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...

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 cod...

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 ...

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' inste...

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 !

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 !

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...

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 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 conditi...

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.