In Latvia, ice spins you

August 17th, 2015

What do we do when its really cold and we run out of potatoes? We cut ice with a chain-saw and then make the ice spin, of course! Now I know what to tell my friends when they ask me what is Latvia famous for.

E-klasse.lv, and the fight for justice

January 23rd, 2014

e-klasse

Currently all schools in Latvia are required to use this online grading system called E-klasse.lv which is run by the company DAEC. When I was still in high school (almost 4 years ago), all the teachers had to put the students marks and grades into both a paper journal and into this online system, but as I have heard from my mother, now they are only using this online system. Of course this has its benefits and make it easier to access to both students and their parents, but there are also obvious risks as well. Unlike UTS which uses a very complicated and secure system to store all the university students marks, e-klasse is not as big and I highly doubt it is as secure as what my university has to offer. Anyway, that is beside the point, what I want to tell you about it the absurd story that happened to one of our students (former student of Rigas 10th Secondary School) when he tried to improve the user experience when using this online grading tool.

Read More

The Internet…. Here and There

April 3rd, 2013

The Internet… Its such a magnificent thing! I can not imagine living without it. Everything I do during the day revolves around using the internet in one way or another. May it be Skyping with my parents back home, or checking into a restaurant on Foursquare, or simply checking my Twitter feed and replying to chat messages in Line. Its amazing how much we can do on the web these days, and it makes our lives just a bit more colorful. But you know what annoys me more then anything? SLOW CONNECTION SPEED AND LOW BANDWIDTH!

Read More