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We went tubing yesterday with some friends.

Of course, I was late to get my butt off home and ended up being an hour late to pick up Olga. She was pissed since other folks had left and supposedly were already at the destination .

Yet, everything happens for a reason. To my luck, these guys managed to somehow get lost., even though they had been there at least 5 times before. They ended up spending more than an hour cruising around and sounded quite confused on the phone. All in all, we  arrived first and Olga was off my back.

The highlight of the drive was some crazy biker who passed me at the speed I have never seen before anybody driving bike at. I checked my speedometer - it showed 120mph. Yet, this dude just flew beside me. He must have been doing 130 or 140 on a bike! Incredible. How do crazy kids like this live to grow up and manage to remain in one piece? It probably has to do with statistics. Enough die, some remain. It's all about math, goddammit!

A piece of advice: if you go to Butts Tubes, do yourself a favor and show up early in the morning! When we arrived, we found ourselves in the tail of two incredibly long lines (one to get tickets, another - to get on the bus). Spending 2 hours under blazing sun may be fun for somebody but that definitely ain't me.

Between me and Olga, one could make a very organized person. Separately, both of us forget things all the time. I forgot sun-screen. Fortunately she did not. Considering how much time we spent under the sun it was good thing. I paid her back with a towel, later. I knew she'd forget it so took two with me.

The river was way slow. We had to raw too much and considering I am a lazy bum, in general, I had less fun in the tube. Fortunately, there were a whole bunch of cool rock-islands. We camped on those and enjoyed the wealthy supply of beer we took along in two coolers. It was not that bad, after all. Water, sun and beer is always good. Also, some rocks had deep water and you could jump. That's when Marcus lost his cap. I fished it out down the river, later, though

The day did not pass without an accident. Olga lost her sun-glasses under a waterfall and  I forgot to put sun-screen on my legs. Boy, it was burning when I got home! Sun-burn is no joke. I was moaning whole night and barely managed to go to sleep. Still feels itchy but I do not have a feeling of wanting to die to avoid the pain, any more.

In the evening we ended up in some nearby bar. At 9, some local band was supposed to perform. The bar-tender told us, the lead singer was bringing his wife to sing together. Bar-tender thought it was pretty cool but we wisely decided to depart, especially since we were done with foods and drink.

The waitress was kinda cute...

 

Google launched open-source projects hosting site . It looks pretty good. I guess I will have to register something and try it out :)

At first you feel a bug crawling up your neck, then you feel the cold. Not the cold of a lame-ass ice but a cold of burning sensation. It dripps down your neck and leaves a red burning line across the back.

Then it starts slowly... very slowly. Lungs feel up with smoke. Smoke's hot. Hot is light, lighter than cold air. Human body is 70% water, much heavier than air. Your body dehydrates and fills with hot smoke. It loses weight, takes off and starts floatng in the air.

God, it feels good.

Then there is a click. A loud one, actually. Something in the mechanism breaks. Oh, don't they always? You feel your back hurts from the fall, but now you hit the head to the floor and it makes you dizzy.

Dizzy's good. You don't really want to feel anything right now. Just melt with the air, just imagine for a second that you are one tiny, meaningless particle in the universe. You don't matter. Nobody cares about you. Nobody bothers you. You don't have to think, or worry.

Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Alarm rings. First time you ignore it, but you know it is coming back. You know how you set it up. You know your damned self, too well. You know one is not going to wake you up. So it is going to ring again. And then again. Three should do it, after all you are not deaf, YET.

And there it goes. You open one eye. Take a quick glance at the mess in the room you made last night (or more precisely - early morning), when you came back after night out with friends.

F..ck, time to go to work. You are gonna be late again and that fat white-trash bitch is gonna be pissed.

Do you care?

You are just a tiny particle in the universe. Just a meaningless particle that does not matter.

I really do not like default Firefox theme. It look like a 5 years old kid's toy. Unfortunately, up until now alternatives were even worse. Most of them feel like lunatics were creating these terrible greeon-on-black-and-some-red nightmares.

Fortunately, there is a solution now. Somebody had common sense enough to "steal" Safari skin. Oh, well - at least it looks much more pleasant :)

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1322/

Since the rise of Google a whole cast of people emerged who do not get a simple fact:

Wisdom of the universe is not contained simply in top 10 results of Google searches.

It is annoying. Folks, you can not just google some crap and think you know everything about anything. Most of the time, it takes much deeper understanding of things.

Sigh

JetBrains announced a new product for Java developers - TeamCity. According to the announcement, it is an intelligent team environment, extending upon the intelligent IDE from the same vendor (IntelliJ IDEA of course). Feature set looks really promising and knowing JetBrains' implementation excellence, expectationa are real high.

Read more at: http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/

This happened to me today and I thought it was funny enough to share.

So, I am doing a little research on cheap IP Telephony solutions. I know Vonage because they have so much advertising - it just sunk in my mind. But what I also know from the word-of-mouth, anecdotal evidence is that their service is not too reliable or cheap. At least, my impression from what I heard is that they grew so fast, they lacked quality in the process.

I also remember that some of my friends are using a smaller-shop alternative to Vonage that they are very happy with. Unfortunately, I do not remember the name of the service and these friends of mine are not online. So I fall back to Google, of course.

Now, I need to type something sensible. I try "ip telephony" but it returns all the big shots and nothing like what I need.

And then I have this idea - if these guys are good, they must have bought "vonage" as a keyword on Google, eh? So, excited with the thought I type "vonage" in Google and sure 'nough, the company I was looking for shows up as #2 hit.

nice :)