Counterstrike

Counterstrike is a very interesting online game. I got to know it a couple of days ago and it seems that it is quite popular. Its not its plot that is interesting, the goal of the game is very simple. What I found interesting is the skills that it requires to play. Such skills are observation and extremely quick reactions.

I decided this game is something I have to learn to play well, not only because its very popular but because I wanted to prove myself that I can do it. Nevertheless, some people might think its very violent. It simulates two teams, the terrorists and the counter-terrorists. One of the most typical scenario is the following: You are a member of the counter-terrorist group that consists of 5 members. You have to hinder the terrorists from placing a bomb in a marked area. To do this you have to kill them and be careful not to get killed. It takes extremely quick reactions and extremely sharp eyesight to recognise in miliseconds where the terrorists might currently be. You have to have a hundred eyes in all directions!!!

There is a lot of shooting, blood shed and killing in this game and in the beginning it was a bit weird to play it. Such games have been accused of being the inspiration of murderers and killers. After having played it for 4 days intensively, I frankly dont believe so. I havent noticed developing any aggressive behaviour. On the contrary, the speed of my reactions and my self-confidence have increased.

I believe such games cannot be the cause of psychologically ill behaviours. The human brain is in position to tell what is real and what is not. Passive people can use agressive games as a way of developing their reactions and coordination, increasing their self-esteem and releasing subconscious and unexpressed stress. However, I think kids and extremely sensitive people should not play such games.

My Magical Christmas Adventures

On christmas day I climbed up a huge mountain



and entered an enchanted forest.




There I met a talking Snowman



who told me that this is where Goethe wrote Faust.

I didnt pay much attention to him but soon afterwards I saw witches




flying over the canyons.

I should have stayed home because they cursed me with having an eternal cold!

Christmas!

Happy christmas and a great new year to everyone!

Merry Christmas in over 350 languages!

Blogs exist because..

Freud said that if you can get the patient express all of his thoughts loudly, he will then be cured of any mental problems. I wonder if that is valid for writing down all thoughts as well.... Maybe thats they reason blogs exist!

To celebrate or not to celebrate?

Doh! I should be celebrating, jumbing up and down out of joy right now because I got accepted in the open university of greece for Computer Science. I am among the 1000 lucky ones that got accepted. But instead, I am staring at the subjects, looking at the contents of the books over and over again, hoping that if I look too hard, the nightmare of mathematics might even disapear from the papers.

Oh no, there are 12 sections of subjects that I have to pass and 3 of them are related to very very very very very difficult and high mathematics. The rest of the subjects are extremely interesting and I am going to study with great interest, such as, programming languages (C, Java, pascal), databases, operating systems, artificial intelligence, networks, computer and network security, internet. But mathematics??? Why? It is not enough that the studies are already extremely, and at times unnecessarily, theory orientated? After all this should be about computers and not about learning to lecture on computers, these maths are just going to kill me.

Unless I kill them first!

So in my old age, I decided to learn all the mathematics that I had DELIBERATELY skipped and never learned at school. Why should I learn maths and chemistry when philosophy and psychology played an equal role in the final grade for passing the class? After all I couldnt study everything at school.. who studies everything at school anyway??? :)) I studied only to get grades and after that all knowledge was erased from my memory... This was something the system encouraged.

But now I need the knowledge no matter what... !?!$#****!?!$# (cencored).

At least I have 7 months to do some preparation, get a maths teacher and start learning...

Uff!

Interpreting the Signs

Today I opened my window and saw a bird with very long wings flying about ten meters away from my spot. It must have been a proud and dangerous eagle. Then I turned my head to the north and saw a colorful butterfly flying in a nervous rythm. She also had very long wings with black and orange colors. At that moment many thoughts passed instantly through my mind and developed. Isnt this an impressive quality of the human brain/mind to be able to perceive and process thoughts and whole series of mental relations by merely thinking in images in such a short period of time? It is a process that strongly reminds me of the way the computer functions. A single function might take an hour to explain but can be performed in less than a second. To return to the thoughts which took place at the same time:
Thought 1:
I thought butterflies exist only in the summer, how strange that she is still alive. Or maybe she was just born today, a day that pretty much reminds a summer one with this heat and sun.

Thought 2:
I wonder if she is of a rare species any crazy scientist would like to have. Or a crazy collector would want her dead. How cruel.

Thought 3: But I have been cruel too when I was a kid. I havent forgotten how I had developed a whole technique for hunting butterflies with my bare hands. I would aproach them silently from behind and catch their wings folded together. I didnt kill them but sometimes they werent able to fly afterwards. They used to leave on my fingers a dust with colors.

Thought Parallel to 1: I wonder what it means to see a butterfly. According to the Alchemist of Paolo Cohelo, the signs of nature can be interpreted. What is this sign trying to tell me?

Thought Parallel to 2:The butterfly is beautiful. Should I value beauty more? But butterflies live for such a short time, so beauty is mortal. Is that what nature is trying to tell me?

Thought Parallel to 3: Then again, the butterfly is extremely playful. Maybe todays lesson is to be more playful with people. Or is it trying to show me that I am being too playful and should at last get serious?


Now I realise that this whole process of trying to interprete something is useless. There are just too many possibilities in this world. I must have wasted my time thinking all this and even analyzing it.

Pictures of my cats

Here is Hobbit:





Here is Hobbbit with his girlfriend:



Here is one of the kids now:



and younger:



a sister:



a sister with a tragical end, disappeared after the attack of two dogs. Unfortunately my swearing frantically in german language at the owner of the dogs (tourist) did not bring the cat back.



Two wild step brothers, they looked harmless when they were still kids. This is an old picture.

My cat

Just a normal blog entry today, I dont want to loose touch with my electronical diary. On the other hand I dont find it meanigfull to post personal things. I am not sure why. It feels as if they loose their original significance when I write them down. The following ones are harmless though (until I decide otherwise and delete them :D).
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

We have 7 wild cats living around our house. One of them, the Hobbit, is my favourite one, he has been around since many years and has a history behind him that would take too long to describe. Two of the other cats are his girlfriends! and the rest their kids! But he is the master of the cats. He is the most serious cat I have ever met. He doesnt fool around like the other ones, he has a steady gaze when he is looking at me and has the ability to concentrate for a long time on one situation or subject. The rest of the cats seem restless, unable to concentrate. They just care for food. They even fight. The 3 of them, all of them white (a mother and the 2 kids) have wild instincts. I hate it when they make war to get the food from the other cats. Thats why I stay there and supervise them, making sure they all get a fair share. The Hobbit might not even go to eat, he will wait until all have eatten and eat what is left. Maybe he is not that special. He knows that I favour him and give him secret pieces of cheese. But what am I talking about? Is food really a way of showing affection? On what is based an affection towards an animal? Regardless of my existential problems, fact is that this cat is different than any other cat, and I see this in his eyes. I see wisdom in his eyes, I just hope it is not old age. In the past I used to spend a lot of time with him, he still knows our old tricks. If I keep my hand about 20 cm higher than him, he jumbs and touches it with his head. Today I was playing with him too, but after a while he scratched my hand. He jumbed and scratched it with his two feet. I know he was just playing but I felt dissapointed that he had forgotten how to behave with my hands. All these cats are wild, so one has to be very careful, they have no sense for what they do with their nails. Hobbit has forgotten and its my fault, because I have stopped playing with him. I talked to him about this, maybe he understood. Who knows.

Violation of Copyright

There is a first time for everything they say and right now I found accidentaly out that a certain person has stolen two of my itsecurity.gr texts and published them on his website as if he wrote them. I was shocked to see my texts there, firstly because they were not only some quotes, there were whole pages of my site!!! And not even one reference to my site or to the author!!!

I still cannot understand how someone can do such a thing. I worked very hard to create all these texts related to various IT security matters. It has taken a tremendous amount of my time to do research and experiment, and finally publish my conclusions.

Why did I bother actually? I could just copy and paste texts like this person did and look! I have an ITsecurity site within minutes and not within months!!

Of course I will not let this continue, I have sent him and his webhost a warning and consulted my legal advisor. If these texts wont disappear immediately, then he has gotten himyself into really big trouble, for I will pursue my rights in every legal way there exists!

Blogspot Servers down?

It seems that the blospot servers were down for a couple of hours today. All blogs were unreachable for an unusually long amount of time. Following that an error 405 apeared to finally let us know that an engineer is investigating the matter regarding the fact that the servers of blogspot were inaccessible. Now its up and running again, and lets hope that it was just a hardware problem. Is it high time we backed up our blogs?

Thoughts on the education of ballet dancers

Dancers have a different relation with their body than normal people. Maybe they dont identify themselves so much with it, they use it as a tool to express themself. However, ballet education nowadays lays too much stress on the athletic aspect of it and less on the creative one. This makes dancers focus too much on the body and they loose the contact with their soul. No doubt, the classical technique has got be acquired, but this happens sooner or later. In the end the strick, army-like discipline, the endless hours of rehearsing and training, wipe out any creative impulse that the dancer may have and maybe even the wish to dance. The ones who get through this training might get rewarded when dancing in ballet companies, it seems that one minute on a big stage with a warm audience makes one forget all the hardships and difficulties that one had to go through to reach there. But even then, the creativity of the dancer is limited to the opinion of the choreographer and the artistic director of how a certain piece should be performed. Again you have to discipline and limit your creativity to the one of the group or to the one of your artistic director... Some companies do give their dancers the chance to choreograph which I find great. This doesnt happen very often though and most of the time dancers are mere clerks that have to execute tasks on stage.

I insist that the creativity of the dancer has got to be promoted and cultivated when he is still undergoing the academic training. That is the time where the mind and soul blossoms, when its much easier to dive into the depths of the human existence, and discover the limits of the body and the intensity of emotions. Actually dance and maybe any other kind of art has to do solely with the emotions. Its the expression of intense emotions sometimes magnifying them, sometimes beautifying them, that depends. Still, the main subject is emotions. Students of dance have got to be encouraged to read literature and poetry, so that they can relate to these emotions. In fact, I believe there should be a subject in ballet schools where literature and poetry is being analysed, in the same way we did that at school. There are so many librettos available, students should start with getting to know the stories behind all ballets and analyze them. I am amazed when I meet students of ballet that dont know the stories behind most important ballets of our century. It seems that theoretical analysis and knowledge of the history, technique and concept of dance is a priviledge of those who want to study as dance teachers or movement analysts. The education of a dance teacher though, is deprived with the most important priviledge that professional ballet dancers have: to really know how to dance!!! and not to merely talk about it.

Sunbelt buys Kerio Firewall !

Its true, the best personal firewall ever will continue to be developed by the software company Sunbelt.

We liked the product so much we bought it

The computer is a living organism...

A computer system is a living organism, you get its original DNA along with its operating system and then it starts to evolve. Every day that you add a new program to it, it grows and becomes bigger and better. The more programs you have, the more tasks you can accomplish. Like a flower, you water it every day so that it can flourish. You might need also some entertaining programs like web-messengers, browsers, games and so the living organism that you have created keeps growing and growing. Your computer is very powerful now. You could conquer the world with it if you wanted.

But what happens if the living organism starts to develop into a monster?

All those programs install much information on the pc. They not only install themselves, they might install an updater, some registry keys, start up information, information… information… information… Some of them though, go that far, to become one with your operating system. As if they were in love with it, they merge into it and it becomes impossible to separate them. Even if you decide one day that you don’t need them, you will never be able to delete them forever. Some pieces will always remain back. With all those programs that you have loaded on your pc it has now become a monster. Especially when you downloaded those hijacker programs that took over your browser, now that you have some much garbage in your temp folders, so many tracking cookies, spy-ware, old unknown registry keys that load for ages when you start your pc.

The power is starting to turn against you.

Then one day, you install a new program that will change your life forever. It will crash your pc, it will make the system instable, and it will finally KILL your living organism. You had of course no idea that such a thing could happen, but some tiny little piece of … past installed and present orphan information, created an invisible but existing incompatibility with the program and killed your pc. Even if the monster survived, it now has become old and lost its swiftness and power, injuries of war with other software can be seen on its body. There is but one solution now, put it to an eternal sleep so that does not suffer anymore… FORMAT C …. And rest in peace…

Who is number one in google?

ME!!! :)) I am not kidding. If you type computer viruses (oh well in greek) my internet security site comes first!

* Click HERE *

I dont know how long it will last, I ve noticed that the places change. But I am sooooooooooo happy and have to do some crazy blogging-celebration now. Everyone is invited.