Year: 2005

Parent recognition is here

Many parenting books say that at the age of about two months a child starts to recognize family members. Some go as far as describe the reaction – smile and the rise of activity. But none of them can describe it properly and thus don’t spoil the surprise.

Yesterday, I woke up and went to check upon Maxim. He was taken care of by his grandma and so I didn’t have to rush, but I did anyway, because I missed him too much (he was sleeping when I got back from work). He was in his cradle and he was awake, but silent. He looked kind of bored – didn’t want to sleep and didn’t want to play with his toys. But the moment he saw me everything changed. First, he gave me one of his Hollywood smiles and than he started waving his hands and legs as fast as he could. He almost jumped out of his cradle, so glad he was to see me.

I picked him up and looked straight into my eyes with the look saying something like ‘Dad, where the hack have you been for the last 12 hours? I was all lonely here without you! Let us go play now!’. And he smiled. Even if I somehow can misunderstand his looks, his smile is rock solid definite. And when I see it, coupled with the looks, I feel like a Japanese cherry garden blossoms inside of me. Kind of like they show it on Discovery, in fast forward mode with millions of flowers opening at a split second. Amazing that is, I tell you.

Later Maxim repeated his recognition smiley dance several times both for me and Olga. Not yet for grandma though.

Switching off the notebook

This must be on of the most hilarious things I’ve heard in some time…

My mother just called me and said that she has a problem with her newly acquired notebook. The bloody Windows XP got stuck while booting up and there is no way to shutdown the computer. She pressed the Power button, but it didn’t work. She did than the next logical step – pulled the power plug from the socket. To her surprise, this didn’t help, because notebook’s battery was charged and the damn machine didn’t react in any way.

It’s been a while since I talked to regular computer users. Most of the people around me are professionals and have other fun problems. This one though reminded me of all those technical support jokes, but in a new, refreshing way. It also reminded me my frastration with ATX motherboards, when I first met them. I remember wondering why the Power button doesn’t work and who was the idiot who came up with this idea.

P.S.: If you came across this post trying to figure out how to switch the damn thing off, it’s actually easy: just press the Power button and hold it for ten or fifteen seconds and it should do the magic.

Minor site changes

I’ve modified the site theme a little bit. Calendar of posts is now only displayed on the main page. Additionally, when looking at some category, the category description and the link to category RSS feed will be displayed at the same place where calendar used to be.

Categories RSS feeds were a long time TODO list entry and were requested by many people. Hopefully, they’re all happy and celebrating now.

Konqueror and BlogLines

My Firefox gave up on me today after I played a bit with its settings once again. I am still hoping that it will return from the NoGo land without the reset of the profile. In the meanwhile, I fired up Konqueror and decided to use it for a while. It has matured a lot since the last time I used it for web browsing and I can even say that it can handle most of the sites that I use correctly.

The most annoying problem so far is with Bloglines. Clicking on items in the left panel does not work at all. The only way to read new stuff is by clicking on the folders which is way too far from convenient. I have over 500 new items in some folders and loading them all at once doesn’t do me any good.

I’ve googled for the solution for a bit, but didn’t find anything. If you know by any chance how to overcome the issue, please let me know. If I will find the solution myself, I will update this node to include it.

P.S.: I am using Konqueror 3.3.1 from the Fedora Linux Core 3 installation.

A good selection of magazines and newspapers

Accidentally, I’ve found an excellent shop for magazines and newspapers. It is located in Limassol, on the Makariou III avenue. It is in the same building as New York Sweets, on the left side if driving from the sea towards the city.

There is really a great choice. There are magazines on any topic out there, from cars and computers to photography and fishing. There is also a choice of languages for many editions. I have seen magazines in English, Greek, and Russian.

Also, I’ve noticed that all these magazines and newspapers are updated frequently. I am getting fresh issues of a couple of photography magazines every month.