All the stars have aligned properly for yet another conference visit. This time I am going with two colleagues to London, UK. We are attending PHP UK Conference 2009. It’s my first visit to UK, and I wont’ have much time around, but if you have any suggestions on what to see, where to go, or if you want to meet for beer, let me know. We are arriving today around 21:00 and flying back early Sunday morning.
Tweets, blog posts, and pictures are coming soon.
I’d like to take this moment and wish everyone a Happy New Year. Let the new year bring more good to your life and take away the pains and troubles. Be happy, healthy, wealthy, and have tonnes of fun!
Maybe it’s also a good time to take a brief look back at the year 2008, as well as examine some expectations for the year 2009.
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Yesterday I’ve heard the bad news – my uncle, Alexander Sorokin, passed away at an age of 44. He was on a business trip, almost a 1000 kilometers away from home, when he had a stroke. He was a really good man.
He was the person who got me into computers many years ago. He was always involved with technology, and it was him who first arrange a PC for our house. At first it wasn’t for me, it was for my mother. But he encouraged my curiosity. More so, it was him spending countless days and nights in our house, trying to fix the consequences of my curiosity, when important documents got missing or system would get stuck with no way to boot. All he said after would be “Don’t do this again”. And on the next occasion: “Oh, that’s OK, I see it’s different this time”.
Strong, kind, smart, and funny. A very good friend, and an example of a Good Man. That’s how I will remember him.
Rest in peace…
A couple of days ago I got my hands on a PlayStation 3. Boy, was that a wrong day of the week! But let me tell it to you properly…
I am not much of a gamer. I like games and all, but somehow I don’t spend all that much time playing. Most of my gaming activities in the last few years were spent either in Quake III or OpenTTD (open source Transport Typhoon Deluxe clone). There were also a whole bunch of simple games like mahjongg, Desktop Tower Defense, and the rest of the flash entertainment goodies.
I never had a gaming console. A few of my friends had though. And back then consoles were very different from PCs. PCs were in the form of huge and heavy desktops, that were booting too long. Gaming consoles were of a much smaller size factor, and they were booting faster. All you had to do was put the game cartridge in, and you were in a game. And that was fun.
Fast forward to a couple of days ago. I get this huge laptop bag, which is pretty heavy. I take it home. PlayStation 3 is in there, with a bunch of cables, and a few games. My first impression – PlayStation3 is not much different from a computer. It’s large, it’s heavy, it’s noisy, and it’s blowing hot air to its side. And, I guess, it costs pretty much as a PC too.
Then I connect this thing to my recently bought Sony Bravia 32-inch flat screen TV. With HDMI cable. When you hold an HDMI cable in your hands, you feel the solid quality. You know that whatever comes through this must be really good. It’s hard, it’s thick, and it’s long. Like a coaxil cable or something. And that was true – the moment I got the first picture from the game, I was stunned. I was just looking at it speechless. No television channel or DVD had the quality of the picture that I had in front of my eyes. Absolute brilliant stuff.
So, I played “Need for Speed” just a bit. I had to get used to joystick – form factor is weird for my hands that are used only to keyboards and mice; and it has so many buttons and controls that it takes some time to manage. I like “Need for Speed”, it’s a nice car racing game, which I used to play on PC some years ago. But since I got a Genius wheel and pedals for one of my birthdays, I don’t like playing car simulators without them anymore. Joystick is OK, but not that much fun as having a real wheel and stuff.
I check the bag for more games, and among unfamiliar titles I noticed “Grand Theft Auth IV”. Now that was something I wanted to try. I’ve heard a lot about the game, but never had a chance to try it out. It was Tuedays, 11:00pm when I started the game. The next thing I know – Maxim woke up. It was Wednesday, 7:30am. Now if that is not a sign of a good game, I don’t what is then.
Coming back to that comment above about the wrong day of the week. It’s a well known fact that no new games or gadgets should be opened or started on any day of the week except for Friday or Saturday. Cause it’s too easy to get carried away and spend a night playing with the new stuff. This time I forgot that, and a sleepy, half-focused Wednesday was a good reminder to me. Gladly, the weekend is ahead of us…
I have been really silent on this blog for the past three month or so. That’s because I was totally consumed by my work. The team in the office is growing, and we are having more stuff to do than ever. But to add to the usually routine, we were doing some really huge restructuring. When I started at the office back in April, the IT stuff was one huge mess – everything was chaotically interconnected and it was practically impossible to change something without affecting something else. We’ve been working hard to separate things ever since, and last week we deployed the last changes to the structure.
Now we have our internal CRM system separated from the web site and from the customers’ tool. All three parts are on their own now and we can make changes to each of them separately. There are, of course, a few minor things still left here and there, but overall I am quite happy with how it turned out to be.
Two things that we deployed last week were our new web site and customers’ trading room. We didn’t have much control over the web design part of it, user interfaces, or the deadlines for that matter, so the results aren’t as glamorous as we’d wanted them to be. Check them out for yourself – https://www.fxpro.com and https://www.myfx.pro . Both of these projects are in a very raw state right now – poorly localized, styles are off the limites, user experience is close to horrible, and both of these weight quite a lot. We will be working on addressing all these issues in the coming month, together with some new and interesting developments.
In the mean time, I think I’ll have more time for blogging too. There has been quite a bit going on that I want to share, and I’ll try to utilize the slow Christmas time to unleash all of that and clean up the backlog.
Some weeks ago, as part of their 10th anniversary celebration, Google presented Google Circa 2001 (yes, I know, I am doing very old news right now – Slashdot, CyberNet News). Google Circa 2001 is basically the way Google was in 2001, including the web index of those times. What’s the big deal? Well, for those of us who were on the web from back then, it provides for a way to see how things were different.
For example, back in 2001 I was better known as “Leonid Mamtchenkov“, not “Leonid Mamchenkov”. That was due to another spelling in my Russian passport. Also, my web site looked pretty different from what it is now. But it was already a blog, even if in the simplest form. Surprisingly even, I found a few posts that were not migrated to the current archives, or got lost somehow after a few CMS and back-end script changes. I’ll restore them for historical purposes later on.
Oh, sweet memories …
Maxim and I went to the see the show of the famous Medrano Circus on Sunday. It was supposedely the last day of their tour, but gladly they decided to delay their departure and will be staying until Wednesday, October 29th.
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Yesterday I discovered one of those banking paradoxes. If you have a check and you want to get the money the same day, but I don’t want to turn the whole amount into cash, then you still shouldn’t go for “deposit check” operation. The thing is that depositing the check to an account takes two to three days, because check needs to be cleared. However, you can cash the check and then deposit cash to the account. Both of these operations are imeediate.
Puzzled.
I’ve been ordering stuff from Amazon.co.uk rather frequently. I never had any problems with any of the products or deliveries. Until my last order. For some reason it just didn’t come. And because it was a DataPost delivery, it couldn’t have been tracked either.
So, when all the dates for estimated delivery passed, I emailed back to Amazon asking them if they have any information about that order. They told me that they haven’t, but if the order won’t arrive in the next few days (they gave me a specific date), then I should just let them know and they would resend it free of charge.
The date they mentioned came and went but the order still wasn’t here. So I waited for another couple of days and asked Amazon again. They emailed me back and said that they will place a replacement order within the same day. A few minutes later they confirmed that the replacement order has been placed, and just wanted to know if I still want all of the items, since one of the DVDs that I had on the list changed status from “In Stock” to “Usually ships within the next 4-6 business days”. I said that I don’t mind about more delay and would rather just get all of the things that I ordered.
And that was it. Two weeks later the re-placement order came in. And now let me state the obvious: I am a really satisfied happy customer. My respects and thanks go to Amazon for handling the situation the best way they could.
P.S.: A few days after the replacement order arrived, the original order came too. Very much delayed, but it came through as well. Because I am a greedy bastard, and because those DVDs are just so good, and because Christmas is almost upon us, I won’t be sending one of this orders back. I’ll keep both of them. But I will for sure order more, a lot more from Amazon. Thank you, and an early Merry Chrismas.
A couple of weeks ago my beloved Sony Ericsson P910 died. It got dropped one too many times. A rather large semi-lequid patch appeared in its left bottom corner and touch screen stopped working. Since the keyboard died a long time ago, I was left with no way to input or navigate the phone. Being an exceptionally smart individual I decided that a reboot might cure this, and, obviously, that left me at the “Enter your PIN” prompt with no hope what so ever.
Next morning I rushed to the mobile shop. The first two on my way were closed, since that was too early in the morning, but gladly I remembered that there is a Germanos branch in Debenhams, which opens pretty early. Like 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning. And indeed it was open.
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