Author: Rauf Aliev

The Space Adventures office is located in my town, literally just a five-minute drive away. These are the guys who send billionaires into space. On their website, there’s a registry of attractions, and besides the classic trip to the ISS for 20 million dollars, they also sell trips to Baikonur to watch a rocket launch and to Star City to ride the simulators. They also sell ZeroG – http://www.gozerog.com/ which is experiencing zero gravity. Costs five thousand bucks.

I’m looking for a place to spend 20 million dollars tomorrow, and here is where I found it, smile emoticon

http://www.spaceadventures.com/

A little brain teaser before the release of Game of Thrones. You need to find a sponsor for product placement in the series, and you know that almost any major company would pay any money for an indirect mention of their brand spirit in an episode watched by an average of 20 million people. Obviously, you can’t show Coke or any other brand on camera, but you can make it so that everyone understands what you’re talking about. What idea do you have, and who will you approach?)

Let’s share the problem, I’m interested in the range of answers)

It happens 🙂

Build America)

Nadya brought from her English course a great series called Mind your language about the challenging life of an English teacher for foreigners. It’s very funny and perfect for those who haven’t yet watched anything in English. The series was filmed in 1977, in England. She says it’s just the same at her courses.

Be sure to watch at least the first 10 minutes 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MApatYdSxO8

Decided to visit Kickstarter after ages. And immediately stumbled upon the Battery Eater project – a gadget for discharging batteries to zero using four paper clips and a circuit board. No one knows why there’s a need to discharge them, but now there’s a device for it. The guy has already raised over $2,000 for this project, but as far as I understand, he won’t see any of it unless he meets the target budget – which is set at $28,000. Amazing what people will fund, huh..

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1861872465/battery-eaters?ref=category_popular

My Americanization is happening at some frightening pace. I began eating chips here, not just simply, but dipping them in sauce. Every other day. I started eating bagels with cream cheese and pizza here. At work, I have a water bottle, which I, like others, carry with me. After some time getting used to it, even the local coffee started to become less offensive to me and I drink it by the liter every day.

If anyone doesn’t know, I almost didn’t eat anything flour-based and sweet throughout the entire year of 2015. It’s true that I am still keeping away from sweets – I haven’t eaten ice cream or drunk soda for a year now. But with flour-based foods, so far I have managed to avoid only bread – I haven’t bought or eaten it at a restaurant throughout the year.

On the other hand, the meat here is decent and there is a huge variety of rice. We started cooking rice more often because it’s tasty here – the store sells several dozen varieties.

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 🙂 )