Walking Home From Thission

Just walked home from Thission (in the center of Athens), because due to today being the first of May, busses and subways have had strikes for some hours. It's been quite a walk, almost an hour. Could have taken a taxi, but it was nice to walk.

Loc in on Tone Loc

Back when I was living in Athens for the first time, the tracks "Wild Thing" and "Funky Cold Medina" were rocking the air waves. They were the soundtrack of my time there, even though I don't really dig Rap or Hip Hop. Years later I remembered the music and started searching for the album. Couldn't track it down. My record shop special ordered it, but it never arrived. Amazon didn't have it at the time (they have now). Long story short, I found it last Friday, on emusic: Loc-ed After Dark.

Send In The Cows!

This morning as I was still sleepy riding the bus to work I saw a couple of bright painted cows at the Parko Eleftherias - quite a herd of them actually. In reflex I grabbed my camera phone and was able to shoot this pic. I expected to see more cows along the way, but no luck. Maybe they are more towards the center, maybe they just started being herded out... what's going on is the Athens CowParade.

The cowparade is an event that originated in Zurich, life-size plastic cows are painted by various artists and placed all over town. After being a success in Zurich, the cowparade went to other places (first stop was Chicago IIRC). The City of Athens has some information about the locations of the cow parade.

Safety on the mobile Internet meeting

Through rather random events we learned about safeline.gr inviting the public to a meeting with the title "Safety on the mobile Internet". There wasn't much of the public following the invitation, the audience consisted of Mary and me. But we were truly interested despite that.

Safeline.gr is a website and organization that is still very unknown but very important. They are a hotline for reports on images of child abuse, racist and xenophobic content that violates Greek law, and other content that might be illegal. They operate in coordination with Greek providers and the Greek police's cyber crime office. If you ever saw something that you thought should be reported to the police - but you didn't because the local cops probably don't know a network from a clothes line - safeline.gr is the place to go.

Papakonstantinou und Mozart

Heute morgen extra früh aufgestanden, um beim Steueramt vorbeizufahren. Mein Steueramt ist in einer komplett anderen Gegend als die, in der ich wohne. Die anderthalb Stunden Fahrt hätte ich mir aber auch sparen können, den das Formular hätte ich bei jedem Steueramt bekommen können. Nach dem Generve brauchte ich eine klassische Ersatzbefriedigung und so gings in einen Mega-CD-Laden. Dort fragte ich nach der CD mit dem Konzert von Βασίλης Παπακωνσταντίνου (Vasilis Papakonstantinou) im Ηρώδειο (Herodeion) 2005.

Sun, Sea, and Turtles in Glyfada

Took the tram to Glyfada today, was in need of some fresh air and a look at the waves. First thing I noticed upon arrival: Should have brought my swimming trunks. The sea was very inviting. Not too cold either. We took a little walk along the coastline instead. By chance we walked into the Greek sea turtle rescue center...

Calculate it in a Spreadshit!

From #zope on freenode.net:

16:24 < betabug> my python can't calculate
16:25 < betabug> adding up a sum of numbers it returns 0.0000324074 - 
       while the result is 1.1749300347 according to a spreadshit 
       (and according to a look at the numbers)
16:25 < betabug> hmm, spreadshit is a rather nice typo
16:26 < g0dil> *grin*
16:32  * betabug wonders how foobared 7 lines of code really can get
16:34 < blaamann_home> He he...spreadshit
16:35  * betabug feels like he just founded another successfull 
       baby-meme

pimps'N'hosis Besuch

Gestern trudelte der Meister Pat von den international PimpsNHosis hier in Athen ein. Den ganzen Tag werkelte er für das Schweizer Senioren Fernsehen (SF) und den Concours de l'Eurovision am Schnittplatz. Das war natürlich nicht das gleiche als sein letzter Besuch, den er grösstenteils auf der hübschen Insel Hydra verbrachte. Hydra ist sicher mehr relaxend als Einspieler für den Song-Contest zu schnippseln.

Eigentlich wollte er an die Eurovisions-Party gehen, doch dank wildem Arbeitseinsatz in den letzten Wochen (gerüchteweise wird ihm demnächst der Titel "Held der Arbeit" verliehen), war er dann doch zu müde. Als Alternativ-Programm gingen wir zum Μπάρμα Γιάννη (Barba Gianni) nach Εξάρχεια (dem Stadtteil Exarchia). Dort gibt es gekochte Speisen und eine Atmospäre gemischt aus altmodisch und alternativ bis anarchisch. Der richtige Start in die nächsten zwei Wochen und die reichen ja dann auch noch für einen Inselbesuch.

Zeit für Klatsch und Tratsch war auch wieder mal. Leicht babylonisch mit einem Gemisch aus Schweizerdeutsch, Hochdeutsch (tjaja, Ελένη musste feststellen, dass Schweizerdeutsch gar nicht so einfach zu verstehen ist :-) und natürlich Griechisch. Kreuz und quer, am Ende rauchte mir der Kopf.

...wherein the betabug watches Eurovision

I've always been ignorant to the Eurovision phenomenon. I mean, we surely must have watched Eurovision once or twice when we were kids, but I can't remember any details, and then I didn't as much as think a single second about the Eurovision Song Contest... until I came back to Greece two years ago. Suddenly people around me started to get all heated up about what, please? A f* european song contest? I couldn't believe it either. Despite my surroundings I have tried to continue to avoid everything about it. I say "tried", because with those surroundings the thing keeps coming after you. Yesterday I went with friends to watch Eurovision in a cafe...

Glyfada Panorama Picture

Picture from last weeks excursion to Glyfada. The sunset was impressive and I liked the scenery. Today I took the time to stitch this little panorama together, in the usual manner. You can view a medium sized and a big version of this panorama picture too.

Another Athens Panorama

Another panorama picture, Athens from above, as seen from the roof of the Divani Caravel hotel. I took these pictures when I was there for the safeline.gr meeting. The day was a bit cloudy and one can't see the swimming pool on the pic - the pool is up the stairs on the left side and on the other side of the roof.

Update: The big picture. Compare with the one taken from the roof of the hilton.

Burning Chrome

Short stories are not my thing usually. I want a book to develop a complete story, and when it's good, I want a book to be as long as possible, so I can stay and dive into the world. I bought William Gibson's short story collection "Burning Chrome" out of desire for completeness. I'm a Gibson fanboy. When I read them the first time, I liked them good enough, but they were short stories. Gibson is tense. More so in the short stories. Since they are some of his earlier works, they are also a bit more rough sometimes. A few days ago I picked them up again, and this time around, I'm really enjoying the read.

I'm reading them in the bus, at the bus station, mostly. Started with Johnny Mnemonic. Wanted to re-read it as soon as I was finished. It's really good, only I would like more of it. In Athens the heat has set in now. The first heat, we're going for the 30s, in summer we will be going for the 40s (Celsius, that is).

Yesterday I took a bus where the air-conditioning was on, this morning it wasn't. Yesterday on the way home I started on "The Winter Market". Gone through that this morning and read through the first page or so of "Burning Chrome", the title story. Being a true addict to Gibson's language, I think "Burning Chrome" is as cool a title as they come. So I couldn't resist using it for this entry.

Technorati Tags working with COREBlog Categories

Currently when I look at my Technorati profile, I see my "Top Tags" listed as stupid stuff like "categorylist_html?cat_id=2"... which is the result of me trying to use the COREBlog category links for Technorati tagging. As described in the Using Technorati Tags page, all one has to do is insert rel="tag" into the link and link to any web page where the URL ends in that tag. Normal COREBlog category links end in "categorylist_html?cat_id=#" which gives those stupid tags. Now I fixed that for me, so hopefully my stuff will be properly tagged in Technorati soon...

Winter-Traum, Sommer-Temperaturen

Nachdem der Frühling dieses Jahr mit zwei ungewöhnlich kühlen Wochen hervorstach, sind jetzt die richtigen Temperaturen - ab in die 30er! - in Athen angekommen. Die Hitze machte mir erstmal zu schaffen, denn normalerweise kann ich mich durch den Frühling akklimatisieren. Heute morgen, ich hab gerade auf den Bus gewartet, machte es plötzlich "klick" und die Temperatur machte mir nichts mehr aus. Mal sehen, ob das so bleibt.

Mixmaster Revisited

While Tor writes about the weather in England, and the OpenBSD developers freeze their butts off (at 4 degrees Celsius) at the hackathon in Canada, over here I sit in front of the computer in shorts and without a T-Shirt on. It's hot. I'm not so sure this this world needs all that heat, with all the global surveillance etc. going on already (NSA wiretappings, wiretappings in Greece, data retention in the EU, putting people who disclose security vulnerabilities into the "criminal" drawer, ...) So I'm reading up on your basic cypherpunk privacy tools. Having a look at mixmaster especially, the mixmaster anonymous remailer network, and the apparently dead or frozen invisiblog.com anonymous blog platform...

Mix Some More... Mixminion

In my search for knowledge about Mixmaster, I discovered the successor to the anonymous remailer software: Mixminion. Mixminion is what they call a "Type III" remailer, whereas Mixmaster is Type II. The minion is trying to solve some of the problems with the old system. Even though it is still in alpha stage, it already solves one of my big problems with the old software, Mixminion is already much easier to use in some respects. For one thing it is smart enough to download the necessary stat files itself, also it's much easier to compile.