Make that smoker suffer!

Smoking is bad. It's very bad. Naughty naughty naughty smoker. Tut tut.


There's a new smoking policy in England since the 1st of July. Smoking is prohibited from all public places. That includes bars, pubs, clubs, halls of residence ... actually any closed space in England. It is against the law to smoke virtually everywhere except outside. It's a policy with good intentions. If you are not a smoker you do not have to stand the smoke coming from a table next to you. If you also take into account the fact that about 500 people die due to passive smoking every year (which is a statistic that I'm quite interested to find out how it was obtained nevertheless), I completely understand this and I am willing to follow this rule in spite of the fact that it makes me enjoy having a drink much less.

Of course this policy applies to my hall of residence. It is now ILLEGAL to smoke in your room. Again, I am willing to have my smoke outside. I am about to quit anyway.


Just to make it clear, it is ENGLAND that we are talking about. The rainiest place on earth. The place where it rains daily regardless of the month. In my hall of residence, there is a small shelter right outside my block. This is where smokers smoke when it is raining (at least the smokers that do not wish to catch pneumonia). Today I just saw an announcement from the warden saying that due to the fact that smoke comes through the windows of some residents' flats, smokers now should be standing at least five meters from their block entrance. Yeah, that's right: In the rain! For your information: Due to insurance policy, the vast majority of the flats' windows are not allowed to be wide open, but rather approximately 15 centimeters. The half of your computer screen (if not even less).



Okay, I've stated that I am in favor of the whole anti-smoking movement in England right now. Just because of this kind of behavior, however, I feel obliged to revolt! Before applying for my residence, I was asked whether I was a smoker or not. Just like all the other smokers, I replied positively, which means that the Hall management was aware of the smoker's percentage (which judging from the number of Greeks here in Manchester, could not be low). I am not asking for special treatment, I am asking for consideration. There might be a point in trying to save someone from lung cancer by giving him pneumonia, but this "lesser of two evils" policy is just stupid.

I took it out of my system. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a date with pneumonia.

Football Evolving

Football has changed throughout the years. It started as a hobby and became a profession. It evolved to become a means of expression for a group of people. It grew larger to become an expression of a whole country. Today, football is as commercialized as no other sport globally. Typical example of that is the recent transfer of David Beckham to L.A. Galaxy. In spite of the relatively low popularity of the sport in the States, Europe is on a constant update of the Englishman's status. Is he injured? Did he score? How was his training?

Europe is the land of promise for football today. The Champions League, the Premiership, La Liga - they're all markets with a lot of profit margin, something that has led a lot of businesses to hugely invest in European markets. This has both helped football evolve and not. It has helped it evolve by allowing clubs invest in their youth academies, build beautiful stadiums and improve hugely the experience of watching a football match. However, due to the amount of money at stake, there are a lot of cases where games become boring. Teams tend to follow more the Italian model of football: Score a goal and then just defend. Many people have condemned this, but my opinion is that there's nothing you can do, so just enjoy what you get.


But what happens when this attitude moves to areas and competitions that have always been about performance rather than result?

I recently watched the Copa America. A competition where the latin style of play is adopted by all participating teams resulting in beautiful spectacle. To be honest I was surprised by the teams' open style of playing and every game I was was exciting. All but the final.

Being a game between Brazil and Argentina, two nations whose rivalry has lived throughout the years, I expected to see something at least equivalent to (if not even better than) the games I had watched so far. I was wrong.

Brazil was missing their two great stars (Ronaldinho and Kaka') so some young players were brought in the pitch. Simply thinking, youngsters playing in a Copa America final would normally help the spectacle since they all would want to prove themselves in the typical Brazilian type of playing. Again I was wrong.

Brazil came in the pitch in a fully-defensive formation. They were marking as good as Italians and just relied on counter attacks to score. The game ended 3-0 for Brazil and all 3 goals came from counter attacks. Needless to say, only Argentina was trying to play creatively, but they were being blocked by the double layer of Brazilian defense. If that was a European Cup final, I would not complain. That's a style that Europeans tend to play. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. However, it was Brazil who was playing. A country notorious about its creative style and exciting dribbling.

Now, two days later, I watched an under-19 game between Greece and Spain. The group standings were such that if they drew, both teams progressed to the next round regardless of what happened in the other game of the group. In spite of their young age, the game's second half must have been less exciting than an accountant's daily schedule. Needless to say, the game ended 0-0.

If football has come to a point where the result is everything and everything else is sacrificed in favor of the final result, even in competitions of lower standards, then we are walking down a strange road. I do not know whether this will be very good for both the winning teams or the sport itself. Unless something is done, the next evolution of football will not be very popular...

Communication! Communication! Communication!

When Tony Blair first became Prime Minister of Britain, in one of his first speeches he underlined his administration's goal to improve British education by his (in)famous motto "Education! Education! Education!". Apparently, according to his judgement, British education was something that dragged the country down.

If I consider my work/school/university environment as my area of administration and decide to improve things that would be one: "Communication! Communication! Communication!".

I consider myself to be clever. Not "cleverly" clever, but "stupidly" clever. A "cleverly" clever person is one who is able to judge "on-the-fly" ideas and propositions and assess whether or not he is capable of executing what has been proposed. He is able to schedule his workload in such way as not to have to overload at any point. A "stupidly" clever person is one who believes that sky's the limit for him and will accept anything offered to him without hesitating. "Hey, how hard can it be?". He ends up working 24/7 just because he wasn't smart enough to pre-schedule.

I believe this to be one of my greatest flaws and assets at the same time. I will take on anything only to find myself baffled in between projects trying to keep up with my schedule and not let anyone down. On the majority of the cases, I (and my projects) have survived this kind of situations without putting my reputation in jeopardy (and maybe even building it even more).

Today I realised that apart from a "stupidly" clever person, I am also a bad communicator. 50 days before submitting my dissertation, yesterday I e-mailed my supervisor regarding my progress so far. Apparently I did it in such a vague manner that the reply I received had me scratching my head puzzled. My supervisor was under the impression that I was far behind schedule and spent two whole paragraphs explaining to me terms in my dissertation that even someone remotely relevant to the subject is aware of (i.e. speaker IDENTIFICATION as in "the task of defining who the speaker is" VS speaker VERIFICATION as in "verifying that the claimed speaker is actually who he claims he is") and subtly urging me to be a bit faster.

When I read the whole correspondence between me and my supervisor I realised what the whole misunderstanding was about. So what I did was spend a whole hour to precisely define what I have done without using abbreviations and try to show him that I have not been slacking around but working my a$$ out lately. It was then when he replied saying that I am actually on a good way and pointed out some hints about what to do next.

You must be able to COMMUNICATE what exactly you have been doing in a project. Show off if you must. Market yourself and pay a little more attention to how you COMMUNICATE what you have been doing. As David Brent (played in a unique manner by Ricky Gervais) in "the Office" once said: "A company runs on efficiency of communication". At the end of the day if you are not able to COMMUNICATE in today's world, you are bound to build bad reputation or worse. So there you have it: COMMUNICATION! COMMUNICATION! COMMUNICATION!

Keep your utilities close and your users closer.

As I have mentioned before, I am working for the network team of the University. It is not the most exciting job, but at some points trying to figure out what's wrong with the user's PC can be as interesting as traveling to the moon. The last user could not browse with her IE, but could connect with her Skype account. Visiting the user, I had the suspicion that checking her settings and firewall would do the trick. I was very wrong, however. Her computer (an XP machine by the way) was running about 20 applications at start-up, was incredibly slow and did not allow commands given in command line to be executed (ipconfig /all, ping etc). Wanting just to see if it is an IE-related problem, I disabled the firewall, installed Firefox and tried to run it. It did not however run. My next easy step was to install my favorite antivirus program and run a full system scan. This took me about 40 minutes. 40 boring minutes where we both tried to break the silence with smalltalk. The user told me that she had recently visited Cyprus, by the way ("beautiful country"). When the scan was finished, so was the awkwardness. The results however troubled me. Not a single virus found. Once the computer restarted I gave the firewall rules a thorough inspection. Nothing weird found there. I ran firefox and this time not only it ran, it also allowed browsing. That's were it hit me. It turned out that when the user had visited Cyprus, she was given a proxy in order to browse. She had meticulously hidden this fact from me. Naughty user. I restored this setting and she was ready to go. Everything running as smoothly as an overloaded XP machine can handle. Total time taken: 50 minutes of which wasted: 40.

At the end of the day, all that matters is correct communication with the user. Our whole conversation was around her skype account and the potential viruses she might have gathered rather than the last time she had to "change something as small as 4 numbers in a box"...

Note to self: Both MSN messenger and Yahoo messenger uses the "Internet Setiings's Proxy server", while Skype does not. That's bad for Skype. Even if it has a Proxy settings pane in it menu, it should all be centralized.

Think Different

I am what you call "Apple-fanatic". I am in the "cult of Mac". I am one of those who'll spend hours arguing with you about what is better: a Mac or a PC.

My whole adventure with Apple started about 2.5 years ago. I was leaving for Iceland as an exchange student and I had to get a laptop to do my work when at home. Until then I was a "PC-fanatic". Not having used a Mac in my whole life, I was under the common impression that only artists would use a Mac, that it would be a pain in the a** to connect it to a network, that compatibility issues must be in the daily agenda etc. A friend of mine that had been somehow lured into the world of Macs introduced me to his iBook. It was a 12-inch G4 PowerPC running OS X Panther. The first thing that I thought when I saw it was "God it's beautiful". Just comparing the look and feel of a Mac running OS X to a PC running Windows XP (I've heard that this also applies to Vista, but I haven't seen the latest MS OS, so I'm not going to comment) makes you think how had you been using the Windows machine without injuring your eyes somehow.

I have to admit I was very skeptical at the beginning. "What about office?", "What about firefox?", "What about development?", "What about games?". The only question that wasn't completely satisfied by the answer it received was the last one. OS X has it's own version of Microsoft Office, OS X has the fastest browser called Safari, but firefox and Camino are also available. With the exception of .net, any major IDE has an OS X version plus OS X has XCode built-in. Games was an issue regarding Mac, but a number of the most popular games were being ported for OS X (mainly by Aspyr).

I have to admit I was feeling like gambling when I decided to buy my iBook. After using it for 2 years I was completely satisfied, except for the times when I wanted to play certain games and I found out that they were not ported for Mac.

2 months ago I bought my second laptop. My second Mac. A MacBook Pro. Now THIS is 100% satisfaction. Thanks to BootCamp, I have installed Windows. A move that when I completed felt like betraying my own beliefs. Now, a month later, I have all I could ever ask from a laptop:

1. Battery that lasts up to 5 hours (when working with OS X)
2. The most advanced OS (OS X)
3. The ability to boot with Windows and run that game/application that hasn't been yet ported for Mac

I could go into details (which I'd love to) and point out the advantages and disadvantages of having a Mac, but I'd lose my point: be flexible, think different. That's what matters

Singing in the rain...

Okay, seriously, what's wrong with this weather? What's wrong in Manchester?


Before proceeding you should lookup the definition of Oxymoron. Once you have thoroughly understood what oxymoron means, go ahead and see this table about the weather in Manchester. In case you do not spot the oxymoron in this table, I urge you to take a look at August. August (along with July)is the hottest month of the year with temperature between 19 and 12. On the other hand, if you take a closer look, August is also the wettest month of the year (along with October). Following this pattern, July is the third wettest month of the year (along with December).

One might think that there is something wrong with the statistics, but this is happening and it is very weird seeing it actually happen. The temperature here is quite good. You do not feel cold, you can go out wearing just a cardigan with no problem. However, it is always cloudy. If you are lucky, you might see the sun for a couple of hours once a week, but be prepared to endure a rainy afternoon. It will definitely rain at some point in the day, so pray not to be caught coming back from buying groceries when that happens!

A pointless week...

I have to say the last days have passed quite fast. Most of the gang left yesterday or are leaving today, so everyone has been throwing a farewell party. I -on the other hand- do not intend either to throw a party or leave for Athens. I do not think that going to Athens will help my dissertation, which has a lot of work to be done and has been my main concern for about two weeks now. Seeing the sun for a change and spending more than 4 hours without getting soaked up in the rain would be a nice change but while picking dissertation topics I was wise enough to choose a topic for which I had no initial knowledge of...

I will go to Ibiza, however! Me and some mates that are not going to Greece decided to take a 1-week break from working and have some fun. Hopefully everything will be as good as I imagine it.