I have been lately thinking a lot about what I want to do in life and I gradually come to a conclusion that working for an employer is not mine. There are really several reasons. One is that I am a very opinionated person and if I feel something is right or wrong it takes a good effort for anyone to convince me otherwise. I have been known for starting arguments in email groups and keeping the flame up long after everyone has lost interest. This makes it hard to survive in a team with another strong personality - my boss. Secondly, I feel that working as an employee I give the best of me to the company and what I get in return is the paycheck, a temporary monetary reward which (after the basic needs are satisfied) is very easy to waste on stuff I don’t really need. It takes huge self discipline to put aside some of it for retirement but the main problem is, there are really not many options as far as choosing where to invest.

Now the key word here is to “invest”. We work for a man to get paid so that then we can turn around and invest into somebody else’s business. Why not start a business for yourself, or become a real investor, and I mean investor in the true meaning of this word. Buying stocks, let alone mutual funds, is not really investing. With so many layers between you and the company, it looks more like gambling. So, instead of “gambling away” your savings and “selling your life” to your employer, why not think of how you can put your efforts into building a real long term investment? One that would make you feel accomplished and would keep on giving long after you are gone…

I recently read a book about retirement. Didn’t mean to but it came as a freebie when I opened some bank account. So, in that book the author says that the typical problem with people who retire is that they think they can get all the money they saved, buy a ranch or a winery (if this is something they dreamed of) and live happily the rest of their life breeding horses or selling wine. The problem is that it takes time to figure out what you like to do in life and expecting you will know it at the first try in unrealistic. Very often reality is far from what the expectation is.

What I am coming to is, it makes sense to figure out early on what you like to do in life and start working towards it. For example, if a winery is your dream, why not buy land and slowly start improving it? Granted land needs attention and buying land when you live in a city is not practical, however it doesn’t mean everything is lost. You can move, or you can hire a helper. All you need is to have the goal in mind. If there is a will there is a way.

Things are a bit easier if your goal is to start a business online and turn it into your retirement investment. You can do it from anywhere, in your spare time, by nights or weekends. If you are really lucky you will be able to negotiate flexible hours at work. And if you “hit the jack pot” you will get laid off and will have a lot more time at your hand to spend on your investment (at least until you find another job).

So what I am thinking is that we are too often get caught up in the routine and forget to look at the big picture. Ask yourself, whatever you are doing right now, is it what you want to keep doing for the rest of your life? If not, what is it that you really want to do and what did you do so far to get to your goal?

We met during the first day and then I went to my friend’s house for the night. He lives with his wife and a 2 y.o. son in a 2-bedroom apartment on the 9th floor of a high rise building in the northern Moscow suburbs. My friend is currently unemployed but soon after he got laid off he started a small motor oil distribution business which fairly quickly picked up and currently pays his bills. My friend’s wife doesn’t work.

A terrible accident happened during my visit. At the night I was staying with my friend he got a call from the town where his father-in-law lived. The police was on the other end and they said that the father-in-law died in his apartment. He lived alone and was 70 years old. This summer has been extremely hot in Russia and older people who don’t have air conditioning in their houses (which is probably around 99% of population) is susceptible to strokes and other types of heart malfunction. I suspect this could have been the cause of the death.

I felt uncomfortable staying with my friend after the news broke off, so I left as early next day as I could. The next day I met a couple more of my friends and spent the remainder of the day browsing the Red Square and Kremlin.

This was the first time I had been inside Kremlin walls. The complex wasn’t open to public when I was in Moscow last time. I also visited the Diamond Fund which is an exposition inside Kremlin featuring expensive gemstones and jewelry. The most remarkable item was the Shah Diamond which Russia got as a gift from a Persian Shah after Russian diplomat and writer Alexandr Griboyedov was murdered in Tehran in 1829 by a mob. A pass inside the Kremlin walls cost 350 rubels (around $12) and Diamond Fund ticket was 500 rubels (around $17). I wanted to visit the “Oruzheynaya Palata” armory but got too tired.

Moscow is a very expensive city. When I was meeting my friends we stopped by a few coffee places and I learned that coffee prices vary from $2 to $5 per cup of brewed Americana. A bottle of water at the train station cost me around $2 and the subway ticket was $1. At the restaurant I met my schoolmates the beer was around $6 per 0.5 liter mug (16.9 oz). Property prices are at New York’s level and cars are twice as expensive as they are in the US. I believe one needs to have at least the US level of income to be able to live in Moscow.

The one fact about the palace that I did memorize is that it literally has two faces. The Northern side is built in western style while the Southern side (pictured above) carries distinct Eastern elements like “There is no Conqueror, except Allah.” engraved above the entrance. This fact symbolizes multicultural nature of Russian Empire of 19th century.

A complete opposite of the failed Vorontsovsky tour was the tour we took in Foros which was free and given by a guy who wrote a book about the place and also has a website about it. The tour took 3 hours and was one of the best tours I have ever been to. Besides learning a lot of facts about the place, the guide also offered many fun stories from the past. One of them was about Gagarin, the world’s first spaceman. He was in Foros in 1961 and twice nearly got himself killed due to his own careless acts. This angered a lot Khruschov, the head of the state back at that time, since Gagarin was supposed to come in person to the 22nd Communist party conference and instead was being treated in intensive care with multiple head fractures.

Among other things, we were told what the biggest predator in Crimea is (fox), how to make a juniper tincture or how covering a lake bottom with a plastic film can kill trees around it (that’s what the current park owner did). The 3 hours went really fast and everyone got a signed book at the end, we bought two. :-)

Another remarkable place on the south Crimea sea shore is Yalta Zoo. We went there with kids and spent half a day going from cage to cage studying the animals. Yalta Zoo is beautifully located on a slope of a hill, split into several levels connected with many stone stairs. By its compact size it reminds me a large petting zoo in the US (you can buy food and feed the animals as you go) but the kinds of animals it has are more like those you would see in a normal zoo - tigers, ostriches and bears (several kinds).

Adjacent to the zoo is “Polyana Skazok”, a place full of sculptures depicting various fairy tale characters. You could visit the two places in one day, we however had small kids and opted to separate the trips since kids got pretty tired after several hours walking around the zoo.

I mentioned in my first blog post that Crimea has magnificent nature and warm climate which is said to have helped many people in the past recover from deadly diseases. Crimea is facing a huge problem however, people run it down at an increasing speed. Wherever you go you can find trash on the streets and in the water. Both of our kids got sick from some sort of stomach poisoning (I suspect dirty sea water). I personally witnessed several barbarian acts by tourists. In one instance several young men and women placed beer cans on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea and shot them down with a BB gun. Unless the locals and the government bring everyone’s attention to the problem and urgently act the once beautiful land will soon turn into a big waste yard.

The climate is sub-tropical. During the 6 days we have stayed so far we had sunny weather with around 30’C temperature and just an occasional short rain in the morning or afternoon. The sea warms up to 26’C during the day. The heavenly climate and gorgeous landscape has been the reason why Crimea attracts crowds of tourists from Russian and Ukraine and was the place for summer homes of some high ranking Soviet officials before the regime collapsed.

We are renting two rooms in a private house located in Alupka which we booked in advance after we called several numbers we found via this website. My mother-in-law did all the calling since we were still in the US at that time. The property we rented is a short (but steep) walk from the sea coast and overall I am very pleased with it.

One of the rooms is larger than the other and has air conditioning. The other one is smaller (just big enough to fit a double bed and a couch) and has no AC. It is however facing north (we can even see the sea between the tree branches) and is overshadowed by a large fig tree, so it is cool in the room even without AC. The fig has been the source of fresh fruits every morning which are best when eaten with the desert wine made out of local variety of grape called Muckat.

Talking about wine, we went to Massandra’s wine-testing yesterday. They give you 10 glasses each filled with a different kind of wine. Only one is a typical dry wine with no sugar, others are sweet varieties with the sugar content up to 22% in their most famous kind - “White Muscat of Red Stone”. The wines for this variety are grown in a village located around a large red stone which is believed to give the drink its unique taste.

The tasting is accompanies by an interesting story about each of the wines. My favorite was #5 in the batch - “Red Portveyn Massandra Crimea”. It has 17.5% of alcohol and 10% of sugar content and somewhat reminds me the Porto wines I had back in Chicago. You can buy any of the wines you taste and more in the company store. The Portveyn is 30 gryvnas for a 0.75 liter bottle (around $4) and the Muscat variety is 120 grivnas (around $15) for the same size bottle. I have been told I can buy these wines when I get back to Kharkiv for even less.

In the next few days we are planning to visit Chatyr-Dag caves and take the kids to the sculpture museum “Polyana Skazok”. We already went to the Yalta Zoo and climbed up the Ai-Petri mountain, I will write about these two places in my next blog post.

One thing that is gradually getting better over time is Android Marketplace. It’s been constantly adding apps and over the past year I have installed quite a few of them, all free so far. The introduction of GPS Navigate functionality to Google Maps has been the killer event (and was highly publicized). Below is the list of 15 lesser known apps that I love and use daily.

Advanced Task Manager

As I make use of more apps, my phone will occasionally run down to a state when buttons don’t click as well and windows don’t open as fast. This happens if the OS is not keeping up removing the apps on time. Advanced Task Manager is a free app that allows you selectively kill or quickly uninstall the apps you don’t need. Another cool feature: “Shake-to-End-All”. Yes, it literally does that!

Aldiko

Love books? Aldiko is the best Android app for bookworms. There is a decent collection of public domain books plus you can order a variety of great titles online. It is nothing like the zillion books you will find on Kindle but it does one thing Kindle cannot do - it will let you export and read an ePub e-book you get from any other place.

Astrid

Task management is an essential part of my daily activity. As a previous user of a Windows Mobile phone I got used to the fact that task manager is a built in part of the phone. I was a bit surprised when I didn’t find a Todo application on G1. Astrid is a little but powerful app that does just that.

ConnectBot

ConnectBot is a powerful SSH & Telnet terminal for Android. I use it a lot to monitor my websites when on the go. Being an open source project, Android enables easy porting of apps from other platforms, something iPhone users can only dream about.

EasyTether

I actually just discovered EasyTether last week. It took me just a few minutes to install the free version and off I go browsing the internet via my wireless connection. The speed is decent, it actually feels faster than when I do it directly on my G1. The paid version will open up the sites that require SSL connection (anything that starts with “https”).

GoogleListen

GoogleListen is currently my most used application. Whenever I have a few minutes, or if I drive somewhere, I turn it on and listen to the latest news coverage or the Marketplace podcast from NPR. Another NPR’s show I love is Car Talk. Google Listen allows you to search and manage podcasts in a similar way like iTunes however you are not restricted to any specific directory and can add any podcasts available on the web.

GoogleSkyMap

This is my daughter’s favorite app. See the stars and planet as they appear on the sky in your geographic location at the current time. Move the phone around and see the picture change to reflect the part of the sky directly behind the phone screen. Tilt the phone down and see what the sky looks like on the opposite side of our planet.

GoogleVoice

I have been a Google Voice user since when the service launched as GrandCentral and naturally I installed and have been using the app ever since it launched on the Android platform. A free phone number with call forwarding and voice mail, this is what Google Voice essentially is.

Key Ring

You can do it on a piece of paper, you can do it on iPhone, now you can do it on any Android phone too! Store all your rewards and loyalty cards in one place and slim down your wallet. Adding cards is easy too, just scan them using your phone’s camera one at a time, and pick store names from the list.

PointInside

I have not been using PointInside as much as other apps, probably because I don’t go out shopping very often, however I can see where this app can be very useful for someone not familiar with the mall layout or the stores it hosts. The app basically allows you look up any shopping mall by location and will help you find any store you need, or that restroom you are desperately looking for.

Shazam

Has this ever happened to you - you are listening to radio and really love a particular tune, but then the song changes or a commercial break starts, and you keep wondering what was that song and who performed it. Wonder no more! Shazam is an app that will listen to the tune for you and will find it in Amazon MP3 store or YouTube.

ShopSavvy

I previously reviewed this great application for comparison shopping. ShopSavvy let’s you scan the product bar code and check prices in the stores around and online. The application keeps the history of products you previously checked, set price alerts, and automatically share your scanned products via Twitter.

Speedometer

I used this app when we went on a cross country skiing trip this past winter. I am sure avid skiers and runners have more advanced tools at their hand however for a rookie like me seeing the distance I ran each day and my average speed was an enlightenment. The ability to see my trail on a map is a plus too.

Twidroid

Twidroid is the best Twitter client for Android I have tried. Sharing photos, easy re-tweets, search,.. you got it! I wish the Twitter itself has lived to my expectations as much as Twidroid does. So far I have been puzzled on what exactly Twitter is and how I can use it.

WaveSecure

WaveSecure is an advanced application for backing up your phone data and locking/locating your phone in case you lose it. I just signed up last week and have not had a chance to really use it but the feature list and the online support site looks very impressive. The service is free if you install the app before the end of March 2010, and $19.99 after that. So hurry up, only 5 days left!

1. Walmart is staging a new price war, this time in video games. Last Wednesday GameStop’s stock tumbled 8.26% on the news and caused a discussion on the topic ‘can Walmart cause deflation’ on NPR Morning Marketplace on Thursday.
2. Do you have a Google Gmail account? You can send a free post card to your friend with this free Google sponsored service. There are several designs available but all have a Google logo hidden in them.
3. Lenovo is running a 40-day holiday giveaway. I usually don’t take part in these (just as I never play lottery) but there is something about this particular one that attracted my attention. Maybe the fact that it takes very little time to try? :-)
4. Disney Rewards is giving away 5 points daily in December. You need to login daily and enter the unique code they feature on this page. What a brilliant idea to bring people to the website! You can redeem the reward points towards movie DVD’s, soundtracks CD’s or theater tickets.
5. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Amazon beats Walmart and Target in a usability test conducted by uTest among the three retailers. Target came in last in every tested category. 600 testers from more than 20 countries took part in the test, over the half of the bugs found were at Target.
6. New York Times rounds up several smart phone apps for reading e-Books. I use Aldiko on my G1 and it is great!

A combination of physical and mood disturbances that occur in the last half of a woman’s menstrual cycle after ovulation and normally end with the onset of the menstrual flow. Physical features of the premenstrual syndrome (PMS) include breast tenderness and bloating. Psychological changes include anger and depression.

Those psychological changes as it seems can lead to interesting side effects. A new study finds that some women tend to resort to retail therapy as a way of dealing with the PMS related stress.

… in the ten days before their periods begin - known as the luteal phase - women are much less in control of their spending habits. Psychologists at Hertfordshire University concluded that a shopping spree could be a way of dealing with the intense emotions of pre-menstrual syndrome…

443 women ages 18 to 50 were examined. Of the 153 women who were in the luteal phase, two thirds admitted to making an impulse buy and 57% said they overspent by more than $35. So ladies, now if you have a shopping splurge, you have a perfect excuse, and to better time things, here is a handy website and a Facebook App to help you out! ;-)

Seriously though it feels more like a conspiracy involving National Retail Federation than a scientific finding. Granted, women are under stress and some are seeking relief in a shopping spree however I feel if you generally tend to indulge yourself with a shopping frenzy then PMS is as good of an excuse as anything else.

What is your take on it? Does this “science” have legs or is it full of BS? Share your opinion in the comments!

Last weekend we had a neighbors meeting and the police officer investigating the case was giving a speech. This blog post is in essence a summary of the tips he gave us on how we can prevent or make it less likely for the incidents like these to happen.

Always lock doors and windows - this applies to homes and cars alike. The officer mentioned a recent arrest where a gang of teenagers was doing ‘car hopping’, the kind of crime when they move into a neighborhood and raid cars. They stole things from around 400 cars in a few weeks - none were locked.

Don’t leave mail in the mailbox - both break-ins in our neighborhood happened after the owner left mail in the mailbox. A stuffed mailbox is a sign telling the criminal that “the owners are not home”. When on vacation, have neighbors pick up your mail or stop mail delivery at the Post Office (and verify it stopped).

Secure sliding doors and windows - in one of the cases of the break-ings in our area, the burglar simply forcibly opened the sliding patio door w/o even having to break the glass. Criminals are looking for easy targets and anything that makes it difficult for them to get into the house will help. The simplest way to reinforce a sliding door is by using a strong wooden dowel or metal rod on the inside.

Make use of blinds after sunset - so many times I have walked by a house during night time and saw a family gather by a large screen TV or a guy working on a laptop computer. Without blinds, your house is a fish bowl and it is easy for the fisherman (the criminal) to pick the biggest fish without much effort.

Leave a light on when you leave - if you leave during dark hours, leave a light on in one of the rooms, alternate the room. Don’t use the kitchen countertop light for this purpose - according to the officer, too many families are doing it so it now has a different connotation. Consider purchasing a couple light switches on a timer and use them to turn on/off lights when you leave for a long period of time.

Light up your house from outside - the best way to do it by installing sensor activated lights on the outside of the house. If possible, install the lights high enough so it is hard for the burglar to just take the light bulb out. Otherwise, buy a motion sensor light bulb socket (available at Amazon for $22.86) and use with your outdoor lights.

Make a thorough inventory of your house - if inevitable happens, you want to be ready to give the insurance company complete list of what was stolen (I assume you have insurance). Get out the video camera and take a thorough tour of your home, then store the video in a safe deposit box, or make two copies and leave them at your friends/extended family.

Install visible alarm signs on the outside - even if you don’t plan to install a security system, a “Protected by” sign can be a strong enough deterrent to avoid the burglary. The criminals are looking for an easy target and anything that can make them think twice about breaking into your home is a help.

Get yourself a dog - this is probably the most effective way to burglar proof your home but at the same time it is a very subjective tip. You should never get a dog just because you want to keep your home safe. To me a dog is a family friend, but if you think of getting one - consider the side effect of protecting your home as a bonus.

Have you had crimes in your neighborhood lately? How do you burglar proof your house?

Photo credit to Johnny Grim @ Flickr

I understand there are probably some bulletin board based bargain forums that do it but the phpBB is a stone age technology and has never really been meant to be used for shopping. What I mean is to have a fully functional social site with all the bells and whistles that come with a perfect deal site but completely owned and operated by the community.

Why would this make sense?

If the idea is novel the media will pick it up and it will spread virally offering free advertising (at least at the beginning). The members that join will make the most devoted bargain community that ever existed since they know the place is theirs and there is no owners behind the scene that set their rules and make profits off of the deals. Devoted members means more growth for the website because of all the free publicity and referrals they bring in.

I know from my own experience running Buxr that the web platform could be written in such a way that the community can properly format & categorize the deals, verify them, and also update them over time. To keep things sane, new members could have limited privileges but as they gain the tenure they turn into “power users” who can do more around the site, and eventually suggest themselves to become moderators. The community would vote (say once a year) to pick a number of moderators who then run the site for the next year.

The platform would be based on an open source code written by web developers volunteers who devote themselves to this idea. The only monetary expense is web hosting but it can be easily offset with donations since web hosting is dirt cheap these days.

So what do you think? Is this something even worth discussing? Does social shopping & bargain hunting have the scale to become a foundation of an open community like this? Do people even care about who owns the content they create and how it is used? Am I out of my mind even thinking about this idea?