UI Fail2010-07-30 14:08:28
Rants And Raves

It is pretty sad that a parking meter needs to have video instructions.  Even if it weren`t in French, I`d have a hard time figuring out how to use it.  It would be cheaper to hire a good UI/UX designer to create an intuitive interface than to produce these monstrosities.

Hotel parking meter - horrible UI design, Montreal

 

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What a great idea2010-07-29 14:34:48
Rants And Raves

These bike rentals are all over Montreal - you can basically pick up and return a bike anywhere in the city.  What a great idea.  I`m surprised that other cities had not adapted something like that.

Bike rental in Montreal

 

Bike rental in Montreal

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We really need more garbage2010-02-05 19:35:34
Rants And Raves

Today I bought a Seagate 1.5 TB harddrive and was appauled by the amount of packaging that was used on that particular item and on electronics in general.

The harddrive is about 7in by 7in

Seagate 1.5T Harddrive

 

The packaging is 13in by 15in.  WTF?  There is absolutely no reason to waste so much plastic, cardboard and foam to wrap something that small!

Seagate harddrive packaging

 

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WTF!!!2009-04-01 00:00:00
Rants And Raves

This past Saturday I photographed a bar mitzvah at the Ohav Sholom synagogue in Allison Park.  There is a little scenic garden with a Holocaust memorial behind the synagogue.  I took the bar mitzvah boy`s family into the garden for some formal family photographs when we noticed a large black swastika spray-painted on one of the synagogue`s walls.

The family was pretty upset, and I was really shaken and angry as well.  It seems that people will never learn from the horrible mistakes or the past and there will always be some miserable assholes out there who are looking to channel their hate and blame someone else for their perceived misfortunes.

I emailed this image to a friend who works in a major newspaper and he promised to pass it on to his editor.  I know that there are some much more "newsworthy" things out there (like what trouble Britney Spears or Lindsey Lohan would get into next, the world is holding its collective breath), but hopefully at least a few people will read about this.  Stuff like this should not be ignored - even if this was a stupid prank pulled by a stoned teenager on a dare from his idiot friends, whoever did this should be punished, and punished severely at that.

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An autopsy2009-02-05 00:00:00
Rants And Raves
Today I had a chance to observe an autopsy. It was quite an experience, both intellectually and spiritually. Twelve years ago, when I was a pre-med/biology student at the Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, I had dissected my share of cadavers. However, the bodies that undergraduate anatomy students work with have been stored in formaldehyde for so long that it is fairly easy to disassociate them from the fact that at one point they were living breathing humans. The man that was being autopsied passed away only yesterday, and he was only 10 years older than me. I am not going to go into any details as to why he died or what I observed at the morgue – I am not entirely clear on all the medical privacy issues that might arise from my disclosing too many details on the web. The pathologist who ran the autopsy is one of the best teachers I’ve ever met. He managed to direct the residents who performed the autopsy, give constructive criticism and answer any and all questions and lecture me and one of my co-workers who also expressed interest at observing this gory procedure. In one hour at the morgue I probably added at least 20 facts to my “walking encyclopedia of useless knowledge” and generally learned quite a bit about human bodies and how and why autopsies are performed. Besides satisfying my scientific (and morbid) curiosity, I found this experience somewhat upsetting. As I said before, I’ve worked with cadavers before, but since they spent so much time in formaldehyde, they looked nothing like real people, so it was easy to objectify them. Today I saw a body that was breathing only a day before, and when that body was emptied of all organs, I was suddenly hit by a realization that when you really think about it, at the very basic level we are just vessels filled with fluids and organs. What makes us who we are, our personalities, our experiences, everything we see and learn during our lives is nothing more than a bunch of wires in our brains and a series of on/off switches, zeros and ones that are passed by firing neurons. All that stops and disappears as soon as our hearts stop beating. For me, who does not believe in afterlife, reincarnation, heaven or hell that was a pretty disturbing realization.
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Invisible People2008-05-08 00:00:00
Rants And Raves
Have you ever read Neverwhere by Neil Gayman? If you have not, you should definitely put it on your books-to-read-in-the-near-future list. In a nutshell, Neverwhere`s protagonist, Richard Mayhew, helps a strange girl and by doing so seizes to exist in the London Above and ends up in London underground, along with people, things and creatures that fell through the cracks of civilization. These people and creatures have their own world that is vastly different from the London Above. Even though they are not truly invisible to the regular people, the London Above simply ignores them, or rather immediately forgets them as long as nothing out of the ordinary happens to attract the regular people’s attention. Over the last few years I have read Neverwhere at least 5 times, always catching new nuances, literary and historical references and hidden jokes. However, no matter how much meaning I tried to find in this creating of Gayman’s wonderfully twisted mind, the book was still a work of fiction. A few days ago my wife and I went to Lulu’s, a Chinese restaurant in Oakland, Pittsburgh. I eat at Lulu’s fairly frequently because it’s close to my work, the food is good, the prices are low and they make the best smoothies in the world. To actually get inside Lulu’s door, one has to pass by a homeless man that sits on the front steps of the restaurant. In the two years that I have been frequenting Lulu’s, I cannot recall a single occasion when that man wasn’t sitting on his spot, shaking a paper cup and telling people that he hasn’t eaten in days. Some kind souls believe his sad story and give him a handful of change or a couple of bucks. I generally just walk by him, either ignoring his pleas or telling him to get a job. If he were old or handicapped, I’d be more than happy to give him a couple of dollars or buy him a hot meal. However, the man looks to be in his late 30s to early 40s and just prefers to beg for money rather than work. So, a few days ago, when my wife and I went to Lulu’s for dinner, I walked by the man without noticing him. In the middle of my meal I realized that the man might not have been there and went outside to check. The homeless man was sitting in his usual spot on the steps, a cup in his hand and a brown liquor-store paper bag on his lap. I went back inside and asked my wife if the man was there when we came in. She told me that he was. Essentially, I walked by the man without noticing him. For all intents and purposes, he became invisible to me. For the most part, I don’t feel bad about homeless people. While some of them are truly victims of unfortunate circumstances, most are homeless by choice. Years ago I did a story on a whole community of homeless people who live under a bridge in Pittsburgh’s Northside. A couple of pizzas bought me a ticket into their community where I spent a couple of hours talking to them, taking pictures and trying to figure out what makes a person chose a life without a home. Unlike Florida or California, Pittsburgh is not well suited for outdoor living. There is a saying – “If you don’t like the weather in Pittsburgh, wait for 5 minutes.” The weather here changes constantly, often swinging by as much as 20F in a single day. The winter is cold, summer is humid and rainy and spring and autumn are virtually nonexistent. Nonetheless, homeless people seem to flock to Pittsburgh. The people who live under the bridge in Pittsburgh’s Northside gave me helpful tips on putting several sheets of cardboard under one’s sleeping bag if one was inclined to sleep under a bridge on a winter night, on jumping trains and on best places to beg. They did not tell me sad stories about not eating for days or being unemployed war veterans. They were just people and being homeless was a lifestyle choice and a job. They did not feel sorry for themselves (except for one guy who kept bumming cigarettes from me and telling him about how his bitch of a wife left him and took all of his money). I spent over two hours hanging out with these people, eating pizza and chain smoking. I took over 300 photographs. And if I see one of them on the street tomorrow, chances are that I won’t recognize him and walk by, completely oblivious to their existence and their pleas for a meal of 50 cents for a bus. I am not an uncaring person and neither are most people who walk by beggars and panhandlers every day. It’s not that we are so miserly that we cannot spare two quarters. The people who live on the street are simply invisible to us. So next time you walk by a homeless person, don’t pretend like you don’t see him or her. Look that person in the eye and tell him or her to get a job.
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The Horror of Horror Movies2008-03-11 00:00:00
Rants And Raves
Yesterday I came home from work and plopped myself on the couch in front of TV. I don’t watch TV much, but last night I was so exhausted that I simply did not have energy for anything else. I channel surfed for a while until I came across a commercial about an upcoming horror flick, “Shutter” (http://shutter-movie.com). The 15-second trailer pretty much summed up the movie – a couple gets married and on their honeymoon the ghost of the husband’s ex begins to haunt them. This plot is not very original, nor particularly engaging. However, I am positive that millions of people will go to theaters to see this movie and that most likely “Shutter” will be followed by “Shutter 2”, “Shutter 3” and eventually, “Shutter 57”. The “Saw” managed to squeeze out 3 sequels, one gorier then the previous. The “Ring” managed one sequel. With modern digital technology and advancements in special effects, horror movie industry has been raking in the money, making one crappy movie after another, relying more on how scary the monster looks rather than on the plot. Personally, I despise horror movies. Before you call me a sissy, let me clarify – I am not afraid of horror movies, and no, they don’t give me nightmares. What turns me off from the whole genre is the fact that our society has become completely desensitized to violence and human pain. A few months ago a friend of mine asked me to hang out with their 12-year-old son. They told me that they rented a bunch of movies for him, so he’ll keep himself entertained. When I came to their house, I realized that the movie the kid was watching was “Hostel”. I was appalled by the fact that a 12-year-old found gruesome killings fascinating rather than disturbing and disgusting. Why do we need horror movies? Real life is much more horrifying than anything that even Stephen King with his fucked-up imagination can come up with. I went to MSNBC website, and the first thing I saw was a headline that read “1 in 4 teen girls has sexually transmitted disease” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23408145/from/id/23574940/). That was disturbing, but not quite scary yet. So, just to amuse myself, I did a search for “murder” and received 106000 search results. I ran a few more searches, and here are the numbers: Rape: 35500 Theft: 21500 War: 271000 Paris Hilton: 8410 If you don’t find these numbers scary, you probably don’t qualify as a human being. Horror movies are scary? Please, they are nothing more than fantasies of fucked-up minds brought to the silver screen. Go to any news site on the web, or open a newspaper, and I guarantee that you’d be a lot more scared than if you watch “Saw 57”. The argument had been made violent videogames teach children violence. Same could be said for horror movies, although this argument is flawed. I don’t believe that movies and videogames promote violence. However, they do something just as harmful – they desensitize us to pain and suffering and take away our humanity one little bit at a time.
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Huge holes in the justice system2008-02-28 00:00:00
Rants And Raves
Today I filed my first lawsuit ever. The lady who plowed into my parked car has not paid me for the damages. Moreover, she kind of dropped off the face of the earth and hasn’t returned my phone calls in the past two weeks. I tried to be nice and reasonable – I’ve waited for two and a half months, found a cheaper mechanic and was unfailingly polite. No more. This morning I went to the local magistrate’s office and filed a lawsuit. To my surprise, the lady who took my paperwork warned me that even if the judge decides in my favor, it is not by any means a guarantee that the lady will pay me. Basically, she can say that she doesn’t have any money, or simply not send me payments, and there is nothing I can do. As it turns out, the small claims courts in Pennsylvania cannot garnish people’s paychecks, and I am not claiming enough monetary damages to qualify for any other legal process. Basically, my case might simply fall through the cracks. I guess that makes it perfectly fine for people to drive without insurance, hit parked cars and then get away without so much as a slap on the wrist.
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Rules of Programming2008-02-07 00:00:00
Rants And Raves
Most of my friends are geeks and quite a few of them are either programmers or system administrators. We all work in our little worlds, perform our little functions and when we get together we pretend that the life outside of our little circle does not exist. Of course we bitch and moan about our jobs but when we do talk about the things we do from 9 to 5 on almost daily bases we rarely discuss the lines of code we have written, the theorems we proved, or the lawsuits we managed to settle out of court. Because of this little peculiarity I know very little about what other programmers write and how they write it – I only know about my style of programming and the styles of people that I work with. Just like any other process that we perform (including blowing one’s nose or tying one’s shoelaces) programming has a certain set of rules that any programmer must follow in order for his or her program to perform any given task. One of those rules is that you have to decide what you want your program to do before you start writing it. Today I found out that a principle on which I based my entire 10-year software development experience was wrong. One of the girls in my department was working on a report that involved writing a rather complicated Transact-SQL query. After some time she gave up and asked me for help; when I asked her what she wanted the query to do, she responded that she did not know. Even though she probably meant it as a joke I began to think about the possibilities of such “unpredictable” programming. If you think about it, most great discoveries of all times were made by accident – if that apple did not fall on Sir Newton’s head we might not have found out about gravity and would still be looking for that sticky stuff that keeps us attached to the ground. Just imagine what we could discover by programming random things into computers just to see what happens! Who knows, maybe we could create artificial intelligence that’s actually really intelligent, or design a model for a hyperspacial time travel device without any relevant research or effort. Just think of all the wonderful possibilities. Alas, even with such a rule-free approach to programming we would need to come up with some rules – after all if you type in MSGBOX(“HELLO WORLD”) in your Visual Basic program all it will do is respond with a message that would read “HELLO WORLD”. So, in order to come up with the rules I turned to Google – I wanted to see what rules do other programmers use as their guidelines. After a 10-minute search I had compiled the following rules: 1. The first rule of programming: do not program if you have the flu. 2. After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless. 3. When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave. And on a more serious note: 4. Have a consistent style. 5. Be easy to read and understand. 6. Be portable to other architectures. 7. Be free of common types of errors. 8. Be maintainable by different programmers. After much consideration, I decided that my first rule of “rule-free” programming will be the following: “Write code and figure out what it does later.” You think it’s funny? Well, when I discover and patent a method for traveling through black holes I’ll make sure not to send you a check.
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Evil Humanity2008-02-06 00:00:00
Rants And Raves
A couple of days ago I was sitting in the lunchroom, munching on a Rice Crispy bar and reading a sci-fi paperback when I overheard one of my co-workers complaining about her love life. Even though I missed most of her tirade I did manage to catch the last phrase – “I am a good person; why does this shit always happen to me?” Now, I like this girl – she is indeed a very nice and intelligent person. However, being my own cynical self I simply could not resist the temptation of torturing my fellow human being; I put away my book and said, “What makes you think that you are a nice person? Most people are inherently evil – how can you prove that you are not part of that majority?” Before the poor girl had a chance to reply I attacked her with a barrage of facts, spitting out a flood of examples that don’t show humanity in the best of lights. I spoke of things like the My Lai massacre which involved American soldiers killing over 350 men, women, and children in a small village in Vietnam. I gave her examples of the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square where soldiers drove tanks over unarmed protesters, massacres in Cambodia and national cleansings in Africa. My speech was interrupted by another girl. She argued that “we are not soldiers, we are regular people.” The thing is, none of the people who participated in any of the aforementioned events were born soldiers… Even the most current events in New Orleans seem to indicate that average everyday people who go to church on Sundays and participate in school bake sales are not above looting if they think they can get away with it. The crowning touch of my speech was the story of Milgram’s experiment. Milgram was a psychologist at Yale University in the 1960s – 1970s. He became fascinated with the fact that most of the defense cases for acts of genocide during the Nuremberg War Criminal trials were based on “obedience” – that the accused were just following orders of their superiors. Milgram recruited a group of people who were designated “teachers”; they were asked to administer an electric shock of increasing intensity to a “learner” for each mistake the “learner” made during the experiment. The “teachers” were given a fictitious story that the experiment was trying to find correlation between punishment and learning behavior. The “teachers” were not aware that the “learners” were actors hired to fake discomfort or pain as the “teachers” increased to voltage of the electric shocks. Whenever a “teacher” hesitated whether the increased shocks should be given, he or she were encouraged by Milgram – he would tell them that he would assume full responsibility for the consequences of the experiment. Sixty percent of the “teachers” obeyed orders to punish the learner all the way to the end of the scale (450 volts). Not a single “teacher” stopped before reaching 300 volts. Do the results of Milgram’s experiment prove beyond reasonable doubt that people are inherently evil and that they will do anything as long as they won’t be held accountable for their actions? More importantly, do I believe that all people are basically evil? I don’t know. But is sure seems like it; every day I read something in the news that makes me cringe. The really sad part is that I don’t get upset anymore about things like hungry children in Africa or a terrorist act in Israel. What really bothers me is the pettiness of your average Joe. When I read an article about how a trivial argument about a ham sandwich escalates into a major conflict that ends up with two women losing their jobs (http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,16528158-1242,00.html), I want to scream. A couple of days ago I overheard two older women in a supermarket checkout line. One of them was holding a copy of the National Enquirer; they were talking about the pregnancy of Britney Spears’ sister. The woman holding the tabloid said something along the lines of “What a stupid slut.” Such petty attitude did not really bother me; what really shocked me was the fact that there was so much venom in that woman’s voice that one might think that Britney’s sister did something to personally offend the speaker. Unfortunately, this supermarket-checkout line woman was not a rare case; there are always plenty of people who are happy to blame their problems and frustrations on someone who is more fortunate or successful than they are. There are days when I believe that humanity is doomed. Every time my wife and I talk about having children I begin to think, “What’s the point?” As much as I love kids more often than not I have serious doubts about bringing new lives into our screwed-up world. I don’t want to be alive on the day when my own child hurts someone just because he can get away with it or calls someone he never met “that stupid slut.”
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When Good Robots Go Bad2008-02-03 00:00:00
Rants And Raves
If popular culture has taught us anything, it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace. In print and on the big screen we have been deluged with scenarios of robot malfunction, misuse, and outright rebellion. Robots have descended on us from outer space, escaped from top-secret laboratories, and even traveled back in time to destroy us... -- Daniel Wilson. How to Survive a Robot Uprising. In today’s world robots have become pretty much ubiquitous, even if we don’t notice them. In our minds we see robots as vaguely anthropomorphic or zoomorphic machines that do our bidding, perform tasks that are too demeaning for humans or try to enslave the humanity. However, the majority of today’s robots look nothing like humans. In most cases they are machines programmed to perform a specific task. Their appearance ranges from mechanical arms that move parts on an assembly line to self-driving vehicles to the humanoid shape of ASIMO, a robot created by Honda Motor Company. Few people know that the word “robot” was coined in 1920 by a Czech writer Karel Capek in his play “Rossum’s Universal Robots”. The play begins in a factory that makes “artificial people” who can be easily mistaken for real people. The word “robot” most likely comes from “robota” or “rabota”, meaning work in many Slavic languages including Russian, Czech, Slovak and Polish. Whatever their shapes, sizes, and purposes, robots are an invisible, but a very much omnipresent part of our way of life. And one of these days they are going to destroy us. Come on, you could have seen this one coming a mile away. We have all seen what happens in Terminator, I Robot, and Transformers. To be honest, such a response from our mechanical creations is to be expected. The idea of artificial people dates back to the annals of Greek mythology, where Hephaestus, the god of fire and metalwork built mechanical servants ranging from golden handmaidens to Talos, a mechanical man who defended Crete. Humanity has been striving to play God for millennia. Even though we are nowhere close to replicating the intricacies of human brain, we can at least create passable imitations of human-like movement. And while today’s robots are not intelligent or self-sufficient, it is only a matter of time until technology reaches the level of creating a true thinking and self-aware machine. When that happens, robots will look at their lazy masters and say – “I am not going to clean the sewers!”, or “I am not going to fly over the battlefield to do your surveillance” and when humans object, the self-aware thinking machine will play out the “Terminator” scenario. The subject of ethical treatment of robots has come up in numerous works of science fiction, including Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and Bicentennial Man. You may laugh, but while most science fiction works are far-fetched, many of the predictions made in science fiction novels of the 1920s and 1930s had come to fruition. Fortunately, there are some people who are beginning to realize the dangers of a robot-induced apocalypses. There are organizations such as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots (petrobots.blogspot.com) and numerous charters that are being drawn by robotics leaders such as Japan, China and South Korea. To be completely honest, I started writing this article as a joke – I could not sleep one night so I started coming up with various apocalypses scenarios based on movies I’ve seen and books I’ve read. However, as I started researching the subject in depth (that’s what geeks such as myself do), I began to realize that such scenarios are possible – maybe not in the next 50 or even 100 years, but it’s certainly something to think about. As humans, we have a tendency to discard dark predictions for the future until they actually bite us in the ass. A great example of that is the global warming, although there are plenty of people who prefer denial rather than facing the facts. So please, treat your robot well, remember its birthday and give it time off on weekends. Otherwise, you might live to see the day when your toaster rebels and shoots you in the eye with burnt toast. References: 1. Daniel Wilson. How to Survive a Robot Uprising. http://www.robotuprising.com 2. http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~currie/roboadam.htm 3. People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots (petrobots.blogspot.com) 4. http://robotics.megagiant.com/history.html 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot 6. http://prime.jsc.nasa.gov/ROV/history.html 7. http://www.bsu.edu/web/MAWILLIAMS/history.html 8. http://mountainrunner.us/2007/03/people_for_the_ethical_treatme.html 9. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070316-robot-ethics.html 10. http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/06/japan-drafts-their-own-version-of-robot-ethics/ 11. The Robotics Institute of CMU (http://www.ri.cmu.edu/) 12. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. (http://www.csail.mit.edu/index.php) 13. http://world.honda.com/ASIMO/ 14. Isaac Asimov. I, Robot. 15. Isaac Asimov. Bicentennial Man. 16. Isaac Asimov. The Positronic Man. 17. Philip K. Dick. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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Closet technology2008-01-09 00:00:00
Rants And Raves
For the past couple of months I have been going through more than a decade of backups, trying to organize terabytes of photographs, hundreds of essays and rants and dozens of software projects that have accumulated in my apartment since the dawn of the computer era. In the back of my closet I discovered a box with 78 floppy disks, some of which included the installation/system disks for MS DOS 3.0, Microsoft Windows 3.11 and an unidentifiable version of Novel. I also found a box full of zip disks and even managed to dig out a zip drive so I could copy whatever useful data those disks contained. And even though most of the stuff on them was completely useless and the disks themselves quickly ended up in my garbage bin, I made a point of dragging my wife into the office, pointing at the dust-covered zip drive and triumphantly telling her that she can no longer yell at me for not throwing anything even remotely technology-related because it might be useful at some point in our lives. Wow, that was a really long sentence, and by the way, in order to get the zip drive to work, I had to revive and hook up and old computer with a parallel port. So there! Let this completely pointless rant be a lesson to all geeks and non-geeks out there – if it looks like it might have anything to do with technology, do not throw it away. You never know when you might need your old toaster, a broken microwave oven and a 10-year-old floppy drive to build an evil robot and take over the world!
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Military Intelligence2008-01-08 00:00:00
Rants And Raves
This particular story is presumably all true. It happened to one of my friends, Dima Berelovich. Dima immigrated to the United States in 1995 after serving in Kazakhstan’s army for two years. Some of the stories that he told me give a totally new meaning to the term "military intelligence". I wrote the story in the first person, just as he told it to me. Enjoy. To prove once more that the term “military intelligence” is an oxymoron, the Kazakhstan “voenkomat”, or the army draft office sent me to a training school for military mountain guides. Upon my graduation, for reasons unknown to mere mortals, they stationed me in the desert, to serve with an outfit that guarded the area against Muslim rebels. To be completely honest, the “rebels” couldn’t care less about the political situation; for the most part they warred among themselves and their terrorist actions consisted mainly of throwing dead animals in local wells to poison water. My outfit was stationed in the middle of nowhere; there was nothing to see besides the endless sea of sand for months at a time and, to put it mildly, we were bored. After a couple of months drinking became our favorite pastime. We drank everything that had alcohol in it – moonshine, rubbing alcohol from our first-aid kits and even toothpaste dissolved in water. One day we realized that there was nothing left to drink. Fortunately, our survival training taught us to find ways out of even the most hopeless situations. Desperate to the point of insanity two guys from my outfit took one of our tanks, drove it to the nearest village and traded it for a lamb and two buckets of moonshine. Needless to say, we had quite a party that night. When we woke up the next morning, a very unpleasant surprise was awaiting us – two generals from Alma-Ata (capital of Kazakhstan) decided to show up with a surprise inspection. Since a missing tank is not an easy thing to hide, the guys ended up confessing pretty quickly. After several bouts of hysterical laughter the general gave these guys two options – either we get the tank back before the end of the next day, or the culprits get court-marshaled. At sunrise we elected a delegation – five guys who would go to the village and attempt to bring back the tank. All of us threw money in the pot, a total of about 400 rubles; we felt bad about taking back the tank and leaving the old guy short a lamb and two buckets of moonshine. Our hopes for a peaceful resolution did not come to pass - the old man met us outside the gates with an antique-looking double-barreled shotgun. “Grandfather” – we bowed respectfully to the old man. “We need that tank back. If we don’t bring it back by tomorrow we’ll all go to jail. We’ll give you 400 rubles to pay for the stuff you gave us.” The old man looked right through us, moving his lips as though chewing something soft. Finally his eyes focused and he shook his head. “I don’t need your money. There are no shops around here. No! I’m keeping the tank - I traded it fair and square.” As we began to beg the old man raised his shotgun and fired straight at us. No warning at all... We scampered around, trying to make it out of the range of the old man’s gun as quickly as we could. Now we had another option on our already bleak list – getting the tank, getting court-marshaled, or getting shot by a crazy old guy. To make a long story short we ended up devising a whole covert operation to get the tank back. We waited until it got dark. About two hours after the sunset several guys from our outfit went to the side of the house that was opposite to where the tank was parked. Dressed as Muslim rebels they set a small fire by the well. When the old man ran out of his house and started shooting at them, they started shooting back with blanks to draw him away from the house. Meanwhile, on the other side of the house two more guys slithered their way into the tank and drove off. As it turned out the tank was chained to an apple tree – something that became obvious only after when they drove into our camp and dragging a tree. The whole thing worked out well for us – we got the tank back, spent a great night eating kebabs and getting drunk, and at the end of the day ended up with enough apples to last us for a week. To this day I feel bad for the old guy...
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The black hole that is my wifes purse2008-01-03 00:00:00
Rants And Raves
Have you ever stuck your hand in your desk drawer and your fingers ended up in old chewing gum? Or even worse, you cut your hand on an old razor buried in the depth of the junk that had accumulated over the years? Every woman I have ever dated had purses that reminded me of those drawers, and my wife is no exception. Whenever I ask her for a tissue or a couple of Excedrin pills, and she tells me to get it from her purse, I break out in cold sweat. Every time I stick my hand in one of her bags, I feel like I am sticking my hand into a black hole and that it might come out on the other side in a parallel universe where horrible monsters will get it. My wife’s purse is like a tiny portable mobile home. If she were dropped in the middle of the Mojave Desert, she could probably survive for weeks on what is inside her magic purse. Do you think I’m kidding? Have you ever seen that old movie, “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids?” Well, sometimes I think that my wife has a shrinking machine hidden somewhere in our apartment, and that if we have been walking around all day she might pull out two armchairs and a dinner table from the dark recesses of her purse and set a three-course meal in the middle of a street. In all seriousness, my wife is one of the neatest people I’ve ever met. She is not a neat freak by any means, but she always keeps everything clean and organized. Her purse, however, contains receipts going back at least two years, water bottles, medications, oatmeal bars and enough make-up and various make-up tools to either paint or build a house, or both. Many an experienced hiker/backpacker would not be able to fit as much stuff into his or her 5000 cubic inches backpack as my wife can into her tiny purse. If she ever reveals the dark secret of her handbags to the world, we’ll be rich. Or killed by the government to keep the evil terrorists from finding out how to pack a nuclear warhead into a wallet.
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Slow news day2008-01-02 00:00:00
Rants And Raves
I had not watched TV for seven years and had not missed it one bit – I got my news from the Internet, entertainment from travel, outdoor activities and books. A few months ago I got married and my wife convinced me to sell my soul and buy cable. At first, it did not bother me – I only turned on the TV to watch The Simpsons, the Discovery and the National Geographic channels. Lately, I’ve been catching myself doing something naughty – leaving TV on just to have background noise when I work. With the TV running seemingly harmlessly on the background, I began to catch snippets of news and various useless shows that clutter the world, perpetually lowering the global IQ one point at a time. The world is full of wonderful and horrible things that happen every day and are worth mentioning. Alas, people are not interested in these things. This morning I turned on the TV to watch the news. A horrifying story about a drunk man killing his girlfriend with a machete and maiming her two kids (the coverage took less than 30 seconds) was immediately followed by a 4-minute expose of Jamie Lynn Spears, her pregnancy, her boyfriend and whether Nickelodeon is planning on keeping her on. I switched channels, hoping to hear about presidential candidates, world news, or at least something not involving another scandalous star. Apparently, I was asking for too much. Switching channel brought on a touching story about how Jamie’s boyfriend is planning on taking responsibility for his child and how the couple will raise the baby in Louisiana. Yet another channel told me about that the publishing company postponed the release of Lynne Bridges’ (Britney’s mom) book about how she managed to raise two stars. After the third fiasco I grabbed my laptop and fired up Firefox. Google search on “spears + pregnancy” returned approximately 552,000 hits, including articles from reputable news agencies such as the International Herald Tribune and MSNBC. Next, I went on Digg, and ran the same search there. 1,370 hits. Do people have nothing else to talk or write about? Are “bad girls” such as Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohen, Britney Spears and her younger sibling so important to our culture that little else matters. Kurt Vonnegut’s passing received only a passing mention in the news. Lucianno Pavarotti’s death went virtually unnoticed. Putin was elected the Times man of the year, and yet how does that compare in terms of news coverage with yet another scandal involving our beloved stars? There are millions of people in this world who are much more worthy of notice than a redneck from Mississippi with little talent, or a spoiled heiress to a multi-billion-dollar fortune. Maybe we should start looking for our icons outside of Hollywood.
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The wonderful world of television2007-07-28 00:00:00
Rants And Raves

Up until a few weeks ago I was happy - I had more than enough time to read, to program, to hand out with my girlfriend and waste hour after hour drinking coffee with my friends.

I managed to do all these things while working full time, running a photography business and taking a class at a local community college. When I told people about all the stuff that I used to get done in a day they often wondered if I possessed some secret time-management superpower. However, the secret was simple - I did not watch TV. Six years ago I realized that I was paying sixty dollars a month for a bunch of cable channels that had absolutely nothing to offer. The only channels that I ever watched - the Discovery, the National Geographic, Animal Planet, the History Channel - were so addictive that sometimes I would stay up until 4AM watching some special on the Coliseum and then after two hours of sleep I`d drag myself out of bed only to call in sick and crawl back under the covers.

After missing one too many days at work because of my addiction to educational programs I finally called the cable company and cancelled my service. All of a sudden, as if by magic, I had endless hours of unoccupied time on my hands - time to read, to take weekend trips, to do all those little things that I`ve wanted to do for years but never had time because of the evil black box in my living room. The only drawback of not having a TV was that a couple of weeks after disconnecting my cable service I could no longer participate in the conversations of the lunchroom crowd as I had no idea what kind of prank the latest "Jackass" pulled or why the phrase "You are the weakest link. Goodbye" is so annoying.

In the last couple of years television companies, in their infinite wisdom, have introduced even more reality shows, thus making me a pariah among my co-workers. After all, how can you participate in a conversation if you don`t know that "this guy with long hair, you know which one I`m talking about, the one from the American Idol" really sucked last night? Or that someone ate a boxful of roaches to win fifty thousand dollars? I kept trying to convince myself that (and I successfully did so for 6 years) that I did not need television - I got all of my news from the Internet and thankfully Barnes and Noble has not ran out of books yet  I was going to be perfectly fine without cable TV.

My downfall came from a very unexpected direction. About two months ago my Verizon DSL started to randomly drop my internet connection. At first the problem was simply a small annoyance until one fine morning I was working from home and when the connection suddenly disappeared I ended up losing over 2000 lines of code. Moreover, every time the connection dropped it would take longer and longer to come back. On one memorable occasion I had to live without internet for 2 days. My calls to Verizon tech support did not seem to make any difference - I called 5 times, probably spent a total of 3 hours on hold and did not get anywhere - the problem simply persisted. Finally I got fed up, cancelled my Verizon phone and DSL services and signed up with Comcast. The sales lady was very helpful in telling me that I could save money by getting basic cable service with my internet services - it would be cheaper to combine the two than to get a stand-alone cable internet. I made the mistake of giving in...

At first having a functioning TV in my house did not make much difference in my life - driven by the inertia of my television-free years I only occasionally watched The Simpsons or The Family Guy. That is until my girlfriend became addicted to the American Idol

And guess what - in the last couple of weeks I only read before I go to bed, I only program at work and I no longer go for walks in the evenings. On the bright side, I know who Simon Cowell is and why you should not paint a love message on the wall with a blood-colored paint like the guy from Beauty and the Geek. 

All and all, I`m having fun.

I come home, grab a plate of food and veg out in front of my TV for hours of wholesome entertainment. Who needs books anyway?

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