Wasser 2018

Diesen Winter hat es auf Naxos stark unterdurchschnittlich geregnet. Von Zeit bin ich mit dem Fahrrad bei den beiden Stauseen / Reservoirs in Naxos vorbeigefahren. In der ersten Hälfte des Winters konnte ich so mitverfolgen, wie die Wassermenge langsam zunahm. Ende Januar war der Stand ungefähr wie im gleichen Monat des Vorjahres. Es regnete zwar nicht ganz so stark, aber dafür regelmässig und oft.

Doch dann blieb der Regen mehr oder weniger ganz aus. Seitdem ist natürlich der Wasserstand nicht mehr angestiegen. Das Foto ist vom 22. April 2018 und es ist deutlich zu sehen, wo der Wasserstand sein sollte. Auch das Grundwasser ist tiefer als es sein sollte. Brunnen in der Nähe des Meeres haben jetzt schon salziges Wasser - was normalerweise erst im Herbst passiert.

Dazu kommt auf der Verbrauchsseite, dass Naxos seit einigen Jahren steigende Tourismuszahlen hat. Mehr Besucher verbrauchen auch mehr Wasser. Die Landwirtschaft verbraucht auch mehr, denn dadurch, dass der Frühling wärmer als normal ist, wird mehr bewässert.

Theoretisch könnte es auch im Mai noch regnen. Aber ich bin nicht allzu optimistisch. Es müsste sehr, sehr viel regnen, um den Rückstand auszugleichen und es sieht im Moment gar nicht danach aus, gerade scheint es so, als ob der Sommer jetzt schon startet. Vor zwei Jahren hatten wir Ende August zwei Wochen mit Wasser-Rationierung (nur ein bis zwei Stunden Wasser pro Tag), ich gehe davon aus, dass es dieses Jahr noch schlimmer wird.

First Swim 2018

Almost forgot to record that during the EspressoSprint I also did my first swim of the season. It wasn't a big thing: As we were on the beach in Agios Prokopios anyway, I just jumped in one sunny morning. The water was still icy. In fact, Agios Prokopios is well known to have cold water even in summer, let alone now in spring. So "jumped in" can't be taken literally. In fact I stuck around with only up to my knees in for a while, considering if I should chicken out. But I persisted a bit longer, and then I warmed up and in the end I even swam properly for a bit. At that point it was quite nice.

EspressoSprint

Twice a year me and the friends who work together on this project get together and work concentrated for a week or so. Usually we're remote working and part of the team is in Spain, part in Greece. So putting our heads together once in a while "in real life" is a Good Thing(TM). Apart from work days, we usually also leave some days free to do something all together, the so-called "social days". The last few years, the cyclists in the team go on a long ride together. This time it was all a bit condensed...

Χρόνια πολλά πριν το Πάσχα

Ένα πράγμα που με διασκεδάζει πάντα στα Ελληνικά είναι οι διάφορες ευχές που έχουμε για όλες τις φάσεις της ζωής. Το "καλό δρόμο" είναι διαφορετικό από το "καλή συνέχεια" (η όποια είναι λίγο η ευκή για τις πολλαπλές χρήσεις). Η διαφορά του "καλησπέρα" με το "καλό βράδυ" μου πήρε λίγο χρόνο. Γύρω από γάμο υπάρχει ένα ολόκληρο ναρκοπέδιο από ευχές που θέλουν την στιγμή και τους ανθρώπους τους. Το "αστειάκι" ότι θα πει κανείς "και του χρόνου" σε έναν γάμο μάλλον είναι πανάρχαιο. Και το Πάσχα έχει τα δικά του, τα όποια όμως κατάφερα να μάθω αρκετά καλά μετά από λίγα χρόνια.

Τώρα τα τελευταία μια, δύο χρόνια βλέπω όμως μια αλλαγή στις ευχές του Πάσχα. Ενώ κανονικά το "χρόνια πολλά" το λέμε μετά το Πάσχα, τελευταία το λένε και πριν. Από τους ειδικούς που με συμβούλεψαν έμαθα ότι αυτό είναι απλά λάθος και να μην το ακολουθήσω. Θα κάνω αυτό που μου λένε!

Today we learn a new word: Poroductivity

Yesterday one of my colleagues created a new word through the process of anorthografogenesis. At first I didn't make much of it, but then it struck me as a word that we actually had missing in our dictionaries. Here it is, complete with the dictionary entry we all should add in our dictionaries:

poroductivity

[poh-roh-duhk-tiv-i-tee]

noun, adjective

When you are doing a lot of the stuff you need to do, but still a lot of small tasks slip through.

I'm making good progress on updating all my printed and digital dictionaries, but there are still a lot of words I haven't yet gotten around to.

A Different Mistery Puncture

Quite often when you have a puncture in a tire, there is a bit of mistery about it: What caused it? Can't find any stones, thorns, pieces of glass inside the tire, can't see where the hole came from. A few days ago I had a different level of mistery.

My spare bike sits on the trainer in the downstairs room. It's seldom used, so I wasn't too surprised when the tires were flat a while ago. I pumped them up, and that was that. And then, some days ago, the rear tire was flat again. Ah well, I found an old spare tube and headed down there to switch out the one that presumably had developed a slow leak.

The usual procedure, take out the wheel, take off the tire, rip out the inner tube, put your hand in the tire to sweep left and right to see if you can find anything that caused the pu... outch! Not only did I find what caused the puncture, it nearly punctured my hand too and it hurt like hell. There was something like a 1cm long nail stuck in the tire, sticking up vertically on the inside. The thing had no "head", and the outside was flush with the tire surface. But the inside point was sharp. Quite obviously this is a condition that does not fit well with keeping the air in an inner tube.

Now the big mistery is there: How did that thing get into the tire, while the bike was on the trainer? It's not like it's going anywhere to pick up stuff from the road surface. Quite unlikely to have the trainer's roll push that thing into the tire vertically. And if it was there before, how did the inner tube survive so long? This bike has been on the trainer for months. Sticking out 1cm is not a situation where the nail works itself slowly into the tube. The tire was flat only twice in those months, so the nail having punctured the tube already, but having "sealed itself" only with a slow leak sounds also quite implausible. Your guess is as good as mine.

Haircut

I wanted to have my hair cut at my preferred barber yesterday, but his shop is closed "for a few days". I like this kind of sign, you could actually leave it on indefinitely, as there is no indication when the "few days" start. The guy had some health problems a year or so ago, so I hope it's not related to that. I like going there, because he knows how I want my hair cut, so there is never any discussion about what fashionable thing I might want.

The downside is that he is slow. Not as slow as the last barber I went to in Athens, who was slow on an epic scale - I would calculate in at least an hour to spend in there, but slow. Some years back in Athens I used to go to a really old barber. He was excellent, and he was damn quick. I never timed him, but I think I'd sometimes get out in 5 minutes or so, with a perfect haircut. But like most of these old fashioned barber dudes, he got pensioned. Actually, looking back, I went to about 3 barbers in Athens in a row who then each got pensioned after a while.

Fast, how unexpected: Brevet Nemea 2018

Been there, done that, but maybe it's time for some repetitions. Last Sunday I was riding the "Nemea" Brevet again, which I had done 4 years ago. Another repeat: I was going to be riding with George again. And same as for my last brevet (Tatoi), I had to travel from Naxos to get to the start.

The plan was: We are going to take it easy, because George is not in shape. But then, even the best plans go to hell when fun arrives on the scene. Actually it was George having fun, since he found out after the first few kilometers that his form wasn't that bad after all. So we went fast, how unexpected.

Portrait Monitor... and tablets

Since my computer work consists mostly of writing code, I find it very convenient to use a monitor that is "upright", or in portrait mode. That way I can see more code in the file that I'm editing. Typically the width of the code is limited to a few under 80 characters wide (and it's common to use a fixed width font). In my case I use a monitor that can rotate. I guess there was some "driver" software that came with it to automatically tell the operating system on your computer in which orientation you have it rotated. I don't use anything of that sorts, I simply tell my operating system how I want my external monitor to be configured.

So much for the navel gazing at my work habits. What is more fun is what happens when I browse on the World Wide Web with this monitor. Because nowadays, many websites seem to "sniff" somehow the screen dimensions, and when they see it's portrait, they assume I'm browsing on a tablet.

So I tend to get huge font sizes, menus hidden behind the "hamburger menu", and sometimes really minimalist pages. Quite often I can fix things by playing with the zoom level or slightly resizing the browser window. Most of the times I can live with this latest trend in web designer stupidity.

An award for extra stupidity goes to the designers of the website of spanish bicycle brand Berria though (or maybe to whatever framework they use) at http://www.berria-racing.com/. Going to their site, I'm informed to please turn my tablet into landscape mode. With no choice to override this, with no way around it or a button "give me the desktop site". (See picture.) Somebody wasn't thinking this through. Well, actually I can override it, by using only part of my screen and reducing the browser window to a landscape-shaped slice, but that's very unconvenient. Interesting enough, when you have a deep link to one of their pages, it works anyway, so why put in this stupid blocker? Facepalm.

Happy New Year 2018! Καλή Χρονιά! Guets Neus!

Happy New Year to all my (few) readers! May 2018 be the best it can be. I'm not expecting much. I've been cycling the last day of 2017 and the first day of 2018, I think it's a good way to spend the change of years.

The last two New Years we had snow here on Naxos. This time definitely nothing like that. Yesterday it was windy and a bit cold, but nowhere near freezing (except when riding downhill in the mountains). Today it was sunny and warm, with no wind at all.

As usual, this change of year is also the birthday of this weblog. The blog has been around for 13 years now, quite some time. Thinking back about those days back then, it's as if it was a different me, and it was definitely a different time. I'm definitely not saying the old times were better though, just different.

The theme of the blog this year seemed to be: "Ups, it's almost the end of the month, better post something now, or else there will be a month without a post!" I had only two months with more than one post. Most posts were about cycling, then a few general posts. But then, the weblog is still around!