Month: July 2020

How they combine it, I can’t understand

Two pieces of news right away. Well, moneygram, of course, is slow with this announcement: Sberbank didn’t just close this topic yesterday. And PayPal—has anyone ever used it for domestic transfers in Russia?

Usually, we toss out mail addressed to “current resident” straight into the trash, but here comes an envelope with money inside. They offer to earn by answering a simple question (something like this recently happened in Russia, but it’s over now). It somehow helps others to develop.

Well, I mean, it’s a usual thing, just the first time the ad came with bills inside

An excellent position for a Hybris developer and/or architect is open. Ideally – St. Petersburg. But the location is generally negotiable. Recommend someone if you know anyone suitable. Hybris, Java, Spring, integration, all that stuff.

At EPAM. The client is a German automotive company, you all know it well. It’s been almost a year since I have been working on their American site. This position is open in a project next door.

Today, Nadezhda Shulga and I took a comprehensive trip to Philadelphia: 2.5 hours by car to Valley Forge, and almost as long by bike from Forge to Philadelphia and back. Schuylkill River Trail. It felt just like a vacation. Eventually, 72 km flew by quickly along a very beautiful and diverse trail, ending with a delicious Thai restaurant in Philly.

The city turned out to be eerily half-empty. The streets were filled with homeless people, wind, random passers-by, and cyclists (us). I can’t say that everything was closed, but we couldn’t get to the same terminal market not because of the virus, but because of the Independence Day weekend, which is particularly reverently celebrated in Philadelphia, as the declaration was signed there. Everyone in the city wears masks even outdoors (well, okay, the homeless do not). I heard that this order was introduced recently.

We discovered a new, very cozy historical small town, a suburb of Philly, Manayunk, Pennsylvania. Wikipedia told us that the name of the three-hundred-year-old city translates as a place to drink. We decided that athletes can’t just pass by without having a drink, so we stopped at a local smoothie bar. If you see Tbaar, do not pass by; it’s simply fantastic. There is also an interesting five-story building on a micro-island the size of this five-story building, to which (and only to which) an iron bridge is built. In general, the town has a scent of Europe.

By evening, all the local animals came out onto the trail. Tiny bunnies and rabbits, deer, and groundhogs were encountered all along the way back. I used to only see groundhogs from a distance, but here both of the ones we encountered were sitting by the path and eating grass. Video is attached. Groundhogs are cool.

Finally, eyes and ears got around to watching a movie about a lion who received a Western education and distorted socio-moral values, and then in his mature years returned to his native home to overthrow the local authority and bring a new religion. Nole is about to learn that pride implies polygamy by definition, otherwise, there would be nobody left to shoot the fifth part of the movie with. The unscared antelopes and giraffes that feed on bugs are surely in for a surprise.

I want to sing praises to the Amazon Web Services support team.

So, about two years ago I was fiddling with AWS and forgot to turn off some paid services. Yesterday, I get a message that I need to pay 7 bucks. Well, no big deal, I’ll pay it and turn them off. Then I thought – I haven’t activated anything there for two years, why just $7 now? I checked the billing and see that I have 31 invoices totaling $208.

Oops. I thought. And I wrote an email to the support team (screenshot #1). I wrote it as it is – sorry, my mistake, it’s silly to pay, maybe something can be done.

The other screenshots show the responses from the support team. What catches the eye: politeness, empathy, and a quick resolution of the problem (within a day). They even provided a credit, in case something comes up for June, so it’s covered too.

After dealing with support services in my homeland, I had the impression that the best response one could hope for was an installment plan. Like, it happens, it’s unpleasant, but you can pay not immediately, but over 6 months. Here, it really exceeded all expectations.

Dmitri Dmitrienko, you have a wonderful company. Only have to test the waters with competitors, and I’m yours 🙂

A very interesting lecture by Maxim Frank-Kamensky about DNA.

For those who don’t know – Maxim Frank-Kamensky is a really cool guy who can also explain complex things in simple terms. Among other things, he is the author of the discovery of the triple-helix structure of DNA (the so-called H-form. There is also the quadruplex (G), two different right-handed (A, B) and a left-handed (Z) double helices, and there is also Cruciform DNA – cross-shaped. In general, all this is covered in the lecture in an understandable exposition).