Month: August 2015

Liza is 14 years old (@ Hooters in Moscow)

https://www.swarmapp.com/r_aliev/checkin/55c8de15498eed44b26b04ff?s=iP0EIawoJD84DXlSm0uDmGslVbk&ref=fb&source=openGraph&fbdevmode=true&appsflyerId=fbshare

The botanical garden is far more interesting than Gorky Park when it comes to skateboarding. A couple of kilometers of downhill and not too many people

Exactly four years ago, the director of the publishing house where I worked 16-17 years ago, Igor Sadomsky, fell into a crevasse at the Pass of Six in North Ossetia (http://taganok.ru/forum/index.php?topic=973.0) .

The film “Touching the Void” is an amazing documentary about the thirst for life, the power of will, spirit, and body, and how strong a person can be – the story of two climbers stuck in the mountains.

Unfortunately, Igor was unlucky and did not make it out. May his memory be bright. And do watch the film, it’s worth it, especially for those who love the mountains.

@[100001040248794:2048:Oksana Snitsereva] @[814653289:2048:Anton Matorin] @[100002267003981:2048:Svyat Kulikov]

http://www.kinopoisk.ru/film/63670/

The most sensible movie about pyramids and more, among those I have seen. It’s incredibly interesting to watch due to the large amount of factual material, supplemented with rare footage from around the world. Throughout the film, one occasionally needs to engage critical thinking to distinguish facts from assumptions, but watching it is definitely worth the time spent. Highly recommend.

http://www.kinopoisk.ru/film/652833/ (rating 8.6)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2124189/ (rating 7.9)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCqZCHsgLVA

Two years at TEAMIDEA! It’s time for some interim conclusions, what I’ve achieved and what not yet. Both work-related and not:

Work-related:

1. Managed to achieve recognition in the market with my team/our company – when it comes to SAP hybris, it’s about us. The main focus now is to enhance and deepen!

2. Assembled a wonderful e-commerce/hybris team, which is now finishing the third project and, god willing, will soon start the fourth. We’ve gained expertise, and by the end of 2015, I will be multiplying it among people, we are expanding, looking for 2xDEV (Java/Spring), QA, BA, SA.

3. Remaining a manager, I’ve enhanced my technical skills as I de facto play the role of an SAP hybris architect, dealing with code in Idea on Java/Spring, balancing estimates-contracts with beans-protocols. Just finished writing a “just for fun” converter from Yandex Market YML to SAP hybris. Created a demo marketplace with products from three online stores (60,000 products), all with attributes, with faceted search/navigation, image gallery, original categories, navigation. Pleased as punch 🙂

Not work-related over these two years:

1. Learned French at some level. Studied a couple of times a week with Anna Derevenitckaia for about a year and a half. I speak a little, read a little, write a bit worse. My trip to France this spring was a test of my French “to the limit”. Need to get back to it somehow.

2. Improved my piano playing skills – have been learning on weekends with Ivan Shapovalov for two years now. Piano still holds the top spot among hobbies. Currently learning the theme from Midnight in Paris, Bistro Fada http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9YNKRwI5aU

3. Quite significantly improved my English language skills with Alisa A Hale. Have been taking lessons for two years, once or twice a week, usually one-on-one, plus recently group lessons in the office.

4. Enhanced my drawing skills, tackled oil and pastel. Almost all drawings from this album are from the last 2 years: https://www.facebook.com/raufaliev/media_set?set=a.10151994159022368.1073741828.573817367&type=3 Unfortunately, haven’t been taught by anyone yet. Would like to.

5. Learned to ride a skateboard, ripstik, snowboard. Now I have something to love about snow in winter and parks in summer!

6. Started running. Although it’s not much and infrequent, it’s nice to realize that a 13 km run in the morning gives a great boost for the whole day. I would never have believed I could run even five km before.

7. Seem to have given up sweets (except for dates) and flour products. Just hit three months today.

Plans for the future – grandiose! So far, I like everything, we live and work on 🙂

I’ve often seen the opinion of professional photographers that a protective filter for a lens is unnecessary (for example, the last time I saw it here: http://strravaganza.livejournal.com/47932.html).

My personal example is in the attached photo. Quite a few shots were ruined until I bought a new lens, and then a new camera.

But in general, the recommendation to use a hood instead of a filter in most cases is a sound one.

An orange, it turns out, is a hybrid of a mandarin and a pomelo.

“Giorgio Armani” and “Ralph Lauren” belong to Nestlé Corporation. Hugo Boss and Lacoste are actually Procter & Gamble.

Corn, or more precisely, its cob, is called an Ear of maize in English. Interestingly, corn cannot reproduce by itself (if the cob falls to the ground, it just rots). “Cornucopia” won’t help either. It is also interesting to note that wild corn does not exist.

Live and learn.

Cool. Just in case someone didn’t know, in Office 2013 you can work on a single document as a group. Right now, we are editing a document three ways, each in our own section. It works on the principle of CVS – when saving, changes are merged, and during editing, icons appear in the document text indicating “here this person started editing something.” The full functionality of Word is operational, unlike Google Docs, which we used before for collaborative work.

It seems, farewell LaTeX for complex documents

How curious the workings of dreams, memory, and coincidences are. I just dreamt that I was taking yet another Hybris exam, and it turned out to be nonsensical (as is often the case in dreams) – for instance, one of the tasks involved actual dog leashes, in another, something needed to be colored in with colored pencils, and yet another was a page-long task, all for 25 minutes, time was ticking, I was submitting in a separate room, and then some men came in to check if everything was fair. Well, a dream is just a dream, all sorts of nonsense, but amusing nonetheless.

I wake up, open Facebook – and it tells me, “what you had on this day a year ago,” and at the top of the list – an exam passed.

In today’s lesson (piano), Vanya mentioned Giuseppe Verdi and his biography written by G. Tarocci. I found the topic interesting and read through three-quarters of the book, which was released in the “Lives of Remarkable People” series thirty years ago.

This story of a man from a peasant family, who carved out a career and name for himself despite facing many hardships and deprivations. He endured the early deaths of his wife and two children. He was rejected from the music academy, without which one could not call oneself a professional composer. His early productions were met with failure after failure.

As is known, artists and musicians in the past primarily earned their living through their work, and only afterward came creativity, lofty ideals, and recognition. Probably 90 percent of all artistic heritage from the past was made to order, had a client, and what we would now call a “brief”.

Music aside, when negotiating opera payments, the money counts: “…Negotiations go quickly – here’s the price. Those who agree – agree. If not – goodbye.”

And this is how many software companies operate today:

“…How the opera ‘Jerusalem’ was made: “Milan becomes Toulouse, Lombard crusaders turn into Frenchmen, mass scenes are added, a couple of secondary characters are removed, completely unnecessary dances are inserted, the accompaniment is refreshed, and all is well – the new opera is already set for its Paris debut. It turns out to be a ridiculous papier-mâché structure, painted more garishly than usual. A monument to tastelessness. But Verdi is satisfied. “The production will be absolutely wonderful, because they do not skimp on expenses.”

About “The Sicilian Vespers”:

“…the libretto lacks any spark, it’s drawn-out, schematic, repeating familiar moves, boring and without even a hint of any character. Bulky sets slow down the action, dances, flashy stage effects — all of this clashes with the drama and deprives it of any rhythm. In creating the libretto, Scribe just pieced together the most outdated and commonplace elements from Verdi’s operas — from ‘The Battle of Legnano’ and ‘Joan of Arc’ — and moreover embellished it all with flashy settings and pointless actions by the extras, just to fill the stage. The maestro is disheartened, he complains to the management of the ‘Grand Opera’, demands that Scribe revise the libretto. But he achieves nothing. ‘Grand Opera’ is a complex, cumbersome mechanism, very difficult to change, to say the least. Verdi is forced to accept the libretto as it is.”

And not only by music do composers live: “…Poplars, manure, straw, young fillies, horses, hay — this is what now interests the author of ‘La Traviata’, ‘Rigoletto’, ‘Il Trovatore’. He thinks only of this.”

I want to quote constantly, but this is not the format for Facebook. I recommend reading it, very interesting.

http://www.classic-music.ru/books_verdi.html