Something that has been annoying me for some time now, but enough for me to look for the solution – a stalled secure shell connection. In graphical mode getting read of a problem is easy – just close a window of the terminal and start a new one. In text mode though it’s a pain.
In order to close a stalled secure shell connection just type in tilde+dot (“~.“). If that doesn’t help, then try holding a Ctrl key while typing in the dot (“.“). Problem solved.
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Our old 21 inch JVC TV-set (on the left) died a couple of days ago. This happened most probably because of some mode I put it in in order to have better experience with DVD watching. Poor thing. :)
Instead, I’ve got a 28 inch Panasonic TV-set (on the right). It’s second hand, but from a very good hand and for a very good price. :)
Olga and I went to the Reptile House today. You can find it near Limassol’s Old Port, next door to the left from the Ladas Fish Tavern.
It has been a while since we wanted to get there, but today we found out that we were not missing a lot. It is a small, dark, hot room with about twenty glass cases. One of these cases is bigger then the others and is filled with midium-sized turtles. There is another bigger one turtle too. A couple of lizzards in two other cases. Everything else is devoted to snakes. All the reptiles make you feel pity. They look dead. Really. No action at all. A couple of snakes lay in the plates with drinking water. Lizards are not any better. There was a lot of excitement from our side when in about 10 minutes one of the snakes started to move a bit to get in the water. That was about it.
There is not a lot of information about these species. There are few printed out paper sheets with descriptions in Greek and English, but they are boring to read due to the small font and darkness. Visually though, there was nothing surprising. I had a feeling that if I would go deeper into the fields somewhere in the mountains that I can find any of these snakes or lizzards. Probably this is wrong to feel. :)
You are welcome to enjoy the Reptile House and make your own opinion for a mere 1.50 CYP. Few pictures from the place are here.
Today, Olga and I celebrate our second anniversary. Yes, it has been two years since we got married. Time flies indeed. :)
I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in Russia there is a title (usually associated with some material) that is attached to each year of the married life. According to this resource (in Russian) we celebrate the paper marriage today.
Feel free to use comments functionality to congratulate us and send us your best wishes. :)
Svetka and Yannis invited us to see a performance given by some dancing group in the CTO center in Germasoia village. Olga and I didn’t have anything better to do so we went there to enjoy the performance.
The show plot was a reenactment of a traditional Cyprus marriage. There was a small scene downstairs filled with about 20 actors, amphitheatre filled with audience (mostly tourists), and us sitting on the top row of it.
Firstly few words about the performance. It was terrible. It was very slow and extremely boring. I’ve seen funerals which were more fun than this marriage. Not only it was boring to me and not only it was boring to all the audience, but it was also boring to the actors and musicians themselves. You could feel it. You could see it. And as if being boring is not enough a tortue by itself, it was also very long. It took them about two hours to finish. We almost left 5 minutes before the end. Few people left for real. But that was not all. After they finished with the show they started to feed the audience with some traditional dish (presumably made of beans) that looked and smelled horrible. Luckily I was hiding behind the camera and sitting in the furtherst row, so I didn’t have to eat it. :)
Secondly, few words about photographing the event. It was pretty dark and I still have only the on-camera built-in flash, so I had to use ISO1600 settings. The location I was sitting in was exactly in the middle of the range of both of my lenses. 18-55 was too short and couldn’t zoom into the scene. 75-300 was too telescopic and I had problems fitting stuff into the frame. I stayed with 75-300 since it could provide with some details on facial expressions and the like. Now, using on-camera flash unit together with 75-300 produced really ugly results with people’s eyes. The flash was too close to the camera which rendered red-eye reduction functionality pretty useless. The eyes were not red, but they glow unnaturaly. Easy to fix in Gimp or Adobe Photoshop, but still… Lots of movement by the actors also didn’t help much. I’ve made about 260 pictures, 160 of which are being uploaded for the web as I write it.
The photo album for the event is here.