NOTES, COMMENT AND BUZZ FROM EUGENE KASPERSKY – OFFICIAL BLOG
August 4, 2017
The purpose of my trip to SVX Ekaterinburg was to visit the industrial exhibition Innoprom. It’s all about metalworking technologies, machine building, all types of materials, machine tools, pipes, wires, wheels, robots, etc.
July 26, 2017
Railrood good mood. It’s a different, special good mood. It’s a bit like motorbike good mood. There’s not much to it, but it brings a nice, calm, reflective feeling. You just stand there, in the engine control room at the front of a train and stare up ahead along the track and to the sides at the passing landscapes. Meditative almost. I’ve heard there are long videos on YouTube showing such railroad good-mooding. It’s so much better doing the real thing though…
Here’s the junction where we turn off the ‘highway’ and onto the ‘back road’ that takes us to St. Pete along the Gulf of Finland:
Read on: Railrood Good Mood…
July 24, 2017
This post is all about trains, tracks, and digital-automation thereof. So, ideally, the 14-minute mix of Trans Europe Express should be listened to while reading this not-so-short post, IMHO…
July 5, 2017
A bit like with Manchester or Scotland, folks will often tell you the weather in St. Petersburg is normally terrible. In Manchester and Scotland it normally is. But not in St. Pete!
I’ve visited Russia’s ‘second capital’ plenty of times – and the sun’s been out on every single trip! This visit was no exception.
In fact, the sun’s not just shining, it’s beaming it’s intense heat down on this corner of the globe without mercy. Sat in a traffic jam upon roasting asphalt wasn’t the nicest of experiences, I have to say.
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:
May 22, 2017
Sorry folks for the tardiness of this post; been up to my neck with work of late. Better late than never though…
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – it’s great watching F1 in the flesh at the racetrack. But it’s best of all watching it from the garage, if you’re lucky enough to have access thereto. It’s in the garage where the team sits, where the pressure is through the roof, where the adrenaline is pumping the most, and where the emotions run amok. And the garage experience is even more thrilling if your team is in pole position – like we were the other weekend (the first time since 2008!). But enough talk – no time for that. They’re on the starting grid!…
It doesn’t matter that we can’t see the cars themselves – we sure can hear them (the starting line’s a mere 30-40 meters away!), and seeing them on the big TV screens is more than enough.
And they’re off!…
Oh my grid. Valtteri Bottas jumped two positions ahead right from the off, and that was actually how things ended today. I’m afraid not a great deal else interesting happened today. No intrigue, nothing! Sometimes it goes like that, F1. In fact, it all resembled more a column of soldiers doing a march. Who would have thought F1 could be dull? :).
A storm cloud looked like it could have put a literal dampener on things, but it decided to stay put up in the mountains and not descend to the sea.
March 2, 2017
I really didn’t expect to find in Moscow yet another curious place that is mandatorily must-see – including by children. But the other day we visited one. It was the Exhibition Complex of Russian Railways at Rizhsky Vokzal (Riga Station). Its railroad scale model and other expositions aren’t all that big, but they’re ever so well done. Respect!
Ok, so, it’s not quite the Grand Maket Rossiya in St. Pete, but, in terms of quality of the models (incredible detail, precise movements…) – I’d say it’s on a par.
January 11, 2017
Happy New Year folks, and hope you all had great holidays!
You won’t believe this… but this post is about… RED SQUARE! // Incidentally, the square I consider to be the most beautiful spot in Europe!
I hadn’t been in downtown Moscow on New Year’s Eve since… oooh, 15 years ago! Yep – 2001 was the last time, on Pushkin Square watching the fireworks. But I’d never been on Red Square on New Year’s Eve. What?! So this year I decided to make amends…
So how was it? Well, actually, my overall impressions were… mixed. And it’s those mixed impressions that I’d like to share with you today.
November 16, 2016
Ok, you’ve seen how the steel gets transformed from red hot slabs into pastry-thin sheets at the Novolipetsk Steel Plant already. Next up: the cold-rolling and polymer coatings workshop…
Rolls from the hot workshop are brought here and unwound onto conveyor belts and then shuffled about here and there and subjected to various technological processes to increase the steel’s quality, among other things.
November 14, 2016
Despite the wholly non-sterile conditions inside the Novolipetsk Steel Plant, on the outside you’d never know there was a mammoth industrial complex nearby. For the management take the ecology of the surrounding environment veeerrryyy seriously.
The above slide says: ‘More than $1.1 billion invested in ecology in 15 years. Lipetsk – the cleanest metal-producing city in the Russian Federation’. And you can probably guess what those figures in the clouds mean: the level of air pollution, with Lipetsk having the lowest level/number – 3.4.
Indeed, several years ago they decided to take air pollution really seriously here and cut it drastically – and it looks like they’ve done a good job of it. For dotted all around (inside) the complex healthy-looking trees grow. So healthy-looking that one visiting foreign delegation asked of the cedar trees ‘how often do you replace them?!’ Turns out they were never planted and all grew themselves of their own accord.
