Harry-Paraskeva

Indignant at the current administration of my country...

...constitutional rights are being neglected.

...public safety is actively ignored.

...people in charge deny any responsibilities.

...inadequate political handling of most matters of the state.

...people are kept quiet through salary and monetary benefits increase.

...neoliberal politics by a left wing socialist party.

...grand capital evades taxation, while the rest are left struggling.

...unemployment doubles.

...no immigration policies enforced.

...economy plunders and the answer to everything is get more loans.

...no fiscal policy and no discussion of it either.

...people get divided into pro- and anti-Government.

...social injustice replaces the pre-election Fair Society motto.

...civil service salaries budget skyrockets.

...no sense of political ethos and moral responsibility.

...disregard of external dangers.

...non-existent political personalities.

...people are being mocked and lied to by their leaders.

...distrust starts to be directed towards institutions, not just dignitaries.

...mismanagement and excessive spending in non-productive activities.

...no protection for small time, local businesses.

...accommodation of huge multi-national corporations.

...social securities funds drained and pension plans collapsing.

...no vision for the future.

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Maybe it is time for people to wake up.

Maybe it is time to rethink the function of democracy.

Maybe it is time to invest in education, research and development.

Maybe it is time to discard a rotten political system.

Maybe it is time to judge ourselves and admit our own sins.

Maybe it is time to stand united against those who look after only themselves.

Maybe it is time to divert capitalism to humanism.

Maybe it is time to start dreaming and hoping again.

Maybe the future is in our hands!

Just another ordinary day I say, yet I'm growing another year. An ordinary day dedicated to myself, not because of some kind of egotism, but because this is the custom in Western societies. Never asked for a day and even if I did, I do not think Nature, God, Lady Luck or whatever is out there is forgiving enough to allow me or you one.

I know it's not been long since I've been here, but it sometimes feels like an eternity. I say sometimes, cause there are those flickering moments, when you are down just enough to wish for everything to end and gain some peace and serenity. Unlike those moments, on a daily basis I'm grateful for everything that I've been given and everything that has been taken from me. The rest I'm gradually learning to take care of myself.

Many times I've fallen, an equal amount of times rose back to my feet. There seems to be an internal mechanism that works even without your knowledge of it. Ticking constantly to ensure that you survive. I do not claim to have studied it much yet, but then again I'm not sure if self-knowledge is appropriate at this age.

I am no longer certain of a future, as my country has recently come into a financial, political and energy crisis. However I understand that it is important to keep working on a daily basis on whatever project each of us has been entrusted with and try to raise ourselves from the ashes. I too blame the Government for everything that has happened and I wish for the resignation of incompetent people. It appears that when you put your faith on people who lack vision, knowledge and skills, catastrophe is not far behind. Even if melancholy and anger occupy much of my present, I'm hopeful and optimistic for the future.

If I had a wish for the day, I would wish for some sanity to wrap the world and remould its unfair structures.

Have a great day everyone.

Features

It's been a long time my fellow travellers...a long time indeed. And to be honest I have been dormant for the most part of it...at least in the field of digital arts. But you see life does not always play out the way you meant it and this causes setbacks and rethinking and more effort on your part. Yet you learn and you grow stronger through this life long learning. More on this later...

You may rightly ask what I have been up to in this past year. Well since October 1st, 2010 I have enrolled in a PhD in Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, which takes up a lot of my time. It requires being focused and giving a lot of attention to details. Within this project I will be trying to reconstruct to the best possible degree some aspects of prehistoric Cypriot societies that lived on the island during the 4th millennium BC. I'm going to be looking at a wide array and huge number of pottery sherds from a variety of projects on the island in order to see the technological and stylistic choices of those ancient people and through theoretical grounding and rigorous spatial and statistical analysis try to extrapolate how the societies functioned and whether or not they communicated on a regional or an island wide basis. So you see there is a lot to do and I can safely say I'm just at the beginning of this.

Parallel to this I have been working on some research projects that are quite interesting and challenging. I try to incorporate them as part of my PhD studies, so that they don't go too far off and waste my time and so far I'm happy to say that they are producing positive results. Such projects are the following:
- Radiocarbon dates recalibration for Cyprus during the 4th-3rd millennia BC, which gave me a very strong chronological framework for the island. Moreover I've applied some new statistics that may contribute to a better understanding of radiocarbon calibrations. This will probably be one of my first publications too in the year to come.
- Digital colour measuring for archaeological ceramics, which seems to be successful in identifying colour through digital means, but unfortunately is quite time consuming and needs to be streamlined in order to become functional.
- Database for archaeological and cultural heritage material recording, which forms the basis of my research and also could set a standardized way for creating digital collections, as I am trying to make this into an online museum style database. No need to say that this takes time and will be working for quite some time on this to get it right. I'm writing the database in MySQL and trying to transfer it to the web via PHP.

Beyond these I also aided in the publication of a settlement in Syria by editing all the photographic material, a project that took almost 2 months to complete. It was about 200 photos that required extensive cleaning up and restoration in Photoshop.

Finally within the last 6 months I also finished designing two websites. The first is for the Student Portal of the University of Edinburgh and it was part of a student design competition, where I got first place. It is meant to go up later this year and I am very happy for this! The second is a site for a friend who is just making his first steps in real estates. I shall upload both designs in due time.

By now you probably think I'm becoming a work-a-holic...well that is far from true yet. Since last October I've been for 15 days in Mexico for a tour around the country with a good friend, spend 5 days travelling around the UK and another 1 month working at an excavation here in Cyprus. I'm also planning a one week trip to Stockholm in August...further ahead and if my papers get accepted I'll be visiting conferences in Lyon, France and Turin, Italy in late October.

At the moment I'm looking at all the photos I've taken this past year and try to organize the chaotic collection of photos. Some of them I have already started uploading in DA and for those who know me better, there are more photos in my FB account. Hopefully by the end of this summer I'll get to finish with most of them. In any event I hope you enjoy the ones I've started sending and I can only promise that there will be many more...