Started twittering for convert-me.com

Twitter seems best to post unit conversion news. So I created convert-me.com twitter account. Let's see if I'm able to post there regularly.

A year (almost) later

One more year passed. Having children indeed keeps one too busy for regular blogging. I'm not going to give any more promises and not going to say I'm back here. Just being in a mood to write a short post.

Ann and me have recently upgraded our conversion forum to the new version. Now it looks better indeed and has better tools to fight spam. Let's see how this change affects the life of the site.

We've also added a couple of new cooking ingredients to our cooking conversion page. Cooking conversion slowly gained its popularity and now is among the most visited conversions. I believe this is mainly because it's pretty unique and we were the first to implement it.

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.