Tag: tourism

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

I think that I should spice up a bit these long lists of links. I’ll be adding some comments once in a while for this posts to be more human friendly. Those posts with a lot of links (lik this one) will be split into a introductory part and the full article, so that the main page of the site won’t get too long to scroll.

First group of links has to do with logic programming in Prolog language. Most of these links I found in the reference list in Ovid’s presentation at OSCON. Ovid was talking about ways of integrating Prolog and Perl. The link to his presentation is the first in the list.

Continue reading Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

New Cyprus resource – kipr.info

There is yet another promising resource about Cyprus – kipr.info. It started off as collection of information and links about Cyprus. Currently, everything seems to be in Russian, but maybe later some English content will be added. The good thing is that the site is using DokuWiki engine, which means that everyone can register, login and update any available information and add some new.

Keep it bookmarked. And it has an RSS feed too.

One place I shouldn’t go

I have a special relationship with all bookstores. Since I feel an unstopable urge to buy half of the books every time I go in to one, I try to avoid them as much as possible. Actually, I’ve been pretty successful at that. I decided to buy all my books from Amazon, but since I am too greedy to pay for shipping and since I don’t have a credit card of my own, I don’t buy that often. All my book shopping ends with my wishlist.

Today though I made a strategic mistake. I had to visit my bank and instead of driving, I walked. And I totally forgot (or didn’t want to remember) that there is an excellent Kyriakou bookshop on the way. I passed it once on the way to the bank and pushed myself not to enter. It took all my powers, but I passed by. Since I didn’t have any powers left, I couldn’t take another road home. And on the way back, I went in. Ouch.

I spent less than 3 minutes inside, but I managed to buy 3 books, paying over 50 CYP (Now you can understand why I try to avoid these places). Here’s what I got:

  • “Digital Photography Special Effects” by Michael Freeman. It’s been some time since I wanted to buy some book that would explain few tricks of digital image manipulation. When I saw the book by Michael Freeman I just had to buy it. I’ve read his other book “Complete Guide to Photography“, which is still the best book on the subject that I’ve read. The Special Effects book is in hardcover, with lots of illustrations, and costs about 19 CYP. “That’s value for money” I thought and picked it up.
  • “Mediterranean Island Dreams” by Jeremy Horner. This is another book that I picked from the Photography section. It has almost 250 color pictures of Mediterranean islands and I want it for some inspiration and ideas. Plus 21 CYP is not that much for that many pictures. Picked that up too.
  • “Rough guide to Cyprus” by Mark Dubin. This book is very well tested, since my good friend Vladimir has a copy. We used the book to investigate Cyprus and to open way more places here than we could imagine – restaurants and beaches specifically. I wanted to order this book from Amazon anyway, but when I saw it in the local bookshop for a mere 12 CYP I decided to buy it.

Additionally, I’ve discovered that this bookshop has an excellent Photography section with lots and lots of books. I’ll have to revisit it next month for sure. How can I stop this fever now?

On visited countries

I came across an interesting tool that generates a color map for visited countries and calculates the percentage of the world seen (by country, not by area). My result is 3% with this map:

Visited countries

The countries that I’ve specified were: United States of America, Egypt, Belarus, Latvia, Malta, Russia, Cyprus, and Kazakhstan. I’m glad I’ve seen most of the continents though, with just South (and Central) America and Australia missing from my list.

Every time I think about how few countries I’ve been too, it makes me want to run streight to the Cyprus Airways office and buy a ticket to somewhere – no matter where – just to flew away. Unfortunatly though I still possess only one citizenship and that one is of the country that noone wants to invite people from much. Yes, Russian passport is the biggest limiting factor of my travels. Hopefully, though, that will change soon…

Trip to Troodos mountains

Troodos signToday I went on a trip to Troodos mountains. Olga wasn’t feeling good enough for travelling, so I went with Lev and Hazard. There was a small get-together planned by few people from the Russian Cyprus Forum. People came from Limassol and Nicosia and maybe from somewhere else, I don’t know. Usually I know pretty much everyone on the “parties” like this. Not today though. There were plenty of new faces.

I, of course, planned and used the trip as an amazing photo opportunity. It is the first time this year that I went to see snow in the mountains and it has all the chances of being the last time too. I have made a whole lot of pictures. Overall I did exceptionally good. Usually I screw things up and than try to make excuses about bad light and everything. This time I have managed to avoid that path. I shot just a little over 100 frames and more than 80 turned out OK.

Hazard was filming everything and he even promised to make a movie in about 10 days or so. I wonder how this will come out. He was filming plenty of events in the last couple of years, but noone has ever saw anything except for a couple of raw clips. He was always planning to make them into a movie, but never found time to actually do it. Today he promised to do so, which is a completely different story.

While I am on the camera and digital equipment subject I want to express my astonishment regarding the way many people treat the sensitive appliences. When we came to Troodos and were walking up the road to meet the rest of the people, we got ourselves in the middle of snowball fight. Everyone was throwing snowballs at everyone. Camera or not. I tried a couple of times to warn people that digital cameras don’t work with snow/water inside, but noone would listten. Strange. And I almost had written that off to alcohol and similar reasons. Olga explained it to me though. She said that most people she knows do not realize that water can damage electronics. Even she didn’t know that until I told her some time ago. Well, she knew that water can damage electronics, but she didn’t know that photocameras and camcorders are not waterproof. Go figure…

Anyway, I had a lot of fun in Troodos. After the snowball fights everyone went to the taverna, where we split because it was way too crowded over there. While everyone stayed at Gabriella’s place, Lev, Hazard and I went to Foini, which was like 15 minutes of extra driving. Steak, wine, and beer and the trip back home… Great time!