Category: facebook

Lisa was asked to bring a “compass” to school. It was a revelation to me that this meant a pair of compasses.

http://thetruesize.com is a cool resource, bookmark it

http://thetruesize.com/

Summer is slowly coming to our cozy courtyard

After three months of burgers and sitting around, I decided to start running again. Today 7.4km, 5:30min/km, 68m elevation gain. https://www.strava.com/activities/562686801

It turns out that there’s an actual spaceport in my area. NASA Wallops is located in the neighboring state, just a 3-hour drive away. In July this year, they will be launching Antares with the Cygnus cargo spacecraft (OA-5). The last time they tried to do this, there was an accident – the rocket exploded a few dozen meters above the ground, and the spaceport was damaged. It has since been repaired, and soon there will be another attempt.

I plan to go there in July to watch the launch. Of course, they won’t let you onto the spaceport, but there are many places nearby with a great view. For example, the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, where wild horses live. Moreover, all this is located by the ocean. http://vaspace.org/

Masha yesterday:

– Mom, why haven’t I seen a single “Opel” here?

But it’s true. Observant. Why?

Please recommend the most interesting TED talks?

No event here is complete without a tea-coffee break. Whether it’s a parent-teacher meeting at school or English language courses. The refreshments are voluntarily organized by the participants themselves. Most often, the table is heaving with cookies and cakes. This is the set we bought at the Russian store. A kilogram of “Alenka” candies costs around 1700-1800 rubles when converted.

One of the peculiarities of working as a solution architect in the US is that, unlike in Russia, there’s a different set of technologies, which I had never encountered before. So on one hand, I share my experience and knowledge, and on the other, I eagerly absorb new ones.

Here are the things I’ve touched on in the last four months (some of them quite in-depth; the list doesn’t include things that were familiar before moving to the USA):

* Worldpay (IPSP, not operational in Russia)

* Avalara Tax (operational in Russia, but not as essential)

* OKTA (This is SSO SaaS, built on SAML, quite a good thing, by the way, very international)

* Apache Kafka (a distributed message broker software, originally from LinkedIn)

* AKAMAI (CDN provider, with a good API and capabilities)

* Metapack (simply put – a delivery services aggregator.. transportation management, but can’t be summed up in one sentence)

How amusing.

The backstory is as follows: in February, the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Oryol region took action against a job vacancy announcement by STORK-GROUP, which was written in C programming language, deeming it an advertisement in a foreign language. By law, such advertisement must be duplicated in Russian. The court was supposed to make a decision on the case today, but it was postponed to May 25, 2016.

If the court declares C a foreign language, it might lead to an interesting legal case, as in such case, programmers might try to demand recognition of themselves as an ethnic group or a small nation. A nation without its own state can use the right to self-determination, established in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It will be interesting to observe the development.

If it does not recognize – the marketer of STORK-GROUP, who came up with such a move, deserves to be framed and hung on the wall.

P.S. They should have sued over goto