Tag: lifestyle

Big cities suck

I live in a small city of a small country.  And I love it here.  One of the big benefits that a lot of people get really used to is that everything is 10 minutes away.  It would take you only about 20 minutes to get from one side of the city to another.  Most of the people I know who live in big cities have to drive back and forth for hours every day.  Those of them lucky enough to live next to the place they work usually pay a lot of money to have it that way.

Why am I suddenly thinking of how bad big cities are? Because I just watched this YouTube video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4FoAr8i26g]

I understand that the guy chose the place himself and since he is young and alone it probably makes sense.  And I do understand that the video is more about living in tight spaces.  But I still keep thinking of how big cities screw people’s minds.  Not only it’s OK for someone in the modern age and developed country to live in a 78 square foot room (7 square meters), but also to pay $800 USD per month for it!  That’s just wrong.  Even if a lot of people are doing it and even if one gets used to it quickly, it still doesn’t make it right.

 

Ultimate geek respect for Adrian Hands

Here is something that touched and moved every geek out there:

Adrian Hands was suffering from ALS and had lost motor skills when he used his legs to type in Morse code and fix a 9-year-old bug in Gnome. The patch was submitted three days before he passed away.

I think the following comment does the best job expressing the feeling:

There are so many who benefit from the community, and so relatively few who give back. So many people claim some excuse to not contribute anything to anybody without getting paid. Then there’s this guy. I am honored to have shared a planet with him.

 

Pages of history

Yesterday I came across this collection of nostalgic photographs that bring back memories from the USSR times.   I was too young to see some of those images in real life, but they still have meaning to me.  Most though are as they were back then.

Yet, these are staged photographs of some every day items.   Today I came across something much more real and something much more dramatic.  It is again a collection of images, but in a video form.  The video shows the staggering difference between the modern day Saint Petersburg and Leningrad (as it was called back then) during the Siege.  As Wikipedia puts it: “It was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history and one of the most costly in terms of human casualties”.  It lasted for 872 days and it took lives of millions of people.  As per Wikipedia: 1,017,881 were killed, captured, or missing and 2,418,18 wounded or sick from the Red Army forces.  Civilian casualties are in the numbers of 642,000 during the siege and 400,000 at evacuations.  These are only those numbers that were verified.  In reality that was much more.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ9LGdamU20]