Kpjas here and now

Soulmate is someone with whom one has a feeling of deep and natural affinity, friendship, love, intimacy, sexuality, spirituality and/or compatibility.
from Wikipedia

A lately watched film has taken list of my favourite films by storm - “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (French: “Le Scaphandre et le Papillon”) by Julian Schnabel, with brilliant cinematography by Janusz Kamiński.

The screenplay is based on the memoir by French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby, aged 42, an editor of the fashion magazine “Elle” sustained a massive stroke, which left him with a condition known as locked-in syndrome.

This is a moving and beautiful picture about a man whose perfectly clear conscious mind and energetic, lively personality have unexpectedly been imprisoned in his completely paralysed and disabled body that the author likened to the mentioned in the title diving bell. It is a disquieting thought that anyone of us could face a similar fate. The film portrays humanity put to one of the most extreme tests and Jean-Dominique Bauby coming to terms his tormented existence with which he was condemned for the rest of his life. Out of the darkest horror optimistic streaks of dawn emerge when he painstakingly manages to communicate with about 200,000 eyelid blinks his personal message to the world and his loved ones. The published book and the following film in a tremendously artistic way add something very valuable to our understanding of conditio humana.

Butterflies have flown away… but will return next summer.

See also: Metacritic.com and Rottentomatoes.com

One can say a lot about Wikipedia. There’s also a beautiful side of the project, please see:

There are dozens of photo sharing websites (with online community features) on the net. Among the finest is Flickr.com or it used to be. Apparently things have gone wrong since the Yahoo aquisition of Flickr. The latest outrage broke in May 2007 when Flickr/Yahoo started imposing its censorship policies (they call it content filtering). Please read this thread.

Flickr.com has also rather unpleasant feature of showing only the last 200 pictures that have been upload to your account. Otherwise you have to upgrade to the pro account.

Due to this mis-feature and the latest backlash I embarked on a casual search for good alternatives. And what I have found:

1. Ipernity - a social website for content sharing that is a kind a Flickr clone and competitor. You can upload not only photos but also other media (music, videos) - all you need for your multimedia blog. Yes, they provide a blogging capability too. Ipernity is an European (French) website and in my opinion it has a lot of potential.

2. 23 - a good looking site for a socially minded photo enthusiasts that seems to be a viable alternative to Flickr. This website is also an European one.

No need to say people running both websites are very friendly and responsive to all feedback and feature request their users present.

The 2007 Annual Wikimedia Poland Conference is currently under way in Białowieza in northern Poland.

The conference is scheduled for 3 days  (May 1-3, 2007) and is going to gather large crowds of Wikipedians/Wikimedians as well as several prominent authors, scientists and other lecturers who will host a wide range of interesting and thought-provoking presentations.

I hope the proceedings of the Conference is going to be published some time in future because I could not attend the event. 

You can really appreciate your sense of smell when you take an evening walk under linden trees in June or July. At least where I live. The smell is divine and it’d be completely futile to describe it here. You have to experience it yourselves.

Interestingly, July in Polish (and several other Slavic languages) is called after blooming linden trees but in some South Slavic languages it is June that takes its name from them. It has to do with faster vegetation of trees in southern Europe. 

Better  late than never.

I am starting my personal blog. Strictly personal. Once I had had another blog at Bloglines but after a while I deserted it. A few days ago I opened an account at another website offering blog hosting but the blog is for some topical issues connected with my job.