this and that

on hunger

And the hunger descends
And your body's on fire
An inferno that never ends
(Depeche Mode)

Although I think Dave Gahan was singing about drugs addiction, I'm simply hungry (:().

I went to the dentist today (thank heavens that's over!) and came back with a half-numb face. I was recommended to avoid eating anything for two to three hours, since I was risking biting my tongue without even noticing it, so I skipped lunch.

Now, I dream of pizza, fried eggs, mushrooms, desert, fruit, soups, pie, eggplants, mashed potatoes, not necessarily in that particular order ...

I think I'm spoiled.

Did I mention pizza?

Sunday evening

about white balance

Here is a lightweight explanation on whitebalance and why it matters. From TFA:

Color temperature is measured in Kelvin (named after a rather clever physicist who was made Lord Kelvin in recognition of his work and, like all good Victorian scientists, had an excellent beard), which is pretty much the same as Celsius, but starts counting at absolute zero (-273 degrees C), rather than the freezing point of water. Its relationship to color is actually the work of Max Planck who, being more recent German scientist, had a mustache, rather than a beard.

I finally understand now why my streetlight shots come out as almost orange-black monochrome.

frappé

One of my RAW format experiments from a few days ago.

Post-processing done with Picasa 2.

clueless

Sometimes I think I'm so clueless that not even Sherlock Holmes could find me.

Just wanted to state that.
(these things are important; the world should know about them)

parrot in Agia Napa, last summer

too sexy for my car

M took this with his camera phone, ten minutes ago.

Sexy, aren't I?!

why Utnapistim?

S. asked me this morning what Utnapistim stands for and I realized I get this question at least once a month, so here we go:

Thereupon Enlil went aboard the ship.
Holding me by the hand, he took me aboard.
He took my wife aboard and made (her) kneel by my side.
Standing between us, he touched our foreheads to bless us:

'Hitherto Utnapishtim (Noah) has been but human.
Henceforth Utnapishtim and his wife shall be like unto us gods.
Utnapishtim shall reside far away, at the mouth of the rivers!'
Thus they took me and made me reside far away,
At the mouth of the rivers.

(from Epic of Gilgamesh)

So ... why Utnapistim?
Because I liked the way it sounds! :D
Well ... that, and I didn't like Melchisedec.

Green Monday Weekend

I did lots of things during the longer weekend, and missed a few things - like M's b-day party (sory M :().

Anyway, here are some pictures I took the time to process:

Snake Garden in Paphos (visited with the bike yesterday):












Bike stop at Aphrodyte's Stones (Petra Tou Romiou):








Ski trip to Trodos, on Sunday:

omlette in Paphos

I had an omlette in Paphos today.

I went there for the afternoon dive with cydive, but the weather was bad and the dive got canceled.

So in effect, I rode for an hour on the Limassol->Paphos highway (B6 I think), had a chat with the guys and an omlette on the Paphos seafront, then rode back through the rain, to Limassol.

I got back home on an empty tank, half frozen, almost completely wet and feeling more alive than I felt in the last few days.

Today seems like a good day, for omlette in Paphos ...

... or something like that.

on a rooftop

I saw this from the bathroom window, on a nearby rooftop.

after rain

I took these two days ago, after the rain stopped, from the bathroom window.

a new post

Well ...

I haven't posted in a while (though I added the google reader to the blog and changed the color theme a bit) so I decided to add some form of "heads up" for this week.

Let me see ... I missed two Aikido classes (due to tiredness and office work respectively), I went to the dentist - an experience that can be quite interesting with the right dentist - and started T'ai Chi classes.

There's a company party this evening which I'm ditching in favor of another T'ai Chi session, and at the moment I'm in the long and tedious process of planning for a long weekend.

Apparently Monday will be free in Cyprus (Green Monday), so I'm considering skiing and a LAN party for Saturday, a motorbike trip on Sunday and maybe I finally manage to dive this year.


Hmmm ...
Difficult to schedule, this weekend is.

Think about it, will ya?

From Bruce Schneier's blog:

Windows Vista includes an array of "features" that you don't want. These features will make your computer less reliable and less secure. They'll make your computer less stable and run slower. They will cause technical support problems. They may even require you to upgrade some of your peripheral hardware and existing software. And these features won't do anything useful. In fact, they're working against you. They're digital rights management (DRM) features built into Vista at the behest of the entertainment industry.

And you don't get to refuse them.

The details are pretty geeky, but basically Microsoft has reworked a lot of the core operating system to add copy protection technology for new media formats like HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks. Certain high-quality output paths--audio and video--are reserved for protected peripheral devices. Sometimes output quality is artificially degraded; sometimes output is prevented entirely. And Vista continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you're doing something that it thinks you shouldn't. If it does, it limits functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem. We still don't know the exact details of all this, and how far-reaching it is, but it doesn't look good.

It says a lot more (its quite the lengthy article), but it got me thinking ... I mean ... Bruce is not your usual lets-ignore-it opinion and he made some valid points.

Think about it, will ya?

romanian song

I. sent me this yesterday and its quite a good (Romanian) song.
Enjoy:

a good day

Yesterday evening, I went - for the first time - to T'ai Chi classes w/ A.

I had brought him some pictures for his website and (more or less) decided to stay for the lesson. It turned out to be a small revelation.

The T'ai Chi steps are not quite what I thought them to be (and of course, there are multiple styles to choose from) and I rediscovered chi power again (only more - if that's possible); By the end I was tingling with energy (and I missed that feeling).

I still get the movements wrong though and I don't know what I'm doing half the time, but I'm getting there.

slowly :)

Then, I went home and had an insightful evening with D (over a couple of beers, two chocolate bars, some beans salad and watching about robotic prosthetics on Discover Science).

I went to sleep around 2AM.

Only for that evening, and yesterday was a good day.

cool code project

I tried this with firefox and the google website and it works.

Step 1. go to any website

Step 2. delete everything in the address bar

Step 3. paste the following code in the address bar:

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

Step 4. press enter and have fun

(taken from here)

about Kruder & Dorfmeister

Anyone knows where I can find their music? (Yes, I'll even pay for it if need be).

wish I was still there

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