Pavel

One of the new shows on our channel

2021-04-21T20:08:59.958Z

I want to tell you about a new show on our channel. Because of that show, I returned home very late on Monday, rather on Tuesday already.

I was assembling the promotional video for an advertiser presentation, but I didn't start doing it from the beginning. It was started by another editor, who needed to leave for a few days. She did nine versions of the video, but our bosses wanted more and more.

I did three new version more. But the next day I had to do another one which was accepted finally.

This is a some sort of the cooking show. Three families, husbands and wives, try to win. To win they need to cook the best meal. They all cook the same meals. A pro chef shows to wives several recipes which their husbands have to cook. But the feature of the show is a wife commands to her husband in remote mode. She can see her husband on a monitor. And husbands can only hear their wives. The meaning of the show is the winner will be that couple who has the best mutual understanding. The husbands have only a hour for cooking. Then wives taste the dishes blindfolded and set ratings. Who win will get the 100 thousand roubles as a prize.

During the cooking part of the show wives are shouting and swearing on their husbands, because time is limited, and to become a winner want all. But the husbands have a big red button which switch off the connection with their wives. And if wives became too emotional, some husbands pressed the red button.

About book Ana Kai Tangata

2021-04-14T20:26:02.757Z

During my English learning course, I was reading the book Ana Kai Tangata. It is a collection of mystic and mysterious tales. The tale, the name placed in the title of the whole book, talks about one man. His name is Max, he is a scientist. He takes part in a biologist expedition on the Rapa Nui island. It has to discover the caves on the island. Max already visited this island in the past. He has many interesting facts and knowledge about the island, its peoples, their traditions and history. He is talking to other members of their expedition what he knows about the island at the beginning of the tale. Beside him, the expedition consists of five more persons - their leader Kyle, another man Barry and three women Alejandra, Rita and Cassie. Max doesn't like Kyle. And he highlighted Cassie out of their group. He liked her much more than others.

They spent the first week on the island in different things but didn't start their direct work about learning the caves. They lived in one of the hotels on the island which owned by a local, a former scientist. He insisted they had to make some rites before visiting the caves, something like sacrificing for spirits of the island.

When, finally, the expedition started learning one of the caves, Max got in a strange situation. He was alone in the cave and saw the huge amount of small bugs on the cave's ceiling. They formed strange curved patterns and glowing different colours. And after it, he felt something strange and came to his normal condition three hours later even. Max remembered nothing that was with him at that time.

Max faced a mysterious situation before, in one of his earlier expeditions. There they saw an unknown creature in mountains, and then his friend died in mysterious circumstances. Max never talked about to anybody, at least the whole story, but when he left alone together with Casie, he felt some trust in her. They want to visit a mentor of Max, who lives on the island but in other hotel. His name is Altazor. But that time they didn't visit him.

Cassie also said Max, she had seen him with several local people near the hotel, but Max didn't remember that. And when Cassie came to Max, the moment he hadn't remembered what was with him in the cave, the floor around him was covered with bare feet trails. And when Max worked in the caves the next days he faced with abnormal behaviour of insects but this time he kept clear conscious

Thoughts about time

2021-03-01T21:24:28.235Z

I recently was reading the popular scientist book about the origin of all and about laws of the Universe. Just for the training of thinking in English, I am going to write some my thoughts about the nature of time. I decided to write one long-read post instead of three small.

Firstly, what time is? Is it really exists objectively or people made it up for their comfort?

We think time is like some process. It is constantly and continuously. Time moves in one direction only, from past to future. I think time maybe like a flow or a river. There is an idiom 'river of time'. All things in the Universe are into that flow. The flow is unstoppable. Even if something or you, for instance, stay in one place without moving, you are move in a flow of time. Actually, everything consists of some more little things, molecules, atoms, and farther, from more and more little particles. And if you stay still these particles moving into your body. But what, if we imagine there is an ultimate particle, that can't divide further. If it stays still would it move in time?

Time is changing. People are getting old, plants grow, water evaporates, and so on. Cells divide, molecules move, atoms create new molecules. Time moves for these things. But if we take our ultimate particle and put it in a place like a full vacuum. It won't move, it won't change - can we say time is passing for it? Maybe it freezes in time? Everything around will be changed, but our particle won't. If we wait for a year and take our particle and it won't be changed - does it mean it was in stasis? Can we say each object has its own time and these times are not the same?

People a long time ago made up to split time into parts to observe it. When they started dividing day and night they invented the concept of time itself. If we haven't memory we perhaps can't feel the moving of time. We would be in the now always and the concept of time hasn't a sense for us.

We can't move in time backward. If time is changing we can't cancel what already has happened. But what if time is a human inventing or an ability only, can we imagine there is something or somebody in the Universe existing without time or out of time. Then they can appear at any point of our time scale if see from the human side. The changing has no sense for them, then they can be in any time, from our point of view. Or maybe everything is for them simultaneously.

Einstein said time is relative. The faster your speed the slower is going your time. If you take twins and launch one of them to space with a speed near the speed of light for a year, then for the remaining brother forty years on Earth will pass .

We can approximately determine how much time passed using our 'inner' clock. But in different circumstances, we can feel the time passing in different ways. Remember how time goes slowly when we are waiting for something that we need or how fast goes the time of a vacation.

People learned to count time with external devices like clocks. They let us use a common scale with other people and appear in the same place at the same time without the necessity of using our 'inner clock'. People can count time, but can not handle it. We can't freeze time around us, can't rewind time forward or backward. We don't know exactly what time is being. Maybe when we would know it we could handle time.

My lunch

2021-02-15T20:57:42.618Z

In the last months, I have lunch at my work at the same place. It is a Turkish restaurant near my work. Actually, it is on the ground floor of the same business centre but has a separate entrance. Every working day I have lunch usually around 3 p.m. At this time there are few people there, often I eat alone or with my co-worker.

I guess, they have a very democratic price for this lunch, it's just 350 roubles. We have a canteen on the basement floor and if I buy lunch there its price can be about 500 roubles, but there you get meals of mediocre quality and without restaurant service.

In Turkish restaurant, you get the meals of high level served on good quality dishwares by waiters. Their chief has an amazing level of cooking meat. Any of his dishes with meat has a perfect quality. For the months of having lunch there, I didn't have any complaints about meats and they were ones of the best meats I had tasted.

And after lunch, they served Turkish tea. It is just black tea, but very tasty and fragrant. They made it in copper pots and served in beautiful glasses.

About breakfast

2021-02-15T20:23:56.430Z

My son was doing his English homework, he had to retell the text about the typical breakfasts in the different countries. I thought about a typical Russian breakfast. I like to have a hearty breakfast. Generally, I can eat everything as my breakfast even soup. There was a time when my wife with my son went to the country house in summer and my wife had cooked for me the big pot of borsch, and for about two weeks I ate only it every morning and evening.

If you take a more traditional approach to breakfast, then you want to eat all kinds of porridges or fried eggs or omlet with fresh vegetables. I like pancakes with sour cream or jams on breakfast, but if there is a person who cooked it for me because it's too lazily to make it myself. I like different meals cooked from cottage cheese. Also, often we have the remains of the previous dinner or supper for breakfast. Sometimes I have just a cup of coffee or tee and a couple of toasts with butter and jam.

The Moscow snowfall

2021-02-15T19:58:08.821Z

The most significant event of the week was a snowfall in Moscow. The snow was started on Friday night and went till Sunday. When we got up on Saturday morning we saw an enormous amount of snow outside. The snow was everywhere - all cars were covered with a thick layer of snow, and all roads were under snow as well.

We watched as a few cars tried to go out from their parking places. Their owners had to dig up them from under the snow just to try going out. If it was the all-wheel-road car they had a chance, but if it was a small car, it gave up after some trying and returned home or went to the closest bus stop or call a taxi. Although the taxi price raised three or four times.

I needed to escort my son to the sports school. We even didn't think to use our car. A tram went from our home to the sports school, but when I'd look at a public transport app I noticed a lot of trams icons in the same place, I guess, something happened on the line and we needed to use the less comfortable way of getting to the sports school with bus and subway with two changes.

The streets weren't cleaned off the snow when we went outside, and it was too hard walked to the bus stop through snow heaps.

My computer's adventures.

2021-02-08T21:19:31.566Z

I bought the first Apple computer in 2009. It was an iMac. Since the time it works like clockwork without any troubles. Nowadays in 2021 after almost 12 years it doesn't lose its relevance.

I did some upgrades to increase his features. Once I bought it I add RAM memory to its maximum in 16 Gb.

A few years ago I change the DVD-ROM to an SSD drive to speed up my computer. After that, he has two hard drives - one big for data and fast SSD as the bootable drive to high speed working of the operational system and apps.

Three years ago the video board of the iMac burnt. At first, I wanted to change it to a new one, but it cost was too expensive, and a master offered me to change just the chip on the video board. It was cheaper almost three times. I agreed and my computer was repaired for two days.

After one year the video board burnt again. I called the same repair service and this time they resoldered a new chip again.

The last time my video board has burnt again after 1.5 years a week ago. To this time I found a new excellent repair service where I fixed a lot of my Apple devices. It locates more comfortably than the previous one, and their level of service and knowledge is liked me more.

The master told me he can insert a new video card in my computer for a lesser cost than the previous repair service that was fixing my chip in the old card by resoldering it. I agreed and after two days took my computer home. Besides, they for free changed one of the computer fans which worked unstable, and which one could be the cause of card burning.
It worked perfectly, but not long. After two hours he started freezing. I called service and they asked to get the computer to them. They found the cause of the freezing - it was the defect of the new video card's temperature sensors. They promised to buy a new video card and change it as soon as possible. And after they would test the computer's work for a day and ship it to my home if everything would OK.

Old photos

2021-02-08T20:09:33.158Z

I found the site on Internet where are a lot of old photos. These photos show the life of people in our country in villages at the end of 19th and the start of 20th centuries.

It has been passing about a hundred years only since that time but it is a wonder how many changes have appeared in our life.

Families on these photos usually had many children, five and more. People usually had very bad wear, if only they weren't photos made by ethnographers for their investigations. In this case, people wore their best clothes, often which were passed from their parents and used for special cases. It looks very strange to me, the dress has many layers, and includes many additional things like decorations and strange headdresses.

Besides I was interested in the indoor design of living spaces in these villages. My wife likes a such design very much. She is going this summer to decorate the veranda we have built this year in our country house. She has many vintage things in the style of the Russian village which were passed to her by her grandmother. Many things were restored by my wife.

I saved some photos to show my wife, and I think they may be useful to her design ideas.

Medical examinations

2021-02-01T21:10:11.625Z

Since my son is a professional sportsman he has to pass medical examinations regularly twice a year. If he passes it he gets medical permission to take part in training sessions and competitions.

I remembered how we came to that medical examination first time. There were many little kids and their parents and most of them came the first time too. We spent many hours passing through all medical specialists.

Nowadays, my son passes this examination himself just in a couple of hours because he has known everything about it. What specialist is better to visit first, which documents to prepare and when.

I guess, a such event is very useful, because a regular medical examination lets monitor health and find any deviations. And besides, it is good training of the child's independence.

The American Gods

2021-02-01T20:37:16.485Z

Today I have read the book by Neal Gaiman named The American Gods. I wanted to read this book for a long time since time I had bought the book about the 1oo best books of the fantastic genre.

It was an interesting book enough, so I could read down it in just one day. That was the story about gods, old gods, and new gods. The people who came to the American continent from other different countries brought their gods in their heads. But as time passed, people started to forget their gods and those lost their forces. With time people started to believe and pray other things, like television, internet, cars, planes, and so on, and the new gods appeared. And the book is talking about the war between old and new gods and about the man who has got caught up in it.

The book is read easily, there is a lot of interesting info about myths, gods and fairy creatures of many countries. The plot has many twists and until the end keeps in suspense.

There is TV-show shot by that book and a graphic novel. I guess I can watch the show now, and compare it with the book.