some pictures from the party

On Friday evening we had the "Mioritza Party" and although I had my doubts it came out well (ok, it came out much better than I expected).

I didn't stay long, as I wasn't feeling very well ... but I stayed long enough to take some pictures.

Some highlights:

had me at hello

Yesterday evening I took my new bike for a ride - twenty minutes or so - around the neighborhood, in between office and attending the Aikido class.

I'm hooked (yeah, yeah ... I already was ...).

I went to sleep last night around twelve, and woke up at two (or three?) AM, due to too much enthusiasm; I couldn't sleep after that point.

This morning (7 o'clock) I wanted to go for a ride again, but the battery had died on me.

Damn battery!

.utnapistim

prime vs. zoom lenses

There are two reasons I prefer prime lenses to zoom lenses (this has probably been debated left and right on the net, but I haven't searched for it, so this is just my impression).

The first reason, the technical one, is that having less moving parts, the prime lenses can be made sharper and can support larger apertures; This doesn't mean that all prime lenses are sharper, or that all prime lenses have bigger apertures; just that there is a bigger chance for it.

The second reason is somewhat subjective; When you change the focal distance of your camera, you get the feeling you're framing your shot, and in a way you are.

You're just not changing your composition or angle in any way. After a time, "changing the focal distance" becomes a synonym to "framing your shot" and you miss out on more than half your framing opportunities (and more than half the shots to take on the same subject) because of this.

When learning photography, zoom lenses may lead to bad form.

portrait of I.

a photography website link I received this morning

here

outing @ Agias Moni

we went yesterday to Agias Moni ... (err ... I think it was called). The place can be found (if it can be found at all - as I'm not exactly sure how we got there) by taking the highway from Limassol to Paphos, then (10 km from Paphos or so), exiting the highway and going for about 8 km. towards the mountains.

Anyway, it was nice.

This is a shack I saw, at our first stop (while looking for the picnic area)


S on a swing, behaving like a mature manager ... err ... sort of.


C (and little C)


cooking mushrooms


S, putting out the fire


C & I in the sunset light


at the table

deer me!

Deer me! (I'm the one in the middle)

some more pictures

bokeh study


I.'s business call

pictures in the office

sign in the basement


fire exit


little I.

MySpace, MyAss

So, in a daunting display of selflessness, I decided to embed myself inside the army of MySpacers in an effort to infiltrate this modern-day Borg ship. It would be terrifying, and I risked being swallowed whole by all the comments, instant messaging and friends list, possibly losing any semblance of real human interaction, but I was willing to take the chance.

If I don't return, IM my mom.

Full article here.

Happy Birthday V!

me, in the taxi this morning

lunchbreak today

" ... spam spam spam spam spaaam ... "(Monty Python)

front of the dojo

portrait

Mr. F. I took this two weeks ago (methinks) as we (M, L&F and me) were having sushi @ the Zen.

in the caffeteria, during lunchbreak

preparing for failure

It's friday morning.

I came to office some time (an hour?) ago and after my first coffee, I stil feel like sleeping.

I told S. today I'd design an invitation/token/ticket for the party we're doing for the end of the month, and I'm about to go into that.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I'm stil skeptic about it.

Some of my friends are enthusiastic about it (well ... ok, I haven't seen anyone else express treir doubts) but for some reason after the plans are gone through, after we go over the last progress and such, there's this persisting idea in my mind:

In the end, it's just another party.

I't not that I don't care about it ... infact I hope it comes out well, people are impressed about it and they will keep talking about it for years to come and all that ... but in the end, it's stil just another party.

Maybe it's just a "subconscious preparation for failure and a way of avoiding dissapointment" - as I've been I do that sometimes (and I tend to agree with this). Maybe it's just my romanian mentality of "nothing good will come out of whatever I do".

Who knows of such things anyway?

I hope for a good party.

photography rant

First let me be the first to say I'm not a photographer; If anything, I'm in the "interested about photography" group. I don't spend all day on photography websites (ok, I do spend some of it), looking at pictures and photography critique.

But anyway, I have a camera ...

... and there are a few small annoyances that come with having a camera.

First, there is the hmmm, so you make good pictures argument; The bigger (and maybe more professional) your camera looks, the more people expect you to make good pictures.

I mean ... photography is an art; right?

That doesn't make me necessarily an artist; this is not what it's all about; At most, maybe an aspiring artist and that would be if I were constant about it; if I were to use - or express - my talent; or inspiration; or vision; or whatever it is; I don't care much to explore what makes photography into an art-form at the moment.


What most people seem perfectly content to ignore is that in all this expressing something above, the camera is not in that "something". It's missing!

I mean ... you don't go to a painter, look at one of his brushes and go

that's a 7mm, blunt tip, horse hair oil-paint brush you're using; you must be a very good painter!

It's ridiculous! It is painfully obvious that it's not the brush, but the one behind it; Why is it then so difficult to understand?

The camera has a very minor effect on the pictures you take. I'm not saying it's not there; It's just minor.

The camera is a specialized tool, and that's that; The differences between cameras are the same as the differences between different hammer types (sometimes you need a bigger one, sometimes a lighter one, sometimes a hammer with a sharper tip or one protected by rubber).

And once you're good enough, even though you get to appreciate the specializations for different purposes, you can make do with whatever you have.



Second, there are all those can I get the shots you didn't show anyone? requests;

... and the answer to this one is a resounding No!


I have heard all the justifications for that request, like

Even if you don't think they're good enough they should be ok.

I mean ... gee ... well ... thanks! It's flattering; But stil No.

I just want to see them.

Well ... Stil no. (And M. wants a Porsche.)

I just want to see how I came out in them.

Well ... I didn't consider them good enough, and it's not for how you came out in them; It might be the light, the framing, composition or bokeh. If I were to take the pictures for somebody else, then they might see all of them; But I'm taking pictures because I like to; It's for me.


Regardless of the answer I were to give to each request, it doesn't matter; They're private! Just part of the process. They're the ones I went over, to get to the successful ones.

You don't go to a woman and say

I like your hair; What color was it before? Can I see that to tell you if you look better?

For example, if you were to go over all my four attempts on the same subject you'd go:

Hmmm ... This one is moved; too bad! It would have been ok;
This is same as before ...
I don't like the light in this one ...
I think this one is "actually ok".

... instead of just looking at the last one picture without it being "the fourh of anything with the same subject" and saying

I like this one; Framing is good, light is good, it's expressive / dynamic / whatever!

The bottom line is that is't not for you to look at and select my attempts; that's for me to do; once I get to where I want, you can look at the end result and decide you like it or not.

I'm finished with ranting for now :o)
utnapistim.

some tennis pictures

Yesterday morning I went to a small tennis tournament, strictly to take some pictures. As usual, I uploaded a small selection here.

so much for stealing my bike

It's been a few eventfull days;

Let me see ... Apparently A. had an informant kid who received ten pounds and free juice for a week (or something symilar).

Yesterday evening A. called me (as I was about to leave for Woodman's pub) and told me his kid had found my bike. I had L drive me to the dojo ( by the way, thanks for the lift, L :) ), and an hour later we were talking to two cypriot policemen.

We all went in front of the thief's house, I described my bike and we (me and A) left; The police went to knock at the door.

Fifteen minutes later I had my bike again, with a mirror broken, and that was that; Thanks A :)

Unfortunately, I never made it to the pub.

There is no old age. There is, as there always was, just you.
Carol Mathau

company wide meeting and the moullinex blender

So ... yesterday, we had a company wide meeting;

It's nothing spectacular - I don't remember if we do them twice a year or quarterly - but anyway ... they're mostly the same:

You get a speech from the local TDs and the visiting TDs, sometimes pieces of news (like "our company has just bought the doghnuth industry in Polinesia, so we'll have doghnut-colored carpets on second floor from now on" or something on that tone anyway).

Yesterday I was checking some fix on a server half accross the world (again) and accidentally heard one of the guys say "Hey, the bus is leaving in 10 minutes".


I missed it.


Instead, i played with my fix some more, then went home.


On my way, I bought a moullinex blender; I'd been wishing for those frozen yoghurts in Agia Napa for a month now, so I figured hey, why not?


I don't get the frozen yoghurts just yet (something in the recipe just doesn't come right), but I've discovered that if you put two bananas, a kiwi, two spoonfulls of yoghurt and a spoon of honey through it (and maybe some milk), you get something resembling a milk-shake.

It looks an ugly shade of gray and it's very tasty.

I'll probably play with my new blender some more during the weekend.

Now I'm off for work.

remember

anyone around here remembering this?

it was nice :D

some more pictures

items on our table sunday, at the Zen restaurant, Limassol


M


F & L


View from our office floor

quick! say something smart!

I started writing this post four times, then deleted it and started over; I think it's because while I didn't have anything definite to say tonight, I stil felt like posting something ...


What am I on about?


It was not a successfull day or anything;

just ... a fulfilling evening I would guess. I gave reiki for a bit, had a chat with a friend and got reminded of Who I Am.

and that's all it takes to brighten a day.

Just like smiling.

(Thanks S)

Here's a message to the person who stole my bike:

Please take care of it; it's a good bike.


Namas'te

Valores Misturados

So ... we received some ... cubes ... from the company, displaying the company values ... like ... efficiency, collaboration, growth ... all that!


Creativity was not among them, but, we improvised anyway and here you go:

We call this ... "Valores Misturados"

Design patterns as language defficiencies

The stance of the "Design Patterns" movement seems to be that it is somehow inevitable that programmers will need to implement Visitors, Abstract Factories, Decorators, and Façades. But these are no more inevitable than the need to implement Subroutine Calls or Object-Oriented Classes in the source language. These patterns should be seen as defects or missing features in Java and C++. The best response to identification of these patterns is to ask what defects in those languages cause the patterns to be necessary, and how the languages might provide better support for solving these kinds of problems.

(Full article here)

some more pictures

In the cabin of the Catamaran

We were between dives and the rain had jst stopped; I went to the cabin and asked if I was allowed to take some pictures; This is one of them.


self portrait (well ... sort-of)

This was taken using the ship's night/signaling strobe.


surface interval

Some of the divers (well ... all of them usually) gather and chat on the deck between dives; This guy was standing in the doorway, not really in the dry area, but chatting with the ones inside.

that's me

( picture taken by F, processed by me; Thanks F :) )

that special someone

I've been waiting for "a special someone" for a few years, and there are lot of people "out there" at the moment who are doing the same.

Here's my message to them:
The "special someone" you've been looking for, is't real. She (or he or it - as it may be the case) doesn't exist.

It's a frigment of your immagination.

Let's call this fenomenon - for lack of a better word - Hollywoodization? It's not a Hollywood effect, but the same effect that actually makes Hollywood be ... well ... Hollywood (so, it's a good name).

I had a chat with someone today and we talked about meeting a "special person" - in this case, someone endowed by God with healing powers, described as "Fenomenon <First Name> <Last Name>" in books written about her, and who heals by touch.

Wether - or not - that person was endowed by God with special powers is not what I'm arguing here (personally I don't remember endowing anyone any differenly than the others when I created the human race, but then again, a lot of details are missing from my recollections lately, so who knows? Maybe I did ... ).

What I hept trying to convince my friend was that there is no "special person" at all. Everything - and anything - that person is, you are also, as am I.

Then, I realized the mechanism is the same as waiting for the "special someone" that will heal your emotional wounds - and love you and pet you and call you George - waiting for the "special someone" that will solve your problems, that will "fix the corruption problem in Romania", and so on and so forth.


So, here's my message to all of you dreamers out there (utnapistim included in that category every now and then):

Wake up

There's no person to accept you unless you accept yourself;

There's no person that can fix your external circumstances unless you're willing - and trying - to change them yourself.

Whatever paranormal, special powers given by God someone has, youI have them also; (Well, ok, ok, maybe you have them too; I'm trying for a serious approach here, so give me a break).

Sensibility (over energy, bioenergy, artistic talent or anything else for that matter) is just that: sensibility.

If you really want to think about "special people" ... well ... go ahead: there's six billion of us around.

And in the end, nobody's special!
except utnapistim

from a few days ago

ingenuity

here

some more pictures

I have nothing to say right now, but here are some pictures:

a public improvement film

Women, know your limits (funny)

raining

It started around an hour ago and it just stopped. Anyway, the hour or so it rained, it was spectacular. I went to the balcony with D and chatted; Well ... he smoked and I took pictures ...







Now, it just started raining again ...

evening clouds

We were talking (me, F and L) on Saturday evening and I looked out and saw the clouds lit by sunset light.

It was truly spectacular.

diving @ Akrotiri Fish Reserve

snorkeling video

second rain of the season

I'm two days late with this picture, but I didn't make the time to upload pictures.

some reasons I like C++

I've been thinking lately (actually I had a talk w/ L about C++ and this started everything) and I wanted to post something on the reasons I like C++ (compared to C# and java at least);

So, let me see ...

First, there's the whole "destructor call being made at a determinstic time". Garbage collected languages don't do this; they only guarantee the destructor will be called sometimes before the next Big Bang.

This allows automation of writing some tasks (which can be further extended by using generic functors and execution sentinels), leading to one-liners for adding state rollbacks, finalizing (committing) transactions, releasing resources, exception-safe allocations (yes, I know this is not an issue in the other two languages, but I like the degree of control), and releasing race condition locks.

Second, there is the whole template system. I don't mean here the

ok, you have a list supporting only Foo objects, so you have type safety

bla-bla-bla, that all C++ courses will tell you about in the first lesson.

That's ... not really spectacular.

It's the other, less visible capabilities you get; optimizations by type, completely hidden to the outside world (see the separate implementation of std::vector<bool> for an example).

It's the capability of using type traits, allowing one to switch from std::string to case-insensitive strings by only implementing case-insensitive comparision operators in a std::type_traits<char> structure and instantiating the std::basic_string template.

It's also the ability to add metadata to the system in an efficient matter, symilar to the C# code attributes system (except for two aspects: first, it's not defined by default, second it's implementation - if you need one - can be anything you choose).

Then (third if you will) there is the flexible (customizable) input/output system (although I have seldom seen code that actually takes advantage of it), the extensible memory management features (new and delete transparent overloading and the std::allocator usage), the operators overloading and I'm sure I could think of more.

apparently, I'm male

Hey, check this out: apparently, I'm male. I pasted one of my text blog entries into the gender genie and it predicted I'm male.

Well ... that's nice.

I generated a PGP key pair yesterday, to use with my email

here is the public key:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux)
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=twJQ
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

random update

I've been neglecting my weblog lately, so today, having a few minutes I decided to post "some form of update".

let's see ... yesterday D convinced me to go to Kurion, where I had a good sleep on the beach; I also had a flat tire, so I had L pick me up half way home (thanks L, you're a life saver :) ).

I also started neglecting going to the pool ... and after only one week :( ... I'll go there tomorrow morning anyway, so no big deal.

Other than that (and the party at V&L's place), boredom, boring, nothing new et caetera et caetera.

... other than some pictures I took in the last few days.

tubes

the tubes of the internet (Ted Stevens)

balancing point

here.

something about meditation

I started going to the pool yesterday, before comming to office. This changes my days completely, from being physically tired on the way to office to being high on endorphins again (and this time without using reiki), to the detachment and peace I've been missing lately.

I also understood the effect (well ... one of them) that meditation has on the mind (the one Osho called "creating an empty space"):

it is an expansion of consciousness, something allowing that type of "unfocused attention", that is naturally centered on your own being and that leads with no effort or attempt on your part, to detachment and inner peace; to an almost "double perception ", first of yourself and second of the things around you ... or some other "bla-bla-bla" that sounds smart like that.

It's impossible to describe to someone who's never payed attention to it before, so I'm not sure why I'm actually writing about it anyway.

back from holyday

so, hey, I'm back (yeah, yeah, "once as bad, twice as ugly", I know ... I know).

Anyway, I came to office early, found the office empty and started reading my mail.

- but first, I saw this (I only added the smile, since it was missing)