book review: l'art du temps by Jean Louis Servan - Schreiber

link for french speakers - original text.

this is the latest book i read and frankly i cannot remember when i bought it, it must have been at least three or four years ago.

it turns out that it's a great one, talking about time management in the broader sense and not in strictly technical terms. it's also extraordinary how the author makes elaborate thoughts, predictions and conclusions about where our time is spent and why, during our lives, even though the book has been written twenty years ago - before the internet age.

a few valuable conclusions:

• the modern age has created a few ways and automations with which we can save time, but has created a lot more procedures that take our time away.
• the modern era is much more complicated than previous times
• most of our time (apart from work and sleep of course) is spent on consumption (think about it, it's scary!)
• becoming time conscious in the broad sense and having long term goals in life is the first and most important step in order to master your time and give time to the things that matter the most in life for you.

my favourite phrase from the book: "mastering time is synonym to elegance"

A definite recommendation for reading.

urban legends and the truth

it's really very difficult to find the truth about chain letters circulating via e-mail. the so-called urban legends or at least their modernised version.

whether these are about a baby with cancer that you can help support by forwarding the e-mail (seriously speaking i doubt there is a system that can track the e-mail over the internet and charge 2c. for every time it has been sent to a bank account) or tommy hilfiger's supposed racist comments on oprah's show. this also happens to be the most recent one i received.

the truth is that noone really has the time to check out whether these things are really true or not. this time i just did a google search for this one and found to my surprise that there are quite a few sites mentioning that the story about tomy hilfiger is untrue. i found no relative link on oprah's website (i guess there are all sorts of things related to oprah circulating on the web so is she would make a statement about each of them she would end up not having time for much more than that). in any case it seems that this story is not a real one, although you cannot know for sure.

the real fact is that everyone keeps forwarding most of the crap that arrives in their mailbox regardless of its credibility or not. and the interesting fact is how someone will never seize to exploit the human tendency to spread rumours around, for various motives, especially in the era of digital communication when spreading a rumour is really a piece of cake and hard to crosscheck how close to reality it is.

my message to everyone is to be a little bit more suspicious on all this. it might improve our lives a bit and save us from unnecessary information and discussions.

random beginning of the week

my flight to iraklio being at 6:50, i woke up late at 5:20 (instead of the scheduled 4:15). called a cab, paid 30 eur to arrive one time and the taxi driver wasn't able to issue a receipt, thus i risk having to pay this amount myself and not from my company travel expenses. arrived at sunny crete, took a cab to the hotel, to find out that this second taxi driver doesn't issue receipts either. put my hand in my pocket to get my sunglasses to discover i only have the case with me, having forgotten my sunglasses at home. called for a colleague to go by car to work, but his phone was switched off, so i took one more cab.went to the bank to withdraw moneym only to find out that their system was down and i have to wait till noon time to get cash...how far can this get?

anyway all these little unfortunate events won't spoil my day. today i watched one of the most beautiful sunrises ever from in a flight. too bad i had forgotten my camera in athens.

euro 2008!

the groups for euro 2008 preliminary round have been drawn, and well, games beging right after the 2006 mundial in germany, in september. check'em out!

greece is in the same group with turkey (once again), norway, bosnia, hungary, moldova and malta. a few people already rushed to say that it's an "easy group" but i'd rather say that let us remember that we are not in the finals of this year's mundial, so lets not start being over optimistic. here's the related article on uefa.com.

i am confident that we will fight as much as we can to play in the finals of euro 2008 (unlike the mundial which turned out to be a disaster). don't forget we are the defending champions, therefore we have to get there and defend our title :)

250 years of Mozart

yesterday we completed 250 years since the birth day of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It's just one of those anniversaries that mean nothing to most of the world, but it's just amazing if you consider that his music has survived for almost 250 years already (he started composing in a very early age btw) and that up till know he is one of the most influential people in world music.

so here we go. i guess this year we'll be lucky enough to hear a lot of him around the world, for the opportunity given by the 250 completed years. already yesterday ET1 had their programme playing 24 hours mozart on tv. so cool :)

what a pity we're not kids anymore

it's snowing all over greece and well, kids don't go to school for a couple of days in certain territorries, for fear they might slip on ice and get injured.

too bad we all still have to go to work in this cold. and watch the kids play with the snow outside, fearless they might slip and get injured.

taxi stories

i spent sometime in Crete, Kavala and Thessaloniki with my job last week...

it;s amazing how many crazy stories one can compile by being in a taxi. i have three stories within two days of last week:

story #1: i met a crazy (literally) taxi driver in iraklio, twice in the same day (what are the chances)! the dude was explaining to me his plan on how he will become a world leader and conquer the world. the details are hilarious but not funny enough if they are described on a blog posting.

story #2: last tuesday, when i landed in athens, i was going home by taxi, and the driver was explaining to me his theory on how we need a dictatorship in order to progress in greece. he was also claiming that people were extremely happy in the 1967-1974 dictatorshp that we had in my country.

story #3: next morning, while heading to the airport, the cab driver was complaining that his phone bills were too high, but well, that was kind of understandable since he was on the phone all the time and had three different mobile phones and numbers and one at home. he claimed that he has to have all this since most of the girls that he meets sooner or later go after him.

i have a friend who has been in all sorts of weird stories in taxis in greece and sometime ago he thought about publishing them in a book. i guess it would make huge success with all those unusual and often funny tales! maybe i am gonna have my share in that book as well by contributing a few of my own stories.

over the bridge

i spent a great weekend with two friends in Nafpaktos this weekend, leaving friday evening and returning just today...tomorrow i have a day off work, so it's cool to get back to reality slowly and well, have time to adapt.

one of the highlights was actually crossing the rio-antirio bridge which was recently constructed and is one of the biggest works in greece over the past decades, as it links peloponese with continental greece. i've heard so much about it before and i always wanted to cross it. not going to talk about the technical details and stuff, i was just impressed by the image itself. you can also have a look at the pics below.




maybe next time i am there it's gonna be jogging or bunjee jumping, who knows. just to spice things up a bit.

serendipity

i watched it on dvd this saturday, and i would like to tell you: if you haven't watched it, please don't.

i think that for all sorts of reasons this movie enters the top five worst movies i have ever watched (a.k.a. WASTE OF TIME). This is all about personal opinions, but i can't even believe how it got 6,5 out of 10 on imdb!

first books of 2006

i read two books already in the 2006, and started my third one just today…i think my record from 2005 will improve (2005: 33 books read = 1 every 11 days).

anyway i wanted to mention that i was impressed by the life story of anthony kiedis ("scar tissue" is the original title) and the way the book has been written makes it also very interesting. make sure you are excited about music, unusual stories and the red hot chili peppers before you read it.

the second one is “a long way down” by nick hornby. it’s his 1st book that i read in translation and i think (also because of the translated version) that it’s not as good as “high fidelity” or “how to be good”. it’s still a pleasant read (hornby is always hornby), though it wouldn’t make it to my recommended books list. i do have to admit that the book does balance well between serious and funny in a topic that's difficult to handle in a funny manner, which is suicide.

awe

now i know why they call it the miracle of life. first time in my life i see a baby that is no more than 2 days old...George and Thomi had their first baby and he's just amazing!

new year's resolution 2006

i've been thinking about this for a while now, what my goals for the new year should be. it's obvious, since it's the 6th of jan and still now news on this one.

2005 might have been a good year. I succeeded in all my goals (which is exceptional), but i still luck a lot of important things. for starters, i lack a girlfriend :), a home of my own, a contract with a job that makes me feel useful etc. In general i
lack a few things that would make me feel happy and have a feeling of achievement.

i have decided, in contrast to my usual tendency for tangible and measurable results, to have these two as my goals for 2006. at the end of the year to feel happy about what i've done with it and have a sense of achievement. not measurable by anyone else but myself. after all, this is all a personal issue.