November 17 2020, 03:22

What a funny newsletter we received from the “Electronic Journal”. This is an “electronic diary” used by a couple thousand schools in Russia, from Moscow all the way to the outskirts. And look, they’re offering scholarships to American schools! Let’s start reading.

As they say, “fact check”. Firstly, it turns out they are not offering scholarships, but a chance to get a discount on a scholarship. What a strange school. Amerigo. We google it — it shows that the annual cost is $62,850. We follow the link. On the Amerigo website, the price range is from $40,850-$57,000. That’s still a lot, but okay, schools vary. But they are listed. Let’s go to the first one, Carmel Catholic High School. It has a website, there’s tuition. $12,950 per year. How about that difference? By the way, this is quite a low price for a private school. All the schools in their list are Catholic. It’s a cheaper option for private schooling. Catholic ones average up to $10-15K/year. Right next to me there’s BASIS Mclean, a non-Catholic school, costing $26,600. But they don’t sell with 50% off 🙂 In general, the level of private schools in the US is pretty good compared to public ones, but darn it, marketers write such nonsense. Such marketers.

In the same letter, for some reason they write about the average SAT score — a whopping 1272 points. They write with enthusiasm. Elizaveta Alieva, check this out. That’s where you should have studied! With such scores, one can dream about universities at the level of Temple University (100th place) or perhaps higher, if very lucky or if there’s a lot more than just grades. “Annually, nearly 100% of graduates continue their education at universities, including prestigious ones like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, NYU, Yale…”. Tricky phrase. Just so you know—a perfect SAT score is 1600, and you need at least 1500, if not nearly perfect, to get into Stanford. If the school’s average score is 1272, yet so many get into the “Ivy League”, it means there must be some really studious folks scoring 1000 on the SAT at that school.

November 14 2020, 00:14

This is how I work. Outside the second-floor window, there’s this guy standing all day with a jackhammer pounding the wall. Seriously, all day long, he has a lot to hammer away. He’ll be back again on Monday.

It’s quite strange to explain to people far from the profession that what’s on my monitor is not a Matrix screensaver, but rather informative Hybris logs from Kubernetes, which I stared at for several minutes and probably at some point exclaimed “eureka” because I eventually spotted the cause of a failure in them.

But as a screensaver, it’s pretty cool too

November 06 2020, 21:42

I have had an electric piano standing no further than a meter from my monitor for many years, both at home and at work. When I go on business trips and get stuck there for weeks, I start to crave playing and look for a place in the city to play. Almost every trip, I find something somewhere without much trouble. This year has not been great for business trips, but there is a story from past years.

So here I am in city X. I punch in the conservatory on the map. Found it! The doors are open, four floors, no security (as usual everywhere in Europe and the U.S.). I ask the students if I can play here. Yes, says a girl, downstairs in the basement there are practice rooms on two levels. Many of the rooms are locked, but there are some that are open. “If there’s no one there, then probably no one will kick you out.” Small rooms with good pianos.

I settle into one of them, playing to my heart’s content. An hour, another.

And then I go out to the restroom, and for some reason, I slam the door behind me. It clicks, locks, and the electronic lock beeps. I already understand what has happened. Even before touching the handle. The doors there open with cards, close automatically, and some students just don’t bother to close them behind them. That’s why so many doors are open. Until you close them.

All my stuff is inside. There’s a backpack, laptop, passport, hotel keys, bike keys, well, everything. For the next 10 minutes, I look for at least one student to help. Inside many of the rooms, someone is there, but the doors are closed. Hooray! One is walking down the corridor. I ask.

“No way,” he replies. “Here, the cards only open the rooms we reserve in advance through the website.”

I go upstairs to give up. There, under the “information” sign in the “aquarium,” sits an old man. I try to explain in English that my things are inside, the door is locked, I want to get back. He doesn’t understand me, because English is not the native language in that country. Took 10 minutes to try to explain with gestures. Unsuccessful. And suddenly:

“So you speak Russian? Great, start over, I didn’t understand a thing. What are you even doing here?”

I explain. In Russian, he understands! Simply a lifesaver.

We go downstairs. Two floors down and a long corridor. We’re silent. I try to smooth it over:

“Decided to drop by, see how modern students are learning, and here’s a piano in an empty room. How could I not play it. And how can I do this officially? I’m willing to pay a little somewhere.”

“No way,” the old man replies. “Actually, non-students are not supposed to play here. But, hmm.. On the other hand, there’s really no one to forbid you to play here, nor to keep an eye on it.”

“When I lived in Moscow, I used to go to the Bolshoi Theatre,” he continues. “So I really understand you, but formally I can’t allow it.”

He opened the door, I took my things, but the weekend was over, no more time was found, and I never made it back to that conservatory.