Category: Personal

Despite being at work all the time, and being constantly busy, I am still a human. I am social. I have a life, family, and friends. I have thoughts and experiences. Once in a while I share them, and when I do, I do so in this category. If you don’t know me personally, chances are you’ll find posts in this category particularly boring.

What’s in the room? A fear. Or two.

OK, you gonna hate me for this, but I just couldn’t resist and read one more question from the The Daily Post.

You’re locked in a room with your greatest fear. Describe what’s in the room.

I wanted to do a post like that for a while now.  But thinking of my fears takes away for a long time and then I don’t know how to connect them all,  with which one to start, and how to finish.  And on top of that I get really scared thinking of all my fears.  But, if I think in terms of the room, and I’m locked in there with my greatest fear, all of a sudden I see … just me.  And that explains at least four big fears that I have:

  1. Fear of loneliness.  That is probably my greatest fear.  I am not comfortable with myself for long periods of time, and I constantly need people around me.  I’d rather have the worst possible people next to me, than nobody at all.
  2. Fear of myself.  This one comes and goes.  But when it comes, it’s pretty scary, and, difficult to explain.  But I do fear myself sometimes.  For most time, I can control myself pretty well.  (Feel free to disagree.)  However once in a while I get into that mode where I have an almost out of body experience, watching myself from aside, doing something crazy.  It’s almost never good or bad, just stupid.  But having no control of it is scary.
  3. Fear of dentists.  And I hear you jump up immediately, screaming – YOU ARE NOT A DENTIST!!! And you are right, I am not.  But remember that this whole thing is hypothetical.  There’s me locked up in the room with my greatest fear.  Well, I am afraid of dentists.  I’ve had more than a fair share of bad experiences and something snapped.  I think I might be so afraid of them, that even if I become one, I’d still have the fear.  And given that fear #2, I might just once have an uncontrollable desire to fix my own teeth.  Isn’t that scary?
  4. Fear of the dark.  Yeah, remember that room?  Someone switched off the lights and closed the shutters too, so it’s pitch black.  That alone wouldn’t throw me into a panic attack anymore – I used to be afraid of the dark a lot more when I was kid – but given all those other fears in the room, I would be pretty miserable.

OK, enough, as I said before, these thoughts get me scared.  I should get of the Internet now and go hide somewhere with people and lights, and without dentists.

What are you afraid off?  What would be in that room of yours?  Answering ‘you’ is cheating. :)

To all those people who keep telling me that I am …

To all those people who keep telling me that I am fat: look at you now, you frozen skinnies!  It’s not even below zero, and all you can say is “OMG! It’s so cold!!”.  Fat is awesome when it’s cold.  Summer, on the other hand, is a completely different story…

Happy New Year and Merry Christmas

Here we are again.  The end of the year is here, all presents bought and wrapped, waiting for the midnight, kitchen full of smells and sounds, occasional looks at the clock, phone calls, chats, and messages with friends and family.

So, how was this year?  How does it compare to the previous few?  Looking at my archives for the last year and the year before that, I have to say that this year wasn’t as fast flying through or as hectic as before.

I spent the first quarter of the year mostly working at our ImpreStyle startup and consulting Easy Forex.  That was the time of learning a lot of new things, both technical and business.   Such an arrangement also provided plenty of opportunities to meet new people, especially, in the case of Easy Forex, people of different cultures, the ones that I don’t know much about.

Roughly by May, it so happened that we had to take a break from ImpreStyle.  So I joined Easy Forex as a full time employee, filling the shoes of both a web developer and a team lead.  A new team, a new department, and a very challenging project all occupied my attention for the rest of the year.  Again, learning new things and re-thinking old ways.

The result of all that work is being launched over these days – Easy Forex’s website rebuilt on a WordPress platform.   It wasn’t as easy as it might sound.  The team had a lot of constraints, shooting at a moving target.  The site itself is a monster, with multiple cultures, multiple languages, static and dynamic content, consuming and providing a variety of APIs, deployed over a very complex architecture with Akamai CDN, load balancers, clusters, and so on.  On top of that, the specification of the project required an identical implementation to the previous CMS, which meant that a lot WordPress native concepts had to be worked around.  The end result, even though still a bit messy, is a rather elegant solution based on WordPress with both public and custom plugins, advanced multi-branch git setup, over 20 KB phing build script, and more.  And even if it doesn’t look the part (yet), I am quite proud of what has been achieved by the team.

Looking back at my previous end of the year posts, travelling seems to be an important part of my life, with not too much of it happening in the last few years.  Well, at least this year I had an opportunity to travel to Israel.   The next is also looking bright with a few possibilities marked down in the calendar, but not yet fully confirmed.

But enough about technology and work.  What about friends and family?  Well, it was a rich year in family affairs.  The highlight of the year is my brother’s marriage, with a few relatives flying over from Russia and spending a few days with us here, in Limassol.  That also gave an a chance to spend some time with my dad, who I haven’t seen in six years or so.

In summer, my wife and son flew to Siberia to catch up with some family affairs over there, and, in September, we were entertaining one of my sister-in-law’s family in Cyprus again.  It was nice.

As mentioned before, with my work changes back and forth, I had plenty of opportunities to meet new people.  I am glad to say that a few of my new work acquaintances became personal friends.  Also, sadly, it seemed that I’ve parted ways with a couple of people.  Maybe it will change, maybe it will not.  That’s not entirely in my hands at this stage.

Judging by the sounds and smells from the kitchen, I should be wrapping up.  Overall, I think it was a good year.  It was, as always, different from what I was expecting, but it still brought me more joy, happiness, and new experiences that sadness and sorrow.  Hopefully, the next one will be as good or better.

With that, I wish you all a very Happy New 2013, and a Merry Christmas.  I hope your wishes will continue to come through, that you’ll be full of health, joy, will, and strength to explore life and to find new things.  All the best to you and your loved ones!  Have a good one.