My ride to soccer game by public transport It should not have been something unusual yesterday except the extremely snowy weather and new people who I was supposed to play soccer (football) with. I left home at around 12pm and when I was walking to my car I saw two cars slipping and trying to get out of this wet snow. When I approached my car I realized that I might have some troubles leaving my parking spot. While cleaning the snow off the car I’ve seen another car slipping on the part of the road that I was supposed to ride and the same time there was a bus driving by the bus stop. Two those facts were reason enough for me not to go by car and I rushed to the station to catch the bus. My little journey was quite interesting. In the photo #1 you can see how interior of ordinary bus in Kaluga looks like and how a man who works in a net grocery store likes to wear the same color [red] as the store decorates most part of its facade and signboards inside the store. Maybe it was just a coincidence. In the photo #2 you can see my 100rub bill change that I got after paying for the ride. I absolutely don’t like to carry that many coins because it's kind of weighty, you can buy almost nothing using it and I prefer to pay with credit card. By the way, one way ride (no matter how long the distance is within the route) costs 16 rubbles or $0.27 or €0.25 in Kaluga. In the photo #3 there's another passenger who was in the same bus with me when I drove back home. It’s behavior didn’t seem exemplary to me but at least it didn’t leave it’s parents’ glove while it was looking at everybody as at a mouse or something suitable to eat. I’m wondering whether that impudent owl paid for it’s ride or not? Choosing public transportation that day was certainly a right decision because when I got back home cars were still slipping in the area around the building where I live. However this move was just a matter of risk reduction and it hasn't changed my mostly negative towards the quality of our public transportation. If our busses were more comfortable and could accept credit cards, I would probably use them more often, but so far I’m choosing a car.

Spain 2015: PortAventura amusement park Hi everyone! In this post I'm going to write about an amusement park that we've visited in Spain. The park’s name is PortAventura. It is located in Salou town and it’s the largest amusement park in Spain. I’ve told some people that it’s the Europe’s largest amusement park, but before writing this post I checked it and found that it’s actual rank is 6. I don’t remember where that false fact came from in my mind and I bring my apologize to anyone who’s been misinformed by me. Anyway it’s amazing place. In my view it has very high quality-price ratio and as far as I remember we payed 50euro per person for two days in a row which is also pretty affordable price. Park’s area is divided into several zones: Mediterranean, China, Polynesia, Far West etc. As far as the area is pretty large, you can get from place to place by local mini-train and even by boat. First area is Mediterranean where is located maybe the most shocking roller coaster in the park: "Furius Baco”. It looks not too long, not too high and not too awesome comparing to others you can see almost from any place in the park. We decided to try it first just to begin with something not extraordinary. After rode this ride we realized a thing we couldn’t estimate standing at the land — the speed. It accelerates up to 135 km/h just in 3.5 seconds! We were completely scared after our fist ride. At the end of the second day in PortAventura, after we tried every even the most dangerous roller coaster in the park we decided to check if we have been so scared on "Furius Baco" just because it was the first ride we tried. The answer is NO, it’s really awesome ride. The acceleration and speed is extremely high there, so I can assure you that the first ride in PortAventura is worth to ride! Of course there are a lot of other roller coasters (including the highest one “Shambhala”), attractions and shows and all they are done very well. In conclusion I can strongly recommend everyone to visit PortAventura if you’ll be somewhere near it.

Spain 2015: first impression Hi everyone! Here is the second post about the trip to Spain in this year. I’m going to share some things we noticed during the first days after arrival. We arrived to the only Barcelona airport “El Prat”. We landed in time and after quite quick passport control we already waiting for our baggage. The first thing surprised me was that there are almost no free Wi-fi in the airport. I say ‘almost’ because when your gadget finds wi-fi network, it says that you can use wi-fi for free for 30 minutes [only]. But in fact I think that about half of passengers from our plane couldn’t use even these free 30 minutes because the connection did not establish for some reason. Even though we arrived in Barcelona we cannot estimate the charm of this city, so the fist impression was made by Salou town where our hotel was located. Salou seemed us a typical resort town. There are almost no any historical places of interest. The most popular place is a long avenue along the seashore. After checking into a hotel we went out to find a place to have a dinner. Note: while planning our trip we intentionally didn’t consider dinner in a hotel restaurant (HB board basis) because we supposed to enjoy local cafes, restaurants and to plan our day with no worries about skipping the dinner time in the hotel restaurant. The first impression regarding local restaurants and cafes in Salou was really bad. Almost every restaurant has a special person who is persuading you to come into their restaurant. They are trying too hard in inviting you. Anyway this fact was not the worst part of the situation. The most unpleasant were that quality-price ratio wasn’t as high as it might be expected. We dislike average quality of food and services in the local restaurants: almost every meal included fries and you couldn't choose another side dish at the same price or just not to pay for this part of a meal; tableware might be dirty or broken etc. After all food seemed us not enough delicious although we were in some of the best rating restaurants on tripadvisor. Standard attributes of the rest on the beach were fine: Spanish people were very welcoming; seashore was enough clean; temperature of the sea was comfortable. After looking through many excursion tours we made sure that there are lots of places of interest near to Salou. This fact could significantly reduce overall influence of minor issues that might happened during the trip.

Spain 2015: introduction Hello everyone! This year I and my girlfriend decided to visit another european country. We have already been to Greece and the most suitable option for us seemed Spain (which in fact finally has been chosen). I'm going to try to describe here the most notable things regarding this amazing trip in series of posts. In this introductory post let's start with the following question: "Why exactly Spain has been finally chosen?" There were several key requirements that our trip had to meet. 1. It must be a European country (as I noticed before) where we have never been to before. 2. It must be a place located next to the sea and the weather should be enough warm for the beginning of September to rest on the beach. 3. We also must have an opportunity to visit cultural sights and that places should be located on the short distance from our location. Roughly it should be maximum 24 hours period for travelling to 1 place of interest (including transfer). We planned to spend about 50% of days on visiting different sights. 4. The duration of the trip must be between 10 and 14 days in a row. 5. Of course cost of the trip must fit our budget limits and departure/arrival dates must be within our vacation dates. After some research we preliminary settled on Italy and Spain. We didn't consider south of France because it might be more expensive and maybe a bit colder weather. We also didn’t consider Portugal because of some difficulties in obtaining a visa. In choice between Spain and Italy the most weighty argument was that Spain seemed more suitable to combine two types of recreation: rest at the beach and visiting different places of interest. Looking ahead I should say It was great trip, we really loved this trip and i’ll try to disclose the most interesting observations in further posts.

Our Cycling Weekend Do you like to ride a bike? We do love it! Previous years I and my girlfriend used to rent bikes. We rode mostly in a forest near our town. Not only because of we rent MTB bikes which supposed to be used for cross-country riding, but also for the reason that there are no bike roads here in Kaluga and it’s very unsafe to ride on a car road without some special skills and equipment. Finally we realized that we are really enjoy this pastime and we bought new bikes early this year. It was not the best time to buy a bike: prices have been significantly increased due to our falling ruble and we had to hurry up to buy good bikes from 2014 collection. Ultimately we found two good enough bikes which fitted our needs and budget and bought them. Last weekend a good weather eventually came to Kaluga and we tried our bikes first time! Despite the fact that the weather was sunny it was pretty cold (about 14 Celsius), but it couldn’t stop us and we rode two days running. We rode around our neighbourhood where we actually were never before and explored in details what we are surrounded with. We just enjoyed riding and first really warm and sunny days in this year. It was a great weekend and I can safely say that it was a right choice to buy the bikes.

Have you ever been to Crete? It was an amazing trip to the Crete island in the August 2013. Finally we arrived in the town of Rethymno and located in the center of the town in 10 minutes of walking from the central beach . The weather on Crete was pretty hot. Maybe it seems extremely hot when you look at the thermometer, but you actually don't that high temperature, especially on the beach. The main reason for this is lots of winds. The sea was pretty clean and there were not a lot of trash around the shoreline. I liked that there were not too much sea life and you could swim and don't think about big jellyfishes or other creatures. There were a lot of interesting places to visit as near to our location, for instance Fortezza fortress, as far from it, e.g. Santorini volcano island. There were many restaurants with affordable prices and delicious food at the same time in Rethymno, but I can't say the same regarding the prices on Santorini. Prices were very high there. Probably one of the most wonderful places we've ever visited is located in Greece, and it is the Santorini island. It’s absolutely unusual place from the landscape and architecture to story about a man who lives alone inside the volcanic islet. So if some day you will be near Santorini, visit it at least for one day and you’ll have a lot of unforgivable impressions. We also went to the capital of Crete Heraklion by bus. The buildings are higher there, the rhythm of the city is more dynamic. It was really hot there because of a lot of huge buildings. Due to these facts we didn’t feel relaxed in this city and we moved back to Rethymno earlier than we planned. In summary I want to say that we found Greeks very friendly and welcoming, so if you want to have a good rest in some warm and interesting place, Crete would be a nice choice.

Overtime at work: what do you think about it?

Hi everyone!

Do you work overtime and how often? Is it paid or not or what can you receive in exchange? Does your manager ask you to work extra hours to wrap up something or you do it on your own? Are there any law regulations in your country regarding work overtime?
It's interesting whether you’re manager and you ask someone to work overtime or if you’re an employee who works overtime for some reason.

What about me. I work overtime both on my own and by request. But my abiding point is to reduce overtime as much as possible. In project work it’s too complicated to prevent overtime at all but every hour you work overtime has to be compensated anyway.
Some managers tries too hard in persuasion their team to work overtime. It’s not a good way in management I think. Everyone has their own schedule and should be able to decline overtime working with no penalties. On the other hand if manager could make a really reliable and cohesive team it would be easy to ask them for overtime work if needed.

Feel free to speak if you have any thoughts regarding the overtime work.

Equipment for a Software Company If someone wants to run a business, this person certainly should own a good idea, be an optimistic, ambitious, goal-oriented etc. But except all of those general points people also should think about more specific topics. On of those topics is the equipment for the business. Of course every type of business needs a specific equipment and I cannot cover equipment for every business here. Moreover every particular business within a particular type may use different equipment. I’ll try to cover some equipment/services which are often used in software development companies. 1. The first thing is computers obviously. Computers can be roughly divided into two categories: workstations and servers. Note: of course someone can argue: "I can run a small software business without even any workstations (except of mine one) and without any servers in my own". — Sure you can, but it’s just not the case which is considered in this post. 1.1. Every workstation has to consist of the following components: base unit with a powerful inside components; two or more monitors; a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) and accessories like keyboard, mouse, headsets. Usually we need to buy some extra accessories just because they are more ‘close’ to us and tend to be broken/worn faster than other workstation components. 1.2. Servers. It actually depends on your needs. If you are going to develop and host a high-loaded applications which suppose to be used 24/7 you’ll need a powerful servers with a high-level of fault tolerance. On the other hands if you’re going to develop pretty simple web-sites you may need no servers at all. But if after all your company needs a server for some reason, you'll also need some specific server equipment and a server room where you will place the servers. 2. Internet services. We can’t imagine a company has no access to the word wide web. For sure every company of today has to choose internet provider and set up an internet connection. 3. You’ll need some internet equipment like switches and routers, some ethernet cable to build your local network and to expand the internet connection almost everywhere. 4. Software. In spite of you are the company that makes software you have to buy some tools which are the software on it’s own. From some Operation Systems to complicated developer tools. 4. Phone. I dont sure a software company really needs telephone switching equipment. But you may need a landline phone number from your local telecom provider.