MPJ

Have you ever thought about first ever practiced team sport on a grand scale? Perhaps, like mine, your first thought could be some competition within ancient Olympic games, right? Well, no, old Greeks didn't like team sports at all - instead their first athletes competed within what we consider today as individual sports or disciplines. Boxing, racing, running, jumping, wrestling, throwing and similar individual competitions or fighting. However, on the other end of the world and perhaps in the more or less the same time, ancient Chinese practiced sport competition just the same and during the Han Dynasty around 3rd century BC it was documented a game that resembles very much to modern football or soccer if you will. It was called Tsu'Chu with kicking the ball in the field in the team effort and with the goal of putting the ball in the net. But perhaps millennium before Tsu'Chu, on the third ancient continent, the origin of another modern sport was invented first and it was

It was different when I was 5th grader in many ways. Learning how to code was not in the realm of elementary schools back then. Computers were simply too large and expensive for kids to play with and having a good teacher who knew programming languages was rarity. So I was in a bit of a blur when I pressed "P" key on, my first, just unboxed, brand new and state of the art, Sinclair ZX Spectrum  keyboard with amazing 16KB of RAM memory. It reacted immediately and at the bottom of the large home TV, it said "PRINT" followed with blinking black square cursor. "2+2" I added and hit "ENTER". It was like magic seeing "4" printed on the screen next instant. The magic of course was not in the correct number. It was rather in the unworldly feeling I got that exact moment of what would come next. What I could command it to do. It was like I found the door of the amazing new world and the door started to open wide! Soon later I learned more, esp

It happened long ago, in the dark ages of CRT monitors, when I first received a short forum message with :-) at the end. I stared at the message for a long minute(s) before giving up of decoding its meaning. It came from a well respected friend of mine so I responded with short reply: "What!?" "You have to turn your screen 90 degrees clockwise." Answer came promptly. My CRT was large and heavy and it looked way too dangerous to tilt it that way so after little brainstorming the problem, I concluded there's a better way of achieving the same goal. I tilted my head 90 degrees anticlockwise. "Aaaaaah!!!" I said promptly and after realising the picture, big smile on my face slowly morphed into loud laughter. So I typed back: "Wow!" I didn't have to wait long for the next message: "LOL!" "What!?" - I quickly copy/pasted my earlier message but realised I was too not informed about new internet fashion so I

History of motion pictures dates back to the second part of the 19th century with photographers like Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge who among others were the first to take several images per second in one effort - all in scientific purpose back then - to study locomotion of birds, animals and humans. For example, Muybridge was the first who took series of photographs of a galloping horse in order to prove that in one single instant of time all four horse legs are not touching the ground. More or less in the same time on another continent, Marey created a shotgun shaped camera capable with one trigger pull to capture 12 images in a row within one single second and store them all on the single 90mm film. He used his gun to study various motion of animals, fish and insects within his so called 'animated zoo', including dropped cats from different heights and filming them always landing on their feet. ELMO Super 106, 8mm movie camera It was not long after initia

I do have regrets. Everybody does. One is that I was born before the Internet and possibility to be worldwide and online when I was young. To be able to expand my own neighborhood outside the front yard fence. Well, on second thought, that is not entirely true - sometimes I feel the opposite and there is no real regret. Childhood without networking and computers was not that bad at all. As it seems, the word 'outdoor' for me and my son today has almost completely different meaning. Without the almighty Internet, and it is not too hard to imagine - boredom in my time was easily experienced indoors and to break it fully you would have to go outside. It was as simple as that. But without this habit of mine, blogging to be exact, I think I lost many things from my childhood as well. Tangible things. Like all of my еssay exams from the school. I lost all of them. It's not that they were that good or something. Just, if I had Internet back then I would most likely wrote some

People are asking me these days what is "Game of Life" we are dealing with this whole summer? The only honest answer I can give is that I don't really know. I guess I lost myself into entire story of our pioneer film making project. It started like any other father-son benign tech play - it was sometime back in the middle of April when I was categorizing our pile of ordinary family video files and our 'cooking series' so in a moment of 'light bulb floating above my head' I asked myself why we don't move one step further and create a little longer short film of some sort. So I asked Viktor and he seemed thrilled about it, especially when I told him that he would play the major role and from there our "Game of Life" project became reality and started growing and morphing into real short movie and after little while began being more and more enjoyable and serious. In short, after four months of all of our 'Hollywood' efforts, Viktor a

Have you ever thought about what is the major waste of time in everybody's lifespan? I am not talking about lost time you made by choosing bad movie or book. Nor about spending months in company of incompatible people or within single relationship with no spark of good chemistry. I am not even thinking about wasting years within poorly chosen school or job. No. There is one more, even worse time-waste we all are experiencing no matter who we are or where we come from. On daily basis. I am referring to one simple thing we are all taking for granted. Sleeping. Something we do for eight or so strait hours every night. No exceptions. Something we do by design of nature. Now, currently, in this very century, if we are talking about lifespan globally, it is estimated to be around 70 years in average. Someplace little more, other places little less, depending on quality of life within our societies. Well, if you ask me and considering enormous vastness of the universe in both space and ti

I don't think anybody can be characterized with just one word. Not until you actually meet somebody to the core and connect with true friendship. Maybe not even then. People change over time. Slightly, but they do. For instance, when you spot a big bald guy with large tattoo on his neck, wearing a blackish uniform, heavily armed, working as a guard or something with a face on a first glance telling you that you should avoid any conflict with him at any hour, don't judge him just yet. He might be thinking how he hates his job and can't wait to get home and continue reading some poem about early Buddhism or good bestseller novel about love and adventure. For that matter, don't make any assumption about a nice and well dressed guy with great manners and perfect vocabulary. He could be a psychopath perfectly capable of fooling any lie detector driven by his emotionless life. It's simple, you can do what I do, never believe your eyes or first impression. In order to ful

There is a mountain just couple of kilometers south of our weekend house that is actively blocking our view toward unknown and beyond. It is not too big, just about one kilometer high, rounded in shape, overgrown in surrounding forests with large plains on the top. In the past, from the years of my early childhood till today I had different feelings about that mountain. First, it was the real edge of the world when I thought there was nothing behind. Then I grew into my teen ages when I unsuccessfully wanted to conquer it and plant a flag on the biggest rock of the highest peek possible. When that was over I dreamed about living there in a forest shack in sort of utopian kind of equilibrium with nature itself. There was a time when I just hated it for blocking my nightly sky from the southern constellations and galactic center lying somewhere in the direction of Sagittarius and Scorpius. Now, I only want to pay her a visit someday and see how mountain was looking at me all those years