Category: life

I’d like to share with you an interesting side effect of blogging that I recently discovered… through Yoga.

During the last 10 years I was blogging pretty actively. To be precise,  I’ve   published more than 900  blogs here, at yakovfain.com. All these blogs were written in English, and the comments were written by English-speaking people from around the world.

During the last 5 years I’ve been also actively recording audio podcasts in Russian at americhka.us, where I published about 400 podcasts. These podcasts are commented by the Russian-speaking people from around the world.

The cultures of the English and Russian blogospheres are different. English speaking people are more polite. If they don’t agree with what I say or write,  they try to express their opinion rather than just writing “It’s bullshit” in comments.  This means my English-speaking readers respect me. Some people say that Immanuel Kant defined respect as the right for another person to have  different opinion (this is not an an exact quote, but the meaning should be correct).

The situation in the Russian-speaking blogosphere is different. Pretty often people do not tolerate other people’s opinions, and you can find the “It’s bullshit”-type comments a lot more frequently there.

I’m not complaining – I have a lot of Russian-speaking readers and listeners who enjoy my podcasts and respect my opinions. I’m just sharing my observations. Five years ago I was caught off-guard by the harsh and sometimes insulting tone of some comments there. I even had to leave one Russian podcasting portal for the lack of any protection from these negative people.

When I opened my own site at wordpress.com, it gave me  the moderation and banning features. I started controlling the content and banning offenders (I banned about a dozen of people over the last 5 years).

Now let’s switch the subject. Last month I’ve enrolled in Yoga classes. This membership allows me to attend unlimited classes ran by various instructors. I’m not a gym-type of a person, and decided to go easy on myself  – I started attending only the meditation classes for now. The teacher is from India, and he spent more than thirty years researching studying of various Yoga masters. I like the teacher.

Many people who attend his class complain about being under stress. Yesterday, one lady came to the class being extremely angry with her husband. The other lady (I’ve never seen her before) spent five minutes before the class telling me how that bad brother-in-law came back into their family’s  life.  People have problems. They are coming to relax and meditate.

The teacher explains that the problems are inside each of us. If someone directs their negativity toward you, just concentrate within your inner self. Do not react to the offender.

I like attending his sessions cause he’s the wise guy. But on the other hand, I noticed that I’ve learned not to respond to the offenders by being in the open in a not-so-friendly blogosphere. I’ve learned to ignore angry comments. It seems that I’ve been already applying these meditation and protection techniques without even knowing about these Yoga studies!

So I want to thank Russian blogosphere for making me a stronger person. No, I haven’t reached the turn-the-other-cheek level suggested by Gandhi and Jesus.  I’ll keep moderating comments. But I’ll remove the bans from those angry birds. Let them keep chirping.

Peace!

One suspect is dead, and the other is in custody. Life’s great? Let’s see.

Being an IT business owner I got used to consider any undertaking as a project. When I look at the entire Boston operation as a project, I consider it a failure. Here’s why.

1. Nine thousand of police officers, special agents and military personnel were trying to find and apprehend a 19-year old kid. How many law endorsement personnel would be required to deal with a terrorist group had a 100 people? Nine hundred thousand? The entire US Army? In software development we call this serious scalability problem.

2. I hate terrorists in general and these two in particular. After FBI got the #2 suspect, I was watching the crowd greeting all these heavily armed forces in the military vehicles. People were holding signs “You are our brave heroes”, and the heroes accepted these congratulation. I guess, it’s heroic to win the game where one team has 9000 players and another only one. I’m wondering how many thousands of armed people would be involved in Israel in a similar situation? Maybe it’s time to do some serious learning from our allies?

3. How much money this operation cost tax payers? Does anyone count money when a terrorists are involved or this is an all out war with an unlimited budget?

4. Take the shootout between two brothers and six armed police officers. What do we got? One dead and one wounded on each side, and the 19-year old kid ran over his brothers and escaped. Yet another failure.

5. Now let’s talk about the media coverage. CNN did a shitty job. They seem to be happy to get any piece of news to immediately air it. Young kids didn’t watch TV – they were listening online to the police scanner to get more reliable information from the first hands. Twitter did a better job than CNN.

I posted a tweet “Everybody who knew this #2 from Boston said he’s a great guy. It’s yet another evidence of how religion can turn a person into a zombie.” One of my followers responded, “Take off your CNN glasses and then try to see the real world. Who has killed millions in recent years?” Then he sent me a link to the article stating that as a result of military actions of the US Army more than a thousand kids were killed elsewhere. I can’t imagine a worse tragedy than when you kid dies. But this is war, and US Army had never planned a special attack to kill kids, woman, and civilians. But these brothers did exactly this.

I could somewhat understand what a relative of a recently killed innocent kid goes goes on a killing spree. But this was not the case. These brothers were living for years in the USA using and abusing its free society, and then someone turned them on, like zombies, like robots, which was enough for them to start the cold blooded killing in Boston.

Then our democratic society is discussing if this 19 y.o. zombie-killer should be read his Miranda rights. What do we expect to hear from this little monster? That Islam fundamentalist hate the USA and will do anything to harm us? We know that much. Two years ago Russian intelligence warned the FBI that the older brother became a follower of radical Islam. The FBI met with him several times, and didn’t find anything suspicious. But when the terrorist will give them the same information, it’s going to be more credible and valuable?

In cases like these there is another subject that usually goes unnoticed in the press: these brothers literally destroyed lives of their own families. These terminators don’t have any feelings for their own mother and father, sisters, and their families. Think about the future of the wife and kid of the older brother. He simply didn’t give a shit. He’s not a human.

Coming back to projects and resources… It’s like someone would have given an IT manager a one week project to complete and said to him, “We are giving you 9000 IT people that cost you nothing. They are professionally trained software developers, testers, Web designers, database administrators, and technical writers…” How do you like that?

The Project Boston didn’t fail for a simple reason: an old guy decided to check on his boat sitting in his backyard. If he didn’t do it, the younger terrorist would have died silently within a couple of days and would be found either when the boating season started or somebody would smell the corpse.

I really glad that these two terrorists will never hurt innocent people anymore, but this entire Boston project left a bad taste in my mouth.

Last week I was vacationing in Asia. Our resort had a bar right on the Indian Ocean, and there was this DJ from Holland who played great music compilations via high quality speakers. I decided that it’s time to upgrade the sound in my office too. After a quick research I’ve ordered a pair of AudioEngine5+. When I returned back to the US, the box from Amazon was waiting by the door.

I hooked up these speakers – they’re simply amazing. It’s hard to believe that you can get this power and clarity right on your desk from your computer. Thirty years ago I was into Hi-Fi sound. I was an audiophile. Over the years I decided that my ears can’t hear all these high and low frequencies, and there was no reason to spend money on sound – I spend most of my time in my home office in front of the computer. My small computer speakers by Bose were OK. Besides, why bother if all these inexpensive earphones with 20Hz-20kHz range can deliver good sound. Wrong! These speakers deliver THE sound especially if you’ll play a CD with good instrumental orchestra music like Richard Clayderman, Fausto Papetti, or James Last.

For the computer speakers they are large though – you need to have a large desk, which I do. This is how my desk looks today:

Don’t get mislead by the voice processor – I use it for the external mike only. The speakers are connected to the headphone output of your computer. Ignore the dumb bells too – I don’t workout.

Warning: If you like boosted base, you’ll need to purchase additional subwoofer, which can be easily connected with provided wires. But I’m not sure if I want it. At 50 watts per channels they will work well for my pool parties too.

The long story short: I give Audioengine5+ speakers 5+ on the scale of 1 to 5.

Last Summer I wrote about a weird 96% Off deal. This morning I got an email with even stranger proposition. The want to suck my extra fat off for 5% of the cost of this pleasant procedure. Actually, it’s up to 95% off. For a lousy $99 they promise me this:

I’m not going to lie to you. I like tis photo. I really do. And the panties look nice and inviting.

“20- to 40-minute noninvasive treatments employ ultrasonic waves to reduce fat in areas such as the abdomen, thighs, and upper arms.”

Nice. But why 95% off? Do they assume that after attending this establishment I’ll fall in love with these ultrasonic waves and will create a new ritual of attending this liposuction place on a monthly basis for $1.5 grand a pop? Does it means that liposuction procedure works for a short time and then you are hooked on waves?

Nay, I’m not buying this deal. I’d rather save these $99 too and will finally start this 200-pushups program, which is 100% free. But let me tell you, I like this photo!

Yesterday, I had to contact my bank (one the three largest in the USA). As every environment-friendly citizen, I’m not using paper statements – everything’s online. Logged into my bank account and followied the link Contact Us. Even before clicking on this link I knew that it’d take time to find the phone of the customer support to I could talk to a real person and not to this stupid and useless chat “Hi, I’m Alex. What can I help you with today”. Nothing, really, Alex. Sending me a link with FAQ won’t help in most cases (is F still for “Frequently”?).

Needless to say, the first two minutes of browsing in the customer services pages didn’t yield any results. It seems that the content providers for these pages get paid by the time they can keep a customer engaged into this hide-and-seek game. And, let me tell you, they are getting better and better over the years. They are winning.

I gave up, and decided to download my monthly statement hoping to find the customer support number there. I’m genius! The phone number was there, yay!  I was still a little irritated, and to let the steam out, had twitted about it.

The helpful advice came right away from my follower @slavkous. Thank you, Slava! He sent me two links – apparently, these kind people went to this frustrated experience too, and created simple lookup services to find those bloody numbers (I’m trying to sound British here). These are the life savers:

1. Get Human: http://gethuman.com/

2. Contact Help http://contacthelp.com (love this image on their home page, btw).

Bookmark these sites. Write these links on a small piece of paper and put them in your wallet. Had these link tattooed on your arm. Don’t leave home without them. Next time your wallet with all your credit cards is stolen, these links will be priceless for canceling all your CC accounts.

It’s time to work. Gotta run.

This morning I needed to meet a friend at the Miami airport, which has the MIA code.  Went to Google maps to get driving directions,  typend MIA, but selected the wrong line from the autocompletetion dropdown – it was ” Mie Prefecture, Japan”.

Google Maps obediently offered me these funny directions below. I had to cross the USA, then sail to Japan. Especially I like the part “Entering Japan, Turn left”. After that I should  ” Turn left at 県道263号線” whatever it means.   It takes only  90 easy steps from where I am to Japan.

Happy New Year, everyone!