Month: May 2015

It seems I’ve found a way to get an interest-free loan in foreign currency

1. You open a debit card. In my case – at PSB.

2. You deposit 1 ruble (in my case, the balance turned out to be 1.85 rubles)

3. While traveling abroad, you withdraw money in euros from an ATM (in my case – paying for car rental 415 euros)

4. PSB just told me that for transactions in euros, the real-time check of the account is for sufficiency, not for positivity. Hence, my account went into the negative (overdraft) by 25,000 rubles.

5. As PSB just informed me, there are no interest rates on the overdraft, so the account was negative from May 5 to May 23. Technically, this is a loan.

Perhaps with an ATM, it wouldn’t have happened, but buying an iPhone on such credit would have been more profitable)

Hmm. I wish I hadn’t watched Hozier’s “Take Me to Church” video.

Today, a railway bridge has disappeared on Varshavka.

Sketched on the way from Yaroslavl

In the Yaroslavl Kremlin, I encountered the smallest zoo in the world. There, you can see a bear for 60 rubles. Truly, a cage with a bear, surrounded by a solid fence with an entrance where a price list hangs and a woman stands. And all this within the Kremlin, where entry is ticketed. No, it’s not styled for children, you cannot feed, pet, or take a photo with the bear. It just sleeps in the corner. The paid bear sleeps in the corner of the Yarosvlavl Kremlin.

Of course, I held back the 60 rubles. Nearby was a mound of construction sand covered with a soft material. By jumping onto it, the bear cage was visible. But that didn’t go well! The woman from the ticket booth sprinted a hundred meters in a second to reprimand me. Basically, the cash register’s over there, buy a ticket. Seeing the bear without paying is like stealing 60 rubles from the cash register!

The Yaroslavl express to Moscow is better than the “Sapsan.” The train has internet and power outlets, and the dining car offers reasonably priced food. It’s slightly surprising to see a canned Budweiser for 480 and tea for 500 rubles, but there’s always an alternative – Zatecky Gus for 170 and half a pot of tea for 250. Interestingly, the tea for 500 differs from the 250 only in the amount of boiling water.

Yaroslavl is beautiful. Visit if you haven’t been there yet. Along the Volga embankment, there is internet and singing fountains. I want to return here.

AAAAA! MASHA IS WRITING ABOUT ME IN THE HOMEWORK!!111

Funny bug. For almost two years now, Alexander Khldunev, deputy director at CROC, has been lingering in my LinkedIn list “people who want to add you as a friend”. You can respond “I want to”, you can answer “I don’t want to”, and after the response, he disappears, only to reappear the next day. I don’t really care, but having it in front of my eyes for two years feels like he’s practically family. Maybe I should meet him in person, since it’s come to this.

An interesting series has started. In the spirit of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive.

Colleagues from e-commerce, in case anyone was interested, are there powerful engines for calculating shopping cart / promotions out there that allow the following (everything below is my own creation, there may be inaccuracies):

1) application of N promotions on M products in the cart in the most optimal way (minimum cart amount or most gifts). Example when it’s not the case: several promotional items enter together with several accessories into various promotions like “buy an accessory and get a gift/discount”. Usually, promotions are applied in some specific order, and the products under promotion are locked out from subsequent promotions.

This also includes the automatic determination that a buy 4 get 20% off offer is better than a buy 2 get 30% off.

2) calculating promotions for abandoned carts (if the price drops – an email is sent to the abandoner). This implies the possibility for batch processing and easy scalability in terms of performance.

3) adding a recommended product to the cart that leads to a decrease in the total cost. This happens, for example, if after reaching N rubles the delivery becomes free, but the total is less than the cost of delivery. As a result, you add a product, and the cart becomes cheaper. Such a feature exists in Hybris, but not exactly this way: these added products need to be set up as promotions, and typically there are significantly more accessories.

In general, some closer integration with recommendation capabilities seems to be from the same field.

4) splitting the cart into two parts. After the first purchase, you get a discount for the next purchase or a voucher, which when applied to the second part of the cart results in a reduction in overall expenses. This also covers promotions like get cheapest free.

5) promotions like “buy X products from category1 and Y products from category 2, get N% discount”. The cart can include more than X products from category1 and more than Y products from category2. How to choose products? And what if there are a couple more such promotions?

6) taking into account various external factors, such as loyalty cards, vouchers, orders, the customer’s region, and so forth.

7) capability to function for both retail and online stores. That is, it’s a separate cluster capable of calculations, which is accessed in real-time by other systems – online stores, POS terminals, ERP.

Accordingly, to maximize profits, and not savings, read some of the above points in reverse, so that promotions are applied in a way that is least favorable for the customer (possibly with an option for the customer to change this).

It would be convenient to have removable media for phones with some ridiculously simple way of connecting to the phone – like a magnetic latch. Even an external SD port would be a savior! It’s unclear why almost all phones have SD card connectors buried somewhere inconvenient.

I understand it’s old-fashioned and all, but buying video courses, HD movies, high-graphic games, and other heavy content at a supermarket, and carrying them scattered in a wallet is more convenient than downloading through iTunes or USB transfer to the phone or built-in card.

By the way, if you load multimedia content onto an SD card, Android starts lagging terribly because it tries to organize it in the Gallery, in videos, creating thumbnails in the background, scanning the file system.

And how handy it would be to buy a series on something like a flash drive, and connect it temporarily to watch. Or a few games. Or a flash drive with a navigator. Or dictionaries. Or to transfer something heavy from the phone to a friend.

Update: partially solved by micro-USB flash drives. I’ll buy one today; turns out, they are not rare.