Vista

A few days ago I have installed Vista for the first time in my life :)
That can look a bit strange for people from other countries, but here in Kyrgyzstan that's pretty much OK, as we encounter Vista on notebooks mostly - and it is usually pre-installed.

However, this time it was a fully licensed copy ov MS Vista - 5 CDs in a pack with an MS "licensed" sticker.
To tell you the truth, that was the first time in my entire life that I have installed the fully-licensed software ;)

So, what can I tell about Vista installation?
First of all, it was an "upgrade" of Windows XP to Windows Vista.
Second - it took A LOT of time to complete.
Third - the installer got every single bit of information from XP and transferred it all to Vista - from the desktop background to programs installed. THe only program that could not be migrated was Nero 7. Symantec Antivirus was transferred, but Vista refused to work with it - but that's minor.
Well, when I saw the result - it became obvious that such a process CAN take a lot of time, if you ask me :)

So, after a few hours of sittting and yawning - Voila! The computer is up and running with a new Windows, with all the old preferences you'd like to keep.
And I was even able to download all the official updates from Microsoft, without fearing that they will uncover the piracy ;)

As I always said to my clients - you'd better spend some money and buy licensed stuff.
Now I will tell them - guys, pretty please, go out and spend as much money as you can, but get me all the licensed stuff you can! :)

PS The only thing that brought me a little bit of distress was that MS Office 2007 haven't installed the MS Outlook by default. I wonder whether the Outlook is a stand-alone product now, or was it just a misconfiguration?

Yet another blog update :)

Alas, it seems like I'm not much into blogging anyway :)

No matter how I tell myself everytime that I'm gonna update my blog on a regular basis, that simply doesn't work at all.

Perhaps the reason is - I started this blog just to refine my writing skills in English, as I don't like the very idea of blogging too much ;)

You see, my perspective is that someone's thoughts should stay with the person as long as possible, prefferably until these ideas embody in the reality. That's about personal philosophy and a point of view.

I believe we create reality with our thoughts, and the people around us do that, too. So, if your idea is to be taken by someone around you negatively, or is likely to get people jealous, or in some other way call the negative emotions upon itself - you'd better keep it inside, so that you are the one and only builder of this part of reality covered by your idea.

So, returning to the purpose of this blog - I think the goal is already reached. No more need in this blog, right? ;)

Well, I'll think about it, and perhaps this blog will get some new purpose. :)

About that damn maniac

A lot of time have passed since that night partol. That was fun, and that was scary at the same time.

To tell things short, we were riding a Black Boomer (kekeke) with hammers, clubs and ice-axes all night long, visiting every single yard and every single dark spot, ready to help people in case they will be attacked, to see them get to their doors unhurt, and to possibly catch that damn butcher.

To sum things up, that wasn't very efficient, as people tended to be afraid of us more that of the possibility to meet maniac. We were even stopped by a speznas patrol - rude guys in ski masks with AKSUs. It was a bit hard to explain we wero from volunteer patrol, though in the end they said their thanks and we went off.

However, taking into consideration that we only met militia two times during the whole night - seems like the neighborhood wasn't safe at all, thus our patrol was not a waste of time.

By the way, when some time have passed, everyone here agreed that the 'maniac' thing was just a political move to distract the attention from our beloved mr. President's affairs.
Yeah, slicing a few people to death is a nice way to gain political advantag these days.

Some random stuff

Havent' been here for long. Seems like a lot of things have changed since my last update.

When I have just entered blogspot to add some stuff, it offered me to move to google blogger. Seems like Google took over the blogspot?

After a minute of googling it became obvious that Blogger was finally bought off by another internet startup (a bit more lucky startup, I must add ;) - Google.

And it seems like Google added some value here, too. The most interesting thing is - everything is in Russian here! I wonder how many languages do they support now?

Anyway, Google is growing stronger. And imo that's good, as they tend to make things work in a nice and convinient way. So - my congratulations to both Google and Blogspot.

.. Actually, initialy I didn't want to write anything about that online monster ;)
I just came here to state the now-obvious fact that I'm unable to carry on adding lots of carefully refined thoughts as small "articles". Thus, I am asking myself whether it will be ok to switch to another style of blogging.

Yeah, I'm talking about entering my blog at least once a day, writing everything comes to my head along the way.

So, in order to save my time and effort, I won't be thinking about it anymore, and will just apply this change.
Let's see what it will ook like :)

Maniac

A knife maniac is acting in our neighbourhood.
7 victims in 5 days, 4 of which are already dead.
Our guys from patrols were on duty tonight.
Tomorrow I will go in patrol, too.
Hope we will at least prevent further murders.

Some random stuff

On internet
Damn, the business here is still in childish state.
Especially when it comes to customer service, no matter how much money was invested and how high-tech services are provided.

That stupid Transline (one of our local home-net providers) have bought out the smaller one, Megaline.

I used to praise Megaline when I was connected to them until last year. For the year and a half they were doing their work quite well. Not flawless, but well.
In the end I have become very loyal to them, and have recommended Megaline to a lot of my friends here.

Now, as I moved to a new flat (once again) and had to decide how should I connect to the internet, Megaline option popped out right away. I did know they were bought out, however I still tended to praise them.

To make long story short, I have lost time, money, and faith in Megaline. All in 3 days.

Just imagine - the image of the company have been built for more than 1.5 years. And was completely ruined in no more than 3 days. Such things really make think about consequences of your every single business decision, don't they?

On beer
I have just bought several bottles of Arpa.
A long time ago I thought it was the best beer down here - relatively cheap, while pretty fine.
As time went by, and my cashflow increased, I tended to think of it as of something barely more worthy than a dog's piss. Awful taste, you know.
Today I have bought the yesterday 'release' of Arpa. Well, it appeades to be fine, much to my delight. It seems like this beer worths bying for no more than 3-4 days from manufacturing date.

On books
I have just finished Peter Benchley's "Jaws".
To tell you the truth, I would never read this book if I had any choice. The book desighn is awful, like if publisher is trying to sell crap. You know, all these selling tricks like 'intruiging' quotes and stuff.
The book, though, is good. Reminded me of Stethen King's best novells. Many details, while really interesting story line. Never thought it would be that good, provided the book design.

That, again, makes me think about over-usage of selling tricks and persistence.

On politics
They are threatening again to storm the White House and make President leave.
However, nobody cares as much as they did last year. Our president is really bad, though everybody doubt the country's economy can handle another 'revolution'.
It is obvious police and army will use weapons in case of open conflinct, and the whole majority of population will support them. Perhaps even with force.
So, it is nothing but really stupid, while funny, theatre. Nobody fears, as far I can tell.

Freelancing

Greetings to all those who was long waiting for me to post something.
..well, the others are welcome, too. :)

I was in transition for about a month. My IT consulting business seems to be working fine, getting bigger very slowly, with little to no effort from myself. It doesn't bring much money, though, so I sat down and started to think of another ways to earn some bad-needed cash ^_^

About two weeks ago I decided to try freelancing once again.
I tried it about 1.5 years ago, and was scared off by those damn cheap-as-hell Indians. And my business model was different, actually.
I was hoping (stoopid, stoopid!) to arrange several projects and pass them to programmers I know. I still have an .xsl sheet with about 30 programmers willing to freelance from time to time. So, I find a project, talk over the matters with the buyer, pass the project to actual developer, and get the difference between arranged cost and the developer cost. Great idea, huh?

In reality, that didn't work at all.
Developers like to get freelance jobs, but only if you can assure them the job is yours. And only if they don't know it's offshore freelance. If they do - they charge two times more with no questions asked.
Buyers like to be sure their project is in good hands and it will meet their needs in both time and quality.

And I am in between, trying to assure the buyer his project will be delivered on time (how the hell can I know? I'm not developing it, and the person I've found is not working on ME), and trying to assure the developer that the project is already ours. While often having little to know experience in whatever requirements the project has. For example, I'm not a web developer, and only know basics of PHP. Yet, there are quite a lot of PHP-related projects out there in the web.

Basically - I'm trying to tell both sides that everything is fine, while I myself am not very sure of it. And when I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing - I'm performing awfully bad.

Yes, and those damn Indians.
If they were not in this world - well, I suppose I could make this model work. But they just pop out everywhere, offering twice as less as you do, with those supid offer templates like "our blahblah company is a PIONEER in whatever you need, our blahblah great coders can do this whatever project in no time we suffer to meet your needs blahblahblah and blahblahblah". Damn them. >:-E

So, it didn't work for me that time. Why did I think it would now?
Well, to tell you the truth, I didn't think at all. I just sat at my computer, registered at 3 or 4 freelance sites, uploaded my complete profile with my contacts, areas of experience, and resume. The next day I started to browse those sites for the projects, and sometimes placed a bid here and there. This time - only if I was completely sure I can pull the project off all by myself.

How did I scare off those pesky Indians, you may ask?
Well, I didn't. They are not too easy to get rid of.
But, as it seems, they are not really a problem. Their main weakness, as it often happens, lies in their main strengh.

They spam.

Every single freelance project has at least one Indian spammer bidding on it. Especially if it's some PHP or site clone or something web-related.
The bids are standart, based on template, and even if there's something like "we have studied your project carefully and we assure you of our blahblahblah-you-name-it" - I started to smile every time I see such shitty template. Sometimes I even laughed on their template pearls, waking my wife in a middle of the night. Stoopid, stoopid Indians. :D

Why did I smile, you can ask? Why the hell did I laugh?
Kekeke..
I don't know, it was just damn funny to see something like:
Buyer: "we need a person in Delhi to do some-desktop-stuff"
Bidder: "our company is an expert in web development. we made 1000 sites last week for buyers form 100 countries. blahblahblah"

And finally, after a night and a day of smiling and laughing, I came out with a solution.
I don't have to spam every single project I meet which I think I can accomplish.
I should better look carefully whether the project is understandable, whether it's lying in my sphere of competence, and whether I have a similar project experience.
Then I make a bid, specifying all these sections in it, so that the buyer can see I'm serious about the project, that I have really studied it, and that I am a person that can and will solve his problem.

Perhaps my business experience have helped to look at things from the buyer's perspective, but this way worked fine.

In just two days I was awarded by my first project, to fix some functionality of a program named ResxEditor. It is an interesting small application with very little code, but extremely useful to its users, as I have found.
Well, I made everything I had to, AND added some additional work to make the code look like it was initially written by me, for, say, a friend of mine.

The buyer, Joannes Vermorel (hi Joannes, if you're reading this!), was impressed by my work, and offered me a stable part-time freelane work in his project, Lokad. That's some really interesting project, however I'd better not rattle about it too much, as it is not launched yet. Not that I already know any "top secrets", but the loyalty is loyalty, hehe.

And, by the way, there's not only single projects on these sites. From time to time I ran into full- or part-time jobs, with requirements meeting my skills, and payment varying from 10 to 60 bucks per hour. Some buyers require developer to come and live at their place, and the others are suited with online workers. All in all, with some time, effort and quality invested, I'm positive I'd be able to find a full-time online job for, say, 2K to 4K bucks per month.

Along with that, I have got a project on some damn-stupid-MSSQL-transaction-log-reading, and though I didn't like the project from the get-go, I have accepted it to make a positive feedback for my account.
Nothing really interesting here, so let's move on to Lokad, of which I have just sweared I won't rattle anymore. ;)

Anyway.

Joannes offered me $8 per hour, with approximately 10+ work hour per week, or 2+ hours per day, if you're not listing weekends. When I have calculated the financial outcome, it was clear that 16 bucks per day is not much (now I really hope you're reading this, Joannes ;)), and i'm not willing to work 8-hours day anymore. So, if I want to raise some solid bucks online, these are not the terms I'm looking for.

From another perspective, this offer gives me several bright opportunities:
1) As I don't have to spend much time on it - I can continue to either freelance, or look for a nice-payed full-time online job, or both
2) As I don't have to spend much time on it - I can finally start to implement my software-selling site which I was thinking of for the last two years
3) The technology used in this project is really amazing, and I'm going to grow big in terms of both software development AND management. Especially - online software development management. :P
4) There was something else I don't remember. Perhaps it was Joannes being such a nice person?
Ah, I dunno, it's too hard to remember everything when it's 5 am, when you have just finished to refactor that damn program you were looking at for the whole last year, and when you are going to get some dead-sleep.

Ouch, that last sentence made me finally understand it's REALLY time to go get some sleep, and even my beloved blog is not going to stop me from that.

Good night, everybody!
See you soon.. er.. sometimes. :P

I'm expanding :)

Ah, at last! :)

My wife has born a child. Name's Mary.
People say she's big - about 4.2 kg in weight, 55 cm in.. length %)
But i still think she's small and fragile. Damn, when they told be to hold her for a minute - i thought I would break her. Didn't know what to do with that small human being at all.

Actually, I haven't understood it all yet. They say it's normal for daddies to accept their babies in about half a year, so I think I'll wait until she will look at me and smile, recognising :)

Daddy.. yep, that's me now :)