Category: General

Just a general category

Discovering the roads of Nicosia

Being a person from Limassol, I just hate the way of roads organized in Nicosia. Everything is so bloody complicated and non-logical for me, but due to the fact that I have to travel to Nicosia four times a week, I have to find out a way to survive.

Until recently I was just taking main roads in order not to get lost, but this takes a lot of time, especially in the mornings when there is a lot of traffic. The solution was to use Google Maps which has a quite nice picture of the Nicosia, to find the ways which are not used a lot. I managed to save 5-10 minutes of driving by leaving highway somewhere near Tseri village. This road seams to be nice, but on the map I found an even shorter way, avoiding another long way of main roads. I tried to get to this road for the past two trips, but each time I was getting lost, making a round of 30 km in Nicosia suburbs, but I think today I have finally find the right path which allows to leave highway near Tseri and go directly to the road I need (I am going to Intercollege which is somewhere near Strovolos area).

Finally got to ski

I used to ski a lot when I was in Russia, but since I left it almost 6 years ago, I had only one attempt to ski a couple of years ago, but that one wasn\’t that good since I had to rent the ski equipment (which was very bad condition) and so on and so forth.

This Thursday, Michael had brought me all my equipment from Moscow (thanks to him for bringing the stuff and to my mom for preparing everything before shipment), so I decided to go up to the Troodos mountains and have some fun.

First, on Saturday, Lana, Olga and me went there and found out that there were some problems with electricity, which was fixed around lunch time. The session was rather short, but was enough for me to remember the skiing basics and for Lana to get into skiing.

Sunday we went with Michael joining all of us. We were a bit late and the session was also kinda short, but Lana continued with getting onto skiing, Olga tried skiing as well (and she also liked it) while Michael chose the snow board and also joined the snow fan company.

I have the photos here (more of them are coming), though it is kinda hard to take a camera with you while skiing. Anyway, I hope we will continue with skiing in this nice company of people during weekends. Thanks to Lana for driving us with her 4wd car, it wouldn\’t be possible to make skiing otherwise ;)

Status update

It\’s been a while since I last posted here and I don\’t feel like posting something huge here this time, so here is just a short life update:

  • Wrote all college exams (4 of them):
    • Artificial Intelligence – this is the only exam I feel like I failed. The subject is really boring, the teaches does not seems to be confident in the topic, exams were prepared by other professor who is very good in subject and probably did not consider that (as I believe) we were taught not in the best way. In addition the class is kinda boring. As I have concluded – it is like maths for me, but while in maths I know that I am totally stupid, here you think for the whole semester that the class goes fine and at the end you find yourself unbelievable stupid.
    • Software Engineering – this one went fine. A class is very boring and implies a lot of bureaucracy related to IEEE standards, but I think I managed it quite good mostly because IEEE has a lot in common with ISO stuff which I know not that bad.
    • Computer Architecture and Organization – went very easy because the amount of information given was very limited and a lot of it came out of previously passed Digital Systems.
    • Object Oriented Programming (based on Java) – went pretty good as well due to some programming experience I have as well as familiarization with many programming languages. One more time proved to myself that Java is not what I like – Perl is the best.
  • Preparing for the next semester – need to pay quite an amount of money for the college but already have some options. Thanks to all people who help me in this matter.
  • Learning AJAX technology and have a post about it on configfun.com here.
  • Preparing for the visit to immigration :( Hate this part of being in Cyprus, but have no other ways yet.
  • Planning to go for skiing one day into Troodos where there is some snow already. Hopefully my skiing equipment will be delivered to Cyprus by a friend of mine who is now in Moscow.