Personal

Lag

As they say, knowing the problem is already half a solution. Here is my problem – lag. I am lagging far behind in a lot of things, which slowly-slowly, one-by-one built up to an impressive list of tasks. I knew I was lagging for some time, but yesterday I spent a few minutes trying to realize how much and how far behind really I am.

In terms of movie reviews, here is the list of films I’v watched in the past couple of weeks: Cop Out, From Dusk Till Dawn, From Paris with love, Hitman, Jarhead, Michael Clayton, Tenacious D – The pick of destiny, The Girl with the dragon tattoo, The great debaters, Un Prophete, Rush Hour 3, Remember Me, Repo Men, Armors of God, Armors of God : Operation Condor, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Terminal, Terminator, Bruno, Collapse, Tapped, The Rise of the Footsoldier, Ong Bak 3, Armored, Traffic, The Brave One, Religious, Capitalism, Goodfellas. Some of these are new, some are old. A few of these I have already reviewed before, but most I haven’t.

In terms of photos, I am even worse. Latest pictures at Flickr photo stream are those of my Eurotrip last year. And I haven’t even got half of those in. More than a year! Just the thought is horrifying. There is almost 500 new photos that I still need to sort through, post-process, and upload. At least I got them all off the camera and into my laptop yesterday – that’s the first step.

I am also lagging in a few other areas – work, side projects, hobbies, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I always had things on my todo list. Never, for as long as I can remember myself, I thought that everything is done, all is in order, and I can sit back and enjoy myself. But for the last year or so things are getting out of control. I’ll need to reorganize myself a bit. Starting now.

Wildfires of Russia

Hundreds of wildfires followed last week all time high high temperature and drought. Dry forests and wind is not the best combination for fire safety. As a result, more than 40 people dead and more than 1500 houses burned down across the country. And with no changes in the weather, it’s probably not the end of it yet.

My grandfather’s house got nearly burned down by the wildfire as well. Luckily, in the last moment there was a change in wind direction which turned the fire away. Even if nobody died in my home city, fire destroyed more than 500 hectares of the forest. That’s 5,000,000 square meters!

Big Picture blog covers the story.

My office window

The latest theme for Flickr blog is called “my office window“. There are some nice photos, as always, but what’s more interesting is that it is quite an engaging subject. Pretty much everyone who ever worked somewhere can participate, share photos, and discuss.

For me personally, the last few years weren’t very lucky in terms of a good office window view. I currently work in the premises which are on a busy Omonia avenue, which runs between the new port of Limassol and the highway. Not too much to see. My previous office was even worse – it had no windows at all. The office before that had some windows, but the view wasn’t any good. And so and so forth. But I don’t feel bad about that. Because for six years or so I had the best office window ever. It was during my time in PrimeTel, where I had a sea view window. I especially enjoyed it when I was working night shifts. I had to see a sun rise several times a week! And also PrimeTel’s office being next to the new port of Limassol, there were always ships to provide some focus and highlight to the view, not just sun and water, which I guess would have become boring pretty soon. Here is one of the many pictures I took during those mornings.

What about you guys? What’s you office window like? Do you have one? What’s the view like? What was the best (or worst) office window you ever head? Got any pictures to see?

What’s wrong with airlines today?

I think there is something wrong with airlines, their policies, and their price making. Here is one example. I was looking for the cheapest way to get from Larnaca, Cyprus to Athens, Greece on Saturday, September 25th, 2010. One of the lowest prices was offered by Aegean Airlines – 42 EUR for a one-way ticket. That sounds awesome, doesn’t it? Well, apparently that’s not the final price. The final price with all the taxes and such came up to 156.16 EUR.

What’s the point of listing the price, on top of which you’ll have to pay the “tax” and “fee”, and which will be almost doubled by those extras?

My first bible – the most confusing book ever

Every once in a while I read a bed-time story my son Maxim. For those of you who don’t know him, is five and a half years old now. Today he, as usual, got ready for bed, picked the book to read, and was waiting for me. When I walked into the room, I got confused for a second, but decided to go with it. The book of the day – My First Bible. I won’t link to it, because I don’t recommend it, and if you don’t care about my recommendation you probably already have it anyway.

Now, the thing is that I don’t believe in religion. I don’t believe in bible. And I don’t believe in church. But on the other hand, I don’t want to limit Maxim’s options – it’s up to him if he wants to believe it or not. And given that we live in country where religion is important and is all around us, he at least has the right to know.

Anyway, we started reading. The first story was from the old testament and it was about The Garden of Eden. Maybe it was an oversimplified version of the story, or maybe the story is getting old, or maybe it has something to do with Maxim spending large chunk of his free time watching YouTube videos and playing Lego. But he missed the meaning of the first couple of paragraphs, so we went back. And the we got into this conversation which made reading the book a real pain. It went something like this:

– At first, there was nothing. Nothing to see, nothing to touch, nothing to hear. It was dark, empty, and cold. Then god created light.

– Dad, who is god?

– Well, you see, it’s this guy. As it says here, it was like a very dark room before – nothing to see, etc. This guy called god switched the light on.

– Ah, OK. But where did he come from? There was nothing …

– Ehm … I don’t know. Let’s read further, maybe the story will explain.

– OK.

It didn’t. It just got even more confusing. We agreed on god being a gardener, because he created a garden and a whole bunch of things in it. We got a bit surprised by god working on Saturday, because nobody works or is supposed to work during the weekend. And then we came across the apples. Apples are supposed to be “good for you”, as per Maxim’s food classes in the kindergarten. So, if not apples, what else was there to eat? And then how come you get smart from eating apples? You need to study at school and read books to become smart. Apples have nothing to do with it. And then there was this snake, which was created by god also, as part of everything else – what was the snakes problem? And then they ate the apples and god got angry with them and kicked them out of the garden. So where did they go?

Maxim probably didn’t ask some of these questions, but asked some of the others that I forgot, but one thing is for sure – there were a lot of questions and a lot of the story didn’t make sense. But we managed to finish it.

I didn’t want to leave him puzzled and confused, so we decided to also read the next story. That one was about Noah’s Ark. That one was much simpler in plot, but way more horrifying. For no particular reason god decided to kill everyone and everything on the planet, except for this Noah guy and his family, who he made to build a ship, which he wanted to host a pair of each living creature and enough food for them. How big was the ship, how much food did they all need, and why not get rid of mosquitoes and angry dogs at this stage remained uncertain. The idea of killing everyone for no apparent reason seemed like a silly thing to read for the bed time. So I closed the book, turned everything into a joke, and convinced Maxim that it was all a bad fairy tale and that none of this is real. We played some Lego after that, talked about Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and I left him to that.

I’ve heard quite a few people joking about introducing bible stories to kids before. But I never thought that those jokes might be so close to reality. But, of course, don’t forget that I am biased.