Tag: misc

The bus broke down about 15 minutes after leaving the village. The fuel stopped coming through. After taking the engine apart, we managed to start the bus; the pump turned out to be dead. We turned around and headed back, the driver stopped a couple of times and pumped the fuel by hand.

Pretty unlucky. On the one hand, because of the holiday very few people were traveling and the losses for the driver are small, but on a day off everything is closed and you can't get the part you need in the village.

So we hired a car that took us to the Novyi Buh highway. We rode in a Kopeika, the road is the worst, good thing there hadn't been rain for a long time and we could drive on the dirt track through the field. It's strange the bus still breaks down fairly rarely. How can anyone drive on a road like that every day, twice a day?

Now we're standing at the 216th kilometer of the Novyi Buh highway. Toward Novyi Buh there are 3 people and toward Kryvyi Rih 7 people. Nobody wants to pick anyone up, strange people, they're driving empty anyway and burning fuel - they could've made some money. No telling when the scheduled bus will come.

The internet is rough: there's no EDGE in the field, only GPRS.

"Beeline Ukraine" has an interesting notion of unlimited mobile internet on the "Click" plan. Previously it was 200 MB per day for 4 UAH, then 5 UAH after activation. Now it's an unlimited number of megabytes at 2 kopecks apiece, and 4 UAH per day, again 5 UAH after activation. On top of that you also have to add the pension fund levy. And this is called "Unlimited".

I have a feeling I'll have to look into the terms of other mobile internet providers that have coverage in the places I need. It's just that a lot of online services are tied to my Beeline number, and it's my main one for talking with family, ugh...

kovudragon back in March wrote about the planned raise in stipends for PhD students in 2009. This raise was only going to be 1.2 times higher, i.e. up to a laughable 1800 rubles. (The last raise was way back in 2006.) It seemed safe to assume the raise would come with the new academic year, but it never did. I also learned how absurd the taxation of research grants is, so at the end of September I wrote a new letter to the President of the Russian Federation, in two parts.

( Read more in Kovu's blog )

Posting a link to the entry in Kovu's blog is welcome, as is copying and sharing it. If you know a better place to repost it, comment on his post

An interesting year it turned out to be, it'll stick with me, just like the previous leap year, I don't even know which one I'll remember more, in certain ways they're alike, but some things just can't be compared.

All in all, different sides of me each got something they needed. Among them: attending a programming contest; getting an Xbox 360; receiving a bachelor's degree with honors; new feelings I didn't think I'd experience, which helped me find harmony with myself, brought new goals, ended a depression that had lasted about two years, roughly since the time I created this blog…

Yes, there were losses in the past year, not everything I'd planned came true, but on the whole I can confidently give it a big plus.

I wish everyone success with their plans and hope you all get what you need this coming year. Happy New Year!

Lately in the evenings I've been watching a bright "star" in the southeast, and when I went out around midnight, I was amazed at how brightly it glowed — over the past weeks the moon shone brightly and I hadn't noticed it. I decided to photograph this object a few times — though it's more likely a planet. With ten-times optical zoom nothing came out clearly in the photo:

While working on my diploma project (officially a bachelor's graduation work), where I had to create an automated library system, I was looking through what popular similar systems already exist. Of course, I couldn't just walk past the "IRBIS" system — I liked the pictures on the product's website, so I downloaded the demo version. The program's icons are quite pretty, there are only two types — some with a snow leopard, others with a leopard, I didn't expect to come across that, where else would you find icons like these, since for now all my system icons everywhere are TLK ones, downloaded from pridelands.ru. And on the program's loading screen there's a snow leopard, just like on the site, nice. Plus the site has a gif of a running cheetah. You can find a lot of interesting things while preparing for your diploma.

P.S. Judging by the songs, the music and the voices of the hosts heard through the window at three!!! in the morning, it's prom night right now. Congratulations to everyone who has successfully finished school on this occasion. But still, school No. 44 (judging by what the hosts were saying) ought to hold the event farther from the residential districts or point the speakers in another direction. After all, not everyone is celebrating this occasion and not everyone goes to bed at 4 in the morning. I don't even know where this event is happening, I've never before heard music playing somewhere in the city so distinctly through the window. Still, I hope it ends by 4, I need to sleep. What's going to happen to their hearing after this night?! I looked out the window, it seems all this is going on across the intersection in some restaurant. Have they lost their minds? It's clearly audible across both of the large residential districts (at least the residents of the outermost buildings definitely hear it). I haven't seen the cat for a few hours now, and usually at this time she watches the bats…

Night. What a wonderful time of day, the perfect time to set out on a hunt; by day it's harder to creep up on someone, and if the sun is shining on top of that, then being out in the open is nearly impossible — but that's not the point right now.

First of all, I'm a lion, or more precisely a white lion. Born in a wild African pride. You won't learn much about my childhood, if you learn anything at all. Having survived that period of life by a miracle, I left the pride early and was doomed to death, but people caught me and, you could say, saved me — if it can be called saving, since the following months I lived, if it can be called living, in a cage, and the two-legged ones came to look at me almost every day, though they did feed me well. It was there that I got to know another lion, who was also different from the rest, and he told me about his life, but that's a completely different story. In the end, a few months ago I was being transported from one place of captivity to another; I'll keep silent about the reasons for it, but there was a crash, and here I am, free, who knows where. Since then I've been living here.

Yesterday I got automatic passes for all my exams, so now I can rest easy for a whole month, which is why  I'm leaving for the village for the entire month and won't have internet access, except maybe through my phone's built-in WAP browser. So, this is my first session that I didn't pass with top marks — a pity, of course, but I'm somehow tired of it — four sessions I passed with top marks, but I'd never been in a situation like this — at the exam I could have gotten an "A," but I'd still have had to study and travel to the city in the cold, and besides I don't like the stress of it.

Yesterday was also the peak of my illness, my temperature was over 38 degrees all day, the trip to the university took its toll too. Today it's already better, now I'm printing out books, articles and stories that I'll read over the break.

So, I don't have time to print everything...

Happy New Year, everyone!

Finally found the time to deal with the system freezing, and I got around to the second Neverwinter too, and you can't play it without the .NET Framework. Decided to go the simple route — look at which processes show up in Task Manager after installing the Framework. The only new one in the list turned out to be mscorsvw.exe. A quick search engine query told me what kind of beast it was. Turns out it's a system optimizer that launches on the first boot after installation and runs the optimization, loading the CPU to 100%. It looks like the processor can't handle the load and freezes — because of interference from Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6 (or one of the other very demanding programs) and heavy dust buildup (tomorrow I'll definitely be cleaning out the case) — even though the optimization only runs once. For now I've disabled the .NET Runtime Optimization Service; after cleaning the cooler on the proc I'll try turning it back on.

In the evening I went to the city's first hypermarket, which opened yesterday. The store really is the biggest in the city, but does it actually qualify as a hyper. The range of goods is the same as in the other supermarkets, well, there's also a section with clothes and discs. Plus there's live fish swimming in aquariums for sale (brrrrrrr). Because of its size the market is spacious, though that was probably hardly noticeable during the day — from the reviews I heard the crush at the opening was unbelievable. It also has escalators, which I haven't spotted anywhere else in the city either. It's good that it's close to home, but not right under the windows. Because of its size they couldn't find a spot in the center, so in the end they built it on the outskirts near the residential districts. Interestingly, a lot of the goods have a long shelf life, and some may even be expired — they were brought in from other stores of this same chain, and in the first days of operation shoppers don't pay much attention to the dates.

I partly figured out why my computer used to freeze before, or more precisely the video card. I decided to play NWN2, and to run it you need Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, so I installed it... In the end, after a reboot the picture on the monitor froze almost immediately, and the same thing happened the next few times too. There weren't many suspects, two to be exact - Microsoft .NET Framework and Daemon Tools 4.08. DT didn't raise much suspicion, so I removed the Framework, and now everything works fine. But I'd had all of this installed before too, except for KAV6. So it turns out there's some kind of conflict between the programs, but why does everything freeze with the antivirus turned off, or does turning it off not play a big role, or is the problem already with the video card? I'm confused, I really need to get to the bottom of this.

Spent all of last evening trying to figure out what was wrong with my system. After booting up, at some point (anywhere from 1 to 30 minutes later) the mouse would stop working and then the keyboard, and then the picture would freeze too. Never did figure out what the deal was, but it looks like one of the drivers got messed up. Had to reinstall Windows and format the C drive so I could install onto a clean volume. Good thing I copied the browser's personal files, otherwise I'd have spent ages installing and setting up Firefox, but I didn't bother copying the cache, so now I have to load all the images from the internet all over again. All in all, in two hours I installed Windows, the drivers, and the main programs I need for work, and now everything's running fine, but I still want to find out the cause of the trouble so I can avoid it in the future — and, well, I'm curious.

Also figured out the other day that there's no point in changing yourself abruptly. Nothing good comes from forcing yourself, and if you do change, then it should be gradually. I am what I am, and when I look back at how I've lived up to now, I don't really regret anything, though sometimes I think completely differently, but that's not the mood right now and these last few days I've been in exactly this frame of mind. This world is too cruel to be too sincere or open in it; of course you can be a hypocrite and lie, but not everyone finds that pleasant. The constant hypocrisy is irritating, and what's even more irritating is that you can't survive without it. IMHO, it's better to keep your true thoughts and emotions to yourself if they go against the majority or would harm you or those you don't wish harm. You can only open up fully to someone very close, but finding such a person is next to impossible. In the end all that's left is things left unspoken; lying and being a hypocrite are impossible to avoid these days, but you can try to do it only in extreme cases, and the rest of the time it's better to stay quiet or tell the truth — but you can't change yourself abruptly.

I think. It really wasn't for nothing that I chose such a nickname and virtual appearance for myself — a white lion. Although, back when I was first creating it, I didn't think about it like that; maybe something was there in the subconscious. After all, white lions in theory can't live normally in the wild — they can't hunt properly, can't tolerate sunlight, and are doomed to solitude, since  the rest of their wild kin won't accept such an individual. A lion like that can't be strong because it can't feed itself properly and be out in the sun, so it won't be able to take over a pride. And so it turns out a lion like that can only survive if it behaves smarter than most of its kin, well, or if it lives in a zoo. Although, in that well-known fanfic based on TLK the white lion survived just fine, but he was still a recluse.