Ilyia Kaushansky

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...

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 !

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 hav...

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, wa...

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 peac...

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...