On my way to the office I witnessed a hilarious scene – a russian girl dressed in a sexy suite walks by the street, one of her hands is casted in plaster, nevertheless the manicure on her injured hand looks so good, and… OMG!!! her plaster cast is decorated with bows! )))))))))
Hey everybody! I’d read the similar story on a Russian programmers web-forum before, but only today I’ve found a good illustration for it. So enjoy!
So, finally I’m seating in my office, trying to do something smart and creative after all that shit I was occupied with on Monday and Tuesday (I mean there was a real flood in my office – the tube which goes through the room there all our servers are situated was cracked and water ran down to the servers!! Fortunately there isn’t such a big damage for our infrastructure except a processor’s fan which was collapsed by the
circuiting). That two weeks before our domestic apocalypse were quite calm in office: nothing big, no new projects except that one I had to start …this Monday lol!!!
Anyway I’ve celebrated my 25th birthday first with my colleagues, my parents and with some of my friends. There are also many little funny details or happiness in my life for this two weeks, but I guess it’s much more interesting to write about my European adventures…
I’ll try to continue since that moment I finished my last post, just after check-in… So, the boarding was the big surprise for me as my ticket definitely said that Aeroflot is our air company, but we were boarded on CSA plane… well, that’s great! The CSA’s services are known to be as good as Lufthansa’s ones are. We were met by extremely friendly Czech crew and had a save flight to Prague. All passport/customs control procedures were quite standard and the only thing that impress me at the airport was airport itself. It looks very similar as my favorite Pearson international in Toronto, so lovely, with big open spaces, huge glass walls and the glass roof. I’m not sure, but I guess Israeli architect who designed Pearson also worked in Prague 
The Citibank ads everywhere said me exchange problems will not annoy me in Prague. Great job btw!
The hotel. We lived in the very nice 3* hotel, called Merlin. The hotel was settled mostly by American teenagers and it was its great advantage – no drank/noisy Russians or Germans. The hotel have a free wireless internet access point (that is extremely important for me, I even could call Mike, my dad and chat with Marina and some other folks) and friendly and helpful staff… ha, it was a funny episode when one girl from reception advised me to join any englishspeaking group on Staramestska square if I would be fed up with my group.
Prague. Actually I’m not going to write how beautiful is it or to describe all that fabulous places I visited, but I want remember some small episodes. So, the first one it’s a myth that Czech people live and work in Prague – the majority of salespersons, waitress, drivers, etc. are either Slovak or Ukrainian\Vietnamese\Arabian immigrants. Obviously Czech people exist, but inhabit only in Hrad (Czech government buildings area). ))
The other myth says that natives don’t like Russians, well it’s a nonsense …but only partly. The biggest part of Russians think that everyone in Europe should praise them because they saved Europe from Nazism, but they tend to forget about the year 1968 and other adventures of Red Army during next 50 years… So, if you want peace don’t recall that historical issues and don’t try to prove that Russians are the greatest and most peaceful nation in the world. The second and most important tip is to be friendly, just smile (not with VVP like smile ), try to speak Czech – people always like if you show respect to their language and culture. And finally if you’re looking for WC in Prague, you should know that it isn’t free, usually it costs 10-20 Kz (around $1), the two free WC in Prague-1 which I know are in Starbucks on Staromestska and Narodna (near Vaclavski namesti). There are also a good cheep buffet on Vaclavski namesti (unfortunately I don’t remember the name, but it has a dark green signboard).
Vaclavski namesti is one of my favorite places in Prague, it isn’t far from all sightseeing places and here you can find all you need: cheep food and drinks, WC, WiFi, excursion office, jezdenki (tickets)… We even found Vladimir Panosovsky near there )).
Prague. Jezdenki. Be careful when you buy them, here you may save your money or be in trouble. There are different types of ticket which are valid for different period of time. I used to buy 20 min/5 transfers ticket for 18Kz if it takes more than 20 minutes to reach your destination you need to buy more expansive 40min ticket. The nice place to buy it is the subway station on Vaclavski namesti, guys there looks like Dagestanians so it isn’t problem to buy ticket even if you don’t speak English. And the last tip if you’ll travel in June you need go to Charles Bridge not from Staramestska but, by most beautiful Parzhska street or through Jewish city and you may smell stunning Prague’s linden-trees while they blow.
Austria. Vienna. What can I write about Vienna? It’s absolutely magnificent place, wide streets surrounded by thousands of trees and blowing bushes, seems very powerful (Gabsburg’s capital you see!), it also seems very similar to St. Petersburg (Peter addicts I know you understand me!). Also I was so glad to listen “Deutsche sprach” around, yeah my roots… The other cute place I’ve visited is Vienna fair – I was full with sausages, famous Vienna strudel and so tasty Austrian apple juice and punch. The only trouble was – we hadn’t enough time to explore the city and its places of interest. I was trying to find any gift for Masha which is connected with famous lippizian horses, but unfortunately there were no show that day 
Well, I think it’s enough for today, I wanna continue my report later as I still have Germany to describe, but I can’t promise…
It is recommended you read forward only if you ever at least attempted to program in Java.
* Chuck Norris serializes objects straight into human skulls.
* Chuck Norris doesn’t deploy web applications, he roundhouse kicks them into the server.
* Chuck Norris always uses his own design patterns, and his favorite is the Roundhouse Kick.
* Chuck Norris could use anything in java.util.* to kill you, including the javadocs.
* Chuck Norris can hit you so hard your web app will turn into a swing application, and a very bad swing application containing lots of icons of human skulls.
* Chuck Norris demonstrated the meaning of Float.POSITIVE_INFINITY by counting to it, twice.
* A synchronize doesn’t protect against Chuck Norris, if he wants the object, he takes it.
* Chuck Norris doesn’t use javac, he codes java by using a binary editor on the class files.
* Chuck Norris’ java code never needs to be optimized. His code is so fast that it broke the speed of light during a test run in Sun’s labs killing 37 people.
* When someone attempts to use one of Chuck Norris’ deprecated methods, they automatically get a roundhouse kick to the face at compile time.
* The java.lang package originally contained a ChuckNorris class, but it punched its way out the package during a design review and roundhouse kicked Bill Joy in the face.
* Chuck Norris never has a bug in his code, EVER!
* Chuck Norris doesn’t write code. He stares at a computer screen until he gets the progam he wants.
* Code runs faster when Chuck Norris watches it.
* Chuck Norris’ binary edited classes ignore Java bytecode verifier.
* Chuck Norris methods doesn’t catch exceptions becuase no one has the guts to throw any at them.
* Chuck Norris will cast a value to any type just by staring at it.
* If you get a ChuckNorrisException you’ll probably die.
* Chuck Norris is the only one who can use goto and const in Java.
* Chuck Norris can compile Java code in .NET Framework, obviously just by staring at it.
* Chuck dont need to catch an Exception because Java is afraid of the “flying tornado kick” at the moment it throws
* Chuck Norris’s code can roundhouse kick all other Java Objects’ privates
* Java visibility levels are public, default, protected, private and “protected by Chuck Norris”, don’t try to access a field with this last modifier!!
* Chuck Norris eats JavaBeans and Roundhouse Kicks JavaServer Faces!
* Chuck Norris can divide by 0!
* Garbage collector only runs on Chuck Norris code to collect the bodies.
* Chuck Norris code uses agressive heap natively
* Every single line code of Chuck Norris runs in real time. Even in a multi threading application.
* When a CPU load a Chuck Norris class file, it doubles the speed.
* Chuck Norris can execute 64bit lenght instructions in a 32bit CPU.
* Chuck Norris implements “Indestructible”. All the other creatures implements “Killable”.
* Chuck Norris only program Java web applications to get a .WAR in the end.
* Chuck Norris once roundhouse kicked a Java class very hard. The result is known as a inner class.
* Chuck Norris can do multiple inheritance in Java.
* JVM never throws exceptions to Chuck Norris, not anymore. 753 killed Sun engineers is enough.
* Chuck Norris doesn’t need unit tests because his code always work. ALWAYS.
* Chuck Norris extends God.
* Chuck Norris workstation has so memory and it’s so powerful that he could run all java applications in the world and get 2% of resources usage.
* Chuck Norris codes generics since 1.3.
* Chuck Norris’ classes can’t be decompiled… don’t bother trying.
These “chewing” landscapes are made by British photographer Carl Warner. My Heaven should looks like this
Well, now we have such a strange season in Samara – it’s 15C bellow zero, but there are practically no snow on the streets… Basically you can’t find many evidences or signs of upcoming Holidays (a few garlands and x-mas trees in foreign-owned firms doesn’t count), except so called “New Year corporative parties”, so the only difference between “New Year party” and ordinary party is that name – “New Year” …and may be that drunk guy with extremely strange sense of humor called Dedushka Moroz ) I don’t want to say that they do absolutely nothing about decorating the streets, they place quite nice nylon stars on the pillars, but in comparison with western countries it’s too little.
Ok, I understand that majority in Russia don’t want to celebrate “western” Christmas, but why the hell they think that creating festive mood means to buy and decorate a tree a few hours before New Year and to dump it next morning?! The the pleasure should be prolonged )
Anyway, if they don’t want to cheer us up, we will do it ourself ))))
That funny X-mas/Chanukah movie I’ve found this morning:))))
It gives as much fun as possible! Really amusing!
