MPJ

Coincidentally, around the end of the first three "Star Wars" movies the time of my high school days begun. That meant, among other things, that the distance from my home to the new school building drastically increased, along with my everyday's commute time back and forth. If I decided to avoid the bus in the morning, it would take me about 30 minutes of leisurely walking to get there. In regards to today's story, it was half an hour of one of the kind entertainment I was enjoying on more than several occasions. Walking toward the school, I was mounting my state of the art Sony Walkman on my belt loaded with one of my favorite cassettes and listening audio recordings from "Star Wars" trilogy. I am not talking about official movie soundtrack - it was the audio cassette of the entire film only without acting and dialogues. Just two hours of background orchestra coverage created by John Williams and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. I wrote mor...

YouTube is really one great service. Probably one of the best online tools there is. But it is not without issues and glitches. Recently, after our vacation I uploaded a video I took on the Lichadonisia beach with our guide and our Greek hosts teaching our (mostly female) group to dance with syrtaki (Greek: συρτάκι) music and even though the music clearly came from the beach-bar loudspeakers, YouTube 'found' that I was using protected and copyrighted content and the video clip was blocked in one country and you will never guess which - Germany. I am still laughing and endlessly trying to find logic behind this silly automation. Nevertheless and ever since then I am not embedding music background by myself anymore and rather using YouTube's selection instead. With today's video I played with two combination and got extraordinary result. First video is accelerated and embedded with horror-typed tune. For the other I used the most cheerful music I could find and with sa...

"Summertime and the livin' is easy..." sang Ella Fitzgerald back in 1957 with tremendous help of one of the kind crispy voice of legendary Louis Armstrong. Even though the most famous lullaby ever, written by Ira and George Gershwin for the "Porgy and Bess" opera from the thirties of 20th century, is not really about the hottest season and happiness per se, one thing is for sure - whatever you do, summertime is definitely the period of year when everything is smooth and nothing dramatic is happening.. At least nothing intentionally. Pure R&R. Even the work hours are passing by somehow easy and without big turbulence. Humphrey Bogart in 'The Maltese Falcon'* As for me, ever since I decided to go low with my social online life, after just couple of weeks I noticed positive change in my daily routine. The feeling was almost like solving addiction of some kind and even comparable to the past when I said definite goodbye to cigarettes after leavin...