, drop the naysay and get on board with the future, kids.  While the revolution may not yet be complete, rest assured that Windows is dead.  As I said.

Ubuntu, ahoy!

“SRI officials are testing a supersnoop computer system that sifts through personal information on Romanian citizens… Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details, medical records, travel and banking information.”

“The SRI program is designed to extract relationships and correlations from large amounts of data… to use data mining technologies to sift through personal transactions in electronic data… to find ‘hidden relationships in the data’…”

“The technology is expected to analyze more than 3 million ‘relationships’ or connections per hour, says the report, which included an example of how friends, family members, locations and workplaces can be linked by pinging the data.”

Fiction, you say? It’s not possible for the Romanian government to have such massive tracking over Romanian citizens?

But I thought Romania was proudly working hard to mimic America.

Both photos from Romanian Stencil Archive