Tampere. Part II. Spy Museum

I got off the train Helsinki - Tampere at 1 p.m., so I had three hours before I could check into Omena Hotel Tampere. Museums close early everywhere around the world, that's why I decided to start with them and to see the city from the outside on the way.

My first stop was at the Spy Museum. Founded in 1998, this museum became the first of its kind in the world. Wiki even states that there aren't any other museums connected with espionage in Europe. It was correct when I visited Tampere but since the 19 of September it is not right anymore.

The museum provoked conflicting feelings in me.

I enjoyed reading the texts which accompanied the displays. The story about the Sanada clan and their successful defense of the castle having 3 thousand soldiers against nearly 20 thousands, as well as mentioning the fireworks as a tool of a spy made me recall one of my childhood hobbies: reading about ninjas and samurai. Going through the texts about famous spies, like Mata Hari, I gained some insight into the intriguing parts of the world history which passed me by. But the record in surprising me was established by soviet paratroopers. If you are from one of the ex-USSR countries, then this question is to you: what do you know about the Winter War? I remember that hardly a couple of pages in the textbook were dedicated to it. I also recall an interesting documentary shown by our history teacher. The most striking detail of that film was that Finns took advantage of the snowy days and deterred the Soviet army advance with their rapid-moving ski troops. But even the documentary hadn't featured Soviet paratroopers. But they arguably were the first regular paratrooper units in the world. What is more significant, the first airborne combat drop in history was performed by them exactly during the Winter War.

Another thing, I enjoyed in the Spy Museum, was espionage devices, about which I've never heard before. To be precise, not the devices themselves (most of them were pretty unattractive) but their concepts amazed me so much. Among them I can mention shotgun microphones (they accept sound from one direction only), photosnipers, a camera hidden in a pen.

However, I'm sure I could become familiar with all of the above in a good book while a museum should provide other experience than a text. Exhibits should be eye-catchers but almost all of them in the Spy Museum of Tampere presented a sorry sight.

There was one more detail which I disliked very much. Around a half of the displays was devoted to the XX century (together with the beginning of the third millennium). Lots of the texts contained descriptions of double-edged historical events (the official positions on those events of Western countries on one side and either ex-USSR countries or China on the other side still differ). The descriptions provided both points of view but presented them not as equal ones. I had a feeling that they laughed at Eastern countries opinion. I'm sure, it is a shame for a museum. Especially taking into consideration that all texts presented in the Spy Museum were available not only in Finnish (as it is in some of the Finnish museums) but in ten languages (Russian among them).

While people fight against intrusion of politics into sports, politics gets into museums. And it is far more dangerous.

Tampere. Part I. The hotel with "invisible" staff

In the end of August I spent two days in Finland. This time I chose Tampere as a destination. I'd like to tell you about plenty of things I've seen during 8-hour walk around the city. However, I'll start my story not with a place of interest but with the most unusual hotel I've ever stayed in.

I'm talking about Omena Hotel Tampere, a specimen of the large hotel network. Currently it covers only Finland but as recently as a year ago you could also stay in Omena hotels in the certain cities of Denmark and Sweden, too.

The story begins several weeks before the trip. After I booked a room online, I received an email specifying all details including the door code. As that email promised, 24 hours prior to my arrival another email, containing the room number, was delivered. The same information came 8 hours before the check-in in SMS message.

Now let's turn our thoughts to the moment when I found myself opposite the front door of Omena Hotel Tampere.

Step 1. Enter the door code, open the door and find yourself on a dark staircase.

Step 2. Ascend the staircase to the third floor, enter the same door code, step into the light and look around. Well, the corridor looks better than the staircase but it is still more like a dormitory than a hotel. At least, floor in the hotels is usually much cleaner than here.

Step 3. Walk to your room, enter the code, that you've already learnt by heart, and marvel at what is inside. I often lack for an electric tea kettle in the hotels, and here it is as well as a microwave. Have a lot of electronic devices that are running out of charge? Six wall outlets at your service! Hairdrier, fridge, TV set don't surprise but are present, too. Oh, look! Two beds (from which I deduce that it is actually a twin room at the price of a single one) and two chair-beds (for those who prefer to have a choice in whatever situation, I suppose). Switch on the TV...

   

wait... I'm not acquainted with you. How do you know how am I called?

Are you sure that you are a TV set?..



... but not a sheep?

Whatever you are, thanks a lot for the built-in information about the schedule you show each time I switch you on!

Well, I stop speaking with TV sets and sheeps and turn back to you.

There is plenty of other things here including the New Testament and twenty bags of sugar. And if you worry about your safety because of all these door codes (who knows how many doors does the code match? Exactly three or more? Frankly speaking, I didn't check it :) ) there is a heavy hasp and a peephole, too (not sure I see the latter one in the hotel rooms' doors often).

Additional benefits and drawbacks I'd like to mention:

• Check-in is at 4 p.m., while check-out is at 12 p.m., i.e. if you stay in Omena hotel for a day, you can actually be there for no more than 20 hours. Sounds unfair, don't you think so?
• Omena Hotel Tampere is situated on Hämeenkatu, the main street of Tampere. The good point is that Hämeenkatu starts (or ends?) at the railway station. So if you arrive too late or if you just want to leave the luggage in your room, be sure that it would be easy to find the hotel: after your train arrives, just go straight ahead and look to the left from time to time.  

Let's finally switch to the heading of this post. Why do I call the staff "invisible"? My counterquestion is: have I mentioned any staff in the above paragraphs? No. In fact, I noticed only a cleaner on the staircase when I was leaving the hotel on Sunday in the morning. Why is it cool not to communicate with any staff? Some people are shy, some people don't speak English but still want to travel. And as for me, I just enjoy saving the time (and the space of the hotel) by such an elegant solution.

Have you ever stayed in a hotel with a similar concept? If so, share your impressions in comments.

Is regular blogging possible?

Do you belive in the great potency of promises made publicly?

Do I believe? I really don't know. But I think, the time to test it in practice came.

During last three months and a half no posts have appeared here. It wasn't due to a lack of ideas. Actually, even without brainstorming I have at least ten possible topics in my mind at the moment. However, I don't have much time and don't set blogging a high priority.

But here is what polyglot Olly Richards says:

In summer 2013, I started a blog.
Two years later, my dashboard shows 167 published articles.
That’s over 1 blog post per week.
During this period, I’ve worked full-time, lived in three countries, published a book, and completed a master’s degree.

So a lack of time shouldn't be considered as a solid reason not to write. Let's test it, too.

I promise to publish one blog post per week during the following twelve months. Each Saturday, no later than 11:59 p.m. (Saint Petersburg time) a new post will appear here (as well as the links to it on VK and Facebook). Thus, 52 posts over the whole year.

What I don't promise is:

• that they would be as long as they had been before. In fact, I'll strive to make the posts shorter and to improve their readability.
• that I'll write only in English. In general, I will, but don't be surprised if someday you will read my new post in Russian.

To keep the promise I need your help. If the time has come and I haven't published a post yet, feel free to remind me about that either in social networks or in the comments to this post.

P.S. Any feedback about the content of the posts, style and language is still highly appreciated.

Floréal (20 April - 19 May) overdue summary

Hoping to return to a regular posting, I decided to alter the format once again in order to make the writing process more interesting for myself. But I still want to share with you several portions of my impressions which refer to the period from the end of April till the end of June, and for that purpose I will follow the old format in that post and in the next one.

5. Functional Programming course in Computer Science Center

After giving up the course in Statistics, due to a heavy workload, badly going with the other subjects, and requirements which occured to be too high for me (I'm quite sure that I shouldn't take the course if I have such an opportunity and if I can't understand the first definition on the first lecture), I reserved two opportunities to pass a course: Functional Programming and Machine Learning. Of course, I wanted to pass them both (and eventually reached this goal), but at some point of time it wasn't clear for me if I could pass at least one. As for Functional Programming, I didn't experience many problems with the main part (i.e. programming in Haskell) thanks to the double coverage of almost all topics (the second one was at the university) but lost too many points for the first three homeworks, which were completely theoretical and were devoted to the lambda calculus. Each time I got only 1/10. By the way, I still understand this theory far from well and still don't see where it could really help me with Haskell (in most of the cases I didn't feel that I need to know anything more and didn't face many obstacles). However, this loss of 27 points at the very beginning threatened me with not passing the course (to pass the course each of us needed to gain at least 65 points out of 131). The situation with Machine Learning was even worse, so I was very happy to surpass the 65-point barrier after the last but one homework in Functional Programming.

To sum up that part, I should say that coding in a functional language was a funny experience. It is not clear for me if it helped me to improve my programming abilities (as we were told at the university, the impact of this experience on the conceptual level may be great), but at least now I can mention in passing that I once implemented Dijkstra algorithm in Haskell ;)

4. Spassky Chess Cup - the final stage

In the previous summary I told you about the qualification for this annual blitz chess competition. Eight days after that, the final 9-round Swiss tournament took place in the Twelve Collegia. The day before, together with one student of the same year I agreed to help our coach, university team captain and the main competition arbiter (I am talking about the same person) to transport the equipment from Peterhof to the venue. Coming more than an hour before the official start of the event, we even thought that we were too early, because we were sure that the only thing we would have to do after bringing the equipment is setting out chessmen on less than twenty boards. But it was not to be so. The organizers left us the whole preparation stage, starting from carrying tables and chairs (almost forty items of each kind) along the corridor to the place where all that furniture was intended to be situated. Ok, on that day I learned that it's worth doing a warm-up not only before jogging or even going to the concert but also before chess competitions.

Carrying heavy things for more than half an hour doesn't help the thinking process much. Neither do the words of organizers who told us on the opening ceremony about their (!) hospitality. The only thing which was able to boost me up was the draw (by this polysemantic word I mean not the result of the game but the process during which competitors are subdivided into pairs), and it coped with its "task". After the random pairing with no respect to the alphabetical order or FIDE rating, with no subdivision into seeded and unseeded participants, I found my name next to my recent opponent's name. Playing against the former world U-18 chess champion two times in a row (I haven't played chess during those 8 days between the qualification and the final stage, and qualification round ended for me with the game agains the same participant) - what can cheer up better? And such funny randomness (I had equal chances to play against anyone of the other 28 persons but...) made me smile. Once again I played as white. This time I chose the deviation 1. b2-b3 (instead of usual 1. e2-e4 which lead to the French defence, troublesome opening for me at that moment, in our game a week before) hoping to take the Woman Grandmaster in front of me by surprise. Predictably, that was a vain attempt even though I had been playing this line from time to time since autumn and was completely sure that it is unknown for my opponent. Such invitation to an unfamiliar area often helps in blitz even against strong players but this time it didn't. However, during this game I almost forgot about my emotions regarding organizers and thus nothing distracted me from chess. In the next seven rounds I ran out of time twice in better positions, and won the other five games. In the last round I was lucky to win nearly equal position still full of life (in which I was likely to lose due to the shortage of time) thanks to the incorrect move of my opponent (any move violating the rules leads to an immediate loss in blitz).

Six points in nine games brought me to the 4th place, and the only criterion which separated me from the third place was the Buchholz score. Anyway I didn't feel disappointed because being fourth among the strongest chess players of our large university is far from bad result.

3. Last school study group lessons

In contrast to the previous school year (and especially, to the autumn term of that year), this year our pupils didn't make us, their tutors, happy for their attendance. None of them visited the last lesson before the New Year, and in spring such low (or, rather, zero) attendance became something like a tradition. Nevertheless, my colleague and I did't say good-bye to all hopes of any positive changes of this dreary situation. And finally, I was rewarded for the expectation: three Tuesdays our study group gathered one of our pupils and me :) Unfortunately, my colleague responsible for Thursday lessons wasn't that lucky.

The end of the school year was near, all the important contests were left behind, so I decided to introduce several uncommon for algorithmic study groups topics. Uncommon, but not absolutely unrelated to our main subject. Firstly, I made up my mind to share basic knowledge of parallel programming, to show how OpenMP library in C++ works and then to propose to apply newly acquired knowledge to familiar algorithms in order to speed up implementations of them. I found such deviation from the standard curriculum to be a useful exercise for the development of algorithmic mind-set and an interesting way to digress from solving customary problems which may seem boring sometimes. On the next lesson we switched to the approximation algorithms for NP-complete problems, on the third one to different optimization heuristics (for instance, hill-climbing, simulated annealing, etc.). I also planned to show the beauty of purely functional programming resorting to some easy to undestand but marvelous concepts like infinite lists. But... suddenly, just before the end of the third lesson among those ones, I am talking about, I found out that it was the last lesson, because nobody was planning to attend the following ones.

Well, I have taught schoolchildren algorithms for as many as 3 years, and that was a great experience! I believe I managed to create a friendly climate and to make a process of learning not only productive but also entertaining. But now I'm pretty tired, and, which is the more important, I became attached too much to those ones who visited us quite frequently during those years. Now most of our pupils graduated from school and I don't feel like it will be easy for me to start teaching a new group. At the point when I realized that, I became amazed to remember my school teachers most of whom managed to work with several generations of pupils. But I simply can't do the same thing, that's one of the reasons why at least for the next school year I have to give up teaching algorithms. And maybe not only for the next year, but only time will tell. Hope there will be a lot of volunteers among this year graduates to hand the lamp by means of sharing the knowledge they gained from us in the study groups with those ones who will visit these groups in the next years. And I also hope that these future teachers will be more successful in leading their pupils to great achievements than I was.

2. New personal rating peak on Codeforces

Even though any rating is unlikely to represent the actual strength of a person or of a team (just an example, I'm sure that Belgium national football team is not second strongest in the world but they were on the second place in FIFA rankings recently), it is still the only way to compare your level with skills of the others as well as to feel your own progress. And as for my rating on Codeforces, I couldn't surpass my best result for more than three years! I couldn't believe that I haven't made any progress during those years but my rating remained below the value which I reached once, in winter of 2012.

Finally the moment has come ;) In Round 300 I managed to solve 4 problems out of 8 and to make (!) 16 successful challenges. I should have solved one more task if I chose better strategy. But I failed to find the best moment to switch from hunting after new small bonuses for challenges to much more valuable source of points. Problem F required quite a lot of coding but the idea was completely evident to me. Anyway, solving half of the tasks and succeeding with the astonishing number of challenges was enough to gain a lot of rating points and to break a personal record at last.

I hope it won't take me so long to improve this new achievement as it was with the previous one.

1. Interactive Chess Viewer   

This semester I worked upon the huge project for the first time. And first of all, I shoud say, I was lucky to be able...

• to work together with my friend;
• to work towards the implementation of my own idea. Maybe, I can even say, my dream;
• to get two credits for the same project (one in the Computer Science Center, the other one at the university).

All of the above guaranteed that the project will be the primary goal for me during the semester and that I will devote most part of the time I spend at home to it. For the first time since long ago I felt the real purposefulness because I worked upon something not (not only, to be precise) because I had to do it, but because I wanted to see the result and to be able to use it. For the first time since long ago (I think, since the summer of 2012) I learned only those things which really mattered for me at the moment (in the contrast to the educational system which suggests us to learn everything not worrying whether the knowledge we acquire is vital for us or not) and that was great, that boosted my motivation a lot. That was like a deep breath of fresh air.

Well, I still haven't said a word about the project idea. You know, I'm a chess player. As many chess players do, I read special books in order to improve. These days it's often difficult to find enough time for reading at home, that's why most of us read in transport. But reading chess book without a board in front of you (to be more exact, without the possibility to move pieces) is sometimes more like a self-torture than a way to impove. And switching to a chess program on a tablet after each move is not a good usage of your time and your patience, too. The only solution, which I see, is to move the pieces on the diagrams drawn on the book pages. Yes, to inject some life into a static PDF file, so that each page will contain several interactive chessboards.

We didn't manage to finish the project during the semester because even if the idea may seem relatively easy, there is tons of work behind it. But we made a great progress and we had what to show the profs and the other students on the projects presentation in the end of the semester (and we even won the audience voting for the projects among those of our category). I'm almost sure that visualization works better than words, that's why I offer you to watch a screencast about our app.

Even though it works properly as you may have seen, there are still some uncompleted details which separate us from the product every chess player will be happy to use. And I hope, in the future we will find the time to complete the app, and thousands of people will enjoy reading chess books in it.

And if you laughed at the word "thousands", just look at this. My idea originated from this clumsy app with more than (!) one hundred thousand of downloads. Currently there is no good alternative to it, so everyone, who needs chess book reader, uses Chess Book Study. But I have no doubts in what will happen if someone implements an application which will be more comfortable to use. I think, we are halfway to the moment when we'll be able to know that for sure. 

Greenfest - 21.06.15

Three days ago the annual festival "Greenfest" took place at the Petrovsky stadium in Saint Petersburg. That was the tenth time the festival had been held, and (probably in honor of that anniversary) the organizers invited the most starry groups for the whole history of the "Greenfest".

Let's look through the festival lineup step by step.

The opening act was performed by the Russian band "Jack Action". I intentionally decided to skip their performance as the whole concert was too long even without it, but I've heard sounds of their songs while going to the stadium. Anyway, my friends told me that I haven't missed anything interesting. When the first band had already finished their performance, I was still in the queue watching how "non-progressive" men (i.e. those who bought an ordinary ticket but not the electronic one) are entering the festival venue without any need to wait because there were separate entrances for e-ticket and ordinary ticket holders, and the latter group was much less than the former one. Nice to see so many people who understand that many things are easy to do without going out from home, not nice at all to see how the organizers treat them.

Ten minutes before "Poets of the Fall" performance I managed to squeeze my way through a crowd of spectators (luckily, not too thick at that time) to where my friends were standing. I wasn't familiar with Finnish band works well enough, so I've heard most of them as if for the first time (probably even without "as if" part). To reproduce my impressions, I should share with you my notion about Poets' songs. I subdivide them into two groups: lyric songs like "Sleep" or "Where Do We Draw the Line" and the other ones with a lot of drum sounds. I enjoyed the first ones and didn't hear much sound other than the drumming while listening to the second ones. Quite familiar impression thanks to club concerts. In contrast to them, my ears didn't suffer so much from the loud noises in the open air. It is a perfect difference but I still can't understand the purpose of making the drums sound so loud as if they are the dominant part of the music. The last thing I'd like to say about the Poets' performance refers to the emotions on their faces. Thanks to the great operators' work, all of us have an opportunity to see the musicians' faces in all details on the huge screens on both sides of the stage. Marko Saaresto proposed us to "get ready to be mesmerized" (wow, the new word in my vocabulary learnt during the concert :) ) just before switching from "too-much-drumming-for-me" songs to the famous "Sleep, sugar", but in my opinion the most mesmerizing part of their performance was the face of the guitarist Olli Tukiainen. It reflected indescribable emotions!

The next band to come to the stage was the Icelandic "GusGus". I don't like the electronic music, that's why I can't say anything exciting about their performance. Just some notes:

• Sometimes their songs reminded me of "The Sisters of Mercy" compositions, and the latter band, as I see it, has something in common with Russian "Piknik". But don't try to apply transitivity to these analogies: in my view, "GusGus" and "Piknik" have nothing similar :)
• It's hard to comprehend why Icelanders were invited to the show where all the other participants, including the headliners, are too different from them, but it is evident why they appeared on the stage just between "Poets of the Fall" and "Muse". Otherwise, a lot of spectators (for example, myself) would come only to these two groups. 

The crowd became more and more thick. And, finally... one of the greatest live bands of all time, British "Muse" walked out on the stage. They are not frequent visitors to Saint Petersburg: their previous performance in our city took place for about four years ago, so that was a great luck to watch them live. "Punctual" british men occured to be the only band who didn't observe the time that evening. They were late for as much as a quarter of an hour. Quite agonizing suspense... And they were the only band whose arrival to the stage wasn't specially announced. So the "Drill Sergeant" appearance on the screens was all of a sudden, but soon his shouting voice was completely lost in the crowd buzz.

After an hour and a half of their performance I came to the conclusion that from the esthetic point of view their show looks much better if you enjoy it sitting in comfort at home and watching the good quality show recording. For example, check this one. But from the emotional point, there is nothing comparable to being just in front of the great show within a crowd of many thousands of Muse lovers. That's one of the reasons why now, several days after the festival, I can say that I was happy to attend it.

A lot of Muse fans don't like their new album "Drones". I was agree with them before the show, but I tend to disagree with them now. Actually, I changed my opinion after just a couple of songs. So... if you love "Muse" but dislike their last album, that means that you just haven't jumped to the accompaniement of their songs (or you jumped not briskly enough) ;)

The operators' work this time was beyond me. I have never seen such impressive combining of the real-time videostream with the elaborate effects.

I wouldn't have noticed one of them but our company consisted of attentive people ;) The effect, I'm talking about, revealed itself as follows: at some moment Matthew Bellamy's guitar was burning blue. At the same moment he was shown on the screen but the instrument in his hands wasn't glowing. It's interesting whether it was done intentionally or not.

If I visited the show without the company, I wouldn't notice one more interesting effect: you needed only to bend over a bit, and the sound suddenly would become dull. Although the effect seems to be easy explicable, I have never encountered it before.

Some of the videos accompanying the songs reminded me of the above-mentioned "Piknik" by their mystique filling. And watching the video for the "Knights of Cydonia" (attention to the screen on the right around 2:00) I recalled the landscapes we created in the OpenGL study group at school 5.5 years ago. Curiously enough, almost half of our company visited that study group :)

There was a lot of causes for smiling that evening. For instance, going out of the stadium we noticed that someone took one of those big black balloons, which were released near the end of the concert (see the photo), with himself (or herself). Just wondering, how to carry such a souvenir home and what to do with it there :)

Another case is connected with the quadrocopter which shot the concert flying above the stadium. We got used to its frequent appearances above us so much that the seagull flying over us provoked the joke about "the gull which is a quadrocopter at heart". 

More than four hours of standing in the crowd and jumping together with it, night passages from Petrovsky stadium to Chkalovskaya metro station and from Ozerki station to my house (for about 5.5 kilometers in total) made me feel much more tired than I may be even after my habitual 10 km jogging. Thus, I came to the conclusion about the necessity of doing a warm up before going to a concert as well as I always do it before jogging :)

The impressions of the evening didn't end up with the end of the concert. Achievement "to be in time to interchange the underground line approximately one minute before it becomes impossible" unlocked :)

Being already in the underground, we noticed that the Greenfest attribute in my hands lost the little finger, thus turning from the sign of the horns into another symbolic gesture.

Such attributes serve as useless but funny identification signs. You return home carrying this huge green glove and see another people with the same thing. These people are unfamiliar to you but now not completely unfamiliar: at least you know where they were just an hour ago, and they know the same about you. So you are not so faceless to each other as unfamiliar people usually are.

Well, it was the fascinating evening. I was very happy to be in the company of those of my friends, whom I see too seldom, and to become acquainted with some of their friends as well. All of you are great, thank you for those several hours! :)

Germinal (March 21 - April 19) overdue summary

I had to deviate from my initial plans to write three posts a month as the workload in April and May increased drastically. But now, when one of the reasons to switch to English here approaches, when I have a bit more time and when I am a bit less tired, it is perfect time to get clear of debts.

Two 30-day "months" have already passed, so, first of all, I am going to summarize these periods.

To begin with, here is my TOP 5 of events/achievements/impressions/etc. for Germinal:

5. I haven't written anything in my French language blog on lang-8 since last summer. And that is really bad as I don't have any other sources of writing practice in French. The good news is (and special thanks here to the Muse's "Megalomania" song as only remembering its lyrics and the line which starts exactly the same way I recalled that "news" is singular) that the first step was made. On the other hand, the first step was not followed by the second one due to the above-mentioned issues with the workload. The current goal is to start writing in French on a weekly basis.

4. This semester programming in the university was amazing and not only because of the glance at the functional paradigm about which I have already written, not only because of the work on the project about which I will write soon, but also because of the half of a single lesson in the middle of the semester. That time our prof returned from the design hackathon where participants' teams tried to create the new models for different components of TRIK robotic set (for physical components as well as for software and even for packaging). He showed us lots of wonderful slides created by the participants. I really enjoy familiarizing with design concepts. Firstly, they show the unlimited potential of human creativity. Moreover, they are very useful as being slightly transformed they may be successfully applied to another fields. I can't draw well and I'm not going to learn to draw either on paper or using the computer tools, even though I dream of a skill of drawing sketches which will be able to express my impressions or memories. But ideas live not on the paper but in our imagination. And you may draw almost anything in your imagination. That is why you can't say that ideas are not the things you may take advantage of. And that is why it is so essential to review other's sketches, to extract the ideas underlying them (of course, in your own interpretation which may have nothing to do with the original one) and to combine the ideas by means of creating your own sketches in your mind.

3. I have took part in several chess competitions during this period. The most memorable was the last one, the qualification for the Spassky Cup, which is the annual personal tournament for Saint Petersburg State University profs, staff and students. Qualification group in which I have to play is the strongest one (4 out of 5 strongest SPbSU faculties participate in it) but, thanks to SPbSU programming championship which was held exactly on the qualification day, I was unable to qualify according to the rules. So I was allowed to play in the simplest group. After my unconvincing win in the first round, the most part of the following games reminded destruction more likely than struggle. Thus, before the last round I was with the full score (having won 7 games out of 7). But I was not the only person who was in the lead. And I was not the only person who participated not in the proper qualification group. Luckily, there was no need to get the first place in order to proceed to the final stage. And my resulting second place was natural due to the fact that in the last round I played against the Woman Grandmaster from psychological faculty (by the way, the only grandmaster for the whole university). The title wasn't the only thing I knew about her. Last August Chess Olympiad was held in Tromsø, and she played there for Croatia women's team on the first board. Being defeated by far more experienced opponent is not bad at all. Learning nothing from your loss is not good at all. Unfortunately, that is the case. So, why is it here, why is it on the third position? Just because of the impression encountered for the first time. Because of the impression of being beaten in calm and cold-blooded way starting from the elegant tactic strike (which I refer to the ones which are almost impossible to notice in blitz chess for my current level and which surprised me a lot. In fact, I even estimated the position as slightly better for me merely a couple of moves before the strike) in the middle of the game and finishing with the endgame where my opponent might simply win due to her extra pawn but decided to make me run out of time taking the advantage in that component formed in the middlegame and making very fast moves.

2. VK Cup 2015 became the first programming competition for me in which teams of two were allowed to participate but not ordinary teams of three. Before the competition announce I was came close to abandon competitive programming. So that was quile a logical step to invite to participate with me my former teammate who had abandoned algorithmic competitions more than a year before that moment ;) We haven't expected much of our results. And we made, at least, not less than reaching the summit of our dreams advancing to the third round, the last online contest and the last but one stage in the whole competition. Putting the card before the horse, I should say that it was our last success. Next month we didn't proceed to the final stage. But the main thing was that after a while I felt the joy of team competitions once again. My partner's jokes (which irritated me before so much but which, I suppose, were the important part of our competitive spirit), absense of any responsibility for the result, last minutes accepted verdicts for quite easy problems - everything of that made the experience really cool! No matter, is it good or bad, that feeling of joy gave me back ambitions and desire for training. And three summer months are ahead which makes me think that everything depends on me. I won't have plenty of time but I believe that regularity overcomes duration, and to check that is the question of discipline. I believe that the set of vital exercises overcomes fanaticism, and I have a great opportunity to check if my notion of vital exercises have anything to do with reality. Ninety one day is ahead.

1. During summer between the last school and the first university year I tried to write app with GUI in Java for the first time (note, that I have no experience of coding in Java before that, even programming simple console apps). Well, Far Manager was not the best IDE for that purpose :) As you may suspect, I didn't succeed that time. And I had hated Java since then. In both cases when I couldn't avoid the usage of that language (i.e., while preparing Codeforces round and while translating some Codefights code snippets into Java) the code was pretty simple. When I invented the idea of the semester project for myself I hoped that Android app may be developed in some Python framework or another not-Java-tool quite easily. The fact that development with Java is easier, doesn't contain hidden dangers on every step (in contrast to the other options), etc. was frustrating... But it was late to abandon the project after several unsuccesful attempts with the other languages. Moreover, that was my own idea and my own dream to have the app I was going to create, so I wouldn't abandon it even if the possibility existed. But it would be hard to begin (and maybe I would have made another tries to start development in the other language) without our curator. He underestimates his contribution to our work but his persuasive words about Java helped me to make the first steps, which were the most important ones as I was afraid to commence erecting the huge building with the unfamiliar instrument in hand. And his estimation of our possibilities (I say "our" as I didn't work alone on the project), which was much closer to reality than ours, made us reformulating our May goal in the proper moment. The impossible goal (as it became evident after some weeks of work) was changed to the reachable one, And was reached, but that's another story for one of the following posts.

Only the "strike" part left. I've tried to return to the habit of watching one TED talk per day. The attempt wasn't as great as you may expect: I've watched six videos during Germinal and the best "strike" contains only four of them. Hope, I will perform longer "strikes" during the following months. Anyway, this part of the summary exists only in order to make habits of some of these strikes.

As usual, I will be glad to read your comments concerning my English, my writing style and the content. And note, it's not the cliché to conclude. Believe, you really help. Believe and comment ;) 

What happened this day in your own life?

Tridi, Morille (Round Morel), Germinal

As I have promised, once a decade (just a reminder: note that by saying "decade" I mean ten days but not ten years) I write about... just about something that, I hope, will interest you and will put some thought into your mind.

But before that I would like to thank two of you who read the previous text very attentively and after that pointed some of my mistakes out to me providing their messages with detailed explanations of what I said not in good English and examples of how to express the same idea better. To both of you: please, continue in the same way if it is not boring! To all of the others: feel free to join in! Of course, that refers to commenting the content of the post as well.

Well, it is time to switch to the main subject.

For about a year ago I read a book full of various ideas. Some of them seem absolutely intuitive (after you have already encountered them), though one should not forget that it is a common situation for a lot of really valuable concepts.

The book I am talking about is "Time-Drive" written by Gleb Arkhangelsky. One may recall that is is not the first time I mention it. And I think, not the last time. That book for me is among those bundles of ideas which cannot be thumbed through once and forgotten immediately after that.

And the idea to which I devote that post is about how to determine the most important fields of activity for yourself (believe me, there is nothing strange when you cannot simply answer that question for sure if you are limited to the number of subitems you give). The plan offered by Arkhangelsky is pretty simple: just write down the most valuable event for you each day and also mark off to which field of activity it refers. Each week choose "the event of the week". Once a month pick out "the event of the month". The representation of each sphere of activity will hint you at the desired conclusion.

From the previous spring I have tried to follow the suggested method. I should admit that some days I forgot about new routine duty to write down the "event of the day", but that fact does not matter much because the statistics cover more than 90% of the considered period (and even knowledge of a person who gave up a course in statistics not long ago is enough to understand that I have quite good data sample). Yesterday I summarized my notes and obtained the following distribution:

1. Programming (excl. hometasks in CSC and in the university) - 20%
2. Emotions - 12.3%
3. Chess - 10.8%
4. Time Management - 10.5%
5. CSC - 9.8%
6. French - 8%
7. Day regimen + Physical Activity - 7.1%
8. University (excl. English) - 6.8%
9. English - 4%
10. Bioinformatics - 3.7%

All of the other fields of activities haven't overpassed 3% barrier and thus were not elected into Duma included into that list.

I suppose that the above data needs some clarifications. To make things clear I should explain that

• "Programming" includes various competitions, work for Codefights and some other things like Kivy App contest or working upon the implementation of my own ideas.
• "Emotions" are those events which cannot be referred to any of the other categories but nevertheless were imprinted on my mind more than any other activity that day. These are meetings with my dearest friends whom I don't see often; no matter positive or negative but very important news; some completely new experience, etc. Of course, that doesn't imply that chess, competetive programming, studying languages or something else is devoid of emotions for me if it doesn't fit for that category.
• "Time Management" consists of well-timed sheduling, dealing with any possible issues beforehand, as well as of addition of some planning techniques to the daily routine.

And here are the conclusions which I can make basing on my year-long experience:

• The idea proved itself to be very cool! It doesn't take much time but it helps to recall easily "how it was". Just yesterday while reviewing my year-long notes I felt that it was a great year, that I had time to do many different things (and I haven't encoutered any remindings of unachieved goals which is essential if you seek for a source of inspiration but not of distress. The fact that actually there were a lot of unachieved goals does not matter in that case). 
• It's worth to determine the "event of the day" not before going to bed that specific day and even not the next morning but to wait for a week or so. That will help your mind to filter the tremendous flow of impressions and will leave only the most essential ones. Thus your choice will be more fair than the decision made out of hand. Here more general fact is deserving mention: from time to time let your mind to perform its work out of your control for some time, i.e. just give your mind some knowledge not just before it needs to be applied but in advance. Afterwards, you will perform better than if you don't allow your mind to "digest the food". Actually, you will profit from the most essential part of obtained knowledge but won't be perplexed by tons of unstructured information.   
• I tried to mark out "events of the week" and "events of the month" but couldn't find out how to make these characteristics meaningful.
• Maybe, the division of activities into fields should have been better. For instance, it's worh consideration to separate studies using the criterion "what" instead of "where", i.e. to join programming in CSC and in the university but to separate maths in the university from programming in the same place. 
• Maybe, I shouldn't have allowed myself to include emotions into the list. Now I suppose that I've come up with a better solution. The new concept is to maintain two lists: activity of the day and impression of the day. The first one will answer what is the most important for me or to which field I should turn to because I don't give it enough attention while I am sure that I should do so. The second list will be a shortened version of a personal diary. Here I should stop as I don't want to deepen into the reasoning why it's important to keep your own diary. I just think so.
• I should repeat the same thing as a year ago: I definitely need some stunning activity somehow connected with English! There were some during the year but they were not enough. Low ranking of that field is caused not by doing almost nothing (it is simply otherwise) but by doing almost nothing exciting. I am sure that efficient language studies should be connected with impressions. That will add some extra ties in your mind which will help you to memorize words, expressions and useful patterns. One should understand that when I have to look for the suitable word in the dictionary again and again while writing that post, although I'm completely sure that I know what it is and just cannot remember it, I don't get the impressions which I want to be accompanied on my way of perfecting.

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By the way, this time I looked into the dictionary 19 times to make sure that I'm right and 35 times in the cases when I couldn't come up with the appropriate word. For the whole post I spent 4h15. And the post itself is definitely smaller than the previous one, which is the only good detail. So, no visible progress with writing for now but, of course, one cannot expect it so soon (and cannot expect to notice visible progress at all). For now it means that I should keep practicing only.