Jozef Nagy.com

The national anthem of the Slovak Republic is based on a folk song adapted to patriotic feelings in the revolutionary 1840s. It speaks poetically of lightning strikes over the Tatra mountains and urges the Slovak nation to wake up.

In March 1844, when the linguist and codifier of the literary Slovak language Ludovit Stur was sacked from his post of deputy professor at the Evangelical Lyceum in Bratislava, several of his students left the lyceum in sympathy, Janko Matuska among them. He wrote new lyrics to the melody of a traditional folk song "Kopala studienku" (transl. "She was digging a well..."). His work later became the Slovak national anthem.

During the existence of the common Czechoslovak (later Czecho-Slovak) state (1918-1939 and 1945-1992), the first verse was used as the second (Slovak) part of the Czechoslovak anthem, the first part being the first stanza of the Czech patriotic song "Kde domov muj..." (transl. "Where is my home..."). This produced a rather inconsistent piece of melody, because the Czech part was relatively majestic and peaceful, describing the beauty of the Czech land, while the Slovak part was rather vital and militant, rousing people to a fight for freedom.

In 1993, when Czecho-Slovakia split into two countries, the Czech Republic kept its part of the old anthem unchanged, while Slovakia added the second stanza of the original song by Janko Matuska to its half.

Download the anthem.

My team at Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA is looking for a System Support Analyst to aid in production support. The candidate would be working with Access, SQL Server 2000, a legacy mainframe, Oracle Applications (a financial system, not the actual DB), and some other systems. The most important technical skills needed are in order below.

This Easter 2007 I gave my Nokia 50D to some friends and family members. Unfortunately (myself included), not everyone knows the first thing about taking a proper shot.

It still amazes me that people can completely ignore how auto-focus works on a digital camera. I'm not talking about consumer point and shoot cameras. I'm talking about more professional digital SLRs. Even with a point-and-shoot the focus is generally set to the center of the frame. As such, if your subject is off to the side and you point and focus the camera as below, what else can one expect? Note the sharp focus of the couch and the obvious blur of your humble webmaster. To be fair, a deeper depth of field could have solved this, but as it were, the f stop was too high and the shutter speed too slow, thereby reducing depth of field.

We found this lying around our house the other day while rebuilding our bar. It seems fitting enough.

Come back soon for the English translation.

When confronted with the inevitable status request, here's how you handle it. As for me, I'm waiting until the next time I'm on a dysfunctional cross functional inter-disciplinary multi-focused team to pull this rabbit out.

Leader: What's the status of your project?
Cubicle Warrior: I've been focusing my bandwidth on organic growth. I'm getting lots of push-back, so I'm taking the discussions offline. But sometimes I table an issue or handle it in a sidebar. Now I have my ducks in a row, the deal-breakers are on the back burner, and I'm managing expectations.