Nicosia

Cyprus police anti-brutality

Here is yet another story showing the soft side of Cyprus police:

At around 5am yesterday morning, the police chased a 24 year old across town who failed to stop when the police signalled him for an alco-test. The chase started in Kennedy street, and finished when he was captured at his house in Mammari village in the Kokkinotrimithia area. During the chase he went through 3 police road blocks injuring a policeman who was trying to stop him. At some point he drove into the buffer zone near his village forcing the police to stop chasing him; on his way back to the free areas he injured a second policeman. The police was forced to use their firearms in order to immobilise his car but even under fire and with broken tires the 24 year old continued driving. He managed to reach his house where he attacked another policeman and entered his house refusing to come out. He was finally arrested yesterday at 15:00. The police is holding the 24 year old’s car as evidence while they are suspecting that he entered the buffer zone to dispose illegal items he was carrying. His father claims his son entered the buffer zone because he was scared and the he didn’t notice the police road blocks due to limited visibility.

Free WiFi to be introduced on Cyprus buses

Cyprus Updates shares the following:

Internet access will be available via wifi for free to passengers of Nicosia buses by next month. The service will start intiially on route 158 (Nisou – Pera Chorio) and then will be expanded to the rest of the routes. Furthermore, by 2012 buses will be equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) which will allow tracking of their location and subsequently provide information to the passengers within the bus as well as at the bus stops.

I wish there was a confirmed authentic source for this rumor. Even with that it would be difficult to believe. This sounds more like Google experiment than Cyprus public transportation roadmap. Great news if it will ever get implemented!

On public transport in Cyprus

Often, when I talk to my friends abroad, I hear that we have it too good here, in Cyprus. As one of the example, they say that everyone has a car. And while I don’t disagree – the life in Cyprus is good indeed – I often find it hard to explain that a car here is more than just a convenience. It’s a necessity.

I also understand why it is difficult to grasp the idea for those who’ve never been in Cyprus. Many of them can’t imagine a city with no public transport at all. Public transport is a norm pretty much everywhere you go. But not in Cyprus.

Finally, I now have a link to send to those friends of mine, who find it difficult to believe me. Cyprus Mail runs an article with some statistics. These are Nicosia-based, but I don’t think Limassol or any other city on the island would be much different.

Nicosia also stood out with 84 per cent of respondents saying they never used public transport. Only a minority – four per cent – used public transport to commute in Nicosia with 91 per cent travelling by car or motorcycle. Just five per cent walked or cycled to work.

Cyprus Linux User Group meeting

As you might have heard, there was yet another Cyprus Linux User Group meeting yesterday. It was, as usual, aligned to the recent Ubuntu and upcoming Fedora releases. This time the even took place in the new University of Cyprus campus, in Nicosia. There were slightly more people than the last time, but I was hoping for even more.

There were three presentations and one workshop. Theo did a traditional Ubuntu Linux presentation in Greek. Alexandros presented, also in Greek, about Linux in Cyprus education – a very interesting one, too bad my Greek is so poor. And then I did a presentation in English about what Linux has to offer to students and why they should get involved. Here are the slides from my talk (Linux for Students and Linux for Students). After the presentations, Constantinos did a workshop about Compiz and Elisa media library. Both looked quite impressive.

After the event a few of us went to the tavern for some really awesome meze and beer. Altogether – good fun.

P.S.: If you missed the event, keep an eye on Ubuntu Cyprus web site and forums for announcements of the next one. Hope to see you there.

WhiteSnake in Nicosia, Cyprus

The other day I went together with a few friends to the WhiteSnake rock band concert in Nicosia. It was the same venue and more or less the same setup as for the concert of the legendary Deep Purple back in 2005. Except that:

the sound was really crap this time
WhiteSnake is not Deep Purple by any means – much more commercial, less passionate
both video and photo cameras were not allowed, so no pictures
there was much more advertising for the event, and the place was crowded
there was a warm-up band, which actually performed better than WhiteSnake at certain times

A few things that I was thinking about during the concert:

we need more beers
“F*ck this” and “F*ck that” in between the songs doesn’t suit the romantic mood of many songs. Like, “Is this love?”
we need more beers
like we have SEO – Search Engine Optimization on the web, some over-commercialized bands probably have CCO – Concert Crowd Optimization. Pointing fingers to random people in the crowd, waving, shouting “Let’s make some f*cking noise!”, and other attempst to engage the audience strongly suggest that. Plus a few other things.
we need more beers
“Ozzy! Bring back Ozzy! Ozzy rocks!”
“Smoooooke on the water! Fire in the sky!”
we need more beers

Overall, I did have a good time with all the noise, beers, and fooling around. But I won’t be going to the next WhiteSnake event. One is just enough.

P.S.: If you want to see pictures, Flickr can help you out – thanks to small size of modern cameras and huge disregard to rules by rockers all over the world.