Rants, Россия, Riddles and Raves
See the world through 20 year old glasses

That last quiz made me want to play one of the US states

http://www.ironicsans.com/state22.html

It gives you 10 minutes instead of 5, to see how many states you can name. I was disappointed I wasn’t able to name all 50, I got 46.

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also here is my room in St. PetersburgI misspeak when I say “World Cup”. I should have said “Euro Cup”

This was towards the end of our trip, so our rooms are a mess getting things ready to be packed. Also, for those of you that remember our room drama, this is the second room (301), where me an my roommate were the only people there, not the first room (201) with the chinese roommates.

A quick fun waste of a few minutes. How many countries can you name in 5 minutes. No cheating!!

I got 44, how well can you do?

Supposedly the average is 56 or so, but it states that “Some people take it many times”

P.S. Use the common, English name. Spelling counts. Has to be a sovereign nation, so Scotland and England don’t count, etc…

I scaled Mount Olympus, and came upon three Greek goddesses who were sitting in a row in an old temple. Their names were Truth (who never lies), Lie (who always lies) and Wisdom (who sometimes lies).

I asked the one on my left, “Who is sitting next to you?”
“Truth,” she answered.
Turning to the middle one, I asked, “Who are you?”
“Wisdom.”
And finally to the one on my right, I inquired, “Who is your neighbor?”
“Lie,” she replied.

Clearly, who is who?

Not quite Greece, but me in Palace Square. Это не Греция, это я на Дворцовой Площаде.

We’re coming down to the final minutes here, in this election. A poll of 1,019 registered Arizona voters had shocking results. 46% said they were voting for McCain, 44% for Obama, and 9% were undecided. This is extremely close for a state that regularly goes red in the presidential election. Not to mention an Arizona senator is one of the two major candidates.

So make sure you get to the polls this Tuesday to vote (if you haven’t already mailed your ballot in)! Whoever you support, your vote might make more of a difference than ever before!

The whole story can be found here.

If you want to find Barack Obama these days, you might have to do nothing more than turn on your Xbox. As we head down the home stretch of the election, Obama’s campaign is trying to do everything they can to ensure voter turnout. They’ve even lately been advertising inside video games.With technology increasing as fast as it is these days, video games are getting more and more complex. Life-like physics, being able to play with anyone in the world over the internet, breathtaking landscapes, and realistic artificial intelligence, are all being implemented. This is causing an ever increasing standard of expectations in gamers, and to meet these expectations game makers are forced to constantly invest more and more money into these games.

But somehow, the price of video games hasn’t changed all that much over the past several years. Even though it takes years and large teams to make these games, companies are still able to sell them at a relatively stable price.

“How?” you ask. Advertising. While generally frowned upon by consumers, I am thankful for advertising (at least in some of the forms it is in now). What kind of free TV would we have without advertising? None. What about radio? None. And forget about $60 for a video game that took two years and millions of dollars.

The type of advertising in these games is non-invasive, and actually blends itself well to the demand to make games more realistic. Lately, games have started having billboards of real ads in their worlds, or, for example on an NBA game, an ad underneath the announcer’s table like you would actually see in real life. So if Sony pays to have their billboard in my game, I get it for cheaper, Sony gets some advertising, and the company has a game that is more like real life than ever before. Negotiating at its finest.

The Obama campaign has recognized the potential of this new advertising medium and has jumped on it. The aim is to target young males, ages 18-34, a demographic that is “typically hard to reach”, and encourage them to vote (preferably for Obama).

I for one have no complaints about the current state of advertising, but I fear with the further inevitable rise in the cost of making a video game, we will start to see more invasive advertising, or a rise in the cost of games. And neither is something I’m too excited about.

Here is one of the ads in the game “Burnout Paradise”.

The full story can be found here here.

Attention technology enthusiasts!

A few weeks ago a friend of mine guided me over to an amazing website. This website features a new product every day (usually electronic/computer/technology related) for a very low price. In fact as I’m writing this, the special of the day is a brand new plantronics bluetooth headset for $9.99 plus $5 shipping. A few days ago they had a 4g micro SD card for $5.99 plus $5 shipping. They’ve even featured laptops, desktops, and monitors.

Greatest of all is the ease of shopping, because if you don’t like the item of the day, that’s it, you’re done. There’s no clicking through pages of products If you do like it, you can order up to 3 online, and they’ll be shipped to your address. To check it out, head over to Woot.com and check out the item of the day. A warning though, they have a limited quantity, so items will sell out if they’re popular. Also, they operate on central time, so if you’re in Arizona and it’s 11:30 and you want to buy the item you saw earlier in the day, too late!

Also, for you wine aficionados, you can check out Wine.Woot.com. The item there changes every few days, instead of every day, and is usually a multiple bottle offer. For you Arizonans though, don’t get your hopes up, they won’t ship here due to legislation.

And lastly, I’m not sure if I’m the only one still regularly wearing T-shirts, but if not: There are a couple sites to check out to buy t-shirts from, they have the same one item a day deal. On Shirt.Woot.com, they go for $10 including shipping, and on TeeFury.com for $11 including shipping. (For the more affluent readers, you can check out the more lucrative DesignByHumans.com, which also features a new shirt every day. Their shirts cost over twice as much when you include shipping, but they don’t stop selling shirts after one day.)

So if you find yourself seduced by the lure of online shopping, you might find value in spending less than 2 minutes a day to check out the featured items. You never know, you could be one click away from seeing the item you’ve been dreaming about getting for a very low price.

P.S. I don’t mean for this to sound like an ad. It’s just that I’ve had a very positive experience with a couple of these sites, and wanted to share them with all of you.

Me in the light rain in front of The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. Я в Храм Спаса на Крови.

Okay to (hopefully) lighten your day, I thought I’d throw some Tom Swiftys in here.

If you don’t know what they are, here are a couple examples:
“Pass me the shellfish,” said Tom, crabbily.
“Can I go looking for the Grail again?” Tom requested.
(The number of spaces correpsonds to the number of letters)

So there you go! You’ve got your sword, now set off and conquer these ones!

[1] “But you don’t deserve an A,” said Tom, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ his student.
[2] “Oh, I’ve dropped my toothpaste,” said Tom, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .
[3] “OK, I’ll send the code again,” said Tom, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .
[4] “Oh no, I forgot to pay the electric bill again,” said Tom, _ _ _ _ _ _ .
[5] “Look! This chicken has no beak!” pronounced Tom, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .
[6] “Never, never, never force-feed a lion,” declared Tom, _ _ _ - _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .
[7] “I’ll have the chicken soup with matzo balls and gefilte fish,” said Tom, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .
[8] “Alright! You can borrow it again,” _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Tom.
[9] “This food tastes like Plutonium,” Tom said _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .
[10] “They had to amputate them both at the ankles,” said Tom, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .

Me in the city of Pushkin, in the gardens where Pushkin spent a lot of his time, and wrote some poems. Я в Пушкин, где Пушкин занимался и писал поэмы.

My apologies.

There is simply no valid excuse for having disappeared these many months I was gone. Sure, for superficial conversation’s sake I can try to make excuse after excuse about being consumed by moving,  my birthday, starting school, being in school, relaxing after my trip, etc. But somehow all of those just seem to stop working once you hit the four month mark.

Also because they’d all only be partly true.  Once I got back from my trip (hold your horses, i’ll write more about it another day) I took a little time to relax and decompress. Then it was up-and-at-em as we went homehunting. We saw many houses for rent and sale, and after several days were able to settle on one hopefull. We put in an application and offer, and after more waiting, we got the location. As my birthday approached, I was spending time getting textbooks and other things in order for school. So by the time my birthday finally came, I just wanted to relax (starting to be a running theme here). Then school started and as each week went on, the air got thinner and thinner, so I found less time to post.

Now it would be an extreme overexaggeration to say that i never had any time to post, as I’m sure I could have squeezed out a post somewhere in between the studying and sleeping. Truth be told, i have multiple half-written and almost finished posts that I never got around to posting, simply because I thought they would not live up to what you readers have earned after waiting so long. The only problem was, after about two weeks, it starts to become difficult to write an appropriate post. I feel “at this moment I don’t have quite enough time to write an appropriate post, so I’ll do one later”. Except that doesn’t work when the next time it comes up is a week later. Slowly I felt the water rising up to my neck with no end in sight. I imagine anyone who has been through debt will have some understanding of what I mean. After one month, you feel it is hard to do, and writing one post wouldn’t really do much or be appropriate, so you don’t. Next thing you know, you’re two months in the hole, and things seem even more bleak. And so it continues until you have to file chapter 11 (in a blog sense) . Because nothing I can say in posts can make up for and un-do what I’ve failed to post. Or remove the disappointment you felt at constantly seeing a lack of updates. There were many times i wanted to post something, but i figured without first touching on the subject of my long absence and covering long necessary posts, i wouldn’t be able to just get on the post the ideas I was having. (hopefully this will change that)

So here it is, my last ditch attempt to try to get back something that was once mine. I loved having all of you read my thoughts and posts, (and i even more loved hearing your responses) and I hope I was of some amusement to you, or at least a place to come to argue with family members. I’ll start posting again, and hopefully in time I can bring back the consistency you had at one time come to expect from me.

Derek

Alas, yet another apology is due. I’m sorry for the quality of this post. I figured it was time to own up and take whatever judgement has been thrust on me, so I wanted to just get this posted. But as I’m quite tired, it is probably riddled with mistakes and typos. But those aside, If you’d have me, I’d love to be back.

Me in Red square. Я в красная площадь.

Last night Russia beat The Netherlands 3-1 in overtime after being tied 1-1 at the end of Regulation. You can imagine this was tremendous for Russia. Even on the far end of the city where we live, there were people screaming and cars honking and people everywhere in the streets and just huge celebration everywhere. From our balcony we could watch everyone honking and people yelling “RO SSI YA!” over and over. It was quite exciting. Next up are the semi finals, so hopefully Russia will do well! How exciting would it be to be here if Russia won the Euro Cup? Unlikely, but there’s always a chance!

Today I visited the Russian Museum. It’s quite large, but not as big as the Hermitage. It’s mostly paintings, with a little bit of other stuff. I’d recommend it to anyone that gets a chance to visit St. Petersburg, second only to the Hermitage. My favorite was

The Knight at the CrossroadsBut I also enjoyed
The Last Day of Pompeii
Dad, my email is working today. I checked back over your options for tours. And I realized that I do know of other tour options. Around the center of the city there are always a lot of tour companies trying to sell excursions. Unfortunately I don’t know a lot about them and don’t know prices, so I would recommend the second option you listed in the mail:ST PETERSBURG CITY/HERMITAGE-DAY 1 08:30AM 05:00PM Jun 23

That way you’ll see the city, and you’ll be able to be at the hermitage until it closes. I’m not sure if we’ll be able to find a way to meet up though. I can probably get there about 2, but there might be a line to wait to get a ticket. So if you get this soon we can try to figure out a place/way to meet around 2 or 3 sometime. I’ll recheck this and my email tomorrow morning before school to see if you have been able to reply.

Aunt Donna, do you think you’ll ever make it out to Russia? I’m pretty used to the currency now, but I’m leaving in a week so it comes a little too late. I’ve been considering doing the year program or semester program sometime in the future (not this coming August, but maybe sometime). It would be in Moscow, so it would be a new place to see. Also it would be nice to truly live here and see the country and become part of it, instead of just being a month long visiting student.

By the way, thank you all for your comments. Sorry that I don’t always get to reply to all of them, but I do read them all and appreciate them. Thank you!

I’m doing fine. The ballet was surprisingly horrible. We spoke with some Russians a few weeks ago about seeing a ballet, and they said not to because it was disgusting. They said during the summer the ballets are terrible, and only for tourists. During the fall/winter is when the ballets are really good. There were three small ballets. The first one was very dissonant and awkward, and the second was not very good. The third one had music I liked better, and I could actually understand what was going on with the story. But overall they were very sloppy and felt extremely under-rehearsed.

Today is quite a day of excitement. As the solstice, it is naturally a day of celebration because it’s the longest day of the year. It’s almost one in the morning, and the sky is still engulfed in twilight. Also tonight is the quarter finals of the Euro Cup. Russia (who placed second in their group) is playing The Netherlands (who placed first in their group). Right now it’s in overtime 1-1. So you can imagine there are fireworks going off and people screaming and cheering everywhere.

Novgorod was quite disappointing. Dad, I would not recommend going to see it as one of your tours if it is an option. It is a 3 1/2 hour drive away from St. Petersburg, so that’s 7 hours worth of driving in one day, to see a city with not many attractions. It was a nice place to see for me, since I have plenty of time here, but with only two days, I would highly recommend spending your time in the Hermitage or Russian museum instead. I believe Peterhof is also one of your options, and that is a very nice place, but the palace is very similar to all russian palaces, so the main attraction is to see all the fountains. The same goes for Pushkin. Catherine’s palace is nothing special except for the Amber room. Outside of the palace though, Pushkin has some wonderful views and scenery and is all around a beautiful place. My email is having trouble and not letting me open the list of tour options available to you, or letting me reply so I’m just inserting my comments in here.

As for another tour option, I wish I could help but I don’t think I can. All of our tours were set up for us through the program, and otherwise we just see the city ourself. So it seems like you’ll just have to pick one of the tour options provided by the cruise. If I had to pick a couple, I would recommend the Hermitage, because of all the treasures it contains, and also it is the Winter palace, so you’ll get to see the inside of a palace (which all the others look similar to). And also I’d recommend a city tour. There are some wonderful cathedrals that are amazing. St. Isaac’s cathedral, Kazhansky Cathedral, and the spilt blood cathedral are a few. Also there are many other neat things around petersburg I’m sure you’re guide will show you.

Otherwise I’m doing fine here. Things are good, but it’s quite late. We spent the day at novgorod and then I took a nap so I wasn’t able to write earlier today. Hopefully things are going great on your cruise. And hopefully for everyone else things in the states are going great as well.