Ilyia Kaushansky

What the hell is our society becoming?? According to this article, eleven year old innocent girl was recently shot in a full bus in Toronto. And guess what - only 1 witness has contacted the police so far to help with the investigation.

What the hell is going on ?

Finally, two months after buying a Canon Powershot S60 I got to read it's instruction manual today. My knowledge of digital photography has been really minimal, so reading that instruction manual really opened my eyes to the wonders of photography. I was amazed at how many camera options one can configure in order improve the quality of the pictures.

After reading the manual, I turned to Google to find more resources and tutorials on digital photography, and quickly found an excellent website http://www.dcviews.com that has an incredible collection of tutorials on all kinds of topics related to digital photography.

Obviously I cannot become a great photographer right away, but I hope that after reading all that information today, my future pictures are going to be at least slightly better than the ones I've been taking up until now.

The first 3 seasons of Seinfeld were finally released on DVD yesterday. I pre-ordered my copy on Amazon back in August, and it will hopefuly arrive sometime today ! I can't wait - love that show !

When GMail first came out many people(including yours truly) were blown away. Many thought it was an april fool's joke(GMail came out on April on 1st), only to discover that it was true. One GIG of email storage - unbelievable !

But is 1 GIG really enough ? I've been using GMail for a little over 5 months and I've already used up more than 100MB. It appears to me that our storage demands are growing at an ever increasing rate. At first we were sending plain text, now we are sending digital pictures(whose size increases as MegaPixels on the cameras continue to increase as well), and soon we will probably send Videos. Additionally, many people(including myself) started using GMail for back-up and storage purposes.

So no, 1 GIG is clearly not enough. At least not in the long run.

Warning: the following will be relevant to software developers only. Ignore this post if you aren't one :)

I wish universities offered a required course on debuggers for those in Computer Science program, or at least made the use of the debugger a mandatory task in a heavy-programming course.

Debuggers are fairly simple to use, yet for some reason many programmers still rely on printf statements to do most of their debugging. I think that debuggers course would help students
appreciate debuggers. And, IMHO, that's the key - appeciating a debugger, and realizing that it's usually more efficient than using printfs ! Most students probably don't recognize true capabilities of a good debugger, and how much it can do for them. For example did you know that you can create a watch and have the debugger breakpoint when some variable attains a certain value, or that you can set a conditional breakpoint so that a debugger only breakpoints on a line if a certain condition holds true ? Modern debuggers even allow you to change code on the fly during debugging session - how cool is that ? And in Java, you can connect your debugger to an already running program. Amazing !

So next time you want to insert a bunch of printfs into your code in order to find that nasty bug, ask yourself - "Wouldn't it be easier to use a debugger?" Or, if you are trying to understand a piece of code that you haven't seen before, trace it with a debugger - the learning process will be so much easier !

Cell phones are getting better. Some cell phones even have built in digital cameras. However I believe there is still lots and lots of room for progress.

I still haven't bought a cell phone, but I will as soon as all of the following are integrated into it: Digital Camera(with GOOD quality), Video Camera, TV, Personal Computer, Wireless Internet Connectivity EVERYWHERE(even in the forest or Alaska) and GPS. That cell phone should also support attachments such as a Monitor, CD/DVD Rom, Keyboard, Printer etc.

Now wouldn't that be a great cell phone ? And the cool thing is that we are very likely to see that kind of cell phone within the next 5 years.

In Santa Barbara in front of a Train Station. As I said, Santa Barbara looks like a "toy" town, and this picture pretty much confirms it. 

In Beverly Hills. Check out the beautiful house behind me. Just one of many gorgeous and super expensive houses in the area. 

The infamous Hollywood sign. 

In Santa Barbara... 

This past weekend(Nov 13,14), myself and three other Google interns from University of Waterloo went on a trip to Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. While Los Angeles might seem like a typical destination for a US visitor, one might wonder - "Why Santa Barbara? What's so special about it?" Well, as it turns out, back in the day a lot of us were avid viewers of soap opera "Santa Barbara", an so were kinda curious to see what the real Santa Barbara city looks like.

And so, early morning on Nov 13 we departed to Santa Barbara on our newly rented Kia Rio. The weather forecast looked very promising - around 23 degrees celcius for both days of the weekend. Amazing, considering it's a middle of November.

We arrived in Santa Barbara around 4PM. The town looked great. However, it somehow felt like a toy town. It's hard to explain. If you've watched the movie Truman Show you'll understand what I mean. Seems like people don't really work there, but rather just "chill" all year long. Half the restaurants there only serve dessert, yet most people look very fit. Most women are blonde, and look gorgeous. Even homeless somehow don't look too poor. Very very weird.

After hanging around Santa Barbara for a few hours, we headed to Los Angeles. Amazing city. Expensive cars(Lamborginis, Ferraris, Porshes, Mercedeses etc) are as common there as Civics in Toronto. It seems like one needs to be a millionaire in this city. I wish we had more time to spend there, as there there are literally hundreds of places to visit there. As is, we've spend considerable amount of our time on Venice Beach(I'm told that this is where Baywatch is based), Beverly Hills and Bel Air. All of these places looked awesome.

Tired and exhausted we departed back home Sunday evening. Overall it was a great trip !

GMail now supports POP3. What the hell is POP3 you may ask? Well, essentially POP3 gives you the ability to use your email client(ie. Outlook Express) to read messages in your GMail account. Great, isn't it ?

Well, seeing that people actually read this blog, I would love to hear some of your comments.. Nothing special is necessary and you don't have to be registered to post a comment. So please, leave your comments - I'd really appreciate it! I think it would also make this blog much more entertaining :)

Well, today is the day! Firefox 1.0 was finally released. For those who might be out of the loop on this one, Firefox is an alternative to Internet Explorer. Unlike Internet Explorer however, Firefox is a much more secure browser. Install Firefox - say goodbye to spyware ! Not to mention that Firefox is also a much faster browser.

Final picture before departing home 

Another picture from Seattle... 

Russian crew in front of Lenin statue in Seattle 

Halloween 2004 - Preparing to go to a rave party. 

So.. This past weekend I went to Seattle and Vancouver. Had a great time. Seattle, IMHO is very similar to Toronto. Unfortunately due to the busy party schedule, we didn't have too much time exploring Seattle, but from what I've seen it was pretty damn cool. Not as good as San Francisco though.

Speaking of parties - this weekend will definitely go down in history. On friday we went to Freak Night 7 in Seattle at Qwest Field Arena, where Ferry Corsten, Marco V and Nu Nrg were performing. All three were absolutely amazing; however, Ferry Corsten was slightly better than the rest. The party was all ages, so there was a lot of younger crowd. Didn't bother me too much though. Everybody was having fun, and the vibe was very happy. Most of the people(including me) were dressed up, so it was really fun.

Saturday evening I went to Vancouver, and went to Spooky party there at Plush nightclub. There were a lot of concerns about the party prior to it since some headliner DJs have been dropped, and party was scheduled to stop at 4AM, instead of the original plan to end at 8AM. Additionally, instead of being all ages, the party became 19+. Despite all these problems, the party turned out to be a great success. Had an awesome time there. Music was for the most part outstanding, and there were lots and lots of gorgeous women most wearing very sexy outfits(it was a halloween weekend).

So yeah.. Awesome weekend !