Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Saturday – the adventure day. Today we went to mountains to see Troditissia monastery and have a meal at Fini tavern. Mountains met us with a heavy snowfall. Flakes were so huge that everyone demanded that we stop and photograph them. :)

The road to the monastery was slippery and dangerous due to a deadly mix of bad tarmac, mud, gravel, water, and snow. Max speed was like 20 km/h. :)

The monastery looked nice on the outside, but tourists (read: we) were not allowed inside. Maybe it’s just a wrong season. Whatever…

Fini tavern and steak “Shato Brean” was excellent as usual. :) Wine was also good. Short walk around Fini village after the meal and a failed attempt to find a trail to Handara waterfalls.

On the way back to Limassol we stopped at Kouris dam. Loads of water! Actually we saw a small church standing in the middle of the water. That’s a real photo opportunity that I tried to exploit as much as I could. The results are here.

In the evening, I went to housewarming party at Alex Yudichev’s place. Lots of people, beer, and talks. Nice time overall. :)

Event of the year – Hazard is presenting his final year project. The topic is rather original: “Self-Learning Proxy ARP+IP Routing as a Technology for Bridging Through Wireless Networks”.

Presentation went very fast and smooth, but demonstration was a bit problematic. Due to some strange error nothing worked. About 15 minute troubleshooting session fixed everything and demo was shown to everyone interested. I’ve been taking lots of pictures during this troubleshooting and ended up with a lot of similar images. I’ll have something to play with in GIMP. :)

Russian restaurant for lunch to celebrate an ‘A’ for FYP, then back to work. :)

Trip around the Larnaca area. First we went to Lefkara and it’s suburbs. Then down to Kato Drys, driving to Agios Minas, which is an excellent monastery that should be revisited in sunny weather for photo opportunities. This time around it was too wet, rainy, and windy to walk around. Average temperature was +5C, sometimes dropping to +3C. Freezing. :)

Trip ended with Barbeque at Svetka and Yannis place. Lots of nice food, drinks and fun. More pictures.

Now, the message to all those who expect posting of pictures from my new Digital Rebel – don’t. :) I am a newbie to start with, and the camera needs some getting used to. There are few good ones, but they are not enough to start an album. I am still trying to figure an easy way to post single images attached to blog, so stay tuned. :)

Olga, Lev, and I decided to go for an adventure and test the camera as well. A trip to Omodhos village. We arrived with darkness, which was a bit disappointing, since there are few cool places to see during the daylight. We’ll have to repeat it, I guess.

Not so many pictures were good too, since I am a total newbie. But there were a couple that I like. I’ll need also another Compact Flash card, since 256 megabytes is enough for roughly 70 pictures (full size, full quality JPEG). That’s something I am not used to. :)

Yaba-daba-doooo! :) Finally, after almost a month of waiting, my camera arrived. I am now a happy owner of Canon EOS 300D (Digital Rebel). :)

In the evening, I joined a bunch of other guys from Russian Cyprus Forum in Chesters. That was some party. Two bottles of tequilla, sea of beer, flocks of buffalo wings… Nice! :)

Some weather we had today! Stormy winds, rain, thunderstorms… Few trees were torn apart, windows broken, and general havoc… Rivers of water coming down into the sea, bringing all mud and dirt from the city. Forecasters say it might continue until Sunday. Very pleasent indeed. :)

In the other news – I’ve published pending photos from Lofou village trip and my walk in the rain. There are few pictures that are still missing (Svetka’s birthday, for example), but there is nothing interesting in particular.

Zebra day. Frist news were good. Hazard got some email from Fedex about the package heading his way. Since he was not expecting any package, most probably that is my Digital Rebel on the radars. Almost a month later, maybe I’ll get it before my birthday in April. :) Tracking number helps close-watching it.

Then some bad stuff happened and I had to perform few restores. Not my fault. Surpsingly, a 7GByte Postgresql database was restored from a simple file system level backup. World is a nice place to live in sometimes.

Since our catering program stopped, we had to do something about a lunch. Ended up in Yugoslavian restaurant with Hazard and Alexander Avanesov. Good food and a couple of beers, then back to work.

Most of the evening I’ve spent trying to install Bricolage CMS on my home Fedora Core 1 server. That failed misarably since mod_perl 2 is not supported. Especially on Apache 2. Especially if compiled as a module (needs DSO). Maybe I will install another instance of Apache with another instance of mod_perl. Somehow I am very bored with my current site and programming requires some of that time that I don’t want to spend on it. ;)

Quick overview of other CMS alternatives didn’t show up with anything as closely matching my wicked wishes as Bricolage. We’ll see… ;)

Fast Chesters session with Lev and Olga. :)

Olga and I went to the Lofou village for a photo session, fresh air walk, and some traditional food. Lots of pictures taken, some are good. Nice taverna with meze and young wine.

Second time at “Return of the King”. :) Very long day.

Today I had to spend most of the day in NOC, since there were no alternatives with our engineers. Oh, well, sometimes it hits even me. :)