MPJ

My first encounter with Intelligence Quotient, aka IQ, was 25 years ago during my preliminary exam for the mandatory military service. In those years Serbia was part of a former socialist federation of Yugoslavia along with couple of more countries and avoiding army service was impossible. Everybody had to go to serve the "time" for one whole year and they used those preliminary tests to better fit you into suitable unit and doing a form of an IQ test was part of it. They didn't give us the result, but I probably did it pretty well since they put me to be main operator of a ground-to-ground missile unit. At least my little bit higher intelligence than average "soldier" spared me from the mud, dirt, long marches, carrying heavy weaponry and other meaningless activities of the service. So I spent most of the time in a classroom surrounded with state of the art simulators, playing video games made specially for practicing real time guidance of the missile in simula

I read about a man once, and I honestly couldn't remember who he was, but in the nutshell he returned from the tourist trip with tons of photos and when his friends asked him why he didn't upload them online yet, he said that he needed to enrich them with words first, otherwise they would be just a pile of nice colored moments taken in time and saying very little or nothing at all about the trip and all the sites he visited. The same is with me and the same truth goes with videos as well. Let me be honest about watching other people videos online and browsing private photos uploaded to social media - I am simply not impressed with many of them, because they lack the story. With me, there is no point of uploading a nicely taken photo of you and your friends in front of some historic place or monument and explain nothing about where were you, why were you taking that photo or without saying little something about the place itself. With videos it goes even further - filming a Yo

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 read a little while ago an article by one of the pretty well-known Serbian filmmaker, which was also known by couple of rewards from Cannes and other European movie festivals from the past. His article was titled with "How's gonna start the third world war" and even though I hinted what it might be inside I started reading it expecting something rational and smart. To be honest, I couldn't read it to the end due to the feeling that my intelligence was started being insulted not too far away from the intriguing title. You can find the link below if you are really eager to read it, but in the nutshell, this is one of those stories made by the guys who lost their compass on the way and think they know everything better than the others. In the article, when he started accusing Hollywood industry in general for taking the role of new cold war propaganda machinery, I couldn't get rid of the image from the past when he was wearing a tuxedo on several occasions eagerly

Have you ever thought about the most common software application installed on your computerized devices in your home? Is it some super tuned operating system you can't live without? Or is it some sort of office application you use to write, make presentations and connect with your friends and business acquaintances? Maybe it is your favorite browser you are using on daily bases to connect to your social network? Or some photo gallery application with tons of your digital photos and video clips? Perhaps it is some Skype-like communication device that is always within reach? Whatever it is, and depending on who you ask, I am more than positive that there are no unique answers. Microsoft's HoloLens I am sure everybody knows (?) why they are so fused to computer screen(s) these days, but in our case there is no doubt. In total sum of our digital home appliances that can be found on various desktops or fit nicely in our backpacks or pockets, the most dominant cross-computer

Moon travels around the Earth in elliptical orbit and logically there are two points in its path where it is closest and farthest from us. Today it was in "perigee-syzygy" of the Earth-Moon-Sun system or simply called "supermoon". Coincidentally, it happens that today it has the power to fully block the sunlight in northern Europe and made the biggest shadow one can do on Earth. In Serbia it only made partial eclipse covering somewhat less than 50% of the Solar disk. These are 12 photos I took in intervals of approximately 10 minutes from eclipse start at 9:40 until it went away around 11:58. The biggest shade was at 10:48. We were pretty lucky today since the nature gave us clear sky with just one stubborn cloud that covered the Sun-Moon kiss around 11AM. Above image is the composition of those 12 photos which I took through our Sky-Watcher telescope with solar filter. I still don't have proper camera or adapter for taking astronomical photos so I used

Do you ever wonder why we work like we work? Why working time lasts those eight hours and why takes the best part of the day? Who made it this way? And why? It all started with industrial revolution in early 19th century which culminated into real nightmare for most of workers, especially in large factories, where long working hours were mandatory and kept people outside their homes all day long. The working day was 10 to 16 hours, six days a week and not only for adults. Use of children was cheap and preferable. Deaths and illnesses from exhaustion were common and it was cruel and inhuman. Eventually, the nightmare spread from workers toward capitalists as well, in form of rise of social movement with Robert Owen's famous slogan " Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest ". Well, today, almost two centuries later, we now live, more or less, in Owen's vision, work around eight hours per day and enjoy our lives during the work or after. Or bot

The road this summer took us approximately 700km south to the Greek second large island of Evia (Εύβοια). Starting from this year we decided to leave Macedonian Greece and start spending our vacations and visiting other regions of the country and this southern part of the Balkans. Our vacation resort was located only about 100km from the spot where famous 'Battle of Thermopylae' took place and where in late summer of 480 BC, king Leonidas of Sparta confronted large army of Persian Empire lead by Xerxes the Great, who was trying to occupy ancient Greece in Persian second attempt. The Greeks was vastly outnumbered and faced with imminent collapse after the betrayal during the second day of battle, Leonidas dismissed majority of his army and in the most famous last stand, remained to guard the narrow pass of Thermopylae only with 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans. We all know what happened next. At least many of you saw the movie and although it was diverted from the re

"Summertime and the livin' is easy..." sang Ella Fitzgerald back in 1957 with tremendous help of one of the kind crispy voice of legendary Louis Armstrong. Even though the most famous lullaby ever, written by Ira and George Gershwin for the "Porgy and Bess" opera from the thirties of 20th century, is not really about the hottest season and happiness per se, one thing is for sure - whatever you do, summertime is definitely the period of year when everything is smooth and nothing dramatic is happening.. At least nothing intentionally. Pure R&R. Even the work hours are passing by somehow easy and without big turbulence. Humphrey Bogart in 'The Maltese Falcon'* As for me, ever since I decided to go low with my social online life, after just couple of weeks I noticed positive change in my daily routine. The feeling was almost like solving addiction of some kind and even comparable to the past when I said definite goodbye to cigarettes after leavin

In the past couple of years, every now and again I was uploading video clips to the YouTube that I made either for the blog intentionally or for some other "publishing" reasons and I've just realized that they piled up to the number big enough I can safely pronounce almost two dozens of them today to their public status and officially publish them. It's not really that big "contribution" to the video community but still here they are. Hopefully some of you would find them inspirational and interesting. If you do, following is the home page of the official channel where you can subscribe for the future or contribute with new YouTube community social features. Milan's Public Journal YouTube Channel Similar to the blog's threads and for better classification of all videos within the channel I created several playlists and filled them with videos of mutual theme or place or event. One of latest video files, the short movie Viktor and I made this su

Approximately 15 years ago I was working as a lab assistant in the programming department of micro assembly and object oriented languages within " College of Applied Technical Sciences " in Niš, Serbia. I was engaged with all five semesters and was teaching students from their freshman year to the graduation and every now and again, along with board of professors, I was asked to attend their final exams followed by sort of social celebration in form of small festivity with table full of food and drinks. On one such occasion, student who came from Pirot, one of the biggest cities of eastern Serbia, asked us if we ever tried before a sausage called "vitamin bomb" which, he said, was one of the oldest delicacies from the region he came from. I spotted that one of the professors, who was actually known that he tried almost everything when it came to food and drinks, started nodding his head but it was clear that the rest of us heard it for the first time. Stude

In our part of the world summer vacation is the most important one for most people. There are several reasons for this and probably the major one is that during July and August in this part of western Balkans, where we live, temperatures can go as high as 45C (113F) degrees and the obvious solution is to pack your bags, jump into the car and go to one of four nearby seas for couple of weeks to cool and enjoy (and also to change the everyday scenery and recharge your inner batteries which are always seriously depleted when summers come). Due to the shortest distance and good roads Greece is probably the best destination for a car trip to the seaside that takes less than 10 hours of drive. Unfortunately this is one of few routes for all those " gastarbeiter " people who mainly work in Germany and other western countries and during summers form very long river of vehicles toward their home destinations in Turkey and other countries. When they hit borders along the way thi