Big Picture covers Ramadan 2010. I am not even religious myself, but I still find the image very powerful. So powerful in fact, that I couldn’t select one to give a taste. I had to pick a few. Make sure you see them and more in large. Stunning!
Today is the System Administrator Appreciation Day. I wish a happy sysadmin day to everyone who ever took their time to answer a stupid question for a billionth time without resolving to violence, to everyone who ever spent a night or a weekend in the office fixing a problem that he didn’t create, to everyone who makes IT infrastructure invisible until there is a problem, to everyone who spent their own free time to make things better for the rest of the world, to everyone who despite working hard and taking a lot of initiative is often the first person to blame, to everyone who spent hours in the freezing datacenters or on pan-frying roofs or in dark and stinky basements, to everyone who’s mobile phone receives dozens of SMS messages every hour 24×7, to everyone who’s mobile number is posted on all office white-boards with the caption “Emergency”, to everyone … you got the idea.
If you know a sysadmin, take a minute of your time, go and say “Thank you”. If you have some change in your pocket, buy your sysadmin a pint of beer. If you are a hot girl, go give him a kiss and a hug. Or her. If you are not a sysadmin, you don’t have and probably won’t ever have an idea of how hard these people work to make your life easier. It’s their day today.
If you still don’t understand what sysadmins do, have a look here.
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!