Christmas

Personalized phone call from Santa

Gmail team, as awesome as it is, has outdone itself. Here is a little tool they’ve created for the seasonal greetings – SendACallFromSanta.com . The idea is old but the application and execution is fresh and excellent. Basically, you just provide a bunch of information about the recipient and then gets either an audio or video message from Santa, very personalized and unique. Here is a video message that it created for my son Maxim after I answered all the questions.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lmbbO4XfQ8]

Try it yourself – it’s fun and cool!

Smile with “Рождеством Христовым”

A couple of days ago DailyPost suggest the following topic for a blog post: Share something that makes you smile. I wanted to share something, but so many things make me smile that it’s hard to choose. Today though I came across something that made me smile, and even laugh. It’ll take me a bit to explain, so please bear with me. And if you choose not to, here is an entertaining and short explanation of “bear with me” versus “bare with me”.

Anyway, here we go with the facts:

It’s just after the midnight on January 7th.
Russia, as well as some other countries, celebrate Christmas on January 7th, and not on December 25th. Wikipedia explains why.
“Merry Christmas” in Russian is “С Рождеством Христовым”.

So, what we have right now is a lot of Russian-speaking people sending “С Рождеством Христовым” via any means possible to a lot of other people. One of those means is Twitter. One of many Twitter features is Trending Topics (aka TT). This is an automatically generated list of most common phrases used across Twitter in some recent period of time (like an hour or two). And as so many other automated features, this one has its side effects.

Firstly, it seems that it doesn’t much care for the language or alphabet. It grabs any frequently used phrase in any language or any alphabet, puts it in the list of trending topics, and shows it to any user, no matter what his location or preferred language is.

Secondly, it seems that it tries to minimize the phrase by removing very short words. Like those consisting of only one or two characters.

So what we have by now is “Рождеством Христовым”, and not “С Рождеством Христовым”. And that phrase is a number one trending topic, shown to all Twitter users everywhere. Here is a screenshot.

Here starts the fun. Most people who see this, have no idea what is it all about. Many of those, who are trying to find out get confused by incorrect spelling and by the fact that Christmas is over already for most of the world. That I find funny.

But that’s not all. Since the phrase went up to trending topics, it got a lot of special attention. Humor. Some people started spreading rumors. For example, that “Рождеством Христовым” is the name of the new Russian nuclear bomb. Some others started using the phrase in famous quotes. For example, “I love the smell OF Рождеством Христовым in the morning!” (original quote talks about napalm and is from the movie “Apocalypse Now”). That I find hilarious. You can have a look yourself at everything that has been tweeted with this phrase.

And even that is not all. Twitter has been known for having hard times during activity spikes. Today is just one of such spikes. So Twitter is unstable, falling over the edge. And when it does so, it shows the famous Fail Whale.

This is cute and worth a smile, but there is still more to the story. The meaning of Fail Whale varies between people. Mashable once published an interview with the designer of the image. While I know the background of this image, I can’t help a different association. The one that Denis Lebel mentioned in the comment to that interview – the story of the Sperm Whale from Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Universe.

It is important to note that suddenly, and against all probability, a Sperm Whale had been called into existence, several miles above the surface of an alien planet and since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity.

Innocent “Merry Christmas” wishes, weird Cyrillic letters shown to the whole world, rumors of nuclear war from Russian, word play with famous quotes, Twitter outages, and flying whales – I find the mix hilarious. I hope you do too.

P.S.: To all those of you celebrating – Merry Christmas and С Рождеством Христовым.

Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!

First of all, Happy New Year and Merry Christmas to all of you! Best wishes to you, your families, and friends. I hope all your disappointments and mischiefs will stay in 2010 and that 2011 will bring only the good stuff.

Looking back at 2010, I see a very rocky year. So many things came and went, started and finished, appeared and disappeared that it’s hard to keep the track of. I found and left two jobs. I moved back to the apartment from the rented house. My wife found the job, but not for long. Maxim started school. My mother moved to another apartment and got back to her blog, even though in a completely different way. My dad took over a website and became a webmaster in just the few month that he was online. With all these changes around me, I didn’t focus as much on blogging, photography, and technological trends. But now that most of these changes are (hopefully) over, I’ll get back to my interests.

I don’t have any big plans or hopes for 2011. I hope that everyone around me stays healthy and wealthy. I hope I’ll get out of the country for a few days (not much travel happened in 2010, but that was well compensated by 2009). I hope I’ll finally get myself one of those Android phones. And maybe even an Amazon Kindle. These gadgets interest me enough to review my programming skills, which I hope will see some refurbish this year.

With that, I once again wish you all the best, and hope you’ll share your year reviews and hopes for 2011 in the comments. Have fun, enjoy, and celebrate. Happy New Year!

Where does Father Christmas come from?

The sweetness of Christmas season is starting to take its toll on me. I am sugared up and covered in chocolate both inside and outside. I’m also in a mildly awaken state between hangover and sobriety. And for this condition, there is nothing better than a funny Christmas story with some black humor in it. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I give you the answer to the question “Where does Father Christmas come from?”.

Warning: minor nudity and minor violence ahead!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei69bYwwCvc]

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Better late, than never they say. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and all the best for the New Year!

I totally missed the appropriate time for New Year resolutions and forecasts, so I won’t bother much. But in brief, the year 2009 and was good to me. I traveled a lot, learned new things, had quite a few interesting challenges at work, met a whole bunch of cool people, pushed quit a bit of paperwork that was lagging behind, got my mother in Cyprus and my dad on the Internet, and more. It was a bit too difficult and challenging at times, but in a good sense. In a way that I probably had too much going on for me, rather than not enough.

As for the New Year, I hope it will be as packed with stuff as the previous one. I hope that I’ll continue my travels and shift a few things at work to get to new challenges and new areas that I wanted to explore for some time now. Also, I still hope that I will sort out all the paperwork during this year (possible, but knowing me well, I have doubts on how realistic this hope is). I have quite a bit of plans for this year, personal projects and such – I hope that they will starting turning real as opposite of being just plans. But, the time will tell and we shall see.

Once again, happy holidays and best wishes to you and your loved ones.