Avenue Q Musical

July 17th, 2015

Avenue Q poster

So far I have only been to one musical, that was “Mamma Mia” on Broadway NY in 2009. But yesterday Amy and I went to see Avenue Q at the Enmore Theatre. It was a great show, and I can say, I laughed so hard my cheeks were hurting. Before going in to watch the musical, I had no idea what it was about or anything, aside from Amy’s brief explanation that it has something to do with Sesame Street.

After watching I can give a brief plot summary. The story takes place in New York on, you guessed it, Avenue Q. We are shown the life of all the residents and a new collage graduate struggling to make ends meat. Even though they might seem like a regular bunch of people (and monsters), but they all have something that makes them special. Like Tod, who is gay (even though he doesn’t want to admit it) living together with Nicky, unemployed college graduate; Brian, the jewish ex-baker with an oriental wife – Christmas Eve; Trekkie, the monster, who … utilises the internet to its fullest potential; and others. What else makes them all special, is that they are all just a little bit racist, for now and of course, it sucks to be them, if they were gay.

And now I finally know where the some of the viral songs and memes come from. Overall great show, very happy Amy invited me to go. Her is a link for the playlist of songs, but I would highly recommend that you go watch it yourself if you can.

Das Upgrade

June 28th, 2015

DasKeyboard 4 Mac

Ever since coming back from Japan, I have been upgrading my life. I got a new apartment, a whole lot of great furniture, new job (upgraded version of old job), new clothes, a 5k iMac, and now some more shiny new things. For years now I have been longing for batter typing experience – a mechanical keyboard. But since I was going to Japan and then in Japan, I could never really get one, cause they are heavy and bulky. Fast track to the beginning of the month. My WoW Cataclysm gaming mouse, which served me well for 5 years, has started to show signs of death, it may not be dead yet, but definitely breathing its last breaths, so I started searching for a worthy replacement.

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Eurovision 2015

May 28th, 2015

esc2015_logo

The biggest song contest in the world is back for the 60th time, and this year with a special guest participant – Australia! Thats right, this year us Aussies can party together with the cool cats in Europe… at 5am… Yea, when Europe was celebrating Sweden’s outstanding performance and win in the contest, we were just having brekky and getting ready for a long Sunday ahead of us. But it was definitely a fun experience – being able to vote for my favourite European countries from all they way out here, in the middle of nowhere.
Everyone was shocked to find Australia participate, but they quickly agreed that it was a good idea after they heard our Guy Sebastian perform.

I loved his perforce, but my favourite is still that macho from Sweden with those pretty drawn animations in the background. Not only were the animations memorable, but the guitar music in the verse was just outstanding, I still have it stuck in my head. Overall great performance, adding it to my top for sure.

DuckDuckGo

May 12th, 2015

duckduckgo

A few days ago, my sempai Ruben wrote up this little blog post about DuckDuckGo and it got me wondering wether I should give it another go.

DuckDuckGo is an internet search engine similar to Google or Bing, but has one feature that all the others lack – privacy. With Google, Yahoo, Bing and pretty much all the other big name search engines, you get no privacy… at all. Everything you search is saved in some form to either be used for marketing, add targeting, search predictions, etc. But ultimately these companies called data about you, and then sell this data (sell you) to advertisers. Thats how they make money, thats their business model. With DDG, thats not the case, they don’t track you (well at least they say the don’t). But thats not the only good factors about DDG. The site has customisation options, a region switch, ! lookup operators, and other neat features, which I never knew I wanted, but am used to now.

Back when Apple released OSX10.10 Yosemite and iOS8, they added an option to make DuckDuckGo the default search engine in Safari. Thats when I tried it for the first time. It was a good experience I might say, but ultimately I ended up going back to Google as my primary search engine, when DDG failed to find results for relatively simple searches.

Now though after a good year, I think I will give it another shot. I have moved everything of my Gmail, I have pretty much cleared my Google+ and the only things left in GDrive is collaboration folders for uni group work. I am not quite sure wether I am ready to give up Google Search, but I will definitely give DDG a go for the next few weeks, and if it grows on me, I’ll stick to it.

Of course I don’t recommend that you all go out there and change your search engines to DDG and change your habits, but as an innovative and forward thinking person as I believe myself to be, I will seek the new solutions to the problems that we have been facing for years; the alternatives to established concepts; I will rebel against the norm and embrace that which is new and (arguably) superior. Long live the startups, long live the community.

70 Лет Великой Победы!

May 9th, 2015

70

С праздником Победы, славным, легендарным,
Пусть Господь дарует мир на всей земле,
Не затухнет память в сердце благодарном,
Не тускнеет злато на гербовом орле!
Поколение новых гениев, талантов,
Пусть рождает снова гордый отчий край,
И под песни детства и под бой курантов
Согревает душу пусть победный май!

Maldives 2015

April 29th, 2015

Maldives

Ah the crystal clear azure sea, the white sand of the beach and the green trees, so beautiful, so tranquil – these are the Maldives.

Honestly after spending 7 days on the island all I can say is: its bliss. If you are in need a rest and have enough funds to back it up, I say go for it! It will be the time of your life. All you do is lie on the beach, eat delicious fruit and go snorkelling to see all the colourful fish down bellow. So bring your sunnies, snorkelling gear and a good camera (normal and underwater) cause you will see so many beautiful things that you will definitely want to keep these shots forever.

Now its time to get back to my normal life: work and uni here I come.

Photos are right here:

flickr_logo

United Arab Emirates 2015

April 18th, 2015

View of Burj Kulifa

Welcome to another exciting episode of: ‘Vadim goes traveling around the world’. This time he is visiting the land of sand and oil – United Arab Emirates. What did our young traveler find in this distant Arabian land? Find out after the break.

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Photos

April 9th, 2015

Today Apple released updates for both their desktop and mobile operating systems. Please welcome OSX 10.10.3 and iOS 8.3. These new updates bring a lot of bug fixes, new emoji and most importantly the new Photos app for OS X and iCloud Photo Library. Now all my photos will be in synch, but I will still keep Lightroom for all the DSLR pics that I snap.

To celebrate, here is a photo of the sunset over Rhodes from a day ago. I’m of to bed, as tomorrow the iWatch is up for display at the Apple stores around Sydney and I must take a look at this new piece of technology!

Red Sunset at Rhodes

This is an unedited photo captured on my iPhone 5s at 6pm on the 8th of April.

If the Internet was a High School

March 26th, 2015

Imagine if all the website we browse daily were living people, teenagers in fact, attending a high school. Wouldn’t that be an awesome combination of personalities! There have been numerous videos showing our websites as real people with personalities, but I feel that this one definitely tops them all! Take a look and see how true most of these depictions are.

Стоп Хам

March 25th, 2015

Stop Ham

Стоп Хам (Stop a Douchebag) is a youth movement which fights against traffic rule violators and arrogance on the roads of Russia. They fight against people who park their cars in the middle of the road, sidewalks or even pedestrian crossings. They also fight against people who think they are the smartest and drive on the sidewalk to save time and go around a traffic jam. Why do they this? Well if its not them then who? Who is going to fix this mess that roads in Russia have become? There is a saying in Russian: “We only have 2 problems in this country: Idiots and Roads”.

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