Category: Cyprus

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.

#cyprus IRC channel on UnderNet

Somehow I ended up connecting to the Undernet IRC network today and joining #cyprus channel.  Last time I did it was a good 10 years ago.  Maybe even more.  Back then IRC was a huge thing in Cyprus and all Internet clubs were full of kids chatting for hours.  I remember, it was so packed, that I had to buy a club membership to get some priority in queue for my HTML hacking.  And, of course, I did IRC too.  What was happening back than on #cyprus channel?  It was exactly as it is now.  Here is a screenshot for you (I won’t go as far as posting a log of this noise).

#cyprus@undernet

What is different about it now?  Well, it looks like they use a tiny bit less of colors.  And they have their own web site now.

Me? I’m living on the FreeNode these days.  That’s where most of the open source fun is happening (#fedora, #wordpress, #perl, #php, and others).

Wagamama open for Cyprus noodle fans

Wagamama franchise opened the doors of its first food spot in Cyprus.  Located in Nicosia, close to other famous food brands like Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Costa, and Burger King, it’s the first of the planned three restaurants.  Financial Mirror provides some details, such as:

Noodles are also the ideal fast food offering a nutritionally complete meal in a bowl, in addition to the rice dishes and a range of fresh juices, while for the hungry, the restaurant offers a variety of side dishes including meat and vegetable dumplings, skewered chicken, deep-fried prawns and raw salads.

Involuntary loss of Cyprus citizenship

Immigration blog reminds that there are a few ways to lose Cyprus citizenship involuntarily (for those who got it via naturalization):

  • Citizenship was gained under fraud or false statements.
  • Person commits acts of disloyalty to the government of Cyprus.
  • Person, within five years of being naturalized, begins to live continually abroad without registering with the Cypriot Consul.

It’s good to keep in mind, just in case…

19 inch from PrimeTel

No, no, you aren’t getting screwed.  Quite on the contrary!  I got an SMS from PrimeTel today with their special offer.  Here is the text of the message:

Free 19″ LCD TV.  Get 2 of your friends to become PrimeTel subscribers and the 19″ LCD TV is yours.  Call 133. Learn more www.primehome.com/offers

I know that you know that I’m biased towards PrimeTel, being an ex-employee and having a friends over there.  But I still have to say that this is a pretty neat offer.  I saw that 19″ LCD TV (remember that LCD means flat), and I wish I had any friends who aren’t PrimeTel subscribers… I have a much bigger CRT TV, and would swap it any day for a smaller LCD, that I could use as a monitor for my laptop too.

Too bad I’m out of non-PrimeTel friends right now, but you.. you got get the TV!

EuroNews rules Cyprus news channels

A quote from Kim Andrew Elliot’s post (sourced stats from Famagusta Gazette Online Edition):

Expats in Cyprus prefer their news without analysis. Online survey indicates EuroNews is most popular among expats in Cyprus.

Agreed.

One other advantage of EuroNews that wasn’t mentioned is the total absence of the “talking head”.  It’s funny sometimes to see how each of the news channels tries to solve the problem of the news reader, who doesn’t have much to do while reading the news.  The poor news readers are bounced around the studio, separated into corners or grouped around one table, sitting or standing or sitting again, with empty hands or a piece of paper and a pencil or a laptop computer which is probably switched off because nobody ever looks at it, etc…

EuroNews solved the puzzle years ago.  They don’t show the news reader at all.  Brilliant!  It’s TV for crowing out loud.  It’s about moving pictures.  Show me the footage from the location.  Show me a graphs and scans.  Show me a marquee line or a visual effect if you can’t think of anything else.   But don’t show me the talking head!