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.

Gaming experience : PlayStation 3

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…

Back from work

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.

How it was back in 2001

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 …

Medrano Circus in Limassol

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.

Continue reading Medrano Circus in Limassol

Banking paradox

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.