Month: April 2016

Very soon, an interesting view of the sunbathers will open up from the small balcony. I wonder, are there any outlets for a laptop there?

Liza’s school canceled the 3 km intramural run with the main prize being a Mini iPad and a $75 gift card, due to a lack of participants.

Ambushed. The daily, hours-long call with the client looks like this.

These are our ways

At Liza’s school, they organized an event called Heritage Night. They even made a website for the occasion. Since half of the people are from various countries, some families organized thematic booths – each about their own country. There were no booths for Russia or Ukraine because there are very few Russian speakers at the school. Most of the foreigners were Asians (Koreans and Chinese).

You could represent your country in four ways:

– participate in a fashion show,

– bring a dish of national cuisine,

– perform national dances

– set up a booth for your country and organize workshops (origami, henna tattoos, patchwork, etc.).

Masha represented Russia in the dance category, and photos from the school exhibition in the hall can be found via the link on my blog.

https://beinginamerica.com/2016/04/14/heritagenight/.

https://beinginamerica.com/2016/04/14/heritagenight/

Near the office

Soviet science fiction

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

Decided to watch a funny segment on the News about Roldugin just for fun. They threw everything together, so it’s worth watching for entertainment. In one of the frames, they showed a surprisingly familiar website. I looked closer – and it was just a placeholder with Google ads. It’s portrayed in the segment as the website of US Investigations Services (USIS) – a company specializing in the analysis of biographical data of candidates for work in governmental structures. It is known for having vetted Edward Snowden before hiring him to the CIA. Also, it is known for being located 7 minutes from my house. The company has since gone under, but we are talking about its logo here.

In the original segment by Vesti, the USIS site was shown with a standard placeholder logo used by Network Solutions. I checked archive.org to see what the page looked like a few years ago – and there I found a little blue logo. The exact same logo, pixel-for-pixel, with the same colors and shades, is used by the British company Kroll OnTrack. Established in 1985, it employs several thousand people. Look – I placed that site to the right of the Vesti screenshot, and I positioned the logos one below the other.

And here’s an interesting question: how can a large company in England and a large quasi-governmental company in the USA have identical logos? Obviously, there’s nothing particularly behind it, just a coincidence that they happened to draw the same ones, it happens.

Maybe it was indeed the case then