MPJ

The age of this blog is both old, in a sense of fast maturing of internet and IT technology in general, but also very young if we are counting human age in old fashion way. When we first visited Thassos island dozen of years before, internet and social sharing technology were about to enter their unstable teenage years, so to speak. It was the time when I bought my first digital camera, HP PhotoSmart C850 with it's state of the art optics and digital technology from the time. Pictures from Thassos back then in the summer of 2003 were probably my first attempt to take more artistic landscapes from our Greece vacations and today is perhaps the time to compare both what changes in photography gadgets and also with Thassos itself after full 12 years. Let's start with images first. After 12 years in time distance, I decided to choose the same number of images for this post - half of them shown above, all taken with HP Photosmart C850 with 4 megap

I remember that scene from the movie "The Blues Brothers" with Jake and Elwood hiding from who-knows-who in the super tiny apartment next to skytrain or railway tracks, shaking every now and again and every time when a train is passing by the neighborhood. I always felt sympathy for all those people who are actually living next to those high trafficking high or rail ways with heavy tremors in the air in form of high decibels of various noises all around them. Guess what? Our own neighborhood is now getting similar feeling. Actually, similar is understatement. It is way worse. The new tracks are placed just couple of dozens of meters above our house. In recent months and years, the local airport are getting more and more traffic and the runway position is actually crossing our street almost to the single angle. I couldn't do much about it except to took the camera as soon as I heard the noise and 'shot' their underbellies. So here are couple of those taken in previ

It was May 20th of the 1883rd year of AD when people living in Dutch East Indies, back then in 19th century, started to feel more intense earthquakes and to spot first steam venting out of one of three volcanic cones, just above the powerful caldera in today's Indonesian archipelago of Krakatoa. In the following days of May eruptions started from the one of volcano peaks and after a week or so calmed down only to issue a warning for what would come in following months. What started happening on June 16th and culminating in August 27th is now well known as the most massive and powerful volcano eruption in the documented history of mankind. William Ascroft's pastel sky-sketches* The eruptions were so powerful that the most intense explosion was heard all the way down in Perth, Australia, which is almost 3000km south of Krakatoa. On the west, across the Indian ocean, people located almost 5000km on the islands not far away from Madagascar thought it was cannon fire from n

I have a small challenge for you in a form of a quick quiz question: You must use just one word in order to describe following paragraph: "You sleep in small rooms with other people usually on bank-beds and everyday you must get up and be out of bed exactly at 5 hundred hours and go outside to do physical exercises where you are usually forced to sing songs with no significant meanings. Three times a day you wait in line in order to eat or you don't get any food. You have to wear the same clothing like all others, take weekly showers in large mutual bathrooms and in other parts of the day you have to work on assigned jobs or learn how to survive fight with other people similar to you." I don't know but I've been told So what is it? I am sure there are several words with different meanings that easily fits the description but in relation to what I am going to write in this post the chosen word is: The Army. In this particular case, there is no room for a

Last week was very exiting on the global scale regarding everlasting anti-piracy war. Only this time, instead of real criminals somebody else could really suffer. Somebody like Wikipedia for example. The whole activity raises more questions now and maybe the biggest one is who was the real target with this SOPA and PIPA last week and who was really responsible? Well, I have no doubts about that. It's the politics and politicians. With vast number of parliaments, congresses, senates or whatever these institutions are named in worldwide democracies, the biggest background activity known as political lobby will always be there. This works really simple, you have money and you want some law to be established to expand your business even more? Not a problem, just hire some advocacy firm to lobby your goal and over time, if you are persistent enough you will succeed - politicians belong to those people who "change their minds" easily. They don't really care if somebo

Back in 2008, Google organized conceptual contest named "Project 10^100". The primary goal of the project was to select ideas that are capable to change the World on a global scale. The period of the change had to be 2 years, so the idea needed to be radical and yet plausible. I was thinking that inventing something completely new could be waste of time as nothing new unless it is truly breakthrough is capable of achieving anything in such short period of time, so the only way was to radically change something already in works on a global scale. So, I thought of democracy. Why not? It's the old system with long rusty roots almost unchanged in past millennium and more and I finally submitted the idea that would eventually get rid of politicians by using a voting system that would replace parliaments with the technology and politicians with ordinary people. Anyway, here is the RDS idea of mine exactly the same as submitted back in 2008.  I am sure this way or another it w