A short visit to the Potami valley

Hot Greece and bare aegean islands without any trees?
Well, not on Samos island!

You want to find out yourself?
There a quite few places on the island where a brook is running under shady trees.
For example: pay a visit to the incredibly green, shady and cool Potami valley with the Potami brook and several cascades/small waterfalls, not far away from the city of Karlóvasi on the north coast of the island.

Walking on the footpath along the brook gives you almost the feeling like you're walking in some type of dschungle!
Whenever I go there, I am always fascinated by the brook running between these strangely formed trees.

Musicians on Samos island: Sarandou, Voularinos & Liapis

Vasilis Sarandou (violin, vocals), Manolis Voularinos (guitar, vocals) and Aristodimos Liapis (bouzouki, vocals) playing in a tavern in Ag. Konstantinos.
East aegean island of Samos, Greece, June 13th, 2011.

In the season 2011 they play every Wednesday night in tavern "Thalassa" in Kokkari, every Friday night in a tavern in Ag. Konstantinos (where the road from Manolates comes down).



Musicians meeting on Whit Monday 2011 in Ag. Konstantinos on the north coast. Singer/guitarist Thrasos from Karlovasi sings the song "Tzivaeri".

Jiannis Loulourgas: luthier, musician & teacher

A video about the greek luthier, singer and bouzouki player Jiannis Loulourgas from Pythagorion. He is talking about his shop "Pythagorios", his "Samos Bouzouki School", and demonstrates different greek stringed instruments like Bouzouki, Baglamas and Tsouras.

In the season 2011 he plays together with guitarist Alexis Papos in a place run by his family called "Thanasis' Sister" in the harbour of Pythagorion. Several songs are included in the video, recorded "live" in May 2011, capturing the atmosphere of this charming place on the harbour promenade, just a couple of meters away from the waters of the aegean sea and anchoring sailing boats.

Kalimera Kokkari!

A peaceful and silent atmosphere on a beautiful early morning around summer solstice in the harbour of Kokkari on the north coast of the island.





The sun was rising fast und half an hour later it looked like that:

Silence / A visit to Varsamos beach and Kallithea

Middle of June we made a tour from noisy Pythagorion to the calm and silent west of Samos island, going down to the coast to visit Varsamos beach.
Nobody else but us was there, the tavern there seems to be closed.




On the way back, a spontaneous stopover in a small tavern in Kallithea around sunset - to record a song video - developed into a gathering with local people and singing a couple of songs together.
Many thanks to the men and women of Kallithea involved in the "party" for the Ouzo and Souma!


"Silence"



Sing along in Kallithea:

30 seconds Samos 2011

I have published a series of short video clips called "30 seconds Samos" or "30 seconds Spring on Samos" on YouTube. These are/were taken in May 2011.

The idea is to give you a short break and lookaround at different points on the island of Samos, almost giving you the impression you yourself stopped on your way and were there yourself.

Interested? Here you can find them!

Two examples of these video clips:

Virtual milling yields presentations out of the cloud!

Automatically generated presentations, offered by several companies, will soon flood the internet, especially the so-called social platforms!

We - as the industrious ants - deliver the content: photos, videos, audio files and text can be uploaded to the companies servers and are processed somewhere "in the cloud" in the internet to yield professionally looking presentations.

While this technology will mainly be interesting for advertising business (searching the internet platforms for free photos and videos and "creating" theme-specific hundreds to thousands of videos automatically over night!), those who have taken themselves some party or holiday photos can easily generate those professionally looking presentations and put them online.

Some basic services are offered free of charge. With these free of charge offers they try to suck you into their system. "Anfixen", make you dependant upon ..., as we in Germany say.

But - guess what - if you want quality, more control over the "creative" process, and videos longer than one minute, you have to pay! O.k., if you like your friends (or the rest of the world), you will be willing to spend 3-5 dollars to use the system and generate and down- or upload a high quality (HQ) or high definition (HD) presentation in full length. Not too bad, if you do it only 3-4 times per year, or?

One of these companies offering "virtual photo and video milling" is Stupeflix, which is boosted by YouTube.
I tried the cost-free version (this is why Stupeflix is shown all the time on the video), played around a bit with some of my Samos photos and added some text, resulting in a 1.12 minute long video with 270p resolution.



One thing is sure: it will be raining presentations like cats and dogs from these "clouds" in the near future.
At first glance they look impressive! The way of showing the content will be (or will become) more fascinating/important than the content itself! It looks sexy, that's why they ask you to pay for it! Sex sells! ;-)

But after you've seen a couple of these automatically produced "cloud products", all processed in the same manner, it might happen that you will be bored to death.

A pretty sad example for such a boring type of automatically generated presentation are imo the TripAdvisorTripWow presentations, which flood YouTube in these days (approx. 18.500 "videos" as per today!). I would rename them "TripYawn"!
A recent example dealing with the island of Samos you can find here!
The problem, as I see it, is: even if your photos/videos are good, the way they are going to be presented by these "virtual mills", the machine generated "milling" processes involved, will destroy individuality and end up in uniformity.
Process dominates content!

Are you ready to invest some content and a little money to become an honorable member of the Society for Virtual Milling (SFVM)? Bring along with you some time, when clouds are dark because servers are overloaded.
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Or like today, April 21st, 2011, Stupeflix is down already for hours because cloud servers at Amazon are experiencing big problems! (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) outage)
See here, here and here
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April 25, 2011
Amazon EC2 outage: summary and lessons learned