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.

Free tests at Brainbench

It’s been a really long while since I looked at Brainbench.com. I used to take a lot of tests an even have few certificates from the early days. I even remember when it was called something else.

Anyway, today I got reminded about this huge repository of tests and certifications and I decided to check it out. Overall there are more than 600 tests that cover a large part of both practical and theoretical computer industry. Here is the list of free tests that you can take.

Just to see if I still have it I took a couple. And passed. The results weren’t as high as they could have been because I wasn’t fully focusing and I was in the middle of the noisy office, but I am satisfied anyway. Check the results below, if you are interested enough.

Continue reading Free tests at Brainbench

Mobloging photography with Flickr

I have decided to use Flickr for yet another purpose of mine – mobloging photography. Basically, I have configured my Flickr account to work with email. From now, whenever I don’t have my camera with me, I’ll use my phone to make a picture and will immediately send it to Flickr. It will automatically tag all such pictures with ‘cameraphone’ (also ‘mobile’, ‘moblog’, and ‘p800’ but that can change).

If you have the mobile phone with camera and email, you can do the same. Login to Flickr and configure upload by email. And than you can tag you pictures with ‘cameraphone’ too. Automatically. And than we can all be a part of one huge international group that tags their pictures with ‘cameraphone’.

That’s fun. Here are my pictures so far (I’ve uploaded some old ones that were in the phone) :

http://flickr.com/photos/mamchenkov/tags/cameraphone/

And here are the global pictures of all Flickr users that used ‘cameraphone’ as a tag :

http://flickr.com/photos/tags/cameraphone/

The house elf loves me

… or I can’t explain it anyhow else.

The house elf is an invisible semi-imagined creature that lives in our house and does all sorts of strange things. Many of these things are small and don’t matter too much for me to spend time talking about them. But there is one particular action that the house elf repeats from year to year and by which it tells me that it loves me.

I am talking about pocket filling.

Continue reading The house elf loves me

I’ll sell it any day now. NOT!


My blog is worth $18,065.28.
How much is your blog worth?

The blogosphere is going crazy with this new toy from Technorati. My blog is slightly over $18K. And although I doubt anyone would want to buy it, I won’t sell it anyway. It carries my name after all. So, how much is your blog worth?

Still, I think it would be nice if there was a tool that could be seriously used by those who buy blogs – I don’t know who they are, don’t ask me. If there was such a tool it would be so easy to measure blogs, build blogs for sale, find buyers, and sell them, that it would be a good business opportunity for those of us, who … well … dares to try.

Until than we should simply blog blog and blog hope. We should hope that someone with the will and money will one day find our piles of posts and offer us something in return, so that we could finally go and spend some quality time with our families. No. I don’t think that would inspire that. If bloggers will be paid for what they do, they would probably do more of it. Or so I think.

P.S.: Last two paragraphs were put here for one reasona and one reason only – to make this post look good. You see, because I use DIVs instead of TABLEs, once in a while I get this weird formatting glitches that require me to put more text or be abandoned by all my audience, starting with me. You can stop reading now. Like you even did. I bet you are already cleaning the history and cache of your browser to help you forget this URL faster.

Rocked a bit

Today I went to “Stork” again with some friends of mine. There was yet another hard rock party. It wasn’t as good as the last time, but it was pretty good anyway. There were enough of both old songs – those that I hear on every rock party, and news songs – old songs, but that I really hear. One of the new songs that really brought up a few good memories was “Another brick in the wall” from Pink Floyd. Among the old ones was an excellently performed “Smoke on the water” from Deep Purple. And yes, it was good even considering the fact that I am among those lucky ones who can compare it to the original.

Although I enjoyed the concert, the atmosphere wasn’t moving enough for me to jump around like a crazy horse and shout like a wounded elephant. Not to worry though. Kakomalis Amateur Song Festival (aka KSP) is coming soon. So far it is expected on November 12th, which is only a couple of weeks away. There I will tear my throat to pieces and abuse my muscles to the point of no return. Again. Yeah. Rock on!