I live in Cyprus for many years now. It is a beautiful little island in Mediterranean Sea. It features warm weather for most of the year, sea, very kind and hospital people, plenty of jobs in IT industry, good food and plenty of alcohol, stable currency, and more. It’s really a nice place to live if you can handle small towns and villages. It’s also a great place to raise the kids.
Not much happens here. It is a quiet and simple place. Yet, when something happens or when I write about it, I post it to Cyprus category.
7 years ago, to the day, I’ve published this post, containing the Google screenshot for the graph of the Internet users in Cyprus. It used to be 38% of the population.
Today I decided to check exactly the same Google query and see how that number has changed. Here is how:
Yup. We went from 38% to 65.5% in 7 years. Considering the fact that the population grew as well, in the absolute numbers the statistics will be even more staggering.
The apartment building where I live in for the last few years had some cabling issues. That prevented me from joining the rest of the world in the 21st century, when it comes to home Internet connectivity. Here’s what I’ve been on until today:
Today, I’ve got my connection updated. PrimeTel Fibernet, which is currently only available to select buildings, brought the modern age of technology into my house. Here’s how it looks:
Yup, that’s a 50 Mbps download with 8 Mbps upload connection. Nearly a 10x speed increase, but not only that. Have a look at 1 ms ping now vs. 35 ms ping before. And that all is for the same price. And nothing else had to change – I still have the same TV channels and the same landline number. Ah, no, wait, my home IP address changed, but who cares about that, right?
This thing is so far indeed, that to fully utilize it I need to use the Ethernet cable. Gladly, that’s how both my PlayStation 3 and the home media server are connected. With my laptop’s WiFi, I get the numbers like this:
I’m not yet sure why, but I’ll probably need to look into my wireless card drivers or something.
Anyways, WiFi or not, it’s way faster than it used to be, both in bandwidth and latency. Which are amazing news!
P.S.: Thanks to SpeedTest.net for cool graphics and years in service too.
My brother sent me the link to this forum thread (in Greek mostly), which contains lots of pictures for the current and upcoming real estate projects in Limassol, which are significantly changing its skyline. It’s one thing to hear about these projects individually, and see the construction begin in different areas of the city, and a completely different to see them all together on one page.
It’s quite impressive!
A while back I blogged about Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission website using a copy-paste design of the logo from the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Since then, CySEC website got a new look and feel, as well as a new logo. Well, it looks like they haven’t really solved the problem of the copy-paste. Have a look yourself. Here’s the updated CySEC logo from their current website:
And here is the logo from the Money Project:
Arguably, not exactly a copy-paste like before, but way too similar not to fall into the plagiarism, which is just a fancy word for the copy-paste.
For those of you not fortunate enough to live in Cyprus, here is a glimpse at how Easter (and other major holidays like … Sundays) are celebrated in Cyprus villages.
The photo comes from this article (in Greek) which (to the best of my knowledge) tries to warn people about buying meat from non-certified butchers. Well, guess what, all certified butchers were probably emptied out anyway.