I don’t exactly understand why westerners find it embarassing if kids stay with their parents after the age of 20-22. Greek kids usually leave for a few years after high-school to study in a college or university (and males have to leave home for military service too for at least two years). But when they come back, they (usually) move back to their parent’s home, even if they find a job in the meantime… Then, they get married and usually rent a house or they stay with the parents for a while if they have to wait for their house to get built (in Greece, building a house is prefered over buying an older house or apartment — outside Athens where there’s space to build that is).

There’s an ad on TV about Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” movie and he says that the word means “a new beginning”, but he is of course wrong in the case this is indeed about the Greek word (there’s a small-to-none chance that the word means something in the Mayan language). I hope he didn’t name his movie based on false information he got… Ap??a??pt? means “I blurt or detect, disclose, divulge, manifest, reveal, uncover, unfold, unveil” and not “a new beginning” in Greek.

JBQ is taking a nap right now and as I am bored to death waiting for him to wake up, I am looking at some of the cult ala-Firefly followings of the ’90s. Apparently, “Space: Above and Beyond” and “Earth 2“, fit that bill. I have seen some of S:AaB’s episodes back in the ’90s Greek TV, but I don’t think I have ever watched “Earth 2″. The cool thing is that Amazon’s amazing algorithm has bundled the two DVD sets together!

JBQ also made a revelation to me last night: Firefly is for him the best space sci-fi series ever. He always kinda snobbed it and he was not very forthcoming going to the “Serenity” movie last year, but during this last week I played back all the Firefly episodes on DVD after his arrival from work, and he gradually fell in love with it. He likes it over Star Trek now…

Oh well, some of ST:TNG episodes remain the ultimate best television for me.

The Diggnation netcast spoiled some of the beans about Apple’s iPhone, saying that it will have a dual-battery design, one for the music portion and one of the phone portion of the handset. It is not clear if the iPhone will actually have two physically separated batteries in it, or a single “partitioned” battery but personally I would go with the second option because it would be easier to implement, it’s cheaper, less confusing when you put the handset together, and also it could be cool if you had a preference panel with a slider to dynamically change how much battery you want for your phone or for your music (kinda like how pre-WinMob5 PDAs could partition their RAM dynamically & user-selectably into ’storage’ and ‘program memory’).

In a previous blog post of mine about the iPhone I wrote that one of the most important hurdles that Apple will have to go over in order to win iPhone customers would be the battery life: people are afraid to use their cellular handset as an mp3 player for too long. Back then I imagined that Apple would have to be hard at work at delivering new, high-tech long-lived batteries, but Apple solved the problem sideways. The dual battery design is in fact a briliant idea business-wise. Ultimately, the user probably won’t have overall more battery life compared to other handsets in the market, but he/she will have a peace of mind — and that’s what matters.