Year: 2004

Cyprus Theatre

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.

Olympic Torch will pass Nicosia tomorrow

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According to the official Olympic Torch Relay website, the Torch will be in Nicosia tomorrow. Unfortunately, there is not that much of information on the Nicosia page of the site. I guess, places under “Relay Highlights” will be the viewpoints. If it is not so, I don’t know where it will be seen. I also have no idea how to get to any of these points and what time the Torch will be passing. Unless I will get any additional information, this will be one lost photo opportunity.

If you know anything, let me know via comments, email, phone call or any other means. Thanks in advance.

Update: it seems that I am not the only one in thinking that the event was badly organized

Gerry

I watched “Gerry” on DVD today. It has been a long time since I had to fastforward a movie while watching it for the first time. I don’t even remember that I ever did it. I had to do it with “Gerry”. After I finished watching it for the first time, I immidiately fastforwarded through it again just to make sure that I didn’t miss anything. I didn’t.

Two guys, both named Gerry, for some strange reason (like playing their RPG) get lost in the desert. It’s not excalty a desert. It’s something in the middle between desert, prairie, a hilly terrain. It might have been interesting. Very interesting. Especially considering the fact that don’t have any food or water with them. But it wasn’t. All of their talking was a once in a while asking each other which way to go. That’s it. One of them also got a bit more depressed then the other. The other got pissed off with it and killed the guy after several days when they were all out of strength. And then he found out that the highway was like five miles away. So he will feel a bit guilty for the rest of his life. Maybe.

See this film if you like watching a couple of silent dudes walking for several days without any talk in the places which are not exactly magnificant. I’ll meanwhile vote it as 2 out of 10.

Kill Bill: Vol. 2 – The second time

Today I went to see “Kill Bill: Vol. 2” for the second time. This time I went with Lev. Out of three people (Olga, Hazard, Lev) that I have seen this movie with, all three liked it, but didn’t love it. I guess, this makes me special. :)

Watching it for the second time brought in all the pleasures of the first time plus even more. I noticed a whole lot of more details, listened to the soundtrack and generally enjoyed myself a great deal.

Now, like a true fan, I had to do something additional to voting 10 out of 10 at IMDB. So I went to the official site and stolen a couple of pictures for my beloved blog.

99 Bottles of Beer

Beer

Beer has been inspiring a lot of people for a number of centuries by now. It’s inspirational powers are especially popular within the hacker community. An example of what a beer inspired person can do is here. It is a website that is devoted to generating complete lyrics for “99 bottles of beer” by using as many programming languages as possible (currently 621 variants).

99 Bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall. 98 Bottles of beer on the wall, 98 bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, 97 bottles of beer on the wall. 97 Bottles of beer on the wall, 97 bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, 96 bottles of beer on the wall.

In case you’ll decide to study one of these programming languages, here is a site with a bunch of tutorials.