Ilyia Kaushansky

Popularity of Bud Light

2008-03-09T19:07:00.001-07:00

One of the most puzzling things here in the US is people's love for Bud Light. It's cheap, I understand that. What I don't understand is how people(including the so called "young professionals") with 60+K/year salaries can drink that crap! These are people who don't hesitate buying expensive clothes and other luxury items. These are people who eat burgers and fries.

It's really quite astounding how many people around here drink Bud Light. This is not what I was expecting to see here in San Francisco.

Amazon Prime

2008-03-05T21:28:00.000-08:00

Amazon Prim e is a feature of Amazon.com. It is a service that costs $70/year. In return you get free 2 day shipping on tons of different items.

Since signing up about 2 months ago, I've ordered the following items, not usually associated with Amazon: iPod, HDMI Cable, Body Wash, Deodorant, Brita Water filters, Bed Sheets and most recently a ladder.

Amazon Prime: Loving it !

Opera

2008-02-12T21:36:00.001-08:00

WOW - this is interesting: Based on my resent searches for "the end up" and "vessel san francisco" (both electronic music related searches) Google has recommended me to visit http://www.sfopera.com :)

Conserving Energy

2007-11-05T01:05:00.000-08:00

Recently there has a been a large push towards clean, "green" energy, especially here in California. Lots of people are driving hybrids, many households are installing Solar Panels, etc.

I've been pretty much oblivious to this phenomenon; however today, while shopping at Costco I finally made my first environment-conscious purchase ! I bought 10 fluorescent light bulbs (~75% power savings) for an incredible price of $1.5 ! (that's right, 15 cents per individual light bulb).

I wish other opportunities for energy conservation were just as attractive financially. Until that happens, there is absolutely no way that we (by we I mean the entire world) are going to get any greener !

Idiocracy

2007-08-11T16:43:00.000-07:00

Idiocracy - watch it ! Great Movie !

Over 2 years in California !

2007-08-03T12:02:00.000-07:00

Wow - it's been almost two years since I moved to California - Time flies !!!

Wirth's Law

2007-01-30T11:45:00.000-08:00

Well known Moore's law, which states that computer processors get twice as fast every 18 months. However, there is another law, stated by Niklaus Wirth in 1995, that states the following:

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

Fascinating, isn't it ?

Bal en Blanc 2006

2006-04-23T21:47:00.001-07:00

Last weekend(Apr. 17th) I went to Montreal for a Bal en Blanc party. Bal en Blanc is an annual "rave" where everyone wears white. The party is huge, with about 12 thousand people in attendance. This year's DJ headliners included Armin van Buuren, Infected Mushroom, David Guetta and Deep Dish.

Unfortunately, Armin van Burren sucked, his new style is slow and boring. Nevertheless, Bal en Blanc was a huge success, and I really enjoyed the party. I didn't have a watch with me, so imagine my surprise when I found out that it was 11:30AM when we went home(I didn't expect to stay that long).

It was awesome seeing my friends from Toronto and Montreal, for some of whom it was a first big party. They weren't dissapointed !

This was my 3rd Bal en Blanc party, and the 4th year in a row that I party in Montreal for Easter. Let's hope this trend continues !

Two desired Wikipedia features

2006-04-09T18:54:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia is great but I think it could be improved even further by having the following 2 features:

Feature One:

Make it very easy for a reader to ask questions about a particular topic, and let readers view and rate the questions.

The motivation for the above feature is simple: many Wikipedia entries are incomplete for two reasons:
1) An editor omits a piece of information which he deems insignificant.
2) Information is not included because it is not known.

Letting users ask and rate questions addresses the first issue because now the readers can explicitly state what kind of information they are interested in.

The second issue is partially addressed as well. While information about a subject may not be known, it may be discovered. But something should motivate the discovery(which is often a difficult, or impossible). And what better motivator of discovery than curiosity ? If many people think that a particular question is important, it just might motivate someone to make an effort and find out an answer to the question.

In conclusion, with reader's questions, Wikipedia becomes much more powerful: It is no longer driven just by editors(people with knowledge, who actually edit Wikipedia entries. For any given entry, there are orders of magnitude fewer editors than there are readers), but also by readers.

Feature Two:

RSS feeds for Wikipedia entries. This is a direct consequence of above feature. When a reader asks a question, he might want to be notified when the entry is updated. Alternatively, even if a reader doesn't ask a question, he might still be interested in tracking "the progress" of a particular entry.

House music in San Francisco

2006-04-01T16:04:00.000-08:00

Here is a short review of various clubs in San Francisco that are known to play House and Trance music. Please remember that crowds come and go(one place might be popular this month, but dead the next), and clubs sometimes change their musical formats. Hence, the reviews below may not be accurate a year, or even a few months from now. It will be interesting to revisit this list next year, and see what has changed.

Ruby Skye: Probably the most well known nightclub in San Francisco. It is a fairly big venue. Music is house (both fridays and saturdays), but since Ruby Skye often brings well known DJs, the music might vary depending on who is at the decks. I rarely go there on regular nights because the crowd tends to be too touristy and the vibe isn't all that great. Best nights are special events that sometimes happen on weekdays . These events attract "those who know" crowd and the vibe is crazy.

Mighty: This is my favourite club in San Francisco. They play pretty decent house there on Saturdays, and have occasional special events on Fridays. The crowd tends to be very diverse, and there are practically no tourists. There is nothing particularly great about that place though; the main reason I love it is because I can come there any saturday with people who aren't even very much into House(or even with people who don't go to nightclubs), and we can all have a great time. I could even come there by myself and still have a great time!

Pink: I used to really love that place. It's a european style club/lounge where they play awesome House music. The place is really small, and most of it is for lounging rather than dancing. Pink attracts trendy European crowd. Recently I've had problems getting into Pink though: it seems that you either need to be with someone who knows the doorman or have girls in the group. I can't blaim them for that requirement: for such a place to succeed in the long run, the ratio should be pretty good(Nevertheless the ratio still kinda sucks there. If you are looking to pick up girls you are better off somewhere else).

Mezzanine: Nowadays it's mostly gay nights, however they do have occasional special events are awesome. On these nights it's pretty much the same crowd that goes to Mighty.

1015: A very big venue with 4 or 5 rooms(Not sure about the exact number, I haven't even seen them all, hehe). The place is open till 7AM(sometimes till 9AM) and they usually play Trance and House. Paul van Dyk seems to be a resident DJ there(he plays there every 3-4 months), and they frequently bring other well-known Trance DJs. The crowd is primarily asian, and many people are high. I wouldn't bring a girl to that place, unless she really loves Trance.

Duplex: Pretty much the same as Pink, expect not as popular and there are no problems getting in. Pink is better, however since Duplex is much less crowded it's much better suited for just a "chill" night with friends.

There are two other places that I'd really like to check out sometime in the future: The Endup(the oldest afterhours place in SF, apparently great on saturdays, and sunday mornings-afternoons) and Anu(very small venue, yet they bring fairly big name DJs).

Most of the above venues are open till 4AM.

The Essentials....

2006-03-30T10:31:00.000-08:00

Essential Applications

- Mozilla Firefox - An alternative to Internet Explorer. Firefox is more secure, faster, but most importantly - it's plug-in architecture allows the browser to be extended in some very powerful ways.

- Vim - Text editor for programmers. I still do most of my coding in Vim. It doesn't have as many programmer friendly features as many popular IDEs such as IntelliJ, Eclipse, Visual Studio and others, but it's blazingly fast. And that's why I still use it.

- Miranda - Universal instant messenger. Why install MSN, AIM, Yahoo IM, Gtalk, ICQ, when you can install Miranda and talk to anyone who uses any of the above IM clients ? (To be quite honest, ever since Google integrated chat right into Gmail, I don't really run Miranda either. Most of the people I talk to have Gmail accounts, and so Gmail chat is sufficient most of the time).

Essential Firefox Extensions

- ScrapBook: Save web-sites on local drive for offline viewing

- IE View Lite: Adds an option to view a page in Internet Explorer. (Firefox is good for 99.9% of the websites, but for the 0.1% of web-sites that do not display properly in Firefox, this extension is key)

- FSLT: When you close a tab, brings focus to the tab that was viewed just before that.

Essential Web Sites

- Gmail: Free online email with over 2GB of storage.

- Flickr: Online Photo Hosting. 25$/year(unlimited) or free (if will only upload up to 25MB of pictures per month)

- Google Video: Free video hosting. Additionally, helps kill those boring hours: tons of fun videos to choose from.

- Bloglines: Online RSS feed reader. This is the 2nd web-site I visit every morning(the first one is Gmail)

- Google News: News aggregator.

- Googe Maps: Whenever I need to look up directions

- Del.icio.us: Stores all your bookmarks online, and allows for easy discovery of related pages.

- Yelp: Reviews of pretty much everything in San Francisco.

Essential Blogs

- Google Blog. Google releases new products and introduces new features almost on daily basis. The only way to keep up with all this is by reading Google blog.

Google Borsch

2006-03-23T14:10:00.000-08:00

First it was Leninade, and now it's Borsch: Google cafeteria never ceases to surprise me !

Borsch is a soup we often used to eat back in "the mother Russia", but it's not every day(or should I say every year), that you get to eat Borsch here (unless it's a Russian restaurant, your wife is fresh out of Russia, or you still live with Russian parents). So imagine my surprise when I come in to work in the morning, and see a fresh bowl of Borsch just waiting to be eaten. And so I did! Cool!

Long live Wikipedia !

2006-03-22T23:25:00.000-08:00

Lately, whenever I want to look up information on a famous person, a city, or any other known entity my first destination is Wikipedia. Gotta love that resource !

I just wish Google and other search engines would rank Wikipedia entries higher. Not only would the users be redirected to great information, but that would also spark more additions to Wikipedia. After all, Wikipedia is created by users like you and me (all information on Wikipedia is entered and edited by simple users), and so the more people know about it(and understand how it works), the more people edit Wikipedia, and so it becomes more accurate and bigger.

Paul van Dyk in New York

2006-03-11T22:43:00.000-08:00

Last weekend(March 4th) I went to New York for a Paul van Dyk party. The whole thing was a little nuts: I arrived in New York at 8PM saturday, partied, chilled with friends, and was back in SF late Sunday night. Sleep wasn't on the agenda.

The party was pretty good, though I think I'm starting to grow out of Trance. Paul van Dyk played a really good set(he was on for 6 hours), but I wasn't really feeling it. By the end the set, I actually wanted to leave, and that doesn't happen very often.

Nevertheless, I thought the trip was a success. I got to see friends whom I haven't seen in a while(they made the trip from Toronto), so overall I'm very happy.

Leninade - A taste worth standing in line for !

2006-02-17T16:07:00.000-08:00

University Graduation: Notes Burning Ceremony

2006-02-10T12:08:00.000-08:00

For those who may not know, you can now upload your videos for free to Google Video, and then "embed" them on your web page.

Here is a short video clip that taken back in May 2005. Shortly after graduation, a few of us gathered in a park and burned our university notes. This is what came out.

Danny Tenaglia at Ruby Skye

2006-01-09T14:28:00.000-08:00

This saturday I went to see house legend Danny Tenaglia spin a 12 hour set at Ruby Skye nightclub here in San Francisco. I have to say that I was entirely unimpressed. The guy is over rated. The best part of the night was the fact that the bar was reopened at 6AM.

Writing old-school style: With a pen and paper

2005-11-09T12:10:00.000-08:00

Today I realized how poor are my writing skills when it comes down to writing with a pen on a piece of paper. I was trying to write an address on an envelope, and it turned out to be surprisingly difficult. I might even say it was irritating and frustrating writing those few lines of text.

Then I thought to myself: how often do I get to write using a pen these days? The answer startled me: virtually never ! Is writing on paper becoming obsolete ? The second skill(first is reading) that we are taught at school is turning out to be useless !

I wonder how long it's gonna take before writing with a pen is no longer taught at school ?

Downloadable Videos

2005-11-08T11:43:00.000-08:00

First it was Apple offering downloadable copies of past TV shows($1.99/episode), and now it seems that TV networks CBC and NBC are following up, and offering past shows for $0.99/episode(those aren't exactly downloadable, but instead can be viewed on Comcact On Demand.)

I think this is a great step forward ! While currently they only offer recent show, I can imagine that sometime soon we'll be able to download pretty much any show that ever aired on TV and this really excites me !

I love halloween !

2005-10-31T18:02:00.000-08:00

Halloween - what a great holiday ! I wish people were wearing fun costumes everyday ! Not only is it extremely funny seeing supermen, witches, policewomen, pirates, etc., but also every everybody looks different. Anyways, I think Halloween is my favourite holiday right now...

Curb your enthusiasm

2005-10-29T14:50:00.000-07:00

I've just finished watching first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, a popular sitcom produced by Larry David(who is most known for being a producer of Seinfeld). I have to say that I was pretty impressed. The show is really funny, not as funny as Seinfeld, but somewhat more realistic. A+ !

Trip to Seattle

2005-10-26T21:47:00.000-07:00

So this weekend I went to Seattle to see my friends Alex and Diego, who I know from the good old times at the University of Waterloo. Seattle turned out to be a better city than I expected (excluding the fact that there are way too many Microsofties in there, sorry Diego).

The nightlife in Seattle is vibrant, with a great selection of clubs, lounges, and social pubs(ala Bomber at Waterloo). Recently I became more of a lounge fan, and I think Seattle offers a little more choice in that respect than San Francisco.

During daylight hours we've explored the city, visited a nice park, and checked out a Boing museum, which was the highlight of the trip. It's been a while since I've been to a museum, let alone a very interesting one. This one was definitely great; it houses a lot of different airplanes from different times of the century - it was very cool seeing them from up close.

Going to Seattle for a weekend

2005-10-20T10:41:00.000-07:00

I'm going to Settle this weekend to visit my friends, who have recently moved there from Canada. Should be a very fun weekend !

Review: San Francisco Love Parade 2005

2005-09-26T11:27:00.000-07:00

Unbelievable, Absolutely Unbelievable !

This year's Love Parade was even bigger, more fun than last year, and the weather could not have been any better! Tens of thousands of people dancing and going absolutely nuts to the variety of musical styles(all electronic), anything from House to Trance to Drum'n'Bass.

The parade started at 1PM at 2nd and Market St, and then proceeded to the Civic Center. As last year, during the parade I was following the Psy Trance float with an Indian DJ. That was the float to be at - crazy beats and people did not hold back when it came to dancing, jumping, smiling and just enjoying themselves to the fullest. Great energy !

The parade concluded at the Civic Center around 3PM, and turned into a giant party. So huge, in fact, that I don't even think we ever covered the entire ground. (lesson learnt: never try to meet-up with people during such big parties. It's nearly impossible, especially considering the fact that cell phones practically stopped working.)

The party was over promptly at 9PM. We took a short break, and at 11PM headed to the official afterparty at Bill Graham Auditorium. There were actually quite a few afterparties, but we chose that particular one because it featured a lot of famous Trance DJs(Ferry Corsten, Above & Beyond, Blank & Jones, etc), and was supposed to be the biggest one(10,000 people). Turned out we made the right choice. The venue was very spacious, it wasn't very packed, and the sound quality was really good. All DJs that we heard played really well, but I think Ferry Corsten played the set of the night. Blank & Jones delivered their best as well, but unfortunately their set was plagued by technical difficulties.

Overall, Love Parade 2005 was a huge success, and surpassed my already high expectations !

Pictures will be coming shortly.

San Francisco Love Parade 2005

2005-09-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

YES. YES. YES !

If Love Parade 2004 was any indication, this year's one should be off the hook ! With DJs such as Carl Cox, Paul van Dyk, Above & Beyond, Ferry Corsten and many many others the DJ line-up is absolutely phenomenal by North American standards. I recommend everyone to attend this. Fun times are guaranteed !

Eric Sink - Closing the Gap

2005-09-15T21:37:00.000-07:00

I recently bought Joel's Spolsky's latest book Best Software Writing, which is a collection of software related essays written by various authors over the past few years. It is a pretty good read, though not as good as Joel's earlier book.

One essay that has I especially liked is called Closing the Gap, Part 1, by Eric Sink. It is available online free of charge, and I highly recommend reading it. It is an easy read, very humorous, and highly educational.

Russian parties in San Francisco

2005-08-27T18:27:00.000-07:00

Went to my first Russian party in San Francisco yesterday. I have to say that I was impressed. The club was really nice(which was a surprise - many nightsclubs in San Francisco look like dumps compared to clubs in Toronto), the music pretty good(mostly Russian dance and house), and there were lots of great looking women. People were well dressed, and smiling which couldn't be said about Russian parties in Toronto. I got the impression that Russians in San Fran have adapted much better to local lifestyle than Russians in Toronto.

Overall I really enjoyed the night, and I think will be attending more of these parties in the future.

Steve Lawler - Live at Pervert Gold, Italy

2005-08-18T21:50:00.000-07:00

All I can say is WOW. I'm not generally a big fan of house music, but this set has not left my playlist for the past month or so. 2.5 hours of dark, dirty, electro house; incredible ! Here is the tracklist:

01. Pastaboys - Tribute
02. Audiofly - Science Fiction
03. Vintagent - Rock N Roll
04. Dj Marbrax - Freakin
05. Tiga - Louder Than A Bomb
06. ID
07. Beginerz pres Def E - Wipe Those Tears Away (Vocal mix)
08. Steve Lawler - Illectronic Music (Vocal mix)
09. Mark Knight + Martijn Ten Velden - Acid Test
10. Mylo - Destroy Rock N Roll (Tom Neville mix)
11. Motel - Feel The Rhythm
12. Trophy Twins - Anarchism (Disciples of Sound & Kid Lopez mix)
13. Funky Green Dogs - Reach For Me (Steve Lawler mix)
14. Tommie Sunshine - Head To Toe In Drag
15. T-Total - Give Me Funk
16. Didier Sinclair and Chris Pie - Heavenly (Sharam Jey Club mix)
17. Max Linen - Flashback (D Ramirez mix)
18. Boombox - The Slam
19. Live Element - Dont Bring Me Down
20. ID
21. ID
22. God's Uncle / Robert Armani - Overclockers / Circus Bells (Hardfloor mix) / (King Unique Mashup)
23. Huntemann - Discotech
24. ID
25. ID
26. Donna Summer - I Feel Love (Steve Lawler mix)

Needless to say I can't wait to hear Lawler at a club again !

Update: Steve Lawler will be performing at Mezzanine, San Francisco on Oct 7, 2005. YES !

Another milestone of my life

2005-08-13T20:20:00.000-07:00

As you may know I arrived in California on July 27th, 2005. But what you may not know, is that today, on August 13th, 2005 was the first time that I prepared food on the territory of the United States. The natural question would be - "What did you cook?" The answer is simple: a hot dog.

View from my apartment

2005-08-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

San Francisco !

2005-08-07T22:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I finally moved into my newly rented apartment in San Francisco. It is a small bachelor apartment(or studio as they call it in the US), but I think it will suit me just fine. The view from the balcony (I'm on the 27th floor) is absolutely gorgeous. Unfortunately San Francisco is often foggy, so I usually can't see very far. I really like the place so far; and it feels great finally living in a place of my own. Surprisingly, I even feel motivated to keep it clean; this never happened to me before. Am I maturing ?

Yesterday I also made a trip to Wal-Mart to purchase various products that are essential for living. It's incredible how much stuff there is ! Anything from forks and spoons, to shower curtain and garbage bin. I spent nearly $150, and will probably need to make another two or three trips.

Right now the apartment feels somewhat empty. Out of furniture I just have an air-mattress, and computer desk. Not even a chair to sit on. Hopefully this will change over the coming months.

Here are the pictures of the apartment:

Note: There is a large built-in closet that you don't see. Its large enough to for all my clothes, etc, so that at least there won't be any shelves or other closets in the room.

Update: A valid question in the comment was "Where are the pictures of view?" Hm.. yeah. Unfortunately it was a bit a bit foggy on sunday, and in addition to that, I don't want to post it until I learn how to shoot a good panoramic picture with my camera. Since I'm not home during sunlight hours on mon-fri, this will have to wait till Saturday.

Trip to Ibiza

2005-08-06T08:18:00.000-07:00

It's been almost a month since I've returned from Ibiza, and so I think it's time to post a few pictures. Unfortunately there aren't many, and even fewer that are suitable for public display.

Tuesday night. On the way to Pacha nighclub, where Junior Jack is spinning house. It was our first club night in Ibiza. Pacha was fun, but I think we should have went to Amnesia instead(Armin was spinning Trance there)

Wednesday morning. This picture was taken around 8AM, soon after me and Vlad returned from Pacha. We weren't done partying yet. After changing, showering and having a little breakfast we were on our way to party at Space nightclub, where we danced till noon.

On Sunday night we went to San Antonio to watch the sunset at Cafe Del Mar. It was pretty cloudy and we got there late, so we didn't see much. And so we drank. A lot. Soon after I found myself singing Elvis Presley - Hound Dog at some bar in San Antonio.

Taken monday morning. After singing Elvis, we went to Judgement Sundays at Eden nightclub where Ferry Corsten, Judge Jules and Agnelli & Nelson were spinning that night. It was an awesome party. So awesome, in fact, that after returning home around 6AM I just couldn't stop laughing(and no, I wasn't stoned).

The infamous Bora Bora. We partied there pretty much every evening, but didn't get a chance to take any pictures until the very last evening. Parties at Bora Bora were always great. Definitely one of the highlights of Ibiza.

Overall it was a really fun trip. Can't wait to do it again !

Tags: ibiza

Start of new life

2005-08-03T21:18:00.000-07:00

And so, I have arrived in California.

The first week here has not been easy. I arrived on Wednesday, July 27th and my first mission was to open a checking account at an American bank. That part was easy; the problems began when I tried to put my money into it. Back in Canada, I've decided that instead of bringing cash into US, I'd make a money order and then deposit it as soon as I open an account here. Unfortunately, Bank of America decided to put my money order on hold for a week, which has really screwed up my plans to get an apartment by the end of the weekend.

Nevertheless I spent the next 3 days looking at apartments in both San Francisco and Mountain View(near work). What I soon realized is that housing in Mountain View is both cheaper, and better than housing in San Francisco. The downside ? Mountain View is BORING. And by boring, I do mean boring. There is absolutely nothing here.

Finally, on Sunday I've discovered a fairly decent place in San Francisco. It is only 5 minutes walking distance to Google Shuttle(free shuttle bus that takes San Francisco Googlers to work every morning, and home every evening), the building itself is fairly nice and it's right in the middle of the city, close to all the entertainment. The apartment is small(bachelor apt, 450sq feet), and is very pricy. Nevertheless I decided to take it due to the advantages described above. My placement there is still not guaranteed; if nobody else takes it before me on saturday, then I will move in(I can't take it before Saturday, because Saturday is the earliest I can come to SF, sign the lease and pay for it)

Monday was the first day at work. No big surprises. I'm back with my old team, working on Google Print (http://print.google.com). Right now I'm in the process of re-familiarizing myself with the system, and just getting up to speed with the changes that happened here while I was gone.

On Tuesday I got myself my very first cell phone. WOHOO :) They have very nice pay-as-you-go plans here. For a $100 you can get a card with 1000(basically 10 centes a minute, anytime, no long-distance charges within US). Given my phone-talking habits, I think this should suit me very well during the next year.

Anyways, enough rambling for now.

Looking for an apartment in San Francisco

2005-06-27T17:46:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm about a month away from moving to San Francisco, CA and today I finally started looking for an apartment. To tell you the truth: it isn't easy, even with great resources such as www.housingmaps.com(merge of Google Maps and Craigslist) and www.apartmentratings.com.

Basically I'm looking for a 1 room studio that is located within 10 minute walking distance of this location (Civic Station BART). There are many available studios in that area, however most of them either require a year long lease, or are really expensive (expensive as in $400-500/week). Normally a year long lease wouldn't be a problem, but since I can't visit the apartment(I'm currently in Toronto) before signing the lease, it might be a big gamble.

Thus, after thinking about this for a bit I came to the conclusion that it's probably a better idea to pay extra for one month rather than commit myself to a year long lease. And so, my current plan is to live at Ansonia Hotel (thanks to RJ for recommendation) for a few weeks, and during that time look for a more long term placement.

I love Flickr !

2005-06-26T08:57:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while a web application is released that is radically better than any existing competition. A well known example is Gmail. A slightly lesser known one is Flickr, which I want to write about in this post.

Flickr is web based photo-hosting service, with some really neat features. You can get a free account, as well as a pro-account (25USD per year). The main limitation of the free account is that it is only possible to upload up to 20MB of pictures per month, which is still ok if you aren't taking that many pictures. With pro-account, you can upload as many pictures as you want and, of course, there are some additional not-so-essential perks.

Here is a short overview of some features I love most:

RSS feed for person's pictures. Basically you can subscribe to person's picture stream, and receive notifications when new pictures are uploaded.
You can tag your pictures with multiple keywords. You then have the option of only viewing those pictures that have keywords you are interested in. For example here are all my pictures that are tagged with keyword 'kenya': Kenya Pictures.
You choose who you want to share your pictures with. For instance if you only want to share it with family members, only your family will be able to view them.
You can attach descriptions to certain areas of the picture. Then, when you move the mouse over a certain area of a picture, a pop-up is displayed describing that area. Example.

Overall, Flickr is a really impressive photo-hosting solution. Lets hope there is more to come !

Flickr was originally based in Canada, but was recently acquired by Yahoo. It is still unclear what implications this will have on the Flickr service; however, I believe that it's for the best. Yahoo has been doing some great things lately, and I think that Flickr will only improve in Yahoo's hands.

Trip to Africa

2005-06-23T09:50:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in the earlier posting, I recently went on a 3 week tour of Kenya and Tanzania. At first I planned to write a very detailed overview of the trip but then when I started writing it, I realized that my writing abilities are simply not good enough to produce a detailed, yet interesting and humorous review. In addition to that, my friend Alex who went on the tour with me has already written a really good review here.

Thus, I'm just going to write a few things in point form.

Seeing all the animals living in the wild, in their own world with little or no human intervention is absolutely fascinating. Its one thing to see a lone giraffe in the zoo, but when you see a family of 5 giraffees, just walking around, minding their own business, not really caring for us humans - it's a completely different experience. Or take lions for example. I couldn't believe my eyes when we were driving in a truck, and there was a pride of about 12 lions sharing the road with us, walking right next to the truck, almost oblivious to our presence.
Guerba - our tour guide company - really knows its shit. They've been in business for something like 20 years and it shows. Our tour guides were very informative and could answer all of our questions about African geography, vegetation and wildlife. Our cook was fantastic. We had great food every day and I was never left hugry. The tents that were provided to us were outstanding; they were easy to assemble, and stayed dry even during the heaviest of rains.
Most of the people on the tour(with 1 or 2 exceptions) were in their late twenties or early thirties. Most were avid travellers, with lots of stories. Our nightly bonefires were never boring. Most people were travelling alone, so it was really easy to make friends.
Kenyan and Tanzanian scenery is beautiful. Some of the highlights were the view of the Great Rift Valley, Hell's Gate Park(apparently that's where Tomb Raider movie was shot) , Ngorongoro Crater, Mount Kilamanjaro and Lake Nakuru.
All bigger Kenyan cities have Internet cafes on almost every corner. The rate is around 1USD/hour, which is really good.
Camping for three weeks is exhausting, especially considering the fact that we had to wake up at 6:30-7AM every morning. Now that I think about it, it would've been better to do a 2 week tour of Kenya, and a year later do a 2 week tour of Tanzania and Zanzibar(which we never visited).
Kenyan beer Tusker is really good. I wish they imported it into Canada.

Overall, it was an incredible adventure that I will remember for the rest of my life.

Tags: Africa Kenya Tanzania Review Guerba

Some pictures from Africa Trip

2005-06-15T02:00:00.000-07:00

On June 13th I came back from a 3 week tour of Kenya and Tanzania. The tour was organized by Guerba, and I really enjoyed it.

Here is a sneak preview of the pictures (Credit for the pictures goes to Alex who also went on this tour. I didn't have a camera, so it was up to him to capture our journey on "film". I think he handled the job well)

The rest of the pictures will be uploaded shortly. Additionally, I will post a full review of the trip within the next few days.

The 6 of us who went on Guerba's Faces of Kenya tour.

This is a picture showing our typical camp site set up. This particular picture has been taken in Amboseli National Park in Kenya

Trying to ride an Ostrich at the Ostrich Farm in Kenya.

Preparing for a heavy rain. Taken at the camp site on the slopes of Mount Kenya.

Reticulated Giraffe. Taken at Samburu National Park in Kenya.

Elephants. Taken at Samburu National Park in Kenya.

On the second day at Samburu park we finally saw a cheetah. It was peacefully sleeping on the road. Unfortunately our truck got to close to it, so the cheetah got up and walked away.

Lake Nakuru attracts hundreds of thousands of flamingos. Lake Nakuru with it's surrounding mountains and wildlife was one of the highlights of the tour.

We saw lots of rhinos at Nakuru Park. This was one of them.

Taken in the Masai Village in Loita Hills in Kenya. On the left is a young Masai Warrior, and on the right is me.

Zebras. Taken at Masai Mara national park in Kenya. Few of the thousands of zebras that we saw in Africa.

Ngorongoro Crater. This looks like a deserted area, right ? WRONG ! This crater has the largest concentration of wildlife on the planet. Zebras, Lions, Hippos, Hyenas, etc - they are all there.

Tags: Africa Guerba Kenya Tanzania

New Paul van Dyk Set from May 15, 2005

2005-05-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

Paul van Dyk is considered by many the top trance DJ in the world. He has been DJing all over the world for more than 10 years, consistently plays great sets and produces incredible music.

Unfortunately, for the past couple of years there weren't any live recordings of his sets with good sound quality. Thus, imagine my excitement when yesterday one such recording finally became available for download. You can download the set at www.tranceaddict.com. Not only is the sound quality really good, but the set itself is amazing to say the least.

A word of warning: Do not listen to this set while doing homework, or any other important work; productivity reduces to zero. It took me over 30 minutes to write this post, while listening to the set.

10 Impressions of USA

2005-05-06T21:08:00.000-07:00

About a month ago I wrote a report about my co-op experience in the United States for my Visa sponsorship agency. One of the requirements of the report was to write about 10 impressions that I had of the US. I decided to post this part of the report here(with slight modifications). Note that these were my impressions, hence not everything here may be absolutely accurate.

Americans seem to be more interested in politics than Canadians. During presidential elections most people were following it very closely. I haven't seen such interest in Canada.
Amerians seem to be very patriotic of the United States. There are lots of American flags everywhere.
The weather in California is beautiful. Possibly the best weather I’ve seen in my life. It was nice and warm during the day, and chillier at night; just perfect.
Americans are a lot harder working than Canadians. It was not uncommon for me to be at work past 7PM, with half the company still there. At first I thought it was like that only at Google, but after talking to more people it became evident that people in the United States (or at least in Software Industry) tend to work long hours.
Universities are beautiful. During my stay in the US I visited Stanford and UCLA. Both schools look gorgeous. Not sure how their Computer Science program compares to that of University of Waterloo, but walking around the campus of Stanford and UCLA made me wish I was a student there. University of Waterloo is really ugly compared to these two schools.
High prices of housing in the Silicon Valley. Although I knew that house prices were really high in the Bay Area, it was still shocking to learn that a small one bedroom apartment in San Francisco can cost around $600,000. This is really disappointing, and I’m not sure how people can afford to buy a house in their lifetime, unless they are lucky and win lottery or get good stock options.
People really like baseball and football. I knew that those sports were popular, but I never realized the extent of their popularity until I actually spent a few months in the US. It was crazy! Football is almost equivalent to popularity of Hockey in Canada.
Pretty much everybody has a car, and people are willing to drive long distances. I was amazed to see that some people commute more than an hour each way to work everyday. I never had a car in Canada, and never really needed one. It was a different story in California. I felt like I couldn’t get anywhere without a car. Sure there are trains and public transport, but it’s not nearly as good as public transport in Toronto.
The little differences like the metric system (temperature in Fahrenheit, distance in miles, weight in pounds) turned out to be surprisingly difficult to adjust to.
Number of restaurants. It seemed that wherever I went in the Bay Area, there were restaurants all over, and many of them were busy. Not sure whether it’s like that only in the
Bay Area, or everywhere in the United States, but it seems that people rarely cook at home and only eat out. It was a bit surprising since in Canada most people try to eat at home.

Favorite courses at University of Waterloo

2005-05-06T06:07:00.000-07:00

Now that I've graduated, I think it's time to reflect on some of the good courses that I've taken.

Math 145 (Advanced Algebra 1)

A slightly better name for that course would have been Introduction to Number Theory. This was by far the most interesting math course I've taken at UW. There was very little brute force work involved in the course since most problems involved proofs rather than straight forward calculations. The problems were challenging enough to be interesting, yet easy enough to be solvable within a reasonable amount of time.

CS 241 (Foundations of Sequential Programs)

This may come as a surprise to some, but I found this course to be my most challenging course taken at UW. The first few weeks of the course were relatively easy though - we learned assembly and some basic computer architecture(mostly about stack organization and registers).

The remainder of the course proved to be much more difficult. We learned about regular expressions, DFAs and context free grammars. All of that was new to me at the time and to be honest I had trouble understanding that material at first.

The last part of the course involved learning scheme programming language. It wasn't as interesting to me; however the scheme assignment was pretty fun(I remember solving one of the problems during sleep).

The main assignment of the course was to implement a compiler for a simple programming language. It was a great assignment; I really enjoyed it. It was after I completed this assignment that I decided to take the much dreaded CS444(Compiler Construction) course. More on that later.

CS 360 (Theory of Computation)

People either love this course or hate it. I loved it. Most of the problems involved rigorous proofs, often using induction. My solutions often spanned many pages(I tend to write unnecessarily long proofs). During the course we digged deeper into regular expressions, DFAs, context free grammars and learned about Turing machine. During the last part of the course we were introduced to the notion of solvable/unsolvable problems. Unfortunately the course has changed since I took it; i'm not sure about the specifics of the change but the course doesn't appear as be as interesting anymore.

CS 354 (Operating Systems)

This was my first course involving a big programming assignment. We had to implement an operating system based on NachOs. It was during this course that I was introducted to all-nighters. During the course we learned about process scheduling, virtual memory, file system and various other operating system related stuff.

Since I took the course it was merged with Concurrency course and renamed to CS350. From what I undestand, the course became a lot easier as a result of that change.

CS 452 (Real Time Systems)

Arguably the most challenging course at UW. There was even an article about the course in Toronto Star.

I was looking forward to that course since the 2nd year of university. The course involves implementing from scratch(in a group of 2) a real time operating system for i486 processor and then writing an application for controlling trains(all within 3 months). Needless to say taking this course requires a lot of dedication and work.

Implementing the operating system was not too difficult and we've done it successfully. Writing the application for controlling trains was a different story. We spent about a month working on it 10-12-16 hours a day. Unfortunately it wasn't enough and our application wasn't nearly as good as we had hoped.

Nevertheless it was an awesome learning experience, and I would recommend this course to anyone who enjoys challenging programming.

CS 444 (Compiler Construction)

This course involves implementing(in a group of 3) a compiler for a subset of Ada programming language.

The first assignment was relatively easy, but not very interesting. We had to fix the grammar for the language, then implement a lexer and a parser. The greatest strength of our parser was error recovery(thanks to Sergey who've implemented it within 2 days of hard work).

Second assignment was very tough and time consuming. It was also extremely interesting since we had make a lot of non-trivial design decisions. I feel that it was one of the best assignments I've worked on while at UW.

Third assignment wasn't as difficult as the second one. We quickly implemented about 70% of the requirements and then.. then I left to Montreal for a week and Sergey lost interest. Only Thomas continued to do work. Everyone's interest resurfaced on the day of submission; it was really fun finding and fixing bugs 5 hours before the deadline. At the end we submitted a relatively decent compiler which unfortunately lacked support for exceptions and nested procedures. In addition to that, the compiler had a curious bug with array indexing. Oh well. We ended up getting a decent mark.

So there you go. These were were my favourite courses taken at UW.

Trip to Dominican Republik

2005-05-03T07:53:00.000-07:00

On April 22, 2005 a bunch of us (Alex "Bombardir", Egor, Lena, Olya, Tanya, Timur and myself) departed on a trip to Dominican Republic. We went on an all inclusive vacation to Santana Beach Resort.

All of us had an amazing time. As expected, most of our time was spent in the pool drinking. At nights we went to the local disco, which generally played pretty horrible music, however it didn't bother us much since we were all pretty drunk.

Some highlights of the trip included partying on a boat, recording some funny music videos and just chilling on the beach drinking and smoking.

Overall it was a really fun vacation ! Here are some pictures.

Cheers !

I am smiling at the camera. Sanya is drinking. Someone's priorities are screwed up.

Olya looks happy. I look puzzled. Hm...

Still Life picture(aka Naturmort)

University no more

2005-05-02T14:00:00.000-07:00

And just like that the university life is over. It is still a little difficult for me to believe that from now on there will be no more school, no more assignments and no more exams. WOW !

I thought for a long time what to write in this first post-graduation post, and eventually decided to just post a bunch of pictures that show my life during university years.

And so, without further adiue here is a selection of pictures taken over the past 5 years.

Sep 5, 2000: Walking to university for the first time. I would take this road to school pretty much every day for the next 4 years.

Sep 5, 2000: First day of Frosh Week. Pink Tie is a symbol of Waterloo Math students. Our cheer was M-A, M-A-T, M-A-T-H, MATH ROCKS !

Sep 2000: Celebrating beginning of university. Who would have thought how quickly we'd be finished?

Dec 14, 2000: End of term. First term involved a lot of drinking. What you see on this picture is me posing as a super-man with 'UW' spelled using beer bottles

July 21, 2001: Rowing in Algonquin. That was one awesome camping trip !

Dec 25, 2001: In Montreal: Danny(aka Pushkin), Vovan and myself. I absolutely love Montreal and try to visit it at least once a year.

August 2002: In front of Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam with Danny. I've known Danny(aka Pushkin) since 1994. We both attended the same school in Israel. Those were awesome times!

August 2002: In Ibiza. If I look tired in this picture, that's because I probably haven't slept for 2 or 3 days at the time. Why - you ask? Come to Ibiza and find out!

Feb 2, 2003: Viva Nightclub in Toronto. I partied quite a bit during university and just had to include one the raving pictures here.

June 29, 2003: Don't remember anymore where this picture was taken. All I know is that it was during some camping trip.

Late August 2003: In Cuba with my ex-girlfriend Tanya

Oct 2, 2004: This picture was taken at the first ever Love Parade in San Francisco. What an amazing time it was!!!

April 16, 2005: Myself and Alex: Former Real Time partners now sitting in the lab for the last time

Fun times at Revolution Nightclub in Waterloo

2005-04-16T07:17:00.000-07:00

If there is one place I'm going to miss in Waterloo, it's the Revolution Nightclub(or simply Rev). I've been going there for almost four years now and that place just keeps on getting better and better. I generally hang out in the Purple Room, that's where trance/techno/house is being played.

What's interesting is how crowd has changed in the Purple Room over the years. When I just started going there it was mostly ravers in baggy pants, lots of people high, few girls. These days it's almost 100% typical clubbers, people are just drinking and, surprisingly, there are many good looking women.

Over the past 3 years I've been primarily going there on Trance nights, which happen once a month. The resident DJ is Dennis Hahn. It's always great Trance/Tech-Trance when he is on, and the crowd is going nuts !

I rarely step outside of the Purple Room, however. The music in the mainroom sucks, and the crowd is very thuggy-looking(makes me wish they had a dress code or smthn). Lots of great looking women in there though, so it could be a good place to meet somebody if you can tolerate the music.

Overall, the club is really nice and very very big. I'm gonna miss it !

Wish List idea

2005-04-13T16:20:00.000-07:00

Amazon, Froogle and I'm sure others have what are called Wish Lists. Wish List is nothing more than a list of items that a user wants to have. Wish Lists are great, but unfortunately if a user is using both Amazon and Froogle he needs to maintain two separate wishlists which is clearly inconvenient.

Thus, I think it would be awesome if some independent company would host the wish list, which could then be shared(with customers permission) with various online retailers. IMHO, this would be convenient to both customers and retailers. Consumer's convenience factor is fairly evident. But why should retailers be interested?

Well, consider the following scenario. Retailer A contains product X, and retailer B doesn't. Clearly, since B doesn't contain X, customer cannot put X into his wish list while browsing B's website. He can; however put the item on the list while browsing A. Now, a month have gone by and B has obtained X. Customer has returned to B's web-site, and B is now aware that customer wants X. B can display appropriate ads.

Note - that's just one example of how this would benefit retailers. There are others.

Additionally, the user should be able to set a price watch on an item in his wish list. A price watch is a price at which user is willing to buy the product. The company that hosts the wish list, would crawl retailers and notify the user if an item in user's list is found at specified price or cheaper. Wouldn't that be cool ?

Hence I think such Wish List would be beneficial to both customers and retailers. I wonder if this idea will ever see the light of day ?

Battling VI addiction...

2005-04-12T06:25:00.000-07:00

They say cigarettes are addictive. They also say that about drugs, coffee and various other things. But for some reason nobody mentions VI. Yes VI, VI: a text editor originally created for UNIX, but now available for pretty much any operating system out there.

When I was first shown VI, I laughed. I thought it was a crappy editor, a remnant from the 70s, an era when the mouse was still unknown to the masses. I had trouble exiting the damn editor, nevermind successfully editing a file. Nevertheless, I forced myself to learn it. Partly because I wanted to look cool among my classmates, and partly because I wanted to see for myself what all the VI hype was about.

For the next month my working productivity was nearly zero. VI turned out to be surprisingly difficult to learn. The biggest problem was the number of key combinations I had to learn. Additionally, it was very difficult to accept the fact that navigation was now done using 'h', 'j', 'k', 'l' instead of the familiar left, down, up, right keys.

It's 4 years later. I still haven't fully grasped VI, yet my current knowledge is sufficient enough to edit any file a lot faster than if I was using another, more modern, editor. Not only that, but I've gotten so used to the VI keystrokes and navigation keys that I'm almost handicapped when it comes down to using another editor.

A natural question then is Why use another editor at all ? Use VI all the time. Well, as much as I'd love to, unfortunately VI is not suitable for all purposes. Sometimes I have to use Microsoft Word, and these days most of the Java development is done in either Eclipse or IDEA. There are VI plugins for the latter 2 editors, but it's not the same.

The point is. I somewhat regret I've learned VI. It's an amazing editor, possibly the best out there. Unfortunately, once you get used to it, it becomes inconvenient to use anything else.

Online Soccer Videos

2005-04-10T13:19:00.000-07:00

It is a well known fact that Soccer (or should I say Football?) is the most popular game in the world. It is also a well known fact that US/Canadian TV channels don't show nearly enough soccer.

What I want to know is why aren't there websites dedicated to showing highlights from the games. I'm not even talking full games, just 5-7 minutes of highlights would be enough!

For example just today was an amazing Real Madrid - Barcelona game, the result of which was 4-2, and I have no way of seeing the goals. I would even pay a monthly fee for an online service which would show the highlights, and I'm sure I'm not the only one !

Back in Canada.

2005-01-09T08:01:00.000-08:00

And so... I'm back in Canada !

The work-term at Google has come to an end, and on Dec 31st I returned to Canada. The last couple of weeks in California have been both sad and happy at the same time. Sad because I worked all through Christmas, and didn't really get any holiday time whatsoever. Happy because I met a great girl (of all places, at a Tiesto party), and it was really awesome spending the last few days in her company. I'm just a little dissapointed that I met her so late into my stay in California.

Fast forward to Jan 9th .. and I'm currently doing my last school term at the University of Waterloo. Motivation level is at ZERO; I really don't want to study. Especially because I don't need to take any required courses, it's the last term, and it's winter. Luckily, there is only 4 months, and then I'm done !

Tiesto - 6 hour set at the Docks in Toronto

2004-12-07T13:17:00.000-08:00

I literally want to cry right now.... Tiesto will be playing at the Docks in Toronto on Dec 11, and I will miss it :( It will be his first ever 6 hour show in Toronto. He has been in TO enough times already, but never played for 6 hours. 6 HOURS ! Apparently he came to Toronto a week or so ago to experiment with the system at the Docks and was really impressed. And when Tiesto is impressed, he delivers ! Damn...

My favourite Seinfeld quote

2004-12-05T15:29:00.000-08:00

Most of us, Seinfeld fans, have a favourite quote from that amazing comedy. The following 2 quotes are my favourite quotes ever:

This one is from The Red Dot episode.

Mr. Lippman: I'm going to get right to the point. It has come to my attention that you and the cleaning woman have engaged in sexual intercourse on the desk in your office. Is that correct?

George: Who said that?

Mr. Lippman: She did.

George: Was that wrong? Should I have not done that? I tell you I gotta plead ignorance on this thing because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing was frowned upon, you know, cause I've worked in a lot of offices and I tell you peope do that all the time.

And this one is from the infamous The Contest episode.

Estelle: "I go out for a quart of milk. I come home and find my son treating his body like it was an amusement park!"
It's a real pity that this show is over....

What the hell is going on ???

2004-11-29T19:20:00.000-08:00

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 ?

The wonders of photography...

2004-11-26T20:50:00.000-08:00

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.

Seinfeld: First 3 seasons released on DVD !!!

2004-11-24T13:33:00.000-08:00

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 !

GMail - Is 1 Gig really enough?

2004-11-17T14:05:00.000-08:00

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.

Debuggers...

2004-11-16T21:39:00.000-08:00

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 !

Perfect Cell Phone...

2004-11-16T18:11:00.000-08:00

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.

2004-11-15T21:28:00.000-08:00

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.

2004-11-15T21:27:00.001-08:00

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

2004-11-15T21:27:00.000-08:00

The infamous Hollywood sign.

2004-11-15T21:26:00.000-08:00

In Santa Barbara...

Trip to Santa Barbara and Los Angeles

2004-11-15T13:25:00.000-08:00

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

2004-11-11T17:40:00.000-08:00

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 ?

Please post your comments...

2004-11-10T22:55:00.000-08:00

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 :)

Firefox 1.0 Released

2004-11-09T18:22:00.000-08:00

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.

2004-11-03T21:18:00.000-08:00

Final picture before departing home

2004-11-03T21:17:00.000-08:00

Another picture from Seattle...

2004-11-03T21:15:00.000-08:00

Russian crew in front of Lenin statue in Seattle

2004-11-03T21:12:00.000-08:00

Halloween 2004 - Preparing to go to a rave party.

Seattle and Vancouver this past weekend...

2004-11-02T04:12:00.000-08:00

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 !

2004-10-27T23:22:00.001-07:00

Me next to Love Parade sign

2004-10-27T23:22:00.000-07:00

First ever Love Parade in San Francisco - The Parade :)

2004-10-27T23:21:00.000-07:00

First ever Love Parade in San Francisco - This is me and Lesha

2004-10-27T22:25:00.001-07:00

In Santa Cruz with Eli Aleyner

2004-10-27T22:25:00.000-07:00

Excellent view of San Francisco from a nearby mountain.

2004-10-27T22:24:00.000-07:00

Breakfast in San Francisco - nothing better than a cold Heineken in the morning :)

Efficient way to read blogs..

2004-10-25T21:30:00.000-07:00

Seeing that I'm reading more and more blogs, I find it very inconvenient to visit web sites of all these blogs, just to find out that there aren't any new messages. Well, today I discovered the beauty of RSS and ATOM.

As it turns out, you can download software ie FeedReader which will do that for you. Essentially you subscribe to blogs(as if they were mailing lists), and FeedReader will pick up new posts when they are posted and show them to you. Really cool and convenient. Give it a try :) For more help see the following posting on blogger: ATOM Help

Yet another fun weekend...

2004-10-24T20:43:00.000-07:00

Eli Aleyner(Cunlaga) and his roomate Grisha(Greg) visited from Seattle this past weekend. It was lots of fun.

I tried my first sushi at a great sushi place Miyaki(or smthn like that) in Palo Alto. It was a real party atmosphere there, so we had a great time, and hopefully I'll be back there soon. After Sushi, we went to Ruby Skye nightclub in San Francisco. I'm really falling in love with that place. Music is good, and the crowd is awesome as well. Too bad we had to leave early around 2AM just when I was getting into the whole thing.

Sunday we checked out out San Francisco. Took some great pictures, and drove down the crookedest street on the planet(Lombard street). I'll post some of the pics here soon.

2004-10-22T00:38:00.000-07:00

Google gives out free t-shirts to employees every few of days. This is a collection that we have amassed so far :)

Ferry Corsten at Mezzanine, San Francisco

2004-10-20T22:43:00.000-07:00

This past friday(Oct 15, 2004) I went to what it considered to be San Francisco's premier underground nightclub called Mezzanine. DJ Ferry Corsten was spinning, so it was a good occasion to check out that venue for the first time.

Up to that point I was somewhat dissapointed in San Fran's nightclub scene - the clubs are not nearly as good as in Toronto, and the sound quality usually leaves a lot to be desired. Well, Mezzanine proved to be a different beast. I really really really liked it. The sound was good, and the vibe was awesome. It was evident that people came there to party, and party they did ! Ferry Corsten was also on fire, and it seemed like he was really enjoying himself.

One thing that I found strange was that most people in the club were sober. Lets be frank here - the crowd in Toronto is usually 80% high. In San Fran it's the other way around - pretty much everyone was either sober or drunk. Nice !

2004-10-19T21:08:00.000-07:00

In front of Google Building

Courses for the next term..

2004-10-08T19:27:00.000-07:00

Well, Well, Well... It seems like it was only yesterday that I started studying at the University of Waterloo, but in fact it was over 4 years ago. This week I was choosing courses for my very last school term, that will start in January 2005.

As it turns out I already took all the required courses, and I only need 3 electives to fulfill my degree requirements. I took 4 courses. 2 are CS courses - Compilers(should be very hard and time consuming, but very interesting), Principles of Programming Languages(not really sure why I'm taking that one. Seems to have no practical value, but I assume there will be some cool proofs in there, so I might as well take it). I'm also taking Interviewing and Law for Math Students(both are supposed to be bird electives)

Can't say that I'm looking forward to that last term. Coming back to Waterloo, in Winter ?? Doesn't seem exciting at all. Oh well - it's only 4 months, and that I'M DONE !! YES - DONE. WOW !

Testing publishing via email...

2004-10-08T14:10:00.000-07:00

This is a test to see if I can publish blog via E-Mail.. Hope it works !

Love Parade !

2004-10-03T23:27:00.000-07:00

WOW ! WOW ! WOW !

Holy Shit !! I never imagined that I would witness such a party in the U.S.A ! First ever USA Love Parade was fuckin' UNBELIEVABLE !!! Everybody was dancing - young and old, rich and poor, EDM fans and those who were hearing this stuff for the first time. It was NUTS !

I didn't know any DJs who were spinning, didn't catch any of the headliners, barely recognized any tracks - but none of that mattered, cause the vibe and the music were so great, that I just kept dancing from start to finish.. And so were the thousands of people who were all there(it's hard for me to even estimate how many people were there, but it felt like there were at least 100,000 thousand)

The crasiest vibe was at the Psy-Trance truck. I don't know who the DJ was, but it was some Indian guy, who looked like he just came back from GOA, and he was spinning absolutely crazy shit(Infected Mushroom style, I suppose). People were going nuts ! Pretty much everybody was sober, and I guess most of the people who were there don't even normally go to these parties, yet they everyone was dancing much harder than what I'm used to seeing at Guvernment, Kool Haus and other Toronto clubs..

One word: MADNESS !

I'm definitely waiting for next year !

Some words about Cali...

2004-09-15T18:44:00.000-07:00

I thought I might write a few words about California(or simply Cali, as we Cali it here). Weather is amazing(not sure how it compares to Vancouver, but I don't think it's much worse). During the day it's pretty hot(25 to 30) and low humidity, and at nights it's very chill and cool. Awesome ! And... not a droplet of rain during the 3 weeks I was here.

Unfortunately, Silicon Valley - is a really really really really REALLY boring place. To go out anywhere, one needs to drive for at least 30-40 minutes. Or even better, one needs to go to San Francisco, which takes about an hour.

San Francisco is awesome though. Beautiful city which has a very long history and TONS of tourists from all over the world. Tourism is number 1 source of income for San Francisco, so you can literally check out that city for a month, and still be far from exploring it
completely.

Some interesting facts: 39% of San Fran population is Asian. They have the largest chinatown outside china. It's freaking huge. Another statistic - 10% of San Francisco population(about 80,000 people) are gay. There is a huge neighbourhood where only gays live.

I also visited Steve in LA a few weeks ago. What a city! Half the city is ghetto, but the other half is AMAZING. Beverly Hills is awesome. That's where I wanna live as soon as I earn my first 10
million..(one can dream, right??) Beautiful houses, but most importantly HOT HOT HOT blondes. Apparently they flock to LA from all over states to become actresses. Obviously most of them don't succeed in their quest, but they still remain in LA hoping to marry a rich actor. Someone told me there are 900,000 actors/actresses in LA. So yeah - LA really impressed me(unless you go into the ghetto neighbourhood).

Paul van Dyk at Guvernment

2004-06-25T15:17:00.000-07:00

Last night(June 24) me and a few friends went to see DJ Paul van Dyk(Ranked number 2 DJ in the world) perform at Guvernment nightclub in Toronto. I didn't go to the party with many expections. First of all I was worried that Guvernment would be overpacked with people(it's usually impossible to move, forget dance - that's how packed it gets), but most importantly I was worried that Paul van Dyk would play the same set he played 2 months earlier in Montreal, and everywhere in general for the past 6 months.

To my big surprise Guvernment wasn't overpacked and Paul van Dyk played a completely new set. Not sure why people didn't come for Paul van Dyk, after all PVD is as popular as Tiesto here in Canada, and Tiesto's party two weeks earlier had way more people.

Paul van Dyk played mostly hard driving techno and tech-trance. Not much emotional banging Trance that he is well known for. My friends were somewhat dissapointed since they expected more melodies. I was actually quite happy with the set, since it was a good refreshment from a typical Paul van Dyk. Paul played for almost 3 hours.

This was definitely a great party. Possibly the best party at Guvernment yet.

Finally got a gmail account..

2004-06-22T22:43:00.000-07:00

Finally got a Gmail e-mail account today. For those who've been living in the dark for the past 3 or 4 months, Gmail(www.gmail.com) is a free online e-mail service from Google that offers 1GB of e-mail storage (compared to 2MB offered by Hotmail) and a bunch of cool, new features. Right now you can only sign up by invitation, but soon the service will be available to everybody.

Upon first inspection, I must say that Gmail is indeed incredible! User interface is very simple and effective. Nothing too fancy, which is great: KISS(keep it simple, stupid) principle at play here.

So far I find Gmail to be lot more usable than Hotmail. Everything that can be done with 1 or 2 mouse clicks in Gmail, requires 4 or 5 clicks in Hotmail. Pretty big difference if you ask me.

Gmail is also a lot faster than Hotmail. For Google's sake I hope that they will be able to maintain such high speeds even when the service goes public.

Unfortunately, since the Gmail is still in beta version there are bunch of nasty bugs. I've already sent Gmail guys some feedback about that, and I expect those bugs to be fixed soon.

First Post

2004-06-21T22:02:00.000-07:00

Well, just trying out this cool new service. This post is mostly a test.
More blogs will be coming soon !