Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

My favorite (so far) programming language has been born 20 years ago.   It’s been loved and hated.  It’s been praised and damned.  It’s been complimented and criticized.  But all that doesn’t matter.  What matters is that it has been helping people all over the world to solve problems.  Tricky, boring, annoying problems.  It provided enough power to build enterprise grade applications, while still being easy and flexible enough to be the super-glue of many systems.

I’m sure Perl will still be with us in another 20 years.  I wish it to be as useful in that time, as it is now.

Thanks, respect, and best wishes to everyone who created and supported Perl, its community and tools all these years.  Happy birthday!

We’ve setup our Christmas decorations today.  This a bit later than we usually do it, but still much earlier than I feel we should do it.  Anyway.  Now everything is sparkling yellow, solid green, and blinking colors.  It looks nice and fresh, but there is definitely a need to switch some of the lights off at least once in a while…

Maxim and Cappa are overexcited about this whole Chritmas thing.  Cappa tries to climb up the tree and bangs on all the toys.  Maxim helps her to hit those chocolate balls in hope that they will fall off and he will be allowed to unwrap and eat them all.  Or spread them all over the walls and furniture in the most unaesthetic manner…

The Christmas is coming.

(For those of you who don’t know, my mother came to Cyprus last Friday for just a few days to celebrate her birthday.  She is back to Moscow today.)

It was one of the shortest visits so far.  The longest one was when Maxim was born.  Ma stayed with us for a month or so.  There were a few two-weeks and 10-days stays.  There were some 1 week stays.  Those felt short, but we had enough time to pack all the fun in.  With 3 days at hand and all the preparations that had to be done for the actual celebration, we still managed to enjoy plenty of time together.

The celebrations were cool too.  A whole bunch of people, up in the hills with plenty of drinks, food, free time, and good mood – that’s a heck of a combination for great time.  It’s a bit sad that it’s over, but  I’m glad we didn’t spoil a second of it.  It was all fun.

Happy birthday mom.  Hope to see you again soon!

I know you’ve been waiting, so here they are – pictures from New Year celebration. They aren’t many, because a) I wasn’t in a mood and b) I was busy being Santa Claus. But those that are there give the idea of what went on.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-12-31_New_Year_Eve/

To all of you reading this blog as well as those of you who got here by search engine accident – Happy New Year! Best wishes to all of you!

One of the good things I carried out of living in Cyprus is Christmas celebration. I came to realize that it’s not a religios holiday of any sort. It’s just a date for a major celebrations. Some people prefer to have family dinners, others go to pubs, yet others ignore it all together. But the scale of the holiday is so huge that the spirit is in the air, and neither you, neither me, nor anyone else can do anything about it.

To all of you who appreciate the holiday – Merry Christmas!

To all those of you who don’t – you lose!

Happy holidays either way.

The older you get, the more reasons you have to celebrate. A whole bunch of those reasons are birthdays. When the baby is very very young, every day of his life is celebrated. Until he gets up to a week or two old. Than weeks start to count. Slowly, monthes and weeks merge together for more reasons. Than it’s years. Than decades. The quarters of the century. Etc. The funny thing is that you can still keep track of days, weeks, and month – not only the years.

Maxim has finished his 26-th week today.

Once again, today is the last Friday of July, which means that today is Sysadmin’s Day! Congratulations to all system, network, database, etc administrators out there. Today is your day. I wish you all receive some appreciation from your users and management. Don’t stay in the office for too long. Go out and celebrate!