Month: May 2006

Cyprus is one of those places, where you’d pay anything for a breeze of cold air. Especially in summer. Especially if you haven’t been raised in the desert. And I proved it true today.

On Friday I realized that air condition in my car is not that efficient anymore. It was still blowing air, but it wans’t cooling it at all. And I started hearing a strange sound every time the A/C was on. I passed by my service garage and talked with the mechanic. He listened to the noise and confirmed that the compressor is dead. He re-assured me that this was a perfectly normal thing – he has the same car as mine, and he changed 4 A/C compressors in the last two years. Hmm.

In order not to risk leaving me without the car for the weekend, we agreed to meet again on Monday.

Today I left the car in the garage in the morning. The guy explained to me, that there are about four different models of A/C compressors for the car like mine, and in order to get the right one, he’ll have to take mine off and go for the search mission with it. No guarantees that we’ll find it today.

A couple of hours after lunch I called him back and he reported that the car was ready for me to pick up. So I did.

The bill was somewhat more than I was expecting. The A/C compressor came out at 120 CYP. Another 25 CYP were for labour. Another 20 for the regas (putting new freon in the system), that he had to do in another garage (I saw the recepeit, if it means anything). Plus VAT, this and that, all came up to 195 CYP.

My guess is that I overpaid. But I don’t care. The A/C works as good as new now. It cools down the hot car in less than a minute – something that I am not really used to. Until now I had to wait for at least five minutes. I’m glad and I’m happy. Which means, I don’t care about the price.

Some people, like me, whine about how terrible most of the email these days is. Other people just act on it. Like Matt May who wrote a nice article on how to write good email.

Mental note to myself: don’t whine, act.

Yesterday Vladimir, his mother, and I went to Nicosia to visit Cyprus State Fair 2006.

The exhibition grows from year to year, and it looked like this time was no exception. More companies participated from more countries, with more products and services. We walked around for about 3 hours and saw only 9 big halls and about 5 small ones. Overall, there were more than 30.

Comparing with prevous years, I also thought that there were more people visiting, and more flyers given away. The giveaways though were simplier. Usually, there were things like hats, badges, bags, key rings, pens, etc. This time I saw flyers and finger food mostly.

The company that I work for – PrimeTel – has announced PrimeHome triple play service. That is a single package for ADSL grade connection, VoIP telephony, and television. This generated quite a lot of interest at the PrimeTel booth, where one can try it out and even subscribe to the service.

Anyway, the exhibition will be going on until 4th of June, which gives you a whole week to check it out. The opening hours are links to more information are availabe from my Cyprus Scout entry.

I was on my quiet night shift today. Around 5am I went to the bathroom server room to check up on a server. While walking I realized that my jeans are falling off. Not completely, of course, but enought to notice the discomfort. That caught me by surprise. I had to tighten up the belt by one hole.