Month: February 2006

Maxim and the polar bear

Maxim and the polar bear

In the morning, my brother and I went for a perilous journey. We had to drive a really old car (“don’t live the city borders in the piece of machinery” type) in heavy rain and limited visibility conditions to Larnaca airport, where we had to pick up an unknown guy, who we had to bring back to Limassol and make and exchange with. This poor soul was a yachtsmen. He had to get to his team and we were his only hope. Team’s coach had a valuable posession for us. It was a package from my father.

Overcoming obstacles one by one, which were many by the way, we managed to succeed in our quest and get the package. In it, there was plenty of stuff. Most of it was for Maxim – books and a giant polar bear. Soft. And huge. He was exactly the size of Maxim.

Maxim showed a more than average level of excitement. He played with the bear, talked to him, and took him for a walk. He even wrestled him to the ground and than picked up into the air – that was a particularly hard thing to do, which you can witness from the pictures in the album.

Thanks Dad – very much appreciated. And vodka too, by the way.

Album location: /photos/2006/2006-02-08_POTD

The hailing thing

Hail

The Global Warming is definitely coming along nicely. Today we had ice cubes falling down from the sky, like we were all in a giant glass of Coca Cola. Hailing. And, while some old timers (ok, ok, not really) can remember that it was hailing down in Limassol, noone I asked could remember ice pieces of this size.

The picture above is of my hand and an ice ball that came down from the skies. One among many others. Not the biggest one. Not the smallest one. But it can give you an idea of what was going on. (Appologies for the terrible quality of the picture – it was taken with my dirty mobile phone in complete darkness.)

P.S.: My boss’s birthday. Maybe it was a sign. Happy birthday, Alex, anyway!

30 Boxes solves calendaring

http://30boxes.com is a brand new webservices. The public beta was launched last Sunday.

The purpose of the site is to solve the surprisingly difficult problem of calendaring. What’s wrong with calendaring, you might ask? Well, lots of things. Existing calendaring applications are complicated and clumsy, unpractical for sharing and social interactions, and, well, “traditional”.

http://30boxes.com chose a fresh approach. They have totally and completely minimized and simplified the user interface.

Entering events can be done with as little as filling in one single text field. Application understands human language like “tomorrow”, “yesterday”, and “next week”. You can have “buddies” which is just their term for contacts. All you have to do to add a contact is specify email address. You buddies can have calendars of their own, you can share calendars and even use the system to send invitations and confirmations/denies for events. You can track a lot more information about your buddies too – Flickr photos, LiveJournal entries, MySpace blog, and any other RSS feed. When there are new items – you get a small icon on the appropriate day of the calendar and can quickly check what they are up to.

The interface looks very clean and works pretty fast. It’s also based on AJAX technology which allows you to see updates without refreshing the page – feels nice.

Check it out – it costs nothing, and can do a lot for your organized life!