Year: 2004

News from work

I don’t talk much about work lately, so I decided I’ll let you know that our Network Operations Center (NOC) will work on different shifts from today. We are still 24×7, but shift changes are now one hour later. So our morning shift starts at 7:00 and goes up to 16:00. Lunch shift starts at 15:00 and goes up to midnight. And my favourite night shift starts from 23:00 and continues until 08:00. This sounds like a little bit more comfortable times, although there is no major change.

The bigger change might be is that now we have an order instead of a chaos. Before, we used to have all the engineers registering for shifts. It turned out that there are certain shifts that noone wants to take and we had to push each other to take them. This, of course, starts as a small problem and grows into a bigger one. To return everything to fair basis, we now have a script (written by yours truly) that collects preferences from all the engineers and generates a fair schedule one month ahead. It gives everyone an equal (as much as possible) number of shifts in the month, but it also tries to assign engineers to their favourite shifts (again, as much as possible). Shifts which are not liked by everyone are evenly distributed on a random basis.

This should shake things down a little bit. Engineers are still able to exchange shifts with each other if they wish, so what we have now is just a default engineer assigned to every shift. I think that should make NOC a bit more fun and a much more fair game.

As usual, time will show…

Killer Queen

For the last few weeks Limassol was covered with posters which displayed a photo of Freddy Mercury and said something about “Killer Queen”. Most people assumed that there will be some kind of DJ mixing and matching Queen songs and who has enough ambition to call himself a killer of the band. These most people turned out to be wrong. Apparently, Killer Queen is the name of the band. The vocalist looks (and behaves) a lot like Freddy. The band has a website where you can read a lot more about them.

So, I was passing by Kanika when I heard loud music, saw a stage and decided that it would be good to go and see it. I called up Hazard and so we went. Entrance was free thanks to sponsoring of the best guys ever. The concert was excellent. The Freddy/Scotty guy was very energetic and had an excellent control over the crowd. After they have finished people were shouting for more, and so they did “We are the champions” which was campaigned with Greek flags, which was all connected to Greece’s triumph in the Euro 2004.

The only thing which was setting back the enjoyment was some stupid guy, who, I think, was the host. I don’t know from which disco they took him, but he was totally out of place, which was pretty much explained by his T-shirt with big white letters spelling “LOST”. :)

I wish there would be more advertising for such and event. A lot of people missed it because they didn’t know what it will be like. Pity. Anyway, once again thanks to Carlsberg and I hope they will do more of these. :)

15 Minutes

They’ve been showing “15 Minutes” on TV. I tuned in a bit later than they started, but it is one of those cop movies where you don’t actually have to see the beginning to get the story. Actually, it’ is one of those cop movies that you can skip watching. You’ll not lose anything. It was so typical, you could predict almost every phrase spoken. Even a typical detective with the face of Robert De Niro, always smoking cigars, was there.

Everything was pretty boring and standard except for a short scene where De Niro fights two guys while being ducktaped to a chair. Pretty exciting 40 seconds. Don’t worry, he gets killed with a knife immidiately afterwards. But there is no surprising turn in the story – the investigation of the crime was already finished and bad guys known to police. They were also standardly stupid and were hanging around those places where they were the most easier to get caught. So they got caught, but then they tried to escape, so the good guy shot them all. Otherwise they had a laywer with a million bucks who could actually save their butts. Not to happen in US. Happy end.

A typical 4 out of 10.

Matt Damon vs Ben Affleck

Olga and I were talking after watching “Jersey Girl” and a funny thought crossed my mind. It is a well known fact that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are best friends and that they have been participating in the same movies for some time now. The difference though, at least in my memory, is that Ben usually appears with some hot chicks, like say Jenifer Lopez, and Matt is more frequently seen with guys. I maybe very wrong on this of course, but it’s just my perception. Another perception of mine is that Matt is usually appearing in films where Ben plays the main role – not vice versa. So I am thinking like why doesn’t Matt leave the poor guy alone? Why does he have to always show up at his shootings?

And then I remember someone quoting Matt along the lines “Ben is not gay. He is just doing a lousy job of being straight.” So, the funny thought that crossed my mind was that it was actually Matt who was gay and he just feels the need to stick around Ben. :)

Not that I care though. I really enjoy acting from them both and especially when they play together. And on the subject of “to gay or not to gay”, there is a perfectly clear anwser at Google Answers. You are free to think whatever you head is up to though, of course. :)