First of all, I would like to congratulate all the Slavs, half-Slavs, quarter-Slavs, pseudo-Slavs and super-Slavs with the holiday, the day of the Slavonic culture. Here in Romania noone knows about it.. Though it would be nice because the local culture and language have a lot of Slavonic elements. I wonder what they know in general? Even on the 9th May when we came with a bottle of shampaign to a hostel to some local ladies we knew, they asked what was the reason. Anyway, everyone who supports the Slavonic soul (it's really difficult to escape from it if you've already got one), and Cyrillic alphabet (well, not all the Slavonic nations use it, whatever), today should celebrate it somehow. I think we've got something to be proud about!

Well, actually I'm not that sure they don't know any holidays. Some dates are really celebrated here actively. For example, the day of Konstantin and Elena which took place on the 21st May. I found out about it in the morning in a taxi, after our Indian manager phoned me from the office and said there was an urgent thing to do. That's why I had to be at work as soon as possible. Anyway, I didn't expected that whole the day Romanian guys and ladies would be congratulating me. I felt like I had another birthday. One of the guys said "Happy Birthday" in Russian, obviously wasn't knowing the difference in our language between expressions for the day of the name (angel's day?) and the for day when someone had been born. And in the evening two colleagues of mine whose names were Costel (was considered their day too) decided to take the whole office staff for some beer to a restaurant.

Was surfing the Net and occasionally got to the pixelsusi site. There a Russian guy who lives and works now in quite a non-Slavonic place - New-York, from time to time writes his observations. Even more, they're written in quite a Slavonic matter, in Cyrillic and sometimes with some Slavonic curse words :)

And more about culture (the Slavonic one, of course). Recently I started missing the good old times, when being first-year students at the university my friends and I were fans of the humoristic radio-show "P.D.S". It was distributed every week on Friday nights on the late "Radio-50" station. Several times we visited their concerts, and at one of them I was introduced to the program authors and shoke Kovalchuk's hand (don't wash it till now, j/k). Melancholy came to me in the moment when I found a CD with their mp3 tracks on a shelve. I brought it from Kharkov. Then I decided to find out something about their current activities, and fired up the google. It was a real surprise to find a site of the project and to find out that in March they gave another concert in Kharkov. Have to admit though, I found no new songs released later my university-first-year times (1998). The good thing is that all of the songs are available for downloading from their own site (hint, hint!). Also, still I remember a beautiful voice of a radio-journalist Olya Rodzyanko, with which she read her own articles on various topics. Really nice time it was. Still fond of the "The president" song of theirs.

Let's finish with something technical. Recently there was a need to write several CGIs in PHP. It happens frequently that not-very-new technologies are discovered like a real revelation by me. Anyway, I'm pretty sure there are quite a plenty of stubborn guys like I was before I knew PHP. The language learning process took me about 3 minutes, and I needed another 10 minutes to write and debug the applications. So, if you're still writing your web applications in Perl, give it up and go to php.net to read the tutorial.