One of these days I was talking to a friend of mine. I was very morning slow, but I was surprised at my fast reaction to one of his phrases. It went like this:
Friend: I am downloading Windows Longhorn now…
Me: It’s like saying that you’re getting a 26 inch dildo. You’re free to do what you want, but I won’t be too proud of that, you know.
Now, where did that come from?
Several Russian news agencies (NEWSru.com for example)wrote yesterday that Moscow municipality decided to spend about 900,000 USD on the campaign promoting sexual abstinence. The campaign was decided to be held because there were no positive results from the previous attemp to decrease the number of sexually tranmitted desease and teenage pregnancy by promoting safe sex.
On the other side of the Web, Julie of the ‘a little pregnant‘ blog wrote this post. It links to the a number of studies and reports which show that sexual abstinence pledges are not a panacea.
[paranoid mode]Coincidence? I think not.[/paranoid mode]
I don’t think that Moscow will see any major changes after the campaign. I think that educating teenagers about safe sex, making condoms and other guardians easily available (everywhere, at any time, and cheap), and increasing the overall moral values of the population is the only way to combat the problem. From what I see in the blogs of Russian teenagers, sex, alcohol, and weed play a much bigger role in the average teenager’s life than they should. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be there. I’m just worried about the extent to which they are. Comparing Russian blogs with blogs of teenagers from other countries makes all the difference in the world. Unfortunately.
Either my night vision improved tremendiously or there is some really bright moonlight outside. It’s past 1:00am but I can see a lot from my balcony – both close-ups and remote objects. Shweet!
After reading through this post and linked articles, I went ‘Hmm..’ and remembered one of the recent Paul Graham‘s articles ‘Hiring is Obsolete‘ where he mentions that:
There might be 500 startups right now who think they’re making something Microsoft might buy.
Than I thought that if Microsoft is to buy Red Hat, there will probably be a huge wave of Linux people starting up companies and making all sorts of things that Microsoft might be interested in after Red Hat purchase. But Microsoft will probably be busy fighting a bunch of anti-trust cases.
While I understand that the whole thing is a rumor, it feeds some interesting thinking…
My father-in-law called today morning and said that he will most probably come to visit us next week. I was really surprised to hear that. Last time he was here about one month prior to Olga’s and mine wedding. That is to say that he was here around June of 2002. Lots of things happened since than, including our wedding, Olga’s hospital adventure with gall bladder, and the birth of our son to name a few. Neither of this events caused him to come.
And than this sudden phone call today morning…
I was thinking about it and couldn’t figure it out. Why? Why now? And than Olga helped me out. Her father got some pictures of Maxim that we passed with Olga’s mother. He gets the pictures and calls us to let us know that he is coming within the next couple of days. It seems like a very strong correlation to me. Even if it’s not so, I’d like to think that it is.
The power of photography, so to speak…