Eugene Ronin / Евгений Ронин

The Net vs. The Real World.

emaster — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:33:04 +0000

Some people say something like «there are only the Net phenomena». I wonder if someday people will tell «It’s only Real World stuff, just ignore it».

Yesterday I overheard Angry Birds theme, translated by some FM-radio. This is quite strange for me. If i was told ten years ago that music from some computer game was translated by ukrainian radiostation — surely I would have thought the guy is joking.

General Frost came into town

emaster — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:07:20 +0000

First half of this winter was unusually warm — we hadn’t any snow until middle of January. And then — bah! White Winter with a Russian flavor — a lot of snow and very cold. Now we have about -15 Celsius (5 ºF).

So I have some old kid’s fun — melt ice on frozen balcony window with my palm and look how it freeze again. When glass is really cold — it looks very interesting — you see as crystal of ice forms and glass freezes back.

First one is my older handprint, then fresh one with ice crystal formed, and then zoomed one.

Idioms and translation.

emaster — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:22:13 +0000

Russian translation of Nickelodeon’s Spongebob Squarepants scares me sometimes. In this episode Squidward dares Bob to go out Krab’s at night (for dumping garbage). Bob was scared, but when he returns to Krab’s he said — «a piece of cake» and snaps his fingers. It was translated on Russian as «give me one cake please». . . . → Read More: Idioms and translation.

My vocabulary

emaster — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 18:21:48 +0000

testyourvocab.com — the site helps me to face sad truth about my English. My vocabulary was estimated and it contains about 11000-12000 words. It’s very modest vocabulary, i think. Also, I believe in my case this estimation a bit too optimistic. I know too much very rare words like «meadow», «whim», «shrill» but often don’t . . . → Read More: My vocabulary

Why English is so difficult for russian-speaking persons?

emaster — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:43:52 +0000

Maybe because Russian language itself is very complex, so all necessary brain cells are already used by it? No!

But Russian and English are very different, so russian-speaking people (including me) usually have similar problems with English:
1. A and The. Russian language doesn’t have nor indefinite, nor definite articles. This means Russians have a tendency to skip both articles, or use one instead of another.
2. Word order in English sentences is much more strict, than in Russian ones. So russian-speaking make a lot of mistakes, trying to copy russian sentence structure.
3. Verbs and their tenses. English verbs are hellish nightmare for Russians.

These weak points very typical for people with native Russian, who learn English now.

Balaclava

emaster — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 21:51:05 +0000

Very interesting — ski mask, or ‘balaclava’ used by special forces and SWAT all around the world — was named after small Ukranian city Balaclava. Two century ago, when Great Britain fought Russia in Crimea war — it was invented by some british soldiers. Crimea’s winter was so freezing, that soldiers forced to use knitted . . . → Read More: Balaclava

Can we make the World a better place without ANY efforts?

emaster — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 06:50:58 +0000

I still can’t believe in plain and stupid fact — my current mobile phone has more computer resources (memory, processor speed. etc) than my desktop PC ten years ago. And when we talk about modern PCs — we need to understand that all of them have more computation power than mainframe supercomputers of 20-th century. This is vast power on our fingertips, and it usually wasted.

Processor(s) of desktop PC idle for 90 percent of time. We can browse Net or composing some report for a boss — out PC mostly idle anyway. It’s just too powerful to these mundane tasks. What we can do with this excessive might?

Personally, I use World Community Grid software to calculate some distributed tasks for scientific or medical needs. It doesn’t cost me a penny, but maybe some day save someone (or mine!) life. Also there are tens of other distributed calculation projects here — choose your own way to harness of your PC power.

Let’s start it…

emaster — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 22:29:18 +0000

Hello, my name Eugene Ronin.

Today I’ve decided to start English blog. This is quite a decision for me, because my English is very work-oriented, and I use it for business communication and customer interaction only. I believe I need to change it and start to speak and write just for fun. There is only . . . → Read More: Let’s start it…