I’ve mentioned a few times already that I became a big fan of P2 theme for WordPress. I currently maintain multiple installations of it, just…
After the news of Google Reader demise broke out, I, like many others, started looking for an alternative. There are many RSS readers out there,…
As most of you know, I spent most of the yesterday in Nicosia, attending the second ever TEDxNicosia event. I know quite a few people who wanted t…
A dozen or so Japanese tourists a year have to be repatriated from the French capital, after falling prey to what’s become known as “Paris syndrome”.
That is what some polite Japanese tourists suffer when they discover that Parisians can be rude or the city does not meet their expectations.
Oh, really? These people should steer clear of Russian then. If they need psychiatric help after Paris, they will probably just drop dead on the streets of Chelyabinsk…
“But don’t you find it boring to wear only two colors?”
“Not at all. I find it liberating. I believe my life has value, and I don’t want to waste it thinking about clothing,” Malcolm said. “I don’t want to think about what I will wear in the morning. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud. But, on the whole, I find fashion even more tedious than sports.”
(Limassol Grand Carnival 2012, originally uploaded by Leonid Mamchenkov.)
Limassol Grand Carnival 2012
I found this image in Web Workers Daily post and I think it’s brilliant. More and more people are spending their time in coffee shops using laptops and other devices. Too many of them have no idea that they are surrounded by people. Hopefully, at least some of them will see this infographic and, perhaps, think for a moment.
Cyprus Mail reports:
A SEX WORKER in Nicosia’s old town yesterday spoke out after a heated altercation with residents and police outside her place of work on Tuesday night. “I’ve been in the business on this street for six years, and now all of a sudden the neighbours remember to get annoyed” the 49-year-old told the Cyprus Mail.
I’ve heard this excuse so many times and even used it myself a few times. But if you think about it for a second, you’d realize that it’s plain silly. If something wrong is going on and it annoys you and you don’t do anything about it for a long period of time, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do anything about it forever. There is a breaking point for everything.
“I do not bother anyone and if they do not like my line of work, then they should help me get out of it, not persecute me.”
Obviously, you do bother someone. And even though they probably should help you to get out of this line of work, they don’t have to. After all each one of them makes an effort on his own not to get into it. And each one of them succeeds, so why shouldn’t you?
Not that I have anything against this line work.
Residents complained that clients of the sex worker would often wander on the street in their underwear or completely naked, while some drunken clients would even urinate outside their doors.
“Several cars pass by every night, blowing their horns and shouting at the sex worker” said another neighbour.
There we go against “I do not bother anyone”. Maybe not you, but your clients do.
Mavrou said that the authorities had encountered serious difficulties in proving the pimping charges due to the vagueness of the current legislation on prostitution.
According to police, the legislation is unclear as to whether brothels can operate in residential areas or anywhere else, while the circumstances by which a person engages in paid sex are also vague.
That, for some reason, is my favorite bit of the article, together with this:
Nicosia’s “red light district” has been predominantly confined to three streets in the old town since the 1950s on Soutsou, Pentadaktylou and Theseos streets. The woman in question was working out of a house on Theseos Street.
It’s so nice of them to specify exactly where the “red light district” is for those of us who don’t know Nicosia highlights that well.
Being happily married now, civil marriages and other forms of living together aren’t high on my interest list, but I still found this Cyprus Mail article interesting.
Cyprus law does not provide for any other form of recognised cohabitation beyond marriage.
The matter came to the fore after authorities denied a 93-year-old woman a widow’s pension because she had never married her partner of 67 years who was also the father of her eight children. The woman had applied for a widow’s pension after her spouse – who had been making his social insurance contributions as long as he was alive – died in February last year.
The couple had been living together since 1943 and had eight children. They were not married because they were relatives by marriage – her brother married his sister – and were banned from doing so at the time.
This makes me think of the laws in historic perspective. Each and every law currently in existence has a history. Some time ago, someone somewhere had a need for a law being introduced or changed. There was a human being, a life, and likely more than one that would be affected by the law. How often do we really look back at and consider that?
We have a little tradition in the office where I work now. We call the last working day of the week – Friday. It doesn’t really matter which day of the week it is really. If there are some public holidays ahead, then, even Wednesday can be a perfect Friday. Sometimes we refer to such Friday as an Early Friday.
A good example of this is today. Even though the calendar on every electronic device around me says “Thursday”, my colleagues are walking around with smiles on their faces. ”It’s Friday finally”, they say. That is because tomorrow the Republic of Cyprus joins Greek in celebrations of the Ohi Day. It is a public holiday which usually also features a military parade.
Interestingly, we don’t have a similar tradition for Late Monday. Even though it would be logical to call the first working day of the week Monday, we don’t. I think that is because Mondays are special. They are tough and ugly and nobody likes them. Calling another day of the week Monday is an insult. Whereas calling another day of the week a Friday is a compliment.
With that, happy Early Friday to all of you guys!
Today morning I had a brief conversation with a coworker. As many office works do on Wednesday, and not only on Wednesday, we were dreaming of the upcoming weekend. Partially, as a joke, we said that it would be nice to have an extra day in a week that nobody else would know about. We could then rest and relax in the middle of the week without anyone noticing our absence.
That reminded me of the system that I’ve built a few years ago. It had to do with schedule generation for a bunch of people who were working shifts. The rules of who can take which shifts were constantly changing. And so, in order to build the most flexible system that I could think of, I implemented one which had a variable number of days per week. You could easily build a week of just three days or eight or ten. On top of that, days could be easily rearranged in order. That was a fun setup, but eventually it proved very useful. I left the company many years ago, but I hear they still use the system with just a few extra tweaks.
Once I remembered that system, it got me thinking more about the definition of the week. Which brought me to the history of how did we come to have a 7 day week. The best resource for things like that is, of course, Wikipedia. Surprisingly, the page is not very long. But even as it is, it still mentions weeks used in different societies at different times. Have a look at it to learn about 3-, 4-, 5-, 6-, 8-, 9-, and even 10-day weeks. It’s quite fun.
Given that time is very abstract, I find it interesting how tightly we hold on to a 7-day week standard.
Via Kottke blog I’ve learned that Barcelona just celebrated its last bullfight. Apparently, the vote has past last year to stop this old tradition. And as much I am in favor of preserving cultural bits, I do agree that bullfighting falls under animal cruelty and thus should be stopped. New York Times has a few photos.
