While the summer along with the autumn goes away and it's getting colder, every kind of activities slows down. Adding news to sites is not an exception. Romanians still haven't turned heating in my block on (batteries are just a little warm right now), so I write this with rather cold fingers. It reminds me my first computers related experience back in school, when at the end of the week I was allowed to stay at my mom's office later, and it got colder, but I kept on sitting in front of the flustrating machine despite of my fingers being cold. But ok, wait a moment, I'll go make some tea for myself..

Well, it's better now. Hope, now reasons of such a low activity of mine are understood for you, dear readers. Besides, it's not the time to fall into hibernation.

On the 8th November the two months term of my visa-free staying here on Romanian territory is gonna be over. This means meanwhile websci is gotta finish making a work permit for me. Otherwise I'm to be deported. Yeah. Sounds funny. Almost the same funny as if someone was deported from Ukraine. Dunno if such cases took place, but during all the 20 years I was living in our wonderful country I have never heard about such a phenomenon. Nevertheless, here I need to present a paper issued by authorities of the county of my citizenship saying that there were no crimes I commited, so that local guys allow me to work in Romania. Do you think one is that easy to get? Relax. Besides the fact that you have to wait for about two weeks, like they are to phone to all the prisons in the country and ask if they had such a gungster, you should also present your face to get it. This ment I should physically be there. But ok, I dunno how, but my parents managed to get it, so now they only have to send it to me. BTW, if someone is intrested, I can tell what documents one needs here to get a work permit. I was naive to think BS dimploma is really needed only to get a European Work Permit or American H1B visa. No way. Practically in every country including Romania, you gotta have the paper. Along with a list of marks and criminal record. That's it.

Yesterday in the end of work day I took a trip to freshmeat.net to look for libraries implementing various instant messaging protocols. Specially I was intrested in Yahoo Instant Messenger, because a lot of people in our company (including superia) prefer it rather that icq. Thus, I gotta have X window running whole the day to be on YAIM. Well, the most instresting thing I found was Chimmy's Yahoo Messenger client. Its package included source of a library in C suprisingly separated from UI :) So I managed to take the source off to a separate library, and tweaked it a bit to implement callback driven mechanism, like the one icqlib has. However, adding yahoo protocol to centericq is gonna be quite a problematic task because of inital icq-only-oriented design. Well, for now this is my excuse. If there was a great inspiration I beleive it wouldn't be a problem. But if anyone around here feels like working towards this direction, he or she is welcome. I will try to do my best to help you in it. And it's always nice to work together.

But, my friends, not only lack of heating and inspiration are the things I'm upset about. Everything is great about Romanian mobile operators, everything is nice. Unlike Ukrainian ones they do have post-paid service. I'll tell you a little about it. I'm sure this won't surprise anyone from developed Western countries, but it's definitely gonna be intresting for my fellow compatriots. Operator I connected to was Connex. BTW, there are three major mobile operators in Romania, they're Connex, Dialog and Cosmorom. I believe all of them have similar schemes of payment. Well, there are two kinds of service, post- and pre- paid ones. The latter is cards of various kinds. Mine is called "Kamarad", "comrade" in translation. In the Soviet Union we were taugth there would be no money when communism comes, but these comrades are not right ones, because they do demand money for their services :) It's now clear with the post-paid scheme: you have to pay no abonent fee, but calls you made only. Free like a wind. With a card. However, if you buy a subscription there is an abonent fee, and you pay for what you phoned in the end of the month. Here they believe in one's solventness. Amazing. Ukrainian operators don't practice that.

And the thing which does really make me upset about local mobile operators is the lack of email -> sms gateway. Our good old Kyivstar provides every customer with such a service for free. Here it's strange. There is some kind of WAP e-mail service, but I'm not intrested in it. The daemon which I wrote to announce new messages in my inbox now doesn't have anything to do. But it was extremely useful when message had just arrived, the daemon extracted sender's name and subject from it, then sent to my mobile. Now I feel really bad without such a nice thingie in my pocket.

Ultimately I'm gonna tell you about new things on this site and my plans for the future. My friends in Kharkov at last scanned our recent photos that were not ready when I left. So, they were scanned and sent to me with e-mail. Thus, the corresponding section of this web site was added with new stuff. Now, about my plans. Some guys around here liked my news postings, specially about my observations here in Romania. That's why I decided to make a mailing list to copy new pieces from the site. I'm gonna write about what I'm intrested in, such as linux, unix, programming, heavy music and will also tell about my adventures :) You'll know soon how to subscribe and so on.