Month: September 2005

Not so good news

Dr.Simos called Olga and told her that he finally managed to talk to Dr.Avraam from Nicosia. It turns out that Maxim’s kidney tests are not as good as we hoped that they would be. The functionality of the kidneys is outside of the safe range. One kidney performs at 58%, while the other one is only at 42%. It’s this latter kidney which is worrying. It should be at least at 45%.

The danger of this situation is in the possibility of urine getting back into the kidney. If this happens Maxim will be in a lot of trouble, not to mention pain. So, obviously, some action needs to be taken.

Another test will be scheduled in the near future to study the situation more and to see how dangerous it really is. Unfortunately, Olga didn’t catch the name of the test while on the phone with Dr.Simos, so I can’t give you any details yet. Neither can I search the web for more information. But rest assured that we’ll be talking Dr.Simos shortly.

Exclusive pictures of the first day of Sofia Georgiades

Sofia Georgiades

A long time ago I’ve promised pictures of Sofia Georgiades. I was the only one who made photographs on her first day in this world, but I had to hold them back for some time. Both Alex and Kate didn’t want me to release them for the 40 days or so. And than they weren’t sure that they wanted to release them at all. But I was persuasive and finally we agreed to make them public. After all this fuzz I realized that I didn’t do any post-processing or color corrections what-so-ever. I’m too bored and lazy to do them now, so you’ll have to look at them as raw as they are.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-07-19_Sofia_Georgiades

Request for an application

I’ve got an idea for an application. If you have nothing to do or looking for an idea to practice your mad programming skills, feel free to use this one.

Flickr is an excellent source of images. Better even, all images are tagged and most are available in different sizes. It would be very nice to have a tool that could use Flickr images as desktop backgrounds (wallpapers). Ideally, I would just specify the tags that I am interested in, such as sports, nature, or landscape, and this tool would get the list of images from Flickr that are available in the resolution that I am using. Images could be random or sorted by some criteria, such as posted date or number of comments. If there would be a preview and an easy way to change to the next image (maybe even automatically based on time period) I’d be totally happy.

I don’t see myself programming this anytime soon as I don’t care much for desktop candy. But if one was available there is a chance that I would use it. I also know of a few people who would simply love something like this.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-09-29

Primer

Working down the list of movies to see, I can across “Primer“. Again, I don’t remember the reason I added it to the list, but I can think of a couple…

Directed by: Shane Carruth
Genres: Drama, Thriller, Sci-Fi
Cast: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya, Carrie Crawford, Jay Butler, John Carruth, Juan Tapia, Ashley Warren, Samantha Thomson, Chip Carruth, Delaney Price, Jack Pyland, Keith Bradshaw, Ashok Upadhyaya
IMDB raintg: 6.6
My rating: 6.5 [rate 6.5]

There is something magical about $7,000 USD. I guess this is exactly how much money you need to have to make a good movie. Robert Rodriguez proved it some time ago with his “El Mariachi”. Shane Carruth proved it very recently with “Primer”. And although the films are completely different and very separated by the genre, there is something that unites them. The feeling of hard work and fun in the process.

“Primer” is another good take at time travelling. But instead of fancy and expensive visual effects it goes for the phylosophy of the issue. Everyone knows that time travelling is a very confusing, dramatic and plain dangerous activity. But movies usually avoid the confusing and dramatic parts to make more room for dangerous stuff that is easier shown with computer graphics. “Primer”, while being a very low budget film, concentrates more on the confusing part. And in does the job so good that the film itself becomes pretty confusing. It is very difficult to follow it sometimes.

And although it gets a bit too slow in several scenes, I really enjoyed the film. For once there is a movie that makes you think and figure out things instead of providing cheap popcorn entertainment. I’m glad I saw this one.