Zero-efficiency day.

Hello, fellows.

I have been busy the whole day last Wednesday: helped production team to fix one problem in the morning; attended bunch of meetings afterwards, filling gaps between these meetings discussing with colleagues some work issues and ideas. I was at my desk about 40 minutes before my day could be considered as finished and was almost in despair – I wanted so much to achieve my personal record: “0 efficiency”! :D Nevertheless the day was saved by a phone call from another colleague asking me to troubleshoot yet another problem! So my personal feat is: was busy the whole day and did nothing! Of course, this was a bit artificial achievement and I actually had completed a lot of tasks but none that I was supposed to work at. This was a good example of some days, when you run in circles and it looks like just waste of time. E-mail is the worst: you leave it for one day and you have to spend another day cleaning your mailbox.
When I was working as Engineer in MS team, I used a lot of tools to do my work. Don’t event want to mention, because this list can be quite long. Nowadays I use Word (all the time), Visio (time to time) and MindManager (time to time as well). I suspect that I am more sci-fi writer than a “techie”. Not even a nerd :(

Yours faithfully,
Rustam.

Hello, fellows.

I am on VMWare course this week. I do like either to be on a business trip or on course, because I am able to satisfy any my gastronomical tastes without having impact on a family budget :) Training centre usually provides lunch, but this one, by some reasons, does not. Bizarre, I know. I was given a small booklet with the addresses of various sandwich shops and restaurants around. One Italian restaurant is just a few hundred yards away and decided to go there - didn't want to wander around. It was a right decision! I think it was the family restaurant with waiters, probably, from Italy or having some Italian origins. Service was great, food was... not delicious, but good enough for me to enjoy it. I always thought that there was no chance to eat well in London unless you prepared to pay well above average price, but that restaurant proved that I was wrong.

Yours sincerely,
Rustam.

A perfect break.

Hello, fellows.

My nephew has been visiting a lot of European cities since last year. It is very interesting – no doubts. Zhenya makes a lot of photos during these trips and it gives me a chance to see Europe as well, albeit I would not mind to see it by myself :) However, I thought that the perfect break for me would be a few days in mountains. Just me and calmness of the ancient mountains, ridges, peaks… covered with snow and ice… I do not want them covered with trees, by some reason. Only dull, murky colours of granite, snow and grey shadows. And no one around. The sun is also not welcomed. The more miserable weather is the better I would feel. May be I just need a break to do literally nothing… to read a book that I like, to amble uphill and downhill, listen to wind and when I come back I will keep this majestic quietness in soul for a long time…

Yours sincerely,
Rustam.

P.S. No English words to learn because my dictionary is full of words a teacher gave to Samir to learn for 11+ exam. These words are all about animals. I couldn’t use them even if I wanted :)

Simply new post.

Hello, fellows.

I was asked recently by my nephew why I had stopped blogging over here. I started feeling guilty about this long time ago. On one hand, I had completed my commitment to my former manager by passing ESOL exam this summer, on other hand, I also promised to blog almost every day and was fulfilling this requirement for just a few months. The main reason is that I blog regularly on my personal blog in Russian, it really takes a lot of time. The personal blog has more value for me because it is read by my non-English speaking friends, parents etc. The second reason is that I feel exhausted almost every day. I am busy at work, I have been studying a school curriculum for Year 2 and Year 5, preparing for 11+ exam. I often do not have even a tiniest leftover of energy to write a blog :) At last, I admit that I am not the smartest guy in the world, just another dumb old chap… I find it hard to come up with a topic that could be even slightly interested for you. However, I decided to to start writing over here once again because I still have some ardent readers :)
The best way to learn language is to use it more and more often. Despite my “computer” English is quite good (at least I want to believe in it), my spoken English suffers because of lack of rich vocabulary. So to overcome this, I am going to write new posts using the words I saw reading some books in English. I think I will remember them better if I use it straight away. This is an idea, let’s see how it will go.

Yours sincerely,
Rustam.

Lie, big lie and statistics.

Hello, fellows.

I have finished recently reading a very interesting book: “A history of Britain in the XX century”. The book contained a lot of stories about society, politics etc about the UK starting from the end of 19th century till the present days, but one fact really stroke me: a statistic about criminal offences. Not statistic itself, but how the criminal offences were counted. We all like to moan about how society was secure in the old days and a main argument to prove it is the statistic, about how many criminal offences used to happen in the past and now. However, each county used to pay for its local police forces. Or, in other words, county police forces used to rely on the money provided by the local councils. There was a dependency on how much councils had to provide based on a number of registered criminal offences, therefore these councils discouraged the police to file any minor offences, so only murders and robberies were getting into the statistic those years. By the way, London police was exception and was subsided by central government. Thus, when this practice in the counties was abandoned, the number of registered criminal offences started to climb up. And as a result we have a perception that life was more secure in “the old days”, but it is just a perception.

Yours sincerely,
Rustam.

If you are rich – what to do not to spoil children.

Hello, fellows.

It is, probably, not the most important thing for us, but sometimes I thought about what could be done not to spoil children leaving them too much money. Really, I was thinking about it more in theoretical aspect than something I needed to worry about :). Anyway, I was watching last Sunday a TV show “Top Gear” and one of the guest (I do not know him and can’t remember his name) was asked what he was going to do with all money he had. What he thought needed to be done about his children not being spoilt by all money they would possible inherit. And I reckon that guy came up with a brilliant idea: he was going to establish a fund and invest a big sum into it. The idea was to encourage the children to earn their own money by doubling the earnings from this fund. So if they earn £20,000 per year, the fund will pay them £40,000 and so on. However, if children chose a profession which is low paid, but is important for society (like nurse, for example), then their earnings will be tripled or even quadrupled. I think that guy had a point. So when I become very rich, I will not need to think hard about this problem :)

Yours sincerely,
Rustam.

Jokes from BBC Radio 2.

Hello, fellows.

I must be ashamed of not posting often enough. I have been writing/reading so many documents in English, that I just didn’t have any will to write something to my English blog. Even now I desperately want to go to bed, but decided I need to add at least on post to have a moral right to deny any accusation about being able to blog only once per month. So, here is my second post for July.
I have heard two jokes on BBC Radio2, which I really liked. The fist one was about marriage. As one of the listener commented about it: “Marriage is about “to give” and “to take”. So I “give” and she “takes””! Brilliant! :)
The second joke was a bit longer. The radio presenter was talking like telling a story: “Some time ago the God looked at the Earth and saw that only a small portion of people lived in the way he would approve. So the God decided to encourage these people, tell them a few kind words and he sent them an e-mail. Well, do you know what this e-mail said? No? Ah, you also didn’t receive this e-mail, did you?”. That was quite unexpected for me! Guilty of sinful life! :)
Right… I’d rather go to bed, because it will be a hard day tomorrow. As usual, just another Saturday.

Yours sincerely,
Rustam.

P.S I had posted it and noticed after, that it is actually my first post in July. Doesn’t matter, it just proves again that I am consistent :)