The DIMV Blog

This post was originally only published in Russian, but a post by  Ter[ence|ry] Eden prompted me translate it. Not unlike their British counterparts, the Russian names tend to have a full form and a (not always but usually) shorter “family form”. Multiple names are extremely rare in Russia; instead, to make it formal, a patronymic (derived from the father’s name) is added. The full legal name (as seen in our passports and other legal documents) consists the personal name (in its full form), the patronymic, and the family name (in passports and such it can go first instead of last). When using foreign languages, and English in particular, it is customary to omit the patronymic – it is a mouthful, and foreigners don’t get it, anyway.

My full legal name is Evgeny Vladimirovich Kuznetsov (my father’s name was Vladimir). The “family form” for Evgeny in Russian is most usually Zhenya. “Zh” denotes a sound that doesn’t exist in English, so for English I always us my full name; the post below only concerns Russian, and that’s why I didn’t even care to translate it initially.

My recent change of occupation led, understandably, to a number of (sometimes) minor changes in my life as a whole. Many of these were expected, yet there were some surprises. This one was particularly sudden and sizeable…

С «Госуслуг» прилетело предложение поучаствовать в опросе, что-то там про поддержку рождаемости. Опрос анонимный. Открываю…

Хочет доступ к данным о поле и возрасте ребёнка (ну, допустим, резонно, какую-то там стратификацию делать). Кроме этого хочет ИНН, данные о транспортных средствах и данные загранпаспорта.

Ctrl + W

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.

Лужа на диване. Жена от усталости и общей задолбанности уже в слезах, и в назидательных целях даёт понять дочери, что плачет из-за её отказа пользоваться горшком.

— Не плачь, мама! У тебя всё ещё будет…

Истерика, занавес.

Для того, чтобы войти в айти, мне потребовалось, кроме знаний, умений и всемерной поддержки супруги, очень изрядное количество везения. Кажется, можно было обойтись куда меньшим везением, если бы, начиная этот путь, я прочёл этот вот пост, но тогда этого поста не было. Теперь он есть; мне уже не так нужно, но не исключено, что кому-то поможет.

I was taking the daughter from the kindergarten. Together we put her in her warm pants, boots, hat with a pompom, scarf, and jacket. We couldn’t find her mittens, not even with teachers’ aid. No big deal, she wore my mittens all the way back home; she did complain they didn’t really fit, thought.

The next morning I was the one helping her get dressed to go to the kingdergarten. Pants, boots, hat (it does look like it’s getting too small, I was right yesterday, we should shop for a new one), scarf, jacket, warm gloves…

As I mentioned earlier, my career in medicine is now a thing of the past. Of course, I’m not yet ready to retire, so I’m building another career. This time it’s IT; software development, to be specific.

For people who know me well, this shouldn’t come as a surprise at all. Actually, when I told people who know me well about this decision, the word I heard from about everyone was “finally”. Computers and IT in general have been a huge part of my life for most of my life.

I’ve been doing medicine my whole life — well, more than half of my life, at least. I must admit, it was never my calling, yet I got rather good at it.

I quit. Today is my last day at this job.

My not-yet-three-year-old daughter seems to like The Rolling Stones a lot. Even the first song she started rocking her head to back when she barely learned to sit up was “Anybody Seen My Baby?” And these days…

We were in our car, The Beatles were on, me and my wife were enjoying the music, the daughter also rocked her leg to time a little, everything seemed fine. At some point, the playlist was over, and a Stones’ song came up. The daughter reacted immediately:

USB type C is lovely, isn’t it? You come to your office with your laptop, and just plug that single cable you have lying on your desk. The other end of the cable is connected to the monitor on your desk, and you immediately have the second screen, the full-size keyboard and the mouse that are connected to the USB ports in the same monitor, and also the headphones (that are connected to the 3.5 mm jack in the monitor). Oh, and the laptop’s charging. With one cable plug, you have the whole workstation set up, the monitor acting as a docking station. Lovely!