Evgeny Kuznetsov

Twenty years ago in Russia, I could go to a train station and board a train without taking my keys out of my pocket. Life got better and more secure since then, so now you need to empty your pockets and present your backpack for screening.

It’s funnier on public transport. In Moscow, you can use the same ticket to travel by subway and city train. The train can be MCD (diameter, goes further to the suburbs) or MCC (ring road in Moscow). At the MCC, it is mandatory to turn out the pockets and present bags for screening. Most MCD stations don’t even have the equipment for that. In subway there is equipment, to the extent that the lobbies of old stations feel tight and crowded, and the ever-vigilant security guards selectively pull potential terrorists out of the stream of people for screening. They don’t check everyone, though. I ride to work every day with the same backpack, with the same laptop inside it. I undergo the humiliating screening procedure once or twice a week; why I get chosen (or not) on a given day is a mistery.

Нашим родителям в жизни пришлось несладко. Они росли в сложные времена у непростых родителей, под значительным давлением (в том числе, а часто — главным образом — обстоятельств), а когда выросли, перенесли эту же модель отношений (откуда же взять другую?!) с этим же давлением на нас. Нам не очень это комфортно, но мы их вполне можем понять.

Наши дети растут заметно более свободными. Мы ограждаем от чрезмерного давления их, и с умилением воспринимаем давление с их стороны — они выстраивают границы, они организуют свой мир по-своему, и нам радостно, что они такие и у них эти возможности есть. Мы их охотно понимаем — да и как иначе?!

Сегодня утром дочерь одевалась, и носочек на правую ногу натянула так, что его пятка оказалась не напротив пятки, а напротив тыла стопы. Попробовала повернуть, не получилось; очень расстроилась и расплакалась.

Конечно, мама была рядом, и непокорный носочек был немедленно повёрнут так, как надо. Казалось бы, никаких причин для слёз. Казалось бы, о чём тут расстраиваться?!

Нам, взрослым, вроде в самом деле не о чем. Но огорчение-то дочери было настоящим, и беда была настоящей: носочек наделся криво, и выпрямить не вышло. И не так важно, что тут же всё быстро поправили; важно, что в этот момент было очень грустно, по-настоящему печально и тяжело. Была причина плакать.

There are things that are nice and interesting to do, yet there are things you’d rather not spend your time and effort doing. People are different, and my categorization may not match yours, but on average, there are a lot of things in today’s life that one would like to delegate to some extent. Hiring a person or a team for this is something very few of us can afford, but technical progress gives some hope to wide audience, too.

Owning your own data is great. I’ve been using this website as the central IndieWeb point of my online life for over five years, and I love it. However, the joy of owning your own website comes bundled with great responsibility: as the website owner, I am responsible for what’s on my site and for what’s stored “under the hood” to make this website work.

It’s not a huge issue as long as I only post my own content on my site, but the cool thing about the IndieWeb — as opposed to “regular” Web — is its social aspect, the ability to interact with other people running other websites. To do that I usually need to put some of the data that belongs to other people onto my website. And that always makes me uncomfortable.

This post is about obvious things, but it looks like they aren’t that obvious to some people.

Many messengers allow to send voice messages instead of text. These messages are problematic: you can’t read them in a meeting, you can’t skim through them later to remember what the conversation was about, you can’t search the contents of these messages… The fact that the voice messages are possible to send doesn’t mean you should. You shouldn’t.

very much Russian.

I’ve been a DreamHost customer ever since I switched from hosted solutions to managing my own website. Back then, I was searching for a web hosting that would allow me to host a Known instance with as little hassle as possible, and DreamHost was one of the first options IndieWeb Wiki listed. I gave it a try and fell in love immediately.

DreamHost was great. Very easy to set up, with clean and comfortable to use administrative panel, seamless SSH access, and everything you’d need for a little private website available and easily accessible. PHP worked seamlessly, setting up a MySQL database was a piece of cake, and I could even set up a cron job to make regular backups (and have my home server fetch those via rsnapshot).