Ilyia Kaushansky

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.

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...

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 conte...

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)

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...