NOTES, COMMENT AND BUZZ FROM EUGENE KASPERSKY – OFFICIAL BLOG
June 21, 2017
I’m taking a short break from my stories about New Zealand: firstly, I do not want to “overload” my readers, and secondly, I have something new to talk about.
A few sketches along the way last week, something like this:
1. Wow! What a great name for a business – ‘Ikar’! Obviously a subsidiary of ‘Daedalus’ airlines. Hard to believe anyone would deliberately board a plane named Icarus.
June 9, 2017
Hi all,
Herewith, a brief interlude from my NZ tales, since an equally interesting topic has come up…
Question: What was your longest ever flight? I mean – without a connection.
Why do I ask? Because I’ve just flown an uninterrupted long-haul silly-haul that went like this:
It was a reeeaaalllly long night. Though folks who live north of the Arctic Circle will scoff when I talk of ‘long nights’ (their ‘long night’ lasts half-a-year!), for me this was perhaps my longest ever night – at least down here in the lower-mid latitudes. The plane took off at 9pm NZ time – when it was already dark, and 16 hours later landed at 5am Dubai time; that is, almost at dawn. It gets dark in Auckland around 6pm at this time of year, so that night for me lasted 19 hours. A personal record, I do believe.
June 1, 2017
The brainteaser from yesterday’s post: ‘what’s not right in this [that] blogpost?’
Answer: the last three pix were of Melbourne! :)
Yep, for that was the next city on my itinerary. Now, I always like visiting Melbourne, but having to leave Sydney on the eve of its yearly Vivid festival to get to Melbourne, well, that’s just not cricket. Here are the pics from 2015 and 2013. Vivid Sydney is a festival that you really have to experience once in a lifetime if possible. There’s no other festival comes near. But I digress. Here we are… in Melbourne!
Another lovely city, but we saw hardly any of it this time: airport (‘welcome!’) > taxi > conference > speech (‘thank you, good bye, come again!’) > taxi > airport. And that was it! The only (non-work-related) thing worth taking photos of were… these here works of art on the walls of the hotel where the conference was taking place. Perplexing is the word I’d used to describe them. Mysterious too, perhaps. What do you think? Oh, and… what, exactly, are the pictures of? :)
Oh well; I’ll just have to show you some work-themed pics – from CeBit Australia conference:
May 29, 2017
So what is an exhausted business traveler to do in Japan after a tough working week? Easy: you get yourself to a traditional Japanese ryokan!
We did the ryokan thing in the town of Hakone. I wondered at first why my super hosts chose this particular spot; I found out a little later – it’s right next to a not fully dormant volcano ).
May 22, 2017
Good day boys and girls!
I’ve been a bit quiet of late – but I’ve a good excuse – I had a real tough week: the schedule was tight and intercontinental, plus alarmingly… combative…
It all started in Moscow. Now, normally come the month of May, the last vestiges of the long cold winter – snow and ice – have long disappeared, at least by a month. Not this year. It snowed the other week! The weather was so bad – cold, windy, wet – that even the May 9 Victory Day parade was partially called off (the airborne part). Ye gods! And I was soooo looking forward to it.
Bad weather causing things to be called off – hardly anything new there, right? Well, actually…
You see, in Russia, the authorities have a habit of… making sure the weather’s good on special occasions. In Russian they call it ‘shooing away the clouds’. I don’t know the details, but they somehow shoo away clouds by… doing something to the atmosphere to make sure clouds don’t come close. Playing God? Maybe. Whatever, it normally works. My question: WHAT WENT WRONG THIS TIME?! I mean, the budget for seeing off clouds for the weekend must be huge. Hmmm, I wonder…
Early doors it looked like the budget was well-spent: the sky was clear and the sun was shining:
April 25, 2017
I think it’s time to review my recent five-week spot of globetrotting. Not the longest of world tours for me, but still sufficiently intense – and, as ever, thoroughly enjoyable.
It went like this:
Moscow – Gatwick – Jersey – Normandy – Paris – Buenos Aires (connection) – Ushuaia – Antarctica – Buenos Aires – Porto Seguro – Sint Maarten – Amsterdam – Dubai – Moscow.
April 21, 2017
Our experts + other experts + our media crew + international press + Sint Maarten = work hard, play hard. Sun, sand, surf, palm trees… and the cybersecurity avant garde. Yep – it was SAS 2017.
Hmmm. What’s this fence doing here – practically on the beach? And all those ‘Danger’ signs?
Aha – yes; you’ve guessed it: it’s that landing strip – the one that ends just short of the beach!
April 20, 2017
Hi folks!
After my Antarctic series on this here blog of mine, it looks like another series may be on the horizon – a historical one. Yesterday we had an alternative history of so-called crown dependencies; today – more history; not of a (British) crown dependency but a former (British) crown colony, no less…
So, who… you know, got there first from overseas? I was just curious after reading various scholarly versions and falsifications. So I read up more on the subject, and I discovered the following:
Episode 1: Homo Sapiens.
So who first discovered America? You know, like a zillion years ago? Well there’s no precise answer to that question one as it was… a zillion years ago, before things like writing and the keeping of records, and a zillion other useful things were invented. But, apparently, it was someone who was from what is now Siberia, who, at some point during the spring of the ice age, crossed the (possibly, at least in parts, dry) valley between the two glacial mountains on either side of what is today the (very wet) Bering Strait.
Who knows today what the Bering Strait looked like back then? Was it completely dry? Was it a swampy marsh? Or was it much like it is today – a sea? Did that first Siberian walk it? Canoe it? Swim it? We’ll probably never know, unless…).
March 22, 2017
Bonjour folks!
Onward we march sail…
We were up very early and headed for the Jersey-St-Malo ferry. The plan was to get a rental car and drive down to Paris, taking the scenic route through Normandy and Brittany. That was the plan, anyway…
January 19, 2017
Having a depressing January? Well don’t! Get out and about – preferably on the road! Which is just what I did. With my trusty big black suitcase…
To warm-up it’ll be Western Europe, mostly of the Alpine variety. Then it’ll be a healthy dose of equatorial/tropical travel, then back to Europe, then back home for a bit. It’s going to be fun, I can tell, and I’ll be sharing that fun, plus pics thereof, as I go along (I’ve already found the ‘masterpiece’ button:).
