just trying to hold on

2 more days, or less. till my final exam for this summer, which will judge whether i have 2 or 3 exams left for september.

honestly, i am not well prepared, but am in a state of optimism for the time being. and seriously i am not on drugs, though what i am saying makes no sense at all (never have been a fan of drugs anyway). but well, the fact that i have taken the exam again in the past might also help in having some success...

one thing that keeps me going is the fact that after friday i have 2 months of sheer freedom (in the sense of what my military service leaves for me of course) with lots of things happening. going to NL, reading books again and not theoretical crap about accounting and economy, swimming, generally relaxing and preparing for my (hopefully) last exam period in september and my triumphant exit from the army in november.

after friday, things will be going my way. but until then i have to struggle a bit more, just to get one more subject out of the way. no guts, no glory. lets see the end result of it. friday is the day.

on insecurity

"If men as individuals surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for their own selves, the result for them all taken together must be a state of INSECURITY, of fear, and of promiscuous misery." - Albert Einstein

what makes the news

1. I AM going to NL! My permit arrived in camp these days. Trip booked, ticket to be purchased tomorrow. July 12th (morning) to 17th (evening). Scheduled events: u2 on the 13th, AI transition party on Saturday the 16th, a lot of catching up with friends during all the days. If you happen to be in the neighboorhood, drop me an e-mail to meet up for a beer or 10.
2. I am not going to Turkey for Evrim's wedding. This is final, there is no time to apply for a supplementary permit go go abroad :(
3. I am off camp for the weekend - going to Athens for some fun :)

soon to post more :)

summer solstice, full moon and cost accounting...

...is a bad combination. the longest day of the year with the fullmoon was not the right day for me to take the cost accounting exam. My next chance: September.

I am going to bed now. Early wake up tmw (5:30) to be on time back in camp, and i haven't slept for 2 days. Let along the driving to and from Thessaloniki and the stress...

tribute to Megadeth

did you actually know that I was a big fan? Tonite they are playing live in Athens for the second time in history and it's the second out of 2 concerts I am missing. That makes 100%, you are right.

So it would be nice to mention a line from a song, which makes more sense than ever to me right now than it used to, 10 years ago:

"Military intelligence
2 words combined that can't make sense"
("Hangar 18", 1990)

countdown

I have been through 221 days in the army

That equals 60.55% of my entire military service

Remaining percentage of 39.45%, which equals more or less 3456 hours and approx 207360 minutes...

If my military service was a football game, we would be now playing through the 54th minute, 9th minute of the second half.

If it was mounting the castle of Palamidi in Nafplio, I would be on the 605th of 999 steps.

If I was climbing mt. Everest I would be at the 5351th out of 8839 metres of height.

If I was climbing the 101 Taipei skyscraper I would be on the 61st of 101 stories, on an average height of 307 out of 508 metres.

143 + today remaining days to complete my military service, 12 square, that is.

Now, i am only asking: is November 8th too close or too far?

Q & A

Q: what happens when you have important things that you cannot handle yourself but affect you directly and you ask for someone else to process but you can't really rely on them?
A: A big, big mess.

Thanks Matt for taking me out of the tax statement trouble! Owe you lots. Difficult to handle tax statements in the Netherlands when you are serving in the Greek army :)

all those moments

now this is where some people (esp. of Greek origin) come in and call me a robot, too literal, exaggerrating etc.

But have you ever thought of all those moments we loose in time doing trivial things or things we don't like which amount for a massive amount of time in our lives?

Let me give some examples:

• shaving
• being stuck in traffic
• being in the toilet
• tying your shoe laces
• waiting for your computer to boot, page to load etc.
• waiting for the elevator

i think you get the meaning by now. Now if you actually calculate all this time (of the special things that irritate you in some way) you kind of get crazy. For example during my military service i will have spent almost 3 days in tying shoe laces and dressing/undressing. 3 out of 365 is a percentage of 0.8% more or less. Almost 1 day within 100, that is...

This can get much worse if you calculate for example the hours that you sleep on a daily level. Of course this is controversial (one can claim that sleeping well allows for more energy for your everyday life) but well, i personally consider excessive sleep a waste of time, if you can cope with less. This has been my opinion for a long time, although i am not always able to sleep less than i actually do in the end. But i remember the joy it used to give me in highschool or even earlier (still does, as a matter of fact) to stay awake for the whole night and actually do something (read, clubbing, listen to music, anything at all) while everyone else is sleeping. Felt like gaining, reclaiming some extra time off my life. If only we could save just one hour off our daily sleep, the effect on our lives would eb amazing.

Of course it's not easy to rationalise everything anc calculate what we do for our entire lives. But it would be an interesting exercise to actually calculate the things that irritate us and try to skip the time we spend doing them. For instance, i am much troubled by traffic, and that's one of the primary reasons (well, never say never, but...) that I don't wanna spend my life in Athens, since my day would be smaller by 2 hours spent in traffic. Of course making use of the two hours you are stuck in traffic is also another topic to be looked up. Lots of things to do there as well...But being stuck in traffic for me decreases what i feel quality of life is to me.

Am i in the middle of a huge calculus to actually drive a concrete outcome out of all of this? No. I just got stuck in traffic today and was thinking about all this. But it would be worth making some calculations at some point in time, probably when in camp :)

isn't it a great feeling...

...when you fall asleep on the beach? I'm telling you it is, cos i experienced it today. Just losing the sense of time for a while can be amazing.

Cool weekend

Dimitris and Yianna
Originally uploaded by Dimitris Mazarakis.

So this was one of the coolest weekends since i got in the army. Friday and Saturday i had evenings off camp, and sunday i was on leave for a day.

Summary:
Friday: Went to Volos (115km north of Lamia) and had a cool time, chit chatted with Anna (was the maid of honor last year in my friend George's wedding). I very much enjoy that city since my childhood years. Unfortunately i couldn't stay for clubbing in the evening since in the morning i had to be back in camp.

Saturday: Went swimming. Went to Marianna's wedding, then at the wedding celebration till 2:30 am, then clubbing till 4:30 with Yianna, her sister and another friend. Hadn't done that for a long time and well, we had a very cool time!

Sunday: Most of the day sleeping, recovering from terrible hangover :), and generally just tidying up the house, setting my mind in order and what needs to be done for studying over the next week!

Next week's highlight: Going to Thessaloniki on the 20th for my exam!

Marianna's wedding

Marianna and Yianna
Originally uploaded by Dimitris Mazarakis.

Well, we only happen to meet in weddings with some old schoolmates! Marianna (on the left) got married yesterday. We have met, say, 10 times since we finished school in 1996. And Yianna, on the right - also schoolmate - i have only seen once in the past 9 years. Was a very cool evening!

Reading targets of the year

Only some of the few i ve' been wanting to read for a while, and might be interested in reading after July 1st (after my exams are done with, that is):

In English:

• the diary of a genious- Salvador Dali
• Ideas and opinions - Albert Einstein
• anything of William Blake poems
• The Group - Mary MCarthy
• Faster Parade - Richard Γειτς
• Little Brown book of anecdotes - Clifton Fadiman (1981)
• the monk who sold his ferrari (everyone but me has read it)
• culture of fear
• The end of history and the last man - Francis Fukuyama
• Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos - Ian Stewart

Greek books or books in Greek:

• To alfabhtari toy diabolou
• Mystikh Istoria
• Albatros - Swth Triantafyllou
• Ergostasio twn molybiwn
• Thewrhma toy papagalou

topics to read on, provided i find cool books related to them (more on the practical side):

• culture jamming
  Conspiracy Theory
• religions
• learning latin
• practical applications of statistics in our lives
• hostory of language/linguistics
• Astronomy
• Istoriki shmeiologia

Is it too much for 2005? If you have any cool suggestions on the last topics, just hop in!

surprising yet cool

How cool: my first cousin, who is also one of my two closest friends, just got in law school. Is this surprising? Yes.

Why?
1. We're the same age
2. He's already got a degree in psychology
3. He's already half way through his masters degree in crime psychology
4. Noone in the family knew he was taking exams for law school at all.

In other words, he's nuts (in a different sense than i am :-), he earned his success and deserves to do something big in the future!

Everything is possible, given that we are willing to put the rigth amount of effort. And this is one more chance for me to say that there is no standard path for life, studies, work that we should follow. Cos I see a lot of ppl mechanically moving from one stage to the next without stopping to think what suits them better, what they would like to do differently, how to move fwd...

Optimistic mood for the weekend :)

another ending

or is it a beginning?

Life never stops surprising me. Too personal and too long a story to mention on a blog. But yesterday I got some news that caused a reaction of mine i cannot quite describe. It's like a chapter, a great chapter, from my distant past closing. It was about time, most probably.

How does it feel? Surprising I even felt anything in the first place. Sad in a way. Refreshing, on the second day of processing the thought on my mind. Detaching oneself from the past can be quite good, even though you might not wanna do it at all in some cases. It's time to move on.

What was that line from Semisonic again? "Closing time: Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end".

[PS: sorry about the secretive mood. But the story itself doesn't matter anymore. It's years a way. What matters is the effect at this point in time, not the cause.]

quote of the day:

Experience is not what happens to you. It's what you do with what happens to you.

Experimental travel

one of the coolest concepts i stumbled upon lately. Read more about it on the link. The other cool thing i wanna do in the future is take the trans-siberian railway all the way to China. There is actually a friend of mine, crazy enough to join me. Planned date is July 2008 :)

swimming

is one more of these things i haven't been doing for the past few years and wanna do lots of this summer. Already went to the sea for the 2nd time this summer [and managed to scrub off a part of my ancle on a stone :P] and the feeling was great!

There were some dudes on the beach doing parachute-skiing (if there is such a name for the thing). Never seen itlive before, and decided i should have my camera with me next time, cos it's pretty spectacular! Well, who knows, maybe next time i will try it too :)

becoming a memory

It feels strange, i've been absent from so many things and friends' lives that i get the impression to a lot of people's mind i am not a real person anymore. Just a memory.

I hope i get the opportunity to discover the opposite soon.

Speed of Sound

My latest favourite by Coldplay - sure a lot of you already know it...Still sore I missed the concert in Werchter 2 years ago, but a few other cool people managed to go, like Zoe, Abhi, Mino!

How long before I get in?
Before it starts, before I begin?
How long before you decide?
Before I know what it feels like?
Where do, where do I go?
If you never tried, then you'll never know.
How long do I have to climb,
Up on this side of this mountain of mine?

Look up, I look up at night,
Planets are moving at the speed of light.
Climb up, up in the trees,
every chance that you get,
is a chance you seize.
How long am I gonna’ stand,
with my head stuck under the sand?
I’ll start before I can stop,
before I see things the right way up.

And all that noise, all that sound,
all these pieces that I have found.
And birds go flying at the speed of sound,
to show you how it all began.
Birds come flying from the underground,
if you could see it then you'd understand…

Ideas that you'll never find,
all the inventors could never design.
The buildings that you put up,
Japan and China all lit up.
The sign that I couldn't read,
or a light that I couldn't see,
something’s you have to believe,
but others are puzzles, puzzling me.

And all that noise, all that sound,
all those pieces that I have found.
And birds go flying at the speed of sound,
to show you how it all began.
Birds come flying from the underground,
if you could see it then you'd understand,
Oh when you see it then you'll understand…

All those signs, I knew what they meant.
Something’s you can invent.
Some get made, and some get sent,
Ooh…
Birds go flying at the speed of sound,
to show you how it all began.
Birds came flying from the underground,
if you could see it then you'd understand,
oh, when you see it then you'll understand…

book review: Creation by Gore Vidal

Creation
Originally uploaded by Dimitris Mazarakis.

Ok so you know my passion for fiction that in some way embraces history. And Gore Vidal is just one of those writers that really does his job well. I am not necessarily seeking historical accuracy, for that I can read a historian. I am looking for excitement, truths and lessons that remain over the milennia, original ideas an plot.

And Creation has got all of that.

Original idea: Telling the story of the Persian Wars (we know so much from history that we learn at school in my country) from the Persian and not the Greek perspective. The main person in the book is a Persian dude that travelled the world and worked for the Great Kings of Persia, that ruled the world around 500 bc.

Theme: The book is built around our hero's quest for the one real religion.

Excitement: In different missions he travels around the world going all the way to India and China, describing the world at the time and meeting great personalities of his time. He ends up in Athens, old and blind, after peace between Greece and Persia is declared.

In the beginning I didn't enjoy the book much, cos I was reading small pieces and couldn't get the story running. But once you get into it, you're in it for good. Definitely a recommendation for fans of history and related fiction. And check Gore Vidal out, he's written lots and lots of fiction and non fiction.

anyone knows

of any cool website to download free mobile ringtones from? Not polyphonic (i nearly hate them :-), mp3 ones! Let me know plsssssssss!