Personal

The presents are here!

Finally I got myself on the package! It came pretty fast, compared to other orders that I did from the states. Bravo B&H!

128 MByte Memory Stick Duo was tossed to the side for a bit. My primary interest was the Tamron lens. I took it out of the package and gave it a good look. A bit larger than I expected. A bit heavier. Much wider. The 67mm diameter make it look like a freaking bazuka. I wonder how people would react to it. On one hand they might get scared by it. On the other they might consider me a professional, which I am, of course, not. We’ll see.

One thing I liked about this thing from the first sight was the hood. It had this nice form that usually appears on the pro-lenses, not a full body amateur ring. But the best thing about it, is that there are two ways to attach the hood to the lens. One is the normal way. And another one – is the reverse attachment. This is extremely convenient for carrying the hood around without using it and without putting it into the bag or pocket. Hard to lose too.

Since noone was at home, I started shooting random things like fan and my own face. Pictures came out pretty good. Not as good as from my Canon 50mm 1.8 lens, but good enough. I’m happy. For the next few days, all pictures that you’ll see posted here will be taken with this lens. I have to teach myself how to use it properly.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-11-30_POTD/

Hellenic Bank – they did it!

Hellenic Bank has been one of the best banks on the island for some time now. The difference between all of them is very small, but in this case, that’s what makes it more noticable.

One of the reasons that I switched to Hellenic Bank was that their Internet Banking website was working in Mozilla Firefox. And not only it was working, it was almost perfect – all operations were available and there was no need for a Java plugin or anything like that.

A minor annoyence existed though. Main menu was a little bit screwed up and didn’t show completely. It was possible to see it by clicking the little menu frame and either selecting text in there, or using the scoll mouse. Not very comfortable, but at least it worked.

Last week Hellenic Bank finally fixed the issue. Now everything looks and works perfect. More reasons, therefor, to stay with them in the coming year.

If I was to pick a feature that I miss the most, it would be the SMS notification for the change of account balance. Currently I can only setup alerts which will notify me if account balance goes above or beyond a certain amount. But what I want to have is an SMS when something changes at all. Other banks have it and I don’t see any reasons why Hellenic Bank can’t have too.

Anyway, I am still pretty pleased with their service.

Work for Google. Again.

You gonna love this one, I promise.

Just when I thought that my chances to work for Google were all used up, I received another email from them. It comes from a recruiter – a different one this time. The content of email is pretty much the same as the one I got the first time.

They make a suggestion for three job positions that they see me fit. They ask me if I will be willing to work for them. And they offer a choice of locations, including the one in Dublin, Ireland that I think I like so much.

I am sitting here, scratching my head, thinking what to do. On one hand, I tried and failed and this second email is caused by some sort of synchronization error between recruiters. On the other hand, they never replied to my email about the minimum period between applications.

I think I’ll repy. I’ll tell them that I tried and failed. And I will ask them if they will mind too much another attempt on my side. If they won’t – I’ll study harder (yeah, right) and try again. If the will – oh, well – I had my chance.

Large files via Bluetooth to Sony Ericsson P800

I’ve got myself a little Bluetooth USB adapter and now I can easily beam files to my phone. No need to use expensive (and slow) GPRS connection for file transfers anymore.

There is a problem though that I am not sure how to fix. You see, transferred files appear as beamed messages in the inbox. I can save the files later to any place I want. But the inbox itself is on the internal drive of the phone. How smart is that?

The internal drive of P800 is 12 MBytes. The external card can be as large as 128 MBytes. But there is no way (or, at least, I haven’t found one) of transfering a file larger than the internal drive. It’s good that I can fill up the 128 MBytes. But it’s terrible that I can’t do so with a couple of 60 MByte files (podcasts anyone?).

Does anyone know of a way to tell Sony Ericsson P800 to save beamed messages on the external card? Furthermore, is this situation fixed with P900 and P910? Those phones can take bigger cards, as far as I know, but their internal memory is not very much larger…

Pediatritian check for 9 month

It’s time again to take Maxim for a routine pediatrician check. And so we did.

The boy is growing. He measured at 73 cm in length, while 9.5 kg of weight. That’s a real improvement of almost a kilogram since last month. Obviously, introducing a small yogurt pitstop in the afternoon and an even smaller yogurt pitstop in the evening helped his diet.

For the next month he will have a new dish to try – yolk of a boiled chicken egg. We’ll start with 1/8, then with 1/4, then with 1/2, and then probably with the whole thing. Since he eats meat pretty good, we will have to give him egg only every other day.

We also discussed the two issues that are oustanding for a few month now – facial nerve and the kidney.

For the kidney we have another test scheduled in Nicosia, Makariou Hospital on coming Thursday. Some “painted” liqued will be introduced into Maxim’s bladder via catheter and than monitor will tell if any of this liqued goes back to the kidney. Hopefully it will stay in the bladder and come out the normal way. The procedure is pretty standard. The two downfalls are the catheter, which I hear is somewhat painful to insert and a minor X-Ray radiation for the monitor.

Because of this radiation dose, it was decided to skip one test for the facial nerve. Instead we will do a more advanced (read: more expensive) test that requires no radiation at all. It also usually provides better results than anything else out there.

These are all news. I’ll have some updates as we go. But most of it should come in about one month from the next visit to Dr.Simos. Where Maxim will get his next vaccination too. Poor kid. And I hear that he has it easy…