October 17 2015, 03:26

About books. In recent years, I’ve found that the amount of interesting/useful information in the form of books, articles, documentaries, as well as opportunities for development around has become so abundant that, with our time limited to 24 hours a day, I have to force myself to choose one over another, which is very difficult to do – I want this and that, and everything together.

Reading a book in your field, you constantly ask yourself if it’s worth continuing when there are even more interesting books on the same or sometimes different topics pushing it aside from both sides. Each book shouts with its announcements that you should read only it, and the one you are currently reading must hold the reader’s attention from the first to the last page. In this battle of books, the winner is the one where the author delivers what is needed and useful throughout all its pages.

Unfortunately, in books on IT and especially management, many American, and Russian authors are guilty of turning a small set of ideas into a whole book, enriching them with examples, numerous repetitions in different words, and discussing why other ideas on the same topic are worse. On the other hand, there are many people who can’t perceive information any other way – repeating the same thing in different words drills the idea deeper into their brains.

I am currently reading “Code Complete” by McConnell, a couple of books on Spring and JAVA, “Pines” by Blake Crouch, “The Elements of Style” by Strunk. These are the electronic ones. Plus, various drawing books are waiting, and I just can’t seem to get around to them.

When I was still studying, in school and university, it was different. There was little information, and there was no feeling of losing out by giving up on some information. Books were re-read several times.

Lisa by age 9-10 has definitely read more than I have in my entire life.

We live in good times.

October 16 2015, 16:22

I realized that for many years I haven’t been using Yandex search at all, as almost all of my queries are global, and all about Mail.ru services. From Yandex, only the Navigator and the Market are invaluable. I never had Kaspersky installed because it slows down the system. I don’t use abbyy products. I can’t bring myself to like 1C.

Somehow, I’m a bad patriot.

October 12 2015, 17:41

Interesting material about a working prototype of an electric bicycle created in Russia, capable of moving at speeds of nearly 100 km/h and above. I wonder, what are they not mentioning in the video?

October 12 2015, 15:33

Thank you @[100001981064147:2048:Victoria Shintekova] for the tip: “I recommend reading. The Russian translation is a very cool series of articles about natural resources, Earth’s energy balance, climate change in the next 10-50-100 years, the impact of current energy extraction methods, and about Tesla and Elon Musk.”