“You know it's time for a vacation when…”

I generally like questions like “What is C#?”, “What is the antonym for «конструктор»?” and “What is the synonym for «нежить»?” – it's funny how they can be used to tell the geeks from musicians / philosophers / normal people. But it's a bit scary when you look at the bottom of the chocolate box with the list of ingredients, see the “RUS”, “ENG” and “GEO” labels there and start thinking “Wait, what the hell does the Russian Geo Engineering team have to do with chocolates?”
Well, blame ISO 639-2, the others have kat/ka for Georgian.

New year .corp

The corporate Christmas party was awful, but the poker afterparty compensated for that. Still, it's pretty funny when a huge crowd of engineers is watching the awful performance and thinking “It obviously sucks so bad that we should stop it ASAP, but hey, who knows, maybe it's just me and somebody is actually enjoying it?”

On a completely unrelated note [TWIMC]: have you seen uuner.blogspot.com?

Visiting relatives

I like my father-in-law's attitude towards food. Here's what happened when he was asked to get some duck for the Christmas dinner:

And you don't want to know what happened the last time when somebody asked for the lamb chops. We've still got our fridge stuffed with frozen meat.

Speaking about social graphs

I love XFN. Check out the specifications:

spouse
    Someone you are married to. Symmetric. Not transitive.
< … >
muse
    Someone who brings you inspiration. No inverse.

I guess I'll start using it.

GCD 2007 postmortem

Conducting the Maps API workshop offline was fun. Hopefully next time we'll have some internet connection.

Google Code Day 2007

Brad Fitzpatrick is coming to Moscow to talk about the social graphs in OpenSocial, so the Google Code Day on December 19 will definitely be fun. I'll be at the Geo workshops. Here is the registration page for the event. Who's coming?

ru.youtube

Yesterday's YouTube.ru PR event was pretty boring, but still: here are some photos featuring Chad Hurley, Alexander Pushnoy and Askar Tuganbaev.

Thanks, Alex!

This morning I became a proud owner of a comic strip printout with a real Randall Munroe signature! Did I mention that I love working at Google?

Photo update

We've finally uploaded our wedding photo album!
Thanks to Tatiana Garanina for the great pictures.

Big Brother strikes back

I'm getting to beleive the conspiracy theory that SUP is here to make as many fuckups as possible in order to scare everyone away from LJ. Today's outstanding privacy violation is showing the list of registered users who viewed your journal/posts/profile recently. Are they deliberately evil or what?

Ordinary nashism

Now I'm pissed off. Just look at these nice people: [1], [2], [3]. There's like 30K of them in the centre of Moscow now. They are chanting really loud, they paralyzed almost all the streets on my way to work, and it's been like that since Monday!

We need to build our own Canberra (preferrably in the vicinity of Magadan) and move the capital there. All the political activities should be equated to gambling and restricted to several designated areas. All these enthusiastic idiots may feel free to come to these areas and chant that they believe in Russia, Putin and themselves, while we'll keep working (and paying taxes to fund their summer camps on Seliger).

GCC rocks

Puzzle of the day in the office:

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int main() {
  int j = 2;
  cout << -1 * abs(j - 1) << endl;
  return 0;
}

1) What does this program print?
2) What the hell is going on?

In Soviet Russia, SUP buys you!

This is fucking ironic, especially today. SUP Fabrik buys LiveJournal from Six Apart, so everyone's leaving or at least discussing the possible options. With SUP Fabrik we get a nice portal, some mobile tools, some free stuff like the Vedomosti subscription – and a whole lot of privacy issues like openID cheating and their tech support using our passwords. Besides, they just lie to us about the ads and about the opt-out options and impose some weird stuff like those snapshots or adult content flags. But most of the people don't care: after all, the portal is really nice, the mobile tools are handy, and the privacy issues are clearly paranoia. The intelligentsia bloggers, however, are panicking and saying that they're definitely going to leave. Most of them don't leave because what matters is the community, and you just can't safely move the whole community away from LiveJournal.

The point is – it's the same as the real life in Russia. SUP Fabrik becomes United Russia: we all know it's pretty much like the old Communist Party; they don't care about the rights and freedoms (though they say they do), but generally the people are happy as long as the oil prices are high and life is not too bad. Intelligentsia is panicking ("We should leave this country"), but not that many people actually leave: after all, the community is here.