Libraries are also a good way to tour a city. Get a transit card from a grocery store or a convenient store (also a lotto ticket because you never know).
Start with the main branch, then on to the various neighborhood branches. It’s important to pick a section you are interested in beforehand. Fiction might be too overwhelming, so I’d go for the math or computer technology sections.
Once you’ve done this in multiple cities you can compare the sizes of those sections between different cities and how current the books are, i.e, for tech books, do they have books on the latest trend in programming languages.
Go to coffee shops and bakeries in between. I can usually squeeze in the main branch and one or two neighborhood branches in a day. Research the city to figure out which neighborhood libraries to go.
I'd add for Brazil, a great alternative to the libraries are SESCs. SESCs are cultural centers, funded by a payroll tax proposed by big business in the 50s when they were afraid of Communist sympathies in population. The result are extremely well funded community centers with big arts budgets for free exhibitions, exercise facilities, primary care clinics, libraries, cafeterias with affordable food and lots of space for people to lounge around. In many neighborhoods, they're the epicenter of social life. They've been a terrific way to break out of the downtown Sao Paulo bubble.
I’d say the Soviet anthem is one of the best there is. They missed it so much it was brought back as the Russian national anthem after Yeltsin. Red Army Chorus has some good tracks like it. Very catchy and “patriotic” if you are in line to fight western imperialism.
-They've kept the melody (which, I agree, as far as national anthems go, is the one to beat) - but the lyrics have changed, three times I believe in Soviet times and then again as it became Russia's anthem.
Now they're stuck with it, though - all versions had lyrics written by the same guy, Sergei Mikhalkov, who died in 2009.
It's is a communist anthem. So it is meant to be sung by a group, ussually with instruments too. It is therefore always more impressive than others like the american which are mostly performed as solos.
There was a canadian opera singer who did anthems for hockey games. He would sing three notes then turn the mic to the crowd. That is how national anthems should be done.
There is also a great vid of a game where the american soloist had a mic fail. The canadian crowd finished the american anthem for her.
Huh? Connection with the Soviet Union and especially the Red Army surely destroys it for most, if not all, people I know. This song is most often described as "beautiful, but turn it fucking off because it reminds me of my dead family" around me. What is it, if not destroyed? Merely playing it in my headphones because of its beauty made me despisable in the eyes of my former classmates. Even I can't stop thinking about all the evil the Soviets did to my family while listening to it.
>* Huh? Connection with the Soviet Union and especially the Red Army surely destroys it for most, if not all, people I know. *
Those people are shallow. It's one of the most beloved anthems globally. Go check the comments in renditions of the anthem in YouTube.
Nobody cares if it was connected to USSR or not, the same way people can admire Gagarin and not care about the USSR connection.
Not to mention that there are worse things to be connected to than USSR -- USSR had several stages, including a more open stage (with many social firsts) in the NEP era, and a more or less conventional and more open post-60s part, it wasn't just stalinism and suppression all the way.
Well, I just happened to have feedback from some of them, e.g. in Romania:
"The INSCOP Research poll revealed that 44.4 percent of the respondents believed that living conditions were better under communism, 15.6 said that they had stayed the same, while only 33.6 claimed that life was worse back then."
Have you been in Romania? That place is comparable to a third world country outside of major cities. Of course it was better when it was heavily subsidised - at the cost of my (Czech) grandfathers' lives.
Source: Last year I spent 6 weeks travelling around Romania and Moldova
Your attempt to relativise what Soviets did is a spit in face of each one of the 65 million victims.
>Have you been in Romania? That place is comparable to a third world country outside of major cities.
That's neither here nor there. Many countries who weren't communist at all are like that. And most of them are far worse.
>Your attempt to relativise what Soviets did is a spit in face of each one of the 65 million victims.
Well, the extravagant "65 million" number and summation of anybody that died during that era as a victim is a spit in the face of the billions who say it as their cause, overthrew colonialism in their countries, and died by the tens of millions fighting Nazis.
That "extravagant" number is from my school book and confirmed on Wikipedia. Another spit, great!
What I said about Romania is that it used to be heavily subsidized at the cost of their own people from other regions and other nations' people, so of course the people in these poor areas had it better than today and liked it more than when the subsidies are gone. That does not excuse anything in any case.
Fighting in the second world war also excuses nothing. My countrymen also fought there and actually didn't conspire to start the war, if we are to compare dicks. From my point of view, of course the Russians and other SSSR nations helped win the war and I'm thankful, but again - that excuses nothing.
Also, yeah, some people today don't value freedom and would like economic subsidies instead. I'm very sure that would change the minute they lost their freedom - that's proven historical experience, people usually want freedom more than to stay alive.
>From my point of view, of course the Russians and other SSSR nations helped win the war and I'm thankful, but again - that excuses nothing.
Well, to me being crucial to not living in a Nazi Europe today, counts for a lot and excuses a lot. And I differentiate between bad actors like Stalin and co and their crimes, and a huge state with domestic (at least at first) and large global popular support.
>Also, yeah, some people today don't value freedom and would like economic subsidies instead.
Or they don't consider slavery to market forces and corporations freedom, and would rather have actual freedom from need with economic subsidies (which even the modern world is considering as UBI).
The USSR had a global support during the cold war? Could you be more delusional?
And no, communism never had popular support anywhere, especially not in Central Europe, but not really even in Russia except for the two major cities. It's just that those who didn't agree had no way of disagreement (and it was same in my country and everywhere in the Eastern Bloc). Note that I live with a Russian national/citizen, these are her words.
In my country, they had to literally throw our pro-West (we were supposed to be a part of the Marshall plan, btw) prime minister out of the window and kill some more people to establish their rule - not cool. They had 31% (not universal) popular support because people had no idea about this and frankly no idea about what happened during the war as well, and that popular support was lost not even a year into their rule. This all happened AFTER the second world war.
> Well, to me being crucial to not living in a Nazi Europe today, counts for a lot and excuses a lot
Well, not to me. They could've went home after the war but instead (this is the key part) they decided to kill the people they helped save - not cool; and then they returned again in 1968 to occupy some more - not cool. My country could've been a free place with happy people instead of dead and sad people for past 70 years if it wasn't for them. Our economy would not be destroyed and our wages and pensions would be comparable to Austrian. I feel absolutely zero sympathy. None of the people who fought in second world war are alive anyways; most of those who occupied us in 1968 still are.
BTW were you paying attention during history classes? Have you forgotten that it was also the USSR who actually started the second world war because of their hunger for more power and global communism (God save us)?
> slavery to market forces and corporations freedom
Stop with this shit already. There was actual slavery in communist/socialist countries, can't you feel how wrong and unemphatic what you're saying is? It seems like you have absolutely no idea of the horrors that happened, or you're soulless. Our grandfathers died in uranium mines, and this uranium was then "given" (give or we destroy you, what a choice! What a nice people!) to the Soviets for free so they could subsidize other places (these are the places where they liked it). NOT COOL. (my country was left with absolutely no uranium and zero repayment, btw)
No one is a slave to any market force in the Czech Republic or in most other Eastern Bloc countries (the problem here lies in corruption which in turn lobbies for harder debt collection laws - entirely government fault!), go solve your USA shit elsewhere, it's not my problem that "the land of the free" can't handle its market when even formerly communist countries can (btw many of my countrymen and friends live in the USA and their experience is vastly different, they always return with pockets full of money - seems interesting; maybe there is a problem with you Americans if foreigners that barely speak English are more successful in your own country).
Stop spreading your lies and propaganda. People living under communism hated it. Even today Romania is the largest emigration source in Europe, in large due to its communist past and corrupt socialist present.
Rather than desperately trying to rewrite history, why don't you take a stroll through Cuba or Venezuela, the current and latest communism victims? Ask those people how much they like it.
One way I found helpful is to repeat or paraphrase what the other person had said in the conversation. At first I was surprised by how difficult this was. Then I realized it’s because I was just hearing the words but not processing them. This also signifies to the other person that you are understanding and engaging in the conversation.
That's basically it. I find that it serves three functions: one is making the other person feel heard, two is making sure I actually understand what they're saying (misunderstandings are more common than I think!), and three is forcing me to put my own response on hold. That last bit is huge. I had no idea how reactive I was in conversation, and what a detriment it is to communication.
The Java SE support roadmap linked at the bottom has more information. It looks like if you want to continue using updated Oracle JDK commercially, it’ll soon require you to be an Oracle support customer. And if you want to use the latest java and don’t want to buy support, there’s the OpenJDK. It’d be a good idea to start the approval process to use OpenJDK in production now.
Master of Doom contains an anecdote on this aspect of John Carmack's life. On page 252, it mentioned how he had sequestered himself in a "small, anonymous hotel room somewhere in Florida" as he researched Trinity. He had a dolch portable computer with pentium II and full length PCI slots, while subsisting only on pizza and Diet Coke.
That bit for some reason made a big impression on me when I read it on the bus ride to school. To be able to let yourself go and research and code what you truly believe in or curious or excited about (w/ room service and not have to clean up after yourself haha) seemed incredible.
I wonder if John still sticks to Florida, or if he goes to different places each year; in a city or just a hotel off of a highway or near an airport. My favorites have been Hyatt - Place Amsterdam Airport, - Regency Charles De Gaulle, and - Lake Tahoe. Something about sterile rooms, room service, a hotel near, but not too close to beautiful and historical landmarks just center you and allow you to think.
Agreed, I guess that the trick to selecting a location is to be in a location the the inside the hotel/cabin room is much more attractive that on the outside.
I had a colleague that told me that his most productive period was when he was stuck at the hospital for a couple of weeks but was able to do some coding.
There was a post on HN years ago advocating coding on a cruise ship -- it's like a nice hotel, but the internet is so crappy that you'll only use it when you really need it (e.g. finding docs, syncing git), which is great for productivity!
Post may have been by Tynan (http://tynan.com); he's big on working while on transatlantic cruises. Following his advice, I have done the same thing several times.
Here are some tips:
- Find the best cruises most easily on cruisesheet.com (disclosure: it's Tynan's project)
- Royal Caribbean has the best internet at sea through O3b. In the Caribbean or Mediterranean it's about 70ms latency. In the middle of the Atlantic it's about 220ms latency. So Skype may work but the delays are annoying. Plenty of bandwidth now though. You may have only "one 9" service on average though. So scheduled conference calls are always a gamble.
- Repositioning cruises (many ships move from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean and back seasonally) in April/May and October/November are the cheapest cruises you'll ever find. 5-8 days at sea means plenty of time to get some work done, as well as goof off a bit during the evenings. For the second week (Europe or Caribbean), I find it easy enough to get an hour or two of email catch-up in on port days after getting back from a shore excursion, but it's easier to just say port day = vacation, sea day = work and great food.
A 2-week repositioning cruise may cost as little as $600 per person including taxes and fees. Add another $200pp for gratuities, a few $hundred for shore excursions, and a few $hundred for airfare to get back home. Depending on where you go, you may get the benefits of a 2-week vacation for the price of one on land.
Similarly, if you want to do a one-week offsite with your startup (particularly if you're all remote most of the time anyway), this is probably cheaper than flying your crew to any big city.
The seminars-at-sea model was also well proven out by geekcruises.com, now renamed insightcruises.com
My wife and I have been renting an off-season beach house near Boston for 8 months out of the year for less than the price of a basement studio in Cambridge, then traveling during the summer. This means our repositioning cruises are further discounted by the fact that we aren't paying rent or mortgage on an empty house. It's hard to beat if you both have good schedule flexibility.
