Month: April 2004

Cyprus police upgrade

Usual gadgets of traffic police around here are the radar, the pen, and the fine form. And the radio. You drive, they measure your speed with the radar, and if it is more then 20 km/h above the speed limit, they stop you and then use a pen to fill in the fine form. If you don’t stop, then they will use radio to complain about you and a whole bunch of cars, bikes, and helicopters will force you to stop and surrender.

Today, Hazard was the unfortunate one to discover that traffic police now has few more gadgets. Apparently, government recognized the century we are living in and decided that computerization is the way to go. So, now instead of using an old-fashioned pen and a fine form, policemen are using a handheld device (visually similar to Compaq Ipaq) to fill in digital form. They than proceed with printing it out using a handheld (or neckstrapped) BlueTooth&tm; printer. The printout looks like a receipt from Woolworth for Chirstmas shopping printed out on a hard paper.

New gadgets must have been introduced very recently, because the policement are extremely slowed down. I haven’t been able to locate any news announcements regarding this issue, so this might as well be a pilot project.

P.S.: Those of you worried about Hazard – he just got the fine of 21 CYP (driving 86 km/h in a 65 km/h zone) and two points to his driving license. Nothing terrible. :)

A couple of multimedia links

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Today I’ve seen and heard a couple of interesting pieces.

Plance crash movie – NASA controlled experiment. This was originally found at College Humour.
Skating dog – this is one of the coolest videos I’ve seen ever! Again, originally posted at College Humour.
Windows sounds mix – this is a must see and listen Flash with a mix done with native Windows sounds only. It also tries to convince you that everything was done in Sounds Recorder that comes with MS Windows, but I find that hard to believe. :)

College Humour has a tonne of other clips that are less impressive, but are also recommended.

P.S.: If you have problems playing these video clips on your Linux machine, then walk down to the MPlayer website and download all the codecs from there. It worked like a charm for my Fedora Linux Core 1 box. Cheers. ;)

The Third Wheel

Feeling the need for entertainment, I’ve watched “The Third Wheel” on DVD. Apparetenly, I’ve already seen this film, but totally forgot about it. And I was right. There is nothing so special to remember about it. This is the typical attempt of a comedy about the guy who has problems with his social skills, but who wants to have a date with the most pretty woman in the office. The whole thing is rather regular. Collegues make bets, there is another third guy (wheel) who helps with the date, and a totally happy ending in the, well, end. This is one of the thousands similar movies. Get something else.

There are few celebrities in this movie though, so if you a collector, then you should check it out. Main characters are played by Luke Wilson, Ben Affleck, and Denise Richards. There is also a small part played by Matt Damon, who is by the way the executive producer of this “masterpiece”. There are few more familiar faces, but I don’t bother to remember or to look them up. :)

Lev is back online

Lev My friend Lev is back online. Last time webbers heard of him was when his domain name expired. There appears to be a problem with regaining access to that domain, so he registered a new one, and guess what – it’s a shorter one!

Enjoy www.shuvalov.com with few updated blog entries of his. :) His email has changed too, but that’s only a good thing with today’s spam levels.

Congratulations, Lev, and welcome back for another two years. :)

The Sweet Hereafter

Just watched “The Sweet Hereafter” on DVD. IMDB calls it a drama. The cover of the DVD calls it a “social” movie. I would call it a really slow boring movie without any point what-so-ever. The story is very simple – there was an accident in of the small towns, where a school bus, full of children of course, went off the road and on to the lake, broke the ice, and drowned. Most of the children died, except for just the few, and a bus driver (woman). So, there comes this lawyer who tries to get this people together to sue someone for damages. That’s it. The cherry is in showing how this people are sufferring over the loss of their kids. The lawyer himself has a problem with his daughter who is a drug addict.

The best moral out of the movie that I can make is: Lawyers are bad, because there life sucks. But everyone else’s life sucks too. That’s it. If you knew that already, then you can pass this movie. This is one of those times when I am glad I didn’t make it into the movies when it was showing.