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.

I am on the right track

Either I am very lucky this month or I am doing something right. First, Google recruiter asked me if I was interested in working for them. And now I got another offer from someone else. This time though there is nothing major. A one time task to transfer a bunch of blogs from Nucleus CMS to WordPress. Since I wrote the script to do migrate my blog, they figured that I might be the right person to help them out.

I am glad. I am glad that my blog starts to bring in a little potential. I am glad that people find stuff that I do useful. I am glad that there is yet another example of how Open Source Software works. I just did something for myself. Than I published it. Few people found it useful and customized it to their needs. And now someone else found it who don’t have the skills or time necessary to do the necessary changes, so they are willing to pay me to do it for them.

That feeds my enthusiasm and helps me both to develop and advocate Open Source Software.

“Oz” prison series

Somehow I got my hands on 6 seasons of the “Oz” series from HBO. I have to tell you that it’s something.

I started watching the first season and I wans’t liking it much. There were too many things going on and some places were somewhat underdeveloped. But it had something in it that kept me in. With every one of the eight episodes I liked it more and more.

The series show the daily life of a number of convicts in an experiemental prison. I guess that teenagers are the target audience for these episodes, because it can sometimes seem too naive or simplistic. But there are interesting thoughts and scenarios for everyone.

Yesterday, I started watching the second season. It was getting late and I thought I would watch one or two episodes (each one is about 50 minutes or an hour) and go to bed. I found myself eight hours later, at 5:30am, finishing the 8-th episode – the last in the second season. It has been a long time since I was so interested in what was going on that I watched it for 8 hours straight – no sleep, no food, not even a bathroom trip.

Today I am carrying the third season home and I have this doubt in my mind – should I start watching it or not? On one hand, I am sleepy and tired. On the other hand I am very interested in watching it and tomorrow’s scheduled is somewhat relaxed.

Maybe just one episode…

Identical is bad

I have two identical computers under my desk. One is to my left and another is to my right. My workstation is to the left. The computer to my right is not mine and I don’t have anything to do with it. It just has to stay there.

During the last two days I spent more than two hours troubleshooting all sorts of wierd problems with my PC. Yesterday I had a problem with DVD writing. I was inserting the empty disk, but the drive woldn’t recognize it. Software was insisting that no disk was in the drive. Today I had a problem with USB storage. I was sticking it in, but nothing was happening. Not like it wasn’t recognized. More like the USB port itself was dead.

I was running all sorts of debugging, tracing, and monitoring. I almost got as far as kernel compilation. Luckily I realized the source of the problem before that.

You see, I am right-handed, so reaching to my right is easier and simplier for me. Add to the fact that for the last five or so years, my office workstation was always to my right. Needless to say that I have to be more careful and pay more attention in my new setup. Otherwise, strange things can happen to my productivity.

Now he gets all romantic

Maxim has been learning recently how to return all that love and tender that he gets from us. Specifically, he is learning how to hug and kiss. And although he is still too clumsy and wet about it, both Olga and I just love the sweetness of these moments.

When he gives a hug, he pushes his body against mine and grabs my neck with both of his hands as hard as he can. If can reach the hair, that’s good too. You might confuse this behaviour with an attack, but it’s not. While doing this he has the biggest and sweetest smile on his face.

Kissing is even more gross. He just started to get the concept. So far he got to the point of mouth touching face. Unfortunately, any action that involves his mouth, also involves it in a wide open state. And considering the fact that his teeth are popping up, he is heavily drooling pretty much any time of the day or night. So the kiss turns into a really wet business. He still has a problem with actually hitting my head with his mouth, so when he succeeds, he laughs out loud like he just won the World Rally Championship.

Anyway, with all the clumsiness, humidity, and pain, these moments are pure happiness. Hopefully, he will practice more often and perfect his procedures. Until that day, we’ll enjoy what we get…