Month: May 2005

Happy Birthday, Katia!

Olga, Maxim, and I joined a bunch of other people to celebrate the 25th birthday of Katia Georgiades. We went up to the mountains for the barbeque and the usual picnic. This was one of the most successful parties ever. Everyone were in a proper mood. There were a lot of drink and food. There was lots of music.

It’s a pity that we had leave earlier to bring Maxim back home for his feeding, change, and the rest of the daily routine. Never-the-less we did have some excellent time.

Happy birthday Katia! :)

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-05-29_Katia_Birthday

Lizards

Today I finally understood how biologists start off with their researches. They don’t do it in universities as other people. Instead they go for walks with their children. It’s been just a few days that I go in the municipal park with Maxim, but I’ve learned so much about lizzards that I’m starting to think it can be enough for a small project.

And today was particularly rich with lizard observations. I saw a lot of them. One caught an insect and ate it. Another one found a bunch of ants who were eating a dead bug. He scared the ants away and ate the bug himself. There was a sick lizard too. Or maybe he was dying or something. He stood in the middle of the road, breathing heavily, with an open mouth, and behaving very aggressively towards anything that approached him. He even tried to bite the wheels off Maxim’s pram. There was another lizard, who was obviously very young and curious. He lost his tail in one of his quests for information. There was a group of lizards sunbathing together. There was this other lizard hiding on the bench. And, sad as it might be, there was a dead lizard too.

I watched all these lizzard for about an hour or so. They got used to me and weren’t getting scared that easy. I made a few pictures too, of course. Fascinating little creatures!

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-05-28_POTD

How to switch the go-around-desktops thingy in KDE

KDE is an excellent desktop with reasonable defaults. One of the defaults does not work for me though. It annoys me beyond limits that switching desktops wraps around. That is when I am at the left-most desktop and I press Ctrl+Left arrow, which is my key for switching one dekstop to the left, I find myself at the right-most desktop. With this behaviour I am getting lost pretty often and have to use the pager, which means that I have to take my eyes off that thing that I am currently doing and break my concentration.

But there is nothing to worry about. KDE can be very flexibly configured using several methods. Switching off mad desktop navigation is as easy as clicking a couple of times in kcontrol. The needed option is in Desktop » Window Behavior » Desktop navigation wraps around.

Flowers on the road

With every day summer feels closer. It gets hotter and trees drop their blooming. Sometimes, these flowers work with environment to create really amazing pictures. Today I saw one of them. There were a bunch of treese with purple, magenta, and blue flowers along the road. When the colors hit the ground, they combined nicely with the yellow “Don’t park, don’t stop” lines of the road and the edge of the pedestrian area.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-05-27_POTD

To sex or not to sex

Several Russian news agencies (NEWSru.com for example)wrote yesterday that Moscow municipality decided to spend about 900,000 USD on the campaign promoting sexual abstinence. The campaign was decided to be held because there were no positive results from the previous attemp to decrease the number of sexually tranmitted desease and teenage pregnancy by promoting safe sex.

On the other side of the Web, Julie of the ‘a little pregnant‘ blog wrote this post. It links to the a number of studies and reports which show that sexual abstinence pledges are not a panacea.

[paranoid mode]Coincidence? I think not.[/paranoid mode]

I don’t think that Moscow will see any major changes after the campaign. I think that educating teenagers about safe sex, making condoms and other guardians easily available (everywhere, at any time, and cheap), and increasing the overall moral values of the population is the only way to combat the problem. From what I see in the blogs of Russian teenagers, sex, alcohol, and weed play a much bigger role in the average teenager’s life than they should. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be there. I’m just worried about the extent to which they are. Comparing Russian blogs with blogs of teenagers from other countries makes all the difference in the world. Unfortunately.