Let's imagine, for a moment, that the late Soviet KGB was not simply a group of bureaucratic careerists, resembling characters from "Our Man in Havana." Instead, consider it as an omnipresent and possibly self proclaimed benevolent force that started working to counter the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union ( Read more... )

В конце 2000-ных, когда я на работе стал поддерживать крупные (от миллионов до десятков миллионов долларов) сделки, мне пришлось работать с людьми определенного типажа - корпоративными продажниками ( Read more... )

Now our family has three passports.

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I am playing with a nice piece of h/w I've just bought on ebay.

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I just read a Russian school's rating that is based on national school olympiad's results. According to the rating, the high school I graduated is #17. (School #239 in Spb is #11th, school #30 is not in top 20, school #40 in N.Novgorod also did not make it to top 20 ( Read more... )

In the previous post I've described how I was programming before I had an access to a PC. Of course, PC did not replace Speccy instantly, at least for me. I could use Speccy almost 24x7 (sometimes I skipped school if I wanted to), and my exposure to PC was very limited in the beginning ( Read more... )

My official CV starts with a first full time programming job I got in November 1999. My first task was to develop a patch for a back end of GCC 2.7 to make it generate code for a custom embedded board based on a derivative of m68k. My salary was $200net/mo, which was kind of cool at that time and place ( Read more... )

In sake of promoting piracy, I'll post a link to a well known web site. Reading their feed I noticed they uploaded a book I liked when I was 9. I was already programming in z80 assembly and knew s/w development will be my profession, but the fairy tale still added +100 to my motivation :)

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I was 6 yo, and looking forward to start studying in a school. In summer 1987, my parents and I went to visit relatives who lived by a sea. A Caspian sea. To a small and quite town called Sumgait. It was called by many "the most polluted beach in the Soviet Union" but my parents and I did not care. We went swimming daily, went to Baku for ( Read more... )