Nota Bene

In my last post, after our walkabout we said our farewells to Barcelona. Today – I rewind back a bit to a day between our getting overloaded with euro-awards in Innsbruck and my being overloaded with interviews and meetings at Mobile World Congress. For, whenever I can fit it in when here in Catalonia, I just have to get a rental car and cruise along one of my favorite roads – one that hugs its coast ->

En route, we occasionally stopped for walkabouts and the odd bite to eat in towns. Curiously, there was practically nobody about and most stores and cafes were closed. I was surprised the eateries we snacked at weren’t closed too. Ghost towns. And all on the typically (in summer) busy Costa Brava! ->

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As promised, more tales from the Catalonian side…

Work hard – play hard is one of my mottos, and that went for in Barcelona recently too. After working hard at Mobile World Congress, we had two free days on our hands. The first was taken up with getting to, up, and back down Montserrat, as reported a few days ago. In the morning of the second day we checked out the progress of the construction of Sagrada Família – which I told you about In yesterday’s post. Which left us with an afternoon, which we filled with a relaxed ramble around Park Güell (which I hadn’t been to in at least 20 years) and later along the famous pedestrianized tree-lined street called La Rambla (so, not quite “playing hard”, but we weren’t being idle either!). But first – the Gaudi (and Güell)-designed Park Güell…

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Sagrada Família is probably the most important touristic (architectural, cultural… basilical) building of Barcelona. Though its construction began in 1882 (no typo folks!) – overseen by no less than Antoni Gaudí himself – it still hasn’t been finished nearly a century-and-a-half later! Indeed, perma-construction is one of the church’s inalienable traits that makes it so unique. It’s like, how can you have a Sagrada Família that’s not under construction – since there’s never, ever, been such a thing?! When the project is finally completed, I’m fairly sure there’ll be something missing from its whole essence )…

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Hi folks!

Just recently, while I was busy at Mobile World Congress, I was informed that back here in Moscow the season of spring had finally arrived! Sure, there’s still plenty of snow around – but it’s falling less and less frequently, and less and less heavily. And what there also is now plenty of is… sun – and birdsong! Hurray! I had to see this for myself. And that’s exactly what I did at the first opportunity after flying back from Barcelona ->

It’s been a wonderful winter, with sooo much snow (there are still plenty of piles of it taller than me dotted all over) ->

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If ever you have a two or three hours to spare in Barcelona, there’s always plenty to choose from to fill those hours with something wow-touristic in the city. Just the easiest and most obvious often will do the job, like a stroll down La Rambla and around the Gothic Quarter. But should you ever have a full day to spare and the weather’s neither rainy or too hot, then you really need to get out of the city. And one of the best local destinations has to be Montserrat (the mountain; not to be confused with the island that was named after it, which isn’t quite local;).

A truly wonderful construction – a multi-peaked ragged-jagged mountain range surrounded by lower and more undulating hills. Could it be the start of the Pyrenees? No – the edge of those is nearly a hundred kilometers away…

(I wanted to take a pic like the one above, but none of mine came out ok; therefore, thank-you Wikipedia)

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Hola amigos!

From Innsbruck, off we flew (with our top awards in our luggage) to Barcelona. Once there, we headed on over to the vast Fira Barcelona venue (awards in hand!) for a monster of an exhibition-conference. And the monster was of course Mobile World Congress (MWC). As usual, everyone who’s anyone in the mobile communications/IT world was there, and it was rammed, noisy and fun! ->

I call it a monster due to its size: like a monster truck, it’s gigantic. It’s also a survivor. For it’s been around since practically year-dot when it comes to large mobile/IT exhibitions-conferences, and hasn’t fallen by the wayside like some of its former “colleagues” like the once-similarly massive CeBIT or COMDEX. MWC has managed to keep up with the times, modernize and diversify; or, to put it simpler – it just became all the more shiny and super-interesting to appeal to a broader audience. ¡Respeto!

Our romance with MWC goes way back – to when it was still known as 3GSM (it became MWC in 2008). Alas, I don’t have much to show for it today – since I’d never heard of “blogging” in the early 2000s. My earliest published bits and pieces hail back to 2010 and 2011 (just a few pics on Kaspersky Club (Google Translate text only)). Sure, MWC’s had it’s bad patches (like in 2021), but it’s bounced back (and gotten bigger and cooler and flashier every year). ¡Mucho respeto!

And here we were again ->

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Hi folks – from Austria!…

But I wasn’t here to just look out of windows at the dreary Euro-weather. I was here on business – lots of it; first and foremost – to personally receive this! ->

…For, when your company is awarded none other than “Product of the Year”, by none other than AV-Comparatives, not getting yourself down to Tirol to receive it in person is simply out of the question!…

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Hi folks!

Finally – I’ve done it: my first business trip of the year; hurray!

En route – a superb view of the Mount Damavand volcano. Oh what a beaut! ->

Our destination – Dubai. Why? To take part in the World Governments Summit 2024.

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Ladies and gents, girls and boys!

Here’s something that needs celebrating (to brighten up these dull and dreary wintry days). The independent testing lab AV-Comparatives has released its Summary Report 2023 in which it “highlights the high-scoring [consumer anti-virus] products” it tested throughout last year. A total of 16 security solutions were rigorously put through their paces in several different tests – including of their ability to protect against malware and advanced threats, of performance (low-system impact), absence of false alarms, and so on and so forth. And out of all 16 there was only one winner – the only product that secured top marks in all 16 of the tests. Can you guess who?! Ok, it’s hardly a toughie since it’s me who’s telling you, but… yes: it was our Kaspersky Standard – named Product of the Year 2023! Hurray!

Ooh – that’ll go nicely in our shiny awards cabinet here at HQ. Oh – wait: is there any room left?!

What’s especially satisfying is that the testers heaped praise not only on the product’s technical capabilities, but also its interface. So it wasn’t for nothing we added plenty more top-notch functionality while seriously overhauling how it all looks. Nice.

Btw – for more than two decades already we’ve been constantly under AV-Comparatives’ microscope – unlike some of our competitors who only select the tests they’d do well in. Which brings me on to another win for us: we’ve garnered the most awards from AV-Comparatives out of all tested vendors across various categories – totaling a full 57 awards (two of which were for low impact on system performance)!

But wait. There’s yet more good news!…

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I’ve shown you how awesome China‘s lesser-known (to non-Chinese) natural-beauty-tourisms can be. But what about the places to stay and dining options for tourists there? How do they stack up?

Quick answer: it all depends on how much you want to spend, for there’s everything in China from bargain-basement lodgings and street/fast/junk food, through to 5* hotels and gourmet cuisine at fine restaurants. As for us, we mostly went for somewhere in the middle for both accommodation and dining – sometimes opting for somewhere nearer the upscale-end of the spectrum; for example, in Enshi (canyon, cliffs) we stayed at a small private hotel that was really very nice indeed. The views: wonderful ->

In the cities we tended to stay in larger hotels – often franchises of international chains, and overall they were decent and comfortable. The views to be had from the rooms in some of them were pretty decent too, for example in the hotel in Xinning County near Langshan where we stayed after our decompression-river-cruise on the Fuyi River. In one direction:

In the other:

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