business

All About Beer

Ok, guys, you gonna love this! I have totally accidentally found the first BEER SHOP in Cyprus! Not only that – it is in Limassol too! Is there still anyone out there who thinks that Limassol is not totally the best city in Cyprus? I guess not…

Anyway, the shop is totally cool. I am writing this post in hope that they will have enough business to stay alive for years to come. There is a great variety of beers in the shop. And I mean a really great variety. They have cans, bottles, and drafts from Cyprus, Greece, Germany, Belgium, Holland, UK, India, and some other countries. I couldn’t count all the brands and kinds of beer that they have, but I am sure they offer well over 40 products.

Additionally, you can buy anything related to beer – glasses, pints, mugs, and tankarts. Nuts and other finger food. Accessories. Gift packages. I can’teven name everything they have.

While in the shop, you can ask for assistance from the two guys who work there (and look like they own the place). There is also a printed guide into different kinds of beer that they have. Business cards and printed bookmarklet can be taken out too.

The shop has opened about one and a half month ago, so they didn’t manage to create a website just yet. But they booked the domain already (at least it’s printed on the business cards) – www.AllAboutBeer.net.

Here is all the information from the business card (I don’t have a scanner):

All About Beer
Sissifou & Ammochostou Str.
3075 Limassol – Cyprus
Tel. 25732007
Fax. 25732008
e-mail: info (at) allaboutbeer.net
www.allaboutbeer.net

Finding the shop is very easy. It is next to Ermes Appolo (ex-Woolworth). If you will turn towards Ermes from the Makariou III Avenue and look to your left across the Ermes parking, you will see the All About Beer shop on the parallel street (perpendicular to Makariou III avenue, next to Ermes parking space). Give them a call if you get lost, but it is really easy to find.

Now, if you will excuse me, I’m going to enjoy a bottle of Kwak…

On hiring programmers

Ovid, who is a rather famous Perl programmer himself, has a few tips about hiring programmers for companies who want to do so. Before reading the article, try writing your own ad for Perl programmer position available. Than see if you’ve got it right.

The main thing you want out of an ad is for people to read it. If you have nothing compelling in the ad, the people who will read and respond are the unemployed or the unsatisfied. Why overlook the competent, happy programmers? You want everyone reading your ad.

On BlogLines origins

I always find it fascinating how some people get an idea, develop it, implement it, and then turn it into a real success. Bloglines is a good example. Today I came across an interesting post that shows where from the Bloglines started:

I looked at a couple of RSS aggregators the other day. These are programs that you run on your machine that allow you to subscribe to various weblogs that support a protocol called RSS. These programs make it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs.

I was very disappointed in what I saw, at least in terms of Linux based programs. Every one I looked at sucked. Couldn’t get any of them to work.

What’s interesting is that people have been focusing on creating client side RSS aggregators. I think the world needs a very good server side aggregator. I’d use it. You could do all sorts of interesting things with a server side aggregator. You could probably fund it with advertising (at least the Google style text advertising en vogue these days).

Did you ever read the Orson Scott Card book Ender’s Game? In the future world depicted in the book, there’s a vast computer network, a la the Internet, with discussion forums. While we aren’t lacking in discussion forums these days (mailing lists, USENET, web boards), I think a closer analogy to what was in the book would be blogs as viewed through an aggregator.

That’s from Mark Fletcher’s blog. Mark Fletcher is the CEO of Bloglines. The post was written on 4th of March, 2003. That’s slighly more than two years ago.

Weird

My boss has left the company. I had to delete his account and clean some groups and other access lists. It felt very weird. It felt like a beginning of the end. Although it’s not.

Not to mention that removing one of the global administrators, who had access virtually to every corner of the network, is not a trivial job…

Should Microsoft buy Red Hat?

After reading through this post and linked articles, I went ‘Hmm..’ and remembered one of the recent Paul Graham‘s articles ‘Hiring is Obsolete‘ where he mentions that:

There might be 500 startups right now who think they’re making something Microsoft might buy.

Than I thought that if Microsoft is to buy Red Hat, there will probably be a huge wave of Linux people starting up companies and making all sorts of things that Microsoft might be interested in after Red Hat purchase. But Microsoft will probably be busy fighting a bunch of anti-trust cases.

While I understand that the whole thing is a rumor, it feeds some interesting thinking…