Back to blogging and fighting spam

Yes, I'm back to blogging today. Started with spam fighting. Got tired early with hundreds of spam comments still there. Why aren't there any way to mark all spam comments and delete them with one click instead of clicking and confirming deletion of every message one by one? Does not anyone else face the same issue with spam? I think Google should implement it.


It's been more than a year since my last post. Lots changed in my life since then. I am now a happy father of two beautiful children - a daughter and a son. I have changed my job moving to Microsoft Russia We've moved to a new apartment.

This year have been pretty hard - I not only quit blogging, I did not have time to support my hobby project Online measurements convertion. Let's see what's going to be next. Hope there will be some spare time back. :)

Saratov and Volga river

It's been a long time since the last post -- over 3 moths. I almost quit, but now I'm trying to return to blogging.

Last week I was on a business trip to Saratov. It is a town on Volga river. We had a chance not only to see Volga, but also to swim there, fish there, spend a day on one of the many beautiful islands scattered all over the river. It is amazing to know that the width of Volga there is over 16 kilometers (which is equal to about 10 miles as suggest my online converter).

The places there are very beautiful. We traveled to Saratov by car (took two days with overnight stay in Ufa). The road was very crowded so sometimes we could not go faster then 35-40 km/h (20-25 mph). The total distance we traveled from Yekaterinburg to Saratov was about 1700 kilometers (about 1050 miles).

Explaining what 3G is

Today I had to explain in written what was 3G and how it was different with 2G. The new interest in mobile network generations is due to the fact the 3 big Russian GSM operators finally got their 3G licenses. They are going to build the networks and commercially launch them in 2008.

Most people in Russia who ever heard about 3G think that 3G is a development of GSM. They aren't aware of the fact that 3G is a generation that include various standards, namely both UMTS (the one GSM operators are going to launch in Russia) and CDMA 1xEVDO that we've already launched with Sky Link.

I think the new interest of journalists in 3G is a good way for us to promote the fact that 3G is already in Russia and anyone can try it with our company.

The text of my explanations (in Russian) is available on mir66.ru.

New Phone

I've changed my old Ubiquam U-300 mobile phone to the brand new U-520. The new phone looks pretty good, but I'll need time to get used to it.

The new phone is pretty slim and light, has MP3 player, video player, 2mpx camera, bluetooth. But what's the most important, it's dual mode -- can work either in CDMA-450 or in GSM networks.

The phone has a few problems, for example you can't switch to Cyrillic in the browser, there's no pc-sync utility yet. I hope they'll fix these in the next software update.

In any case so far I'm happy with the new phone.

Trip to Tyumen

Last weekend we traveled to Tyumen. There are hot natural springs that are said to be funny to visit in winter. It was funny indeed. The weather was not very cold, but it was still pretty exciting to go outside dressed only in swimming shorts. Sitting in a small pool of hot water that was steaming and watching the snow outside was pretty cool.

It took us over 4 hours to drive to Tyumen from Yekaterinburg. The road was pretty good and not very crowded. We enjoyed the trip very much.

Listed in Live Search again

In December 2006 our units conversion site was banned and unlisted from Microsoft Live Search (also known as MSN). The reason for being unlisted remained unclear for me. Our site simply silently disappeared from all MSN search results as if there were no such site at all. I tried to contact Microsoft to clarify the issue. Unfortunately I did not get any reply.

That was when I wrote about this problem in my blog. I put a link to my blog from www.convert-me.com and got quite a lot of feedback. I was very much impressed by the support I received. People contacted Microsoft and asked to re-include the site to the index. There was no reply however, so I thought it would not give any results.

However, the miracle happened. Something silently clicked again inside Microsoft and yesterday convert-me.com started to re-appear in their search results. At the time of this writing there are only about 120 pages of our site indexed, but I hope the number of indexed pages is going to increase.

I am sure this re-inclusion would not be possible without help and support of our visitors. I very much appreciate their help!

The winter goes to its end, ice town is being destroyed

This winter was very strange. At first it could not start, the temperature kept unusually high in December and January. They built the ice town in the center of Yekaterinburg as always, and tried very hard to stop it from melting down. They decided to remove the ice town by the end of February. But here came the real winter with all the colds and its temperature of -25C. On the picture you can see the ice town being destroyed away in a real cold weather.