Year: 2003

Three big things…

Three big things happened today.

Firstly, I’ve advanced to the level of abbot on PerlMonks.com. It took me about two month, but today I finally did it. I’ve got 1000 XP points with exactly 100 write-ups. Of course there are other forces involved like some voting and frequent visiting of the site, never the less it looked nice. :)

Secondly, I’ve finally bought that Sony Ericsson P800 that I’ve been dreaming of for the last few month. Most of the day after office I spent RTFMing, since it comes with the book and a lot of staff in the box. :) Purchase of additional memory and Bluetooth headset has been postponed until better [financial] times. :)

Overall, the phone looks and feels as I expected it to be, and even better at certain times. Hand writing recognition is truely excellent. Lots of menus and options to play with. Interface is mostly intuitive and documentation is good. The only thing I couldn’t do properly is configure WAP. GPRS I didn’t try, since my card does not yet allow it, but that I’ll take care of tomorrow. Anyway, I’ll need few days to learn to use the thing. :)

Third big thing that happened today is Hazard publishing the whole bunch of photos from the last few days. I am currently downloading, resizing, rotating, and annotating them, so don’t expect them today. Tomorrow is more likely. Lots of nice pictures indeed. :)

Final Destination 2

Off to cinema with Olga for a rather random movie, since all the cinema guides stopped updating at least 1 month ago. Random movie today appeared to be “Final Destination 2. Neither me, nor Olga have seen the first part, but that was not much of a problem. Olga liked the movie. I consider it to be more or less OK. It’s a bit boring with ideas and story telling, but it has some very nice shooting of car accidents. It’s like watching few case studies for a book of safety instructions. :)

The whole idea though on cheating death and extending your life time by doing random stupid staff is kind of lame. The black guy with the idea of totally controlling his life is also lame – that was pointed out in the Matrix about 4 years ago, but I guess he hasn’t seen it. :) On the other hand, the movie creates the atmosphere for thinking about the life time, death, control, cause-effect, and a bunch of other semi-phylosophycal staff, which we happily did sitting in Kanika, eating Sophies ice-cream. :)

Hazard is an uncle now

Those who experienced problems with this site recently (mostly myself), should have them no more. There were few measures taken, which improved much the accessibility and lost the packet loss. :)

Hazard officially became an uncle today! There is no way the event like this will pass uncelebrated in this town. Lev, Hazard, Olga and myself all joined up in my place to have some food and start with a beer. After the official part we moved to Hazard’s place to watch “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” DVD. Back home rather early in the morning – around 4:30am. :)

MP3s, beer, and coffee making

Kinda shopping day. First of all, I’ve renewed a bit my mp3 collection by adding albums of Deftones (Deftones-2003), Godsmack (Faceless-2003), and Taproot (Welcome-2003). Not that it has anything to do with actual shopping, but anyway. :)

Then, Olga took me on a tour of “Woolworth”, where we got a million things that we’ll never need. Beverages section pushed me to try the new beer we have around here called “5 beer” (the website does not work properly in my Mozilla). This is exactly the same beer which I saw the ads all over the city and even made a picture of one of them. The beer itself has a cheap taste and no smell what-so-ever (or maybe that’s my running nose talking). It’s low on the bubles and has a distintive somewhat sour taste. Carlsberg is still on the top. :)

While browsing the rows of the shop shelves, I’ve decided that I am a grown man now and I need to learn how to make coffee. Following the reason, I’ve got myself a “Traditional Greek Coffee set”, which included a small, long-handle pot, a can of coffee and two small cups for drinking the masterpiece. Now, me cooking anything is a scary thought, but recent Hazard’s mussles inspired an enthusiasmic push. Let’s be real, it’s just a stove top coffee maker, it should be easy. Of course, an automatic espresso machine would be even easier but I’m not at that coffee level just yet.

Actually, making coffee is not all that difficult. Good people from Charalambous, who packed the coffee cooking set were nice enough to provide instructions on how to achieve the satisfaction. It turns out that all one need to do to enjoy the famous taste is two put a full spoon of coffee from the can into the pot, then put 70ml of water (which is exactly one cup of water, and cups are included), then some sugar (I put one spoon), and put the whole thing on fire. :) Now, the focus is on not boiling the whole thing. It should, they say, slowly start to rise, and you need to take it off the fire for few moments and then put it back couple of times. BUT NEVER BOIL IT. That’s what they said. Well, the instructions seemed crystal clear, so I followed straight away. And guess what – it worked! :) The only thing that disturbed me was if there were too many coffe e particles which affected the taste, but I suddenly remembered the advice of Lev’s mother, which I overheard few days ago – pour few drops of water into the cup, so that all these nasty particles get down to the bottom of the cup. So I did, and here I am – enjoying my first cup of coffee ever made! :) I will practice some more on myself and (poor) Olga for the next few days…

Random bits

Slow day. Got up late, since I had to have some sleep before my today’s NOC night shift. Olga seems to stop fighting the cold and slowly falling sick. I cannot do much – it’ll be one week before she will get back.

Trip to “Malenkaya Rus'” restaraunt for a quick and tasty food to cheer up Olga a bit.

On the way back from restaraunt, we’ve seen a spectacular traffic accident. I was driving on the seaside and stopped on the yellow sign of “Four Seasons” traffic light. Meanwhile, a car going opposite direction to mine did stop and went to pass on yellow. Old granny from the small perpendicular street decided that her yellow sign was good enough to start travelling, so she accelerated. Two cars hit each other and turned a bit to the right keeping each other in a drag, until they closed my way and stopped. Luckily, noone got hurt, but both cars were totally wasted. There was some white steam coming from under the hood of the granny’s car, which perfectly suited the white color of both cars. Shouting, nerves, and all other accident staff started. I made sure that noone got hurt and drove away.

Now, since Hazard decided not to upload all the pictures unless he will assemble his new computer (which is a pathetic excuse), I decided to go mean on him. I called up Lev, who apparently felt asleep yesterday and had to miss all the excellent staff with mussles, and told him everything in details. I described how yummy and juicy were the mussles and that I’ve seen that Hazard had some of them left in the fridge. Lev, of course, lost the interest in whatever was that he was doing and started calling Hazard. So, probably I’ll see the pictures uploaded sometime later today. :)