More than a week without smokes, coffee and sugar..

More than a week has passed since I had a smoke, a Cola light or coffee with sugar.
First thing I notice is that my teeth are getting whiter by the day. You only get this little damage if you are deserted on an island ( I've seen this in Survivor ).
As far as nicotine or sugar craving is concerned, all I can say that it's just a myth. I didn't use any patches, chew any gum, read any books or ask for medical help. I just finished my pack and decided not to smoke again, ever. That's it. Well I did have a lot of chest pains and I wouldn't get any good sleep so deciding to quit only came natural. All I am saying is that quitting everyday delights is easy, it's all in your head..

An iPod installation screwed my Win machine..

I hate to be the negative guy when it comes to iPods because simply enough they look amazing. My first encounter though wasn't good, in fact it was quite damaging to my windows setup and ever since I tried to install my buddy's iPod on my machine all hell broke loose. What it left me with was a boot sequence that gave the message " A file is missing or corrupt in windows\system32\config\system , use original windows cd and type r for recovery ". A few hours later I managed to get my pc to work again. If I was a novice I would be cursing' at iPods for the rest of my life. I know it's a million things that could possibly go wrong and that it might not even be the iPod's fault but ask yourselves whom would you blame since it was the setup I did and after the request for a restart my machine would stop booting up.

I've quit smoking, caffeine with sugar and fast food, all in the same day..

I might be going for a world record here but lately I realised I was doing some serious damage to my body by almost doubling my smoking ( 2 packs a day ), eating nothing but junk whenever I was out ( ribs on bbq sauce )and drinking three cups of coffee with 3 teaspoons of sugar each and to top everything off I work in front of a computer all day long. So this past Sunday I decided I should do something about all of this. I started of by watching the excellent documentary called " Supersize me ", 20 minutes into the film and you're having some second thoughts on fast food altogether, by the end of it you're wondering how come these food chains remain open. Secondly I smoked all my remaining cigarettes and simply stopped buying ( the last 2 times I decided to quit I had smokes lying around, that is a tricky part ). Last but not least I realised that I must have been addicted to sugar since I was drinking 3 cups of coffee per day only to have the sugar that goes along with it, and during the weekends I would drink between 1,5 to 3 litres of Cola light. PURE MODERN DAY ADDICTION.
The reason I am writing this post is to let the world know that I belong amongst the millions that realize everyday that we are getting screwed by modern living while all our bodies need is some attention, some exercise, natural food and plenty of fresh air. Hell if I cannot have all of the above I will try to get as much as I can.
I sure hope that one year from today I will be looking back to this post thinking " damn I really did it"....

Firefox and Thunderbird have revolutionized my web experience.

Today I realized that the 2 flagship Mozilla products, Firefox and Thunderbird, have seriously revolutionized the way I use the web nowadays. I just had a quick flashback realizing that I was barely scratching the Internet's surface with the MS counterparts.
Tabbed browsing along with extensions ( weather data, countdown clocks, color picker etc. ) have turned Firefox into a powerful tool that speeds up my Internet experience multiple times. RSS reading, address auto filling and secure connecting make Thunderbird a complete client instead of a crippled e-mail product.
I know the hype around these products leaves no space for my praise so all I can say is that if you haven't used the above products give them some serious consideration, you might get a flashback in a couple of months yourself. I am a web designer, I know..

Has the internet taken a bad turn ?

Canada's Big Brother Net : During the Internet boom of the late 1990s, Nortel Networks ran an advertising campaign that featured as its slogan, 'what do you want the Internet to be?' The implications were obvious ? the Internet was a technology of unlimited possibility that could be whatever we wanted it to be.
More than five years later, Nortel's vision is becoming reality. The Internet has become so essential to the every day lives of millions of people — a pillar of communication, information, entertainment, education, and commerce — that at times it seems as if the Internet really is anything we want it to be.

Notwithstanding the Internet's remarkable potential, there are dark clouds on the horizon. There are some who see a very different Internet... ( go to p2pnet for the full story, quite an interesting read.. )

A State of Trance with Armin van Buuren got canceled ( again ).

I just read over at Etn.fm that Armin van Buuren's radio show called "A State of Trance" will have to stop once again. The show has been picked up by a syndication service called 'The Radio Department' and they won't let Armin provide the show directly to the 2 online stations that broadcast it over the net. That's sad news ( once again ) since that show provides me and hundreds of other listeners around the world with a weekly trance dosage. Etn.fm is currently talking to TRD to get back the rights to broadcast the show, I sure hope they succeed.

Got Hypertag ?

Hypertag : It seems that there is a new trend in the U.K. called hypertag. It is a spot on a street advertisement where you point your mobile phone turn on your infrared connection and a message, a tune or a game uploads to your phone. Apparently it has been utilized in the latest album campaign of the U.K. based band New Order ( as our correspondent georgek has pointed out to us ).

Markus Schulz " Coldharbour Sessions 2005 " available for pre-order

www.markusschulz.com : Miami based trance DJ and producer Markus Shulz has finished his much anticipated 2nd trance compilation CD named Coldharbour Sessions 2005 ( Miami '05 ). The CD is available for pre-order through Amazon US and it's out on Armada ( Armin van Buuren's label ). The full tracklisting is as follows :
CD1
1. Blue Tubes (Intro Mix) - Hydroid
2. I Found You (Harry Lemon Remix) - Interstate
3. '3579 KM' - Kalafut & Fygle
4. Baltic Sea - Hammer & Bennett
5. Soul Dimension - Fluid In Motion
6. Close Enough (Noel Sanger Mix) - Keo
7. Heaven Drops - Jose Amnesia presents Tiffany
8. Let The Light In - Lens
9. Free Yourself - Aronek
10. In The End - Ave Mea
11. Quarter Century - Jagermaestro
12. I Know You're Gone - Max Graham featuring Jessica Jacobs

CD2
1. Fanatic - Bakke & Ljungqvist
2. Sublimate - Steve May
3. Sorrow - Sundawner
4. Eighties (Original Remix) - Yilmaz Altanhan
5. A Dream Came Through - Nikola Gala
6. What - Attention Deficit
7. Electro Hairspray - Markus Schulz
8. Yael - Jellisimo
9. Connected (Santiago Nino Remix) - Ozgur Can
10. Space Guitar - Mike Foyle presents Statica
11. A Little Hazy Morning - Progresia presents Sokaya
12. Language - Hammer & Bennett

Markus also produces the excellent weekly radio show " Global DJ Broadcast " on party931 in Miami also available at www.etn.fm.
Judging from his previous CD ( Coldharbour Sessions 2004 ) this one should not be missing from any trance fan's collection.

Forecastfox has been updated to ver 0.7

Forecastfox has been updated to ver 0.7. With this great firefox extension you get up to date weather forecasts from weather.com displayed right on your toolbar in firefox.

Google Desktop Supports Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird and Netscape ( from MozillaZine )

Google Desktop Supports Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird and Netscape - MozillaZine Talkback: Search giant Google has released the first non-beta version of its Google Desktop application, which now includes support for several Mozilla-based applications. The desktop search tool lets you find Web pages you've visited with the Mozilla Application Suite, Mozilla Firefox and Netscape 7 and locates emails received with Mozilla Mail & Newsgroups, Mozilla Thunderbird and Netscape 7 Mail & Newsgroups.
Although I haven't installed it yet, all of the things Google has offered so far are quite usefull and working great, so consider giving it a try.

Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta Released ( from MozillaZine )

Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta Released: ( Download Netscape 8 Beta ) Based on Mozilla Firefox 1.0, this beta of Netscape's newest browser offers support for both the Gecko and Internet Explorer rendering engines. A new Site Controls feature lets users enable and disable features like ActiveX, JavaScript and cookies on a site-by-site basis (the browser includes self-updating whitelists and blacklists of safe and dangerous sites). The new Multi-Bar functionality lets users have more on-screen widgets than ever before, including Live Content like RSS feeds, weather forecasts and map searches.

Third day is a charm. This is what the weather is like today, just one day after the small snowstorm. All this makes me think of what we have done wrong so the weather behaves like this. It seems that there are no news worth mentioning this week so I give you guys weather pictures.. Oh, I bought a Philips Pronto LCD remote yesterday, I'll see how that turns out.

Just one day later, everything in my city has come to a stop due to the snow. If my friends from Finland are watching this I expect them to laugh out loud.

Snow in Greece for the second time around.. Last week we had some form of an early summer, all sunny and warm. Today I wake up and face this, snow all over again. I know it doesn't look much in this picture but don't forget this is Greece we're talking about..