Month: April 2016

Friends, is there anyone among you who plays bridge well? We somehow got hooked on it, playing with the family on weekends. There are some questions about the game rules that are somewhat grudgingly resolved by reading materials online – mainly, concerning the scoring.

Eee, this is some kind of wild hole on VKontakte. In any chat, you click on “Attach,” and a pop-up window appears with a search through documents. Next, you can type the word passport, for example. It yields a bunch of links to various images. Of course, the uploaders themselves are oddballs – they uploaded their passports to some obscure groups or to their own pages. But to conduct a search through these uploaded documents is something else altogether. The same passport can be found using regular search, but it requires a very specific query – “Diana’s passport pdf”.

This relates to the issue that every convenient feature can backfire when there is too much broad and poorly controlled information in the system.

And here’s another type of widely popular devices here – label printers. Unlike the previous device, label printers are sold in Russia, but they are insanely expensive. The right one costs about 60 bucks, the left one – $130. The left one can work directly with mobile phones (via NFC). Some are capable of printing on RFID tape.

An interesting device was discovered in the office. It’s a so-called postage meter. The bright top part is a scale. They weigh correspondence on it, then insert the envelope below, and the machine prints a stamp (frankotype) of the respective denomination. But where do you insert the money?.. The money is on the account, managed through the computer. So, people who know the language are not needed anymore when mailing!

Postage meters have been around for a hundred years. In Russia, such devices are still not present (or no longer present due to progress, as everyone is switching to Mail.Ru and such 🙂 )

On Wednesday afternoon, I have my first presentation at a major internal conference in English, titled “Understanding hybris internals.” Learning new words 🙂

Someday I’ll bring it to light

Alexey Pronin Pavel Polyakov Alexander Zolotilin Victor Romanovsky Alexey Lyubimov

Summer is coming quickly. It’s already 30° in the shade during the day

Walking around

After Google (31%) and Facebook (6%), the top spot in the ranking of sites I visit every day goes to the translator context.reverso.net (5.5%).

This is the most useful tool I’ve seen for written communication in English. A contextual translator is not merely a dictionary, but a database of bilingual texts with a search function. When you need to say something in English, you search for a fragment, find a host of examples, choose the one that fits the context, and borrow words/phrases. Usually, this is followed by using Google to double-check the assumptions.

I also rarely use multitran, but generally, it is almost unnecessary when reverso is available. I have not seen other good contextual translators (there is Abbyy, but it has a smaller database).

http://context.reverso.net/перевод/

At the office.

Not far from the house, workers quickly assembled and raised a crane. In the photo – the assembly process, the last photo shows 1/4 of its height, as it is currently waiting for work and the telescopic part is not extended. In the coming days, I can throw the full size into the comments when I see it in operation