Month: June 2005

Rock festival in Nicosia

Once again Andrey Shvachko informs all rock and rock-n-roll fans that there is an event coming soon.

Date: June 17, 2005 (Friday)
Time: 20:00 – 00:00
Place: Amphetheatre of Intercollege campus, Nicosia

There will be several bands performing. Andrey will participate in two of them.

No information about tickets and no map so far. But finding Intercollege is very easy. Here are the instructions: when entering Nicosia from Limassol-Nicosia motorway, go left to the roundabout, than go left again to enter the main road which goes around Nicosia. Drive straight. You’ll pass Orphanides supermarket on the left, Metro supermarket on the left, Jumbo supermarket on the right. Keep going straight until you reach the T-junction. There will be a huge church on your right. Turn right and drive straight until you see Intercollege buildings on your right (about 5 kilometers later).

There is a discussion at the RussianCyprus Forum, as usual. Stay tuned for more information.

Anoter soap opera

There was this other soap opera on TV today. It looked like something Mexican about some old Mexican war times. And there was this fight, a duel even, between an old and wise guy and a younger one. Both of them were military men – generals or something like that. It looked like they were really close. Maybe a father and son, or maybe very close friends. And they had this fight on the bank of the river. Swords. Suddnely, the young guy cuts the right upper arm of the old guy.

Dramatic pause. They look at each other.

Then there is blood, coming out of old guy’s mouth. MOUTH?!! Yes, mouth. And he falls, like he’s dead or something. Straight into a shallow river. Than he mumbles something. I guess he said something like “Enough of stupid fighting”. The young guy picks up the swords and throws them away. Than he uses the right upper arm of the old guy to pull him out of the river. Than, he picks up the old guy, puts him on his shoulder and carries him like a dead lamb.

I stayed and watched for a few more minutes. The old guy survived. Thanks God. I was getting warried for him. With this wounds in the arms you never know…

Soap Opera

The TV was on and there was this soap opera that goes on and on for years and years. One of the characters is supposedely a successful businessmen, owner of a large corporation and multimillioner. The same actor was noticed in a very similar role in another soap opera.

I haven’t seen many multimillioners in my life, but I am pretty sure neither one of them looks and acts like that guy. Actually he resembles a multimillioner and a successful businessmen much less than I do. And I don’t. At all.

Now imagine a guy, who has two jobs for years – playing a role of an extremely rich guy in some cheap soap opera. Every day. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. Financial difficulties are probably not a strange thing to him. And yet he has to go to his job ever day and pretend that he is a rich guy. And than he has to go his other job and pretend that he is a rich guy again.

I think that jobs like this, repeated for a long period of time, can mix with the real life really badly. Depressions, alcoholism, humiliations… Tough choice. Still, better than no job at all.

New office workstation

My office workstation has finally arrived. It’s a Black Beauty with IBM being stamped all over it.

The case is a midtower, which looks slightly smaller than the rest of computers in our office. It features a nice design and easy access to the internals. No screws at all! I was waiting for this for some years now.

Inside the case are some Intel super-pooper-duper motherboard, Pentium IV 3.00 GHz CPU (5980 bogomips) with 1 MByte of L1 cache, 1 GByte of RAM, 80 GBytes hard disk, and DVD-RW drive.

On top of that, I’ve got a new monitor. Again, a black design of IBM ThinkVision C190 CRT monitor. It is bigger than any monitor I had before, although its just 19″. I guess I never had a big enough screen. At first I configured it to run 1600×1200@75Hz, but switched to 1280×1024@85Hz later.

Additionally, I’ve got a black IBM keyboard, with large Enter and Backpspace keys – the way I like them. Unfortunately, it has the Windows keys, which I don’t like at all. They are functional and everything, but I never use them and sometimes I hit them instead of Alts and Ctrls.

And I’ve got an IBM optical USB mouse too.

The specs are good and machine seems pretty fast. I’ll have to get used to DVD-RW and optical mouse though as these are two devices I never had before.

I have already installed Fedora Linux Core 3 on it with all the updates and stuff. I’ll spend the next couple of days restoring my stuff and getting used to this new animal. After that, I’m back at full speed again.

As a side note – I am yet again amazed as to how cheap computers are these days…