2013

The English language captures the weather in my hometown exactly!

The best teacher doesn’t shout and doesn’t reproach you for not knowing or for forgetting. He simply teaches.

Sometimes the world destroys you in order to build you anew.

Fog. Visibility of about two hundred meters. It rained all night. The power went out in the evening. Now that’s autumn!

Today the starry sky is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly beautiful! I can see the expanses of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

Happy Birthday, my dearest and most beloved @Valentyfire Now, like the wizards in Harry Potter, you can do magic without asking permission!

Hello, autumn…

Just a reminder, I’m in Ozinki. Here snakes crawl under my skirting boards. I’m already looking for the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets in the washbasin!

Now I’m listening to the audiobook of “Twilight”. I’ll be damned! By irony of fate, it was the one that ended up in my hands.

If there is something constant in our world, it is the arrangement of the stars in the Big Dipper. Though even that is not constant over the life of the Universe.

Everything is contained in the number Pi http://habrahabr.ru/post/190202/

It isn’t the mistakes themselves that stand out, but the attempts to hide them.

Don’t reproach people. Forgive them. Forgive them before they have done anything wrong. Their conscience will do the rest.

What a wonderful long rain! The window wide open: fresh air, wet leaves, night lights and their reflections.

It’s a pleasure to listen to a person who has everything neatly sorted. In his head, not in a warehouse.

Plug – a personal Dropbox made from an ordinary USB flash drive http://itc.ua/news/plug-personalnyiy-dropbox-iz-obyichnoy-fleshki/

#Dropbox has done what I dreamed of: #DatastoreAPI https://www.dropbox.com/developers/datastore

Waiting a long time for a reply? Imagine you had sent a pigeon with a letter. Think about how much longer it still has to fly. Forget about it.

Something conceived as a secret must remain a secret.

#TheHobbit, the mood on the additional shooting days through the eyes of Empire http://www.henneth-annun.ru/index.php/2013/07/empire-statya-o-pustoshi-smauga-na-russko/

And soon the player will learn to sense our mood and pick music to match http://apps4all.ru/news/devices/microsoft-datchik-nastroeniya.html

A competent review of #Windows 8.1 Preview http://itc.ua/articles/obzor-predvaritelnoy-versii-windows-8-1-knopka-pusk-nanosit-otvetnyiy-udar/

A curious continuation of the parallax idea in #iOS7 http://pinterest.com/pin/434104851552384279/

Haven’t you played #Limbo? A very special thing. The game isn’t new, but games like this don’t age… They just keep coming out again and again. It’s even coming to iOS soon.

Still, on a mental level this really is a very special day.

I felt like revisiting Soviet film classics. And only together with @Valentyfire

It seems this birthday will be remembered for being memorable for nothing. Which strangely matches my wish to spend it quietly and unnoticed…

#Windows 8.1 is already available to try: http://windows.microsoft.com/ru-ru/windows-8/preview I wonder whether the bug-fixing has paid off…

The world premiere of #TheHobbit #TheDesolationOfSmaug may take place in Moscow: http://www.henneth-annun.ru/index.php/2013/06/hobbit-2-vsemirnaya-premera-v-moskve/ Great news!

For those who have discovered freshly ground coffee: don’t chase expensive varieties. I’ve chosen #Jockey for myself, Italian roast.

Back when I didn’t know freshly ground coffee, I drank only #CarteNoire. The best coffee among instant ones…

If a long black cable crosses your path, lift your feet so as not to trip.

If a writhing black viper crosses your path, then you really need to be careful.

Suddenly I realized that the long painting on the wall depicts the very same landscape I see outside my window — the steppe, a lake and a smoking town on the horizon.

If a shaggy black cat crosses your path at a right angle, it means it is perpendicular to you. (A pun: “perpendicular” is used jokingly in Russian to mean “indifferent”, so it also reads as “the cat doesn’t care about you”.)

Fresh white bread with a crusty crust, sweet black tea brewed from large leaves, the steppe and the sunset sky in a quiet lake… The taste of life.

…a countless and ever-growing number of slaves performed all the work that free, hard-working citizens had done before. All this killed labor — the most powerful source of strength, morality and prosperity…

— Raffaello Giovagnoli, “Spartacus”, On the Decline of Rome

Another inspiring progress update for #OpenMW, the open-source #Morrowind engine https://openmw.org/2013/openmw-0-24-0-released/

For several mornings now I’ve been automatically waking up at dawn…

Reading “Spartacus” by Raffaello Giovagnoli. A novel about a slave uprising can give new plot ideas for an evolving game project.

For everyone worried about the cat’s fate: sensationally, by dinner it turned out to be alive.

Is the cat still alive — the one that at noon lies almost in the same spot where it lay in the morning, as if accidentally shifted by someone’s foot?

A clear day, a light breeze, birdsong, Russia’s Day, the halfway mark…

#Microsoft’s persistence with tiles now looks far more advantageous than the wavering of #Apple, which has strayed from its own course.

The release of a reasonably refined #iOS7 this autumn may bring back my interest in #Apple mobile solutions; for now, I’m happily rid of it.

The new #iOS interface is not bad at all. Only if your icons are no longer photorealistic, it is better not to show them against photographic backgrounds.

The look of #iOS called for a careful evolution. Jony got carried away, destroying the beloved visual language that others eagerly copied.

The angular, monochrome poster revolution of a century ago is repeating itself in the new design of operating systems.

The Kazakh cleaning lady reminded me a lot of the Chinese assassin from Johnny English 2

The WWDC conference (starts tomorrow) should finally show me whether it is worth joining the Apple ecosystem in the future.

Returning to Twitter, I’d like to report that for the next six months I’ll be, on official duty, in the town of Ozinki, near the Kazakh border.