If you know and remember a person under the nickname CYBERMANIAC , for you this conversation will be like the sudden discovery of half of the student salary in the inside pocket of an old jacket. For those who have never heard of Stanislav, I think it will also be interesting to read about the small but unique time spark of the Internet started in the eyes of CYBERMANIAC, far from the capitals of Russian cities. He seemed unchanged to me since the year 00 and so isolated that I really wanted to write about him.

We will carefully talk about the life of a programmer in the outback, about programming languages ​​from the moment they appeared in Russia: Forth, Borland Pascal, Delphi, C #, MegaBasic, Java, SQL, C ++. about Japanese language, about snakes, about national drinks, about Socrates, about Soviet lenses, about stars, human fears.

CYBERMANIAC has a lot of experience in cracking, writing utilities, by Neo Sign 0f Misery , an ancient e-book “Theoretical Foundations of Kreging” , as well as the author of many of your favorite windows scanner and a great astronomer amateur photo journalist . The interview turned out to be much more than I expected. But I hope you will hear similar thoughts with bells. We listen to them when we read ...

Photos provided by Stanislav.

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Table of contents:

INTRO SOFTWARE HACKING SIGN OF MISTERY HARDWARE HUMANWARE

Intro

Let's start by talking about your current activities, and then switch to my insane questions?

Tell me, please, what level of tasks are you currently loading? What city do you live in?

Do you have a project and what are you responsible for? Does your company have a business template with western tag words?

I live in Zheleznogorsk, which is in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, although the city is quite industrially developed, but it’s quite a “bearish corner” in the truest sense of the word: from any point to the taiga - from the power of half an hour’s walk, and in the outskirts of the city bears are seen frightening regularity. I, personally, am with the “master of the taiga”, although I didn’t communicate closely and didn’t particularly thirst, but I found traces.

By occupation - a programmer engaged in the automation of production management in the enterprise. However, the word "management" attention can not be paid, because in reality we are talking only about accounting mate. values, procurement planning, loading shops and other equally mundane things. So we do not have managerial slang, the business part is dealt with by completely different people, with whom I practically don’t intersect. All this “production management” rests on a samopisny MPRII system, the server part of which rotates on Oracle and has seen both VAX and Alpha, and I would not be surprised if x86 survives, and the “super-thick” modular user client, the modules for which I compose . Occupation is so uninspiring that you have to regularly sweep flies from the windowsill, bored to death, looking at us. Though I am not deprived of my imagination, I cannot imagine people who are able to do such things with pleasure and not for the sake of money. It happens, however, there are tasks that require the use of WinAPI, possession of Delphi, or simply develop a non-proprietary algorithm, but this rarely happens and lacks them completely non-condolly.

How did you find yourself where you are? Are there people who somehow put pressure on you at work simply because of the hierarchical status?

With employment, everything is trivial: while I was studying, I worked in parallel here and there, until I turned up an option, at least remotely similar to what I understood. So I stayed there, more paid vacancies in our specialty are not frequent, and if you already have to change your place of residence, then immediately to the tropics, in this matter, compromises are absolutely unacceptable for me.

The hierarchy itself is not really annoying for me, as the immediate supervisor is also a practicing programmer. The only difficulty is that he is a programmer of the old school, and therefore the above-mentioned client looks like he was born in the same year with Windows 95, although it’s not even a design, but already five years old as such tasks They are solved not by megabyte clients in C ++, self-downloading software modules, but by means of web programming. However, no one wants to change the paradigm and it will not, as long as all this miracle of technology is finally tightly refused to work under any Windows 9.

The city in which you live, do you love him? I know how you complained about the tides of anguish associated with a small number of warm days. Your photos in the blog, taken by experiments on Soviet lenses, make you understand a little - if anything changed in this landscape for you, it is the height of the view, because with age you grew taller ...

It is hard to say ... I rather love places that are significant for me, and feelings that they respond to in my soul, in my hometown, of course, more than anywhere else. However, the city has changed a lot before my eyes, and I increasingly notice that in the surrounding towns, places that look like my hometown even more than it is today are like past ones. I can’t say that it’s always so bad - the streets are getting brighter, the houses are more modern, just nothing connects me with all this, and the “little homeland” turns into just “the city where I live”. Besides, I began to notice a long time ago that the space around me seems to shrink every year, if in childhood I simply went to the other end of the courtyard “far away”, taking a bus to the grandmother was a journey, and getting to the regional the center (only 50 kilometers away) is almost like flying to the moon, now riding a 30 km bike is just an ordinary evening walk, and I begin to experience the feeling of refreshing novelty only about a hundredth kilometer from home. Only taiga remains unchanged: the other paths that I walk with are definitely more than a quarter of a century old. Going out on the balcony, see the tops of the pines to the horizon - perhaps the only thing I sometimes lacked under the tropical sun.

Our climate is not a gift at all - “five months is snow, three months is dirt, the rest is ticks”. Winter, of course, is especially annoying; the dirt is ephemeral; you can also evade close contact with ticks, but the cold from November to April is truly awful. Not only do you have to put on so much clothes that you feel like an astronaut, you have almost nothing to do all these five months: you can forget about the beach and bike right away, for ordinary winter entertainments like skis and snowboards, I get completely indifferent only for birds, and even for an hour and a half either the camera or hands freezes, it is also rarely possible to look at the starry sky, because the clearest nights are usually the very same and cold. It remains only to lie on the bed, read books from the iPad, learn Japanese or take a vacation and go to the tropics, live there for three weeks, and then come to life for a couple of months because everything was warm, sunny and bright. , and here only snow and cold.

SOFTWARE

This is where the fun begins. Because geography, dear readers, seems to affect not only cultural features, but also preferences in choosing development tools. Fact?

Borland products for their popularity in the ex-USSR are more likely to be due not to geography, but to the quality of the product and to what tasks at that time were faced by most programmers (who were programmers then, not “developers” and “software engineer”). First, Borland had an integrated development environment earlier than others, and it was so successful that it quickly became an unspoken standard and role model: RHIDE for the “open” compiler DJGPP , BlackCat ASIDE for TASM and many others copied it. A completely modern FreePascal also uses an almost exact copy of the Borland Pascal 7.0 environment, and although text interfaces have been around for ten years, as they are almost completely superseded by graphical ones, I would not say that it is inconvenient to use. Apparently, for the same reason, Borland compilers got accustomed in educational institutions: to understand the command line keys for the sake of assembling an educational project of two dozen lines is a pleasure for an amateur, from which teachers and students were spared.



The second advantage was the Turbo Vision library, which made Borland’s “proprietary” interface publicly available. Prior to this, almost every programmer went through writing his own library to create window-buttons, without which it was difficult to imagine a complete software product at that time. For developers of countless accounting and personnel management programs, in which besides this very interface with the inevitable buttons and editing fields was often the most voluminous part, Turbo Vision was truly a gift from heaven. In general, Borland was still not the absolute leader, but shared the palm with Watcom, and Borland was more often used to create real-mode applications, and Watcom was almost completely dominated in the protected mode. Before the advent of Windows, the current software monster was known to the general public not as clumsy and unremarkable as Microsoft C or even as an immortal MASM , but as “popular” QuickBasick .

And, as far as I know, the popularity of Borland products is by no means a Russian phenomenon, it became widespread in Europe much earlier, from which it came to us, and North America, with their fashion for Microsoft, is a completely separate world from us with its own obscure addictions.

What languages ​​are relevant to your work? I know that you still put a great word on the C # brainchild of Microsoft.

I can’t say that I am completely inorning it, I even programmed a little on it: there is a plugin for Paint.Net that allows you to write an image processing program in C # and immediately, without inviting any "studios". That's exactly what I used them for, for experiments and one-off tasks, when the code is written longer than it works. But in order to develop something from scratch and completely on it, for the time being I am not ready for such sacrifices. After some program asked to install it. Net Framework of the previous version despite the fact that I already had a newer one, I came to the conclusion that for the ultimate and mass user .Net is the ninth round of the DLL-hell, and I have no desire to send them there.

Raise your hands Who thinks the future is C # ? - yes, it does.

Raise your hands, who believes that Delphi is alive and will not die for a very long time?
- SI Sharpisty, stop laughing and tickling colleagues.

I think my humorous example shows the reality well. Do you feel sad about it?

For me, Embarcadero’s approach harms Delphi more than Microsoft could do. If you look at the evolution of Delphi (and C ++ Builder), it is easy to see that the development environment is cluttered with tools aimed at industrial use in large and complex projects. For small and medium-sized projects, the current development environment is clearly redundant, so there are still a lot of people sitting on Delphi 7 , the level of stability of which Embarcadero could only return to Delphi XE . “Creatively rethought” help in Delphi 2005 , I think, became an unpleasant surprise for many: the description of many functions in it took only a couple of lines that did not clarify the subtleties of their work, or even send them to the official website for details. Since then, help has, of course, been dirtied, but there are still enough white spots in it. But a radical change in the format of the reference to a new and “fashionable” increased the time from pressing the F1 button to obtaining the necessary information.

Not liking the fact that, fascinated by the addition of cutting-edge technology, the Delphi development team is not in a hurry to implement the much-needed, but more “down to earth” functionality. The “tray icon” component - one of the most popular — appeared in 2006, however, due to an annoying error, it became possible to use it only in the next version; VCL translation to use Unicode, the need for which was evident already at the beginning of the zero, took place only in Delphi 2010 , we also got the compilation for 64-bit platforms only last year, although the x86-64-based technology was five years old, as it was written on desktops . There is no need to talk about full support for BMP with alpha channel: despite the fact that the second decade of the 21st century is already outside and the requirements for application design have grown significantly, VCL still lives in the world of prehistoric images with indexed colors. True, there is FireMonkey, but this is still a “dark horse” with a bit of a bit of agility, while for the VCL there are already written gigabytes of proven and consistently working code.

The main trouble Delphi is that now it exists only in the paid version, sharply limiting the influx of new developers, while the main competitor distributes express versions of their development tools in the form of humanitarian aid. Turbo Delphi Explorer Edition existed for enthusiasts earlier, curtailed to the point of being irrelevant in terms of installing new components, but even this very modest initiative stalled, barely starting. It is not surprising that the popularity of Embarcadero products among those who are just starting to program does not grow at all.

It seems to me that a person who has a great experience simply has to tell what he feels in every language of the wonderful.

My ideal of a programming language is a minimum of syntax with a complete idea of ​​how the program will be executed. In general, I hope that someday we will come to a language that has no syntax at all in the traditional sense of the word. Perhaps, those to whom the English language is native, all these “if”, “while”, “continue” are really perceived as words that carry a certain meaning, but for everyone else this is nothing more than a set of Latin squiggles that can be done without any damage Replace with any other flourishes, even Arabic, even Chinese, even abstract (and therefore generally understandable) pictograms, and the process of describing the algorithm is reduced to drawing a flowchart. This approach to the creation of automation scripts and the construction of SQL queries has been used for quite some time, but if we consider the programming industry as a whole, all this is a drop in the ocean, the imperfection of the existing input tools greatly limits us. Indeed, typing a program on the keyboard is still faster and easier than “assembling” with a mouse, but “keyboard-less” devices with touch screens that are increasingly declaring into our lives are fully capable of changing the balance of forces.

If we talk about specific programming languages, I was most impressed with Forth . In fact, his entire syntax fit into two lines:

1. The program consists of "words", each of which is executable.
2. Words are separated from each other by spaces.

Absolutely amazing example of syntactic extremism! Without containing operators, official words, functions, and all other attributes of traditional programming languages, he also had almost unlimited extensibility. Forth , which initially did not even support typing, could be turned into anything only by means of itself.

I chose Delphi from similar considerations: the syntax of classical Pascal is simple and consistent, and the extensions introduced by Borland do not look like something alien and unnatural. For me, Delphi is a “transparent” language, which allows you to express the essence of the algorithm, without thinking about the form in which you have to clothe it. Another reason was the ability to quickly create an interface of the program, without having to go down to the level of WinAPI calls and message handling, unless absolutely necessary. And, of course, components that save a lot of time and nerves: I can’t imagine how much power I would have spent on creating a hex editor for Window Scanner myself or on an editor with syntax highlighting for Neo Sign 0f Misery , and would I have left this desire to write something else.

Now I am gradually learning Ruby . In a sense, this language is the antithesis to my ideals: syntactically redundant, not having a compiler into an “honest” executable code now, not very convenient for direct communication with the operating system at the API level. And yet, there is something in it: the only statement if (“if not”), when we first met, plunges into ecstasy. And from a purely practical practical point of view, it would be totally wrong to limit oneself to exclusively classical areas and languages, without paying attention to modern programming.

And since there is only one step from love to hate, I cannot help but mention the languages ​​that I most disliked.
First, Java . I didn’t write a single line on it, but every time LibreOffice loads, I simply hate it, because Microsoft’s “office” written without using JRE starts in a couple of seconds, and free, but with JRE, almost ten times slower. Truly, this language was created for the sole purpose: to eat more and work less.

The second number is SQL . I find it difficult to trust a language in which the elementary question: “What is faster — an external connection of tables or a subquery?” Is generally almost impossible to speculatively speculatively. In addition, I am regularly annoyed by how cumbersome requests are sometimes generated by elementary, in fact, tasks.

And finally, C ++ . A doomed attempt to embrace the immense; a monster who has grown fat on trying to shove into it all the “fashionable” paradigms, which, however, year after year drags on itself hoary antiquity in the form of header files and an archaic preprocessor, which with great desire can be made to do a lot, but usually the desire ends much earlier than this "much" it turns out to do and debug. About the "little things in life" like overloaded syntax or compile time, again resulting from the vastness of the language and the same header files, even inconvenient to speak. In general, this language is a complete collection of problems characteristic of a project that has survived its own death.

And now come into your past. Your first computer and your first language?

“My first computer” and “the first computer with which I had a chance to talk tightly” for me are two very different machines. For two years I went to the programming circle at the local Station of Young Technicians, there was a very advanced computer class based on the Yamaha MSX-2 at that time, the machines were 8-bit though, but with hardware support for sprites, a sound coprocessor, a RAM disk, what a local network, and even a color monitor, mouse and drive on the "head" machine. The implementation of BASIC on that machine was also the best of all that I saw for the equipment of this level. The only drawback is that we had only three classes a week, and almost every person had two people behind each machine, and it was very important to come earlier in order to be the one who was sitting at the keyboard.

I didn’t get my computer home but I don’t remember what birthday it was, it was Dubna-48K , a Spectrum clone with a 2-fold reduced clock frequency and a completely oak keyboard, after six hours of use of which fingers almost cramped . She was technically far away from Yamaha, of course, but she was only mine 24 hours a day, you could get programs for her, and in a couple of years you could even find the book ZX Spectrum for Users and Programmers on sale which cost almost as a “King Solomon’s Mine” on the collapse, but finally allowed to understand the assembler for the Z80 and the architecture of the Spectrum. The reduced clock frequency of the “Dubna” processor, in fact, led me to study the assembler and the first hacking experiments: my own programs in BASIC sometimes did not work as fast as they wanted, and some games designed for a normal frequency simply did not load. And when I wrote my own font search program in memory, and it worked so fast that I had to insert empty slow cycles into it, and at the same time I fit in a couple of hundred bytes, then it finally became clear to me that the assembler is a force, able to move mountains. Spectrum - perhaps the one of the platforms, the departure of which I regret the most. If you know how to program in assembler, know the purpose of input-output ports (of which there are no more than a dozen used), know how to handle interrupts and know the documentation on the ROM subroutines, you can do everything with the Spectrum and even a little more. Modern Wintel in this regard is a swamp, in which, according to Pelevin, “a dull mind will sink like an iron and a sharp mind like a Damascus blade.”

Hacking

I know little about your hacker experience. I am not much here in the subject. When did it all start? Where did the need come from, discovering forbidden complicated things?

Let's start with the fact that once all this has not been forbidden. To rewrite the program or music was in the order of things, nobody saw that sin. And, of course, it never occurred to anyone to condemn a person who corrected a dozen bytes so that a program that had previously refused to load and work still started to do it. Hacking games for “endless lives” flourished in general, there were even brochures about which game should be fixed in which game to make it easier for you to pass, and for more advanced players how to identify these bytes yourself.

That is, the need, both then and now, was mostly practical: to speed up their programs in assembler pieces, make other people load and work, see what the game ends with, and honestly can't get through. Programs then cost nothing, but information about how to use them was worth its weight in gold. Documentation was almost inaccessible, which especially prevented the development of programming languages ​​in which I became interested almost immediately. And so I thought of viewing the program code using a simple one-line monitor in BASIC, looking for text lines. And then I tried to use these lines as operators, substituting various parameters after them and studying error messages. Despite the primitive approach, I managed to almost completely understand MegaBasic 's and ZX-Forth 's in this way.

I did my very first hacking, not only completely without understanding machine codes, but also having very vague ideas about computers in general. It was at the Krasnoyarsk airport, and I “hacked” the slot machine. Then such painted iron boxes with a TV set inside, a joystick and some household computer were loaded, into which a specially patched game was loaded (in my case it turned out to be a timeless “River raid”). Feed the aggregate a 15-kopeck coin, press the red button, and you can play. Smashed three airplanes - get the next coin and start over. The game was unfamiliar, the joystick was oak, so the coins were decreasing very quickly. It was then that a crazy thought came to me: “What if, without throwing a coin, press the red button before the game ends?” An unknown craftsman who crossed River raid with a button and a coin acceptor didn’t I expected: the game just restarted from the beginning, and I again had three airplanes. It is not difficult to guess that every time when it was about to lose, I simply shook the red button, and it was only when people behind the back gathered quite a few indecently people.

Toward the end of the 90s, when PCs began to gradually turn from luxury goods into household appliances, the situation changed somewhat: the main source of software was CDs with all sorts of software assembled with the world. There, the documentation was usually supplied as part of the product, but there were often “shareware” programs that after 30 days started to insist on requiring registration. Having bought a “everything for the programmer” disk for the occasion, I found on it really deposits of useful programs and libraries for all occasions, much of which, however, suffered from the ailment of greed. , Oscar, SoftIce , W32Dasm the Keyboard Caper', , . , Fallout.

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SIGN OF MISTERY

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title , “photo123.jpg” ( title ) , title input , “.” . .

GALLOC 99 . ON_ERROR ^wait_wnd MBOX " " . BEEP $40 ^wait_wnd WND_FIND 0 $ $ "" 1 . ;     LENGTH 0 1 IS_KEYS_PRESSED 10 $71 . ;   F2   CALL_BRANCH 10 0 ^next ^exit . ;       ^next branch 1 0 ^wait_wnd . WND_FIND_OWNER 0 4 ;    WND_GET_TEXT 4 . ;  title ; USTR_EXTRACT 4 5 " - Goo" . ;   READ_USTRL 5 0 6 ;    sleep 300 ; MBOX @6 "" . WND_FIND_CHILD 2 0 'Edit' 1 $ 1 . ;   Edit WND_SET_TEXT 2 @6 ;   WND_FIND_CHILD 3 0 $ $ '&' 1 . ;    sleep 600 ; WND_CLICK 3 ;  EMULATE_KEYDOWN $0D . sleep 300 JUMP ^wait_wnd ^exit MBOX " " . BEEP $40 EOS . 

It was some kind of horror with the type conversion variable from the array. With these indices is a very big pair. It was interesting, and we went home in a great mood because of our ability to pervert in accepting problem-solving options, but in these 40 lines of code, which mean the numbers after the commands, it is rather difficult to recall in two days. This is a huge minus. Creating a loop with the exit condition oh ...



I mean, because programming languages, because of their abstract models, for professionals, it seems to damnly expand the area of ​​RAM in the head as the n-back.
And it is precisely the absence of tasks deeper than “2-back” and allow merging into any script coding faster than the same C #. That is how AutoIt jumped out. Your previous version of sign of mystery didn’t require user memory — it’s all on its face. Your latest versions of Neo, to which I hardly passed, for I didn’t look at programming at all, is already real script coding. It does not make sense to study NeoSignOfMystery, when it is better to start learning something serious. Alas, for me it is true.

View syntax

 “BRANCH 9 9 2” 

where you need to store in your RAM what these numbers are and where they refer ... oh, n-back puzzles.

Here I completely agree that the language in NeoS0M is simple in essence, but quite voluminous in content. I myself use tips on the order of parameters and sometimes even look in my own help. And I am fully aware that people who haven’t been able to communicate with programmable calculators are shocked by the very idea of ​​designating variables by faceless numbers. However, the current state of Neo Sign 0f Misery is an excuse that is invisibly present in the documentation: this language is referred to as internal. Initially, it was conceived as a relatively simple to implement intermediate layer between the visual script designer, similar to the Sign 0f Misery shell, but without restrictions on the number of command parameters, variables, etc., and the kernel, whose task is to execute bytecode as quickly as possible.

If I started programming from the interface, the project would have stalled in the wilds of buttons and molds without even starting, because there are not too many things in programming that would be more boring than the user interface. In the current state, the program already knows how to do what it was intended for and allows the user to solve practical automation tasks. For example, a script written in a couple of evenings (most of which went to study under a debugger of someone else's DLL and study the features of calculating winter-summer time in Windows), in 20 minutes, put into order an archive of 40 gigabytes of photos, to which I For several months I was even afraid to approach.

The current state of NeoS0M is such that almost all the necessary commands have already been implemented, the syntax is also well established and no revolutions are planned in it, therefore in future versions the main emphasis will be placed just on improving the visual means of constructing scripts. Moreover, I even had an idea on this subject that was so exciting, as much as I was terrifying, because it completely cancels the visual designer in its current form and requires more than half rewriting of the NeoS0M shell.
If your community grows, authors will appear, will you be ready to change the logic of Sign 0f Misery? Or is there an AutoIt for everything else?

I still urge to perceive NeoS0M not as another programming language, from which it is required (ideally) to solve school programming problems equally well and to be suitable for the development of industrial-scale systems. I was guided primarily by the solution of modest "home" tasks, hence the relative limitedness of language means. The cycles in NeoS0M look unusual only because for the last thirty years the structural programming paradigm has dominated, where the use of GOTO is the first of the deadly sins. For some reason, it is believed that structured programming is very simple and straightforward, although I noticed that people far from programming understand the classic BASIC with its GOTO much easier than structural bells and whistles. Therefore, my BRANCH and CALL_BRANCH are nothing more than the ON ... GOTO and ON ... GOSUB operators from BASIC, which are brought to a logical conclusion. At some point I noticed that NeoS0M implies its own special style of writing not only scripts, but also comments to them. When I program in "ordinary" languages, I describe the actions performed by a particular block of code. When I write the NeoS0M script, I describe the assignment of the contents of a variable with which subsequent script commands will work. Without this, the NeoS0M script doesn’t really look much clearer than the holes in the punched card.

If, as an object of criticism, to consider precisely the absence of the naming of variables and constants, then I agree that a record like

 MBOX "  .  ?" "" {ICONERROR+YESNO} $ {_} 

would be more transparent than the current one

 MBOX "  .  ?" "" $14 $ 5 

The need for certain steps in this direction is definitely overdue, and such improvements do not contradict the original idea of ​​Neo Sign 0f Misery as a visual environment in which scripts are not written, but “assembled” from cubes. I do not plan to go along the path of AutoIt and create a highly specialized programming language with control structures, objects, lambda expressions and other traditional attributes; if I had such an intention, I would limit myself to writing a library for the same C #, especially since the compiler of this language has been part of Windows for several years.

HARDWARE

What is your equipment from technology today? What kind of computer? Camera, glass?

My computer is not the newest, as I bought the Q6600 quad core 4 years ago, so I’m still sitting on it, only my memory has increased to 8 gigabytes and I inserted another hard drive into it this summer. There is enough power, I do not see any special reasons yet. I had to go a lot worse on the periphery: ASUS Vento 7700 case, Logitech Performance MX mouse, Microsoft Reclusa keyboard - even if you don’t count the monitor (HP ZR24W), outside my computer is more expensive than inside :-) For some time, I became design and convenience set above purely technical characteristics, and this, alas, in modern technology has become the most expensive "detail". The processor, hard drive and other offal "to the fullest" are not used very often to seriously worry about the shortage of megahertz, but the inconvenient keyboard or "rubber" mouse would annoy you all the time, I learned it back in times when I was sitting at my first Pentium MMX in a faceless case of fake ivory color with a keyboard and mouse of unknown origin.



My current “big” camera, the Canon 50D, is used almost exclusively “for butterflies” in conjunction with 100 / 2.8L Macro. Seven years ago I bought my first digital camera, the Canon 350D, with an eye to using optics from the old Zenith, then a telephoto lens and a flash to it, after which it was too expensive to change the system. For several years I managed to collect some of the old optics, from which the Zeiss Tessar 50 / 2.8, Helios 44-3, which served me in various situations, Mir-10A and Tair-3C, which immediately became indispensable for filming celestial phenomena. There is also an inexpensive Sigma 70-300 APO Macro zoom, with which I initially also shot macro activity, but now I use it rarely and only for birds, and also the Kenonian 17-55 / 2.8, which has recently been completely without work. It happened so that before last my Thai voyage I took all three of these lenses, and since I didn’t risk losing all this equipment, I was afraid to get it as spare parts on arrival, I had to wear them all in a photo bag on my shoulder. And if I arrived there without incident, then upon returning from the many hours of dragging all this, and the suitcase, which was heavily weighed down from souvenirs, my back ached terribly for a week. This led me to the idea of ​​an equally high-quality, but more miniature camera. Having seen the Sony NEX-5 mirrorless in a store once, I bought it the next day without a second thought. Since then, NEX, small, light and inconspicuous, has become my main vehicle: it accompanies me on foreign trips, cycling, and forays into nature, and after acquiring a 30mm macro lens, I was able to shoot them and my favorite butterflies.

From the same considerations of lightness and convenience, I initially tormented by the choice between netbooks and conventional compact laptops, eventually rejected them all in favor of iPad2. At first, the breadth of the capabilities of this device even made me wonder, mixed with joy. After that, of course, I began to take it for granted, but initially I thought that the tablets were suitable only for the role of internet browsers, book readers and an interactive sky map, nothing more. I didn’t even think about making such a “frivolous” device to sketch a not too complicated drawing or do something with a photo, even remotely resembling a work in Photoshop, and was sincerely happy to be deceived by my pessimism.

HUMANWARE

I know you are a big fan of photography and astronomy. This is also very close to me. It seems to me that people who are not interested in the stars at all are simply afraid of them, because the fear of uncertainty in life is almost the most important motive for action. We all try to find confidence. You do not feel like Adam in the biblical paradise, with the tool of knowledge of the world, when in summer you go out to your Siberian fields? Not with the tool under the fig leaf, but with what you wind your collection of lenses into.)

As a child, I was also afraid of space - the then popular science programs knew how to scare children correctly :-) All these stories are about thousands of parsecs of darkness and eternal cold, long-gone stars, the light from which goes to us for millennia, the Sun which is destined to cool through some pathetic billions of years (such is the paradox of children's perception: the millennia of flight to the nearest stars is “terrible because never”, and billions of years before the extinction of the sun is “terrible as soon”). Children's impressions are often forgotten, but they are not in vain for anyone - hence, probably, the unwillingness to look too deep into the abyss. Yes, and nothing, perhaps, does not degrade humanity, as the starry sky overhead. It was millions of years before us and there will be millions of years after, on other nights it seems that a little bit more, and the stars can be collected from the sky by hand, but we cannot even move the smallest of these luminous points.

And modern man has not so many opportunities to look at the stars. Interest rarely arises from scratch, and now even in a small city the sky is so bright that out of all its magnificence only a hundred faded spots are available to the eye. Many admire the images of the night sky from National Geographic, and after that the dusty and empty city sky rather disappoints, rather than encourages them to look closer. When once a lantern burned in the next house, I myself, going out to the loggia late at night, was amazed how many stars, it turns out, can be seen above our yard without any telescope. Alas, the starry sky is increasingly turning into luxury, for the sake of meeting with which you need to climb farther and farther from human habitation - stars are like butterflies, which are infrequent within the city limits and limited to half of the most unusual types of coloring that is not at all impressive, and only in the city do you understand as far as they are actually numerous and diverse.

Knowledge of the world for me is not even the main thing, first of all I am a seeker of impressions, living according to the behest of Pythagoras: “Life is like games: others come to compete in them, others to trade, and the happiest to watch.” I do not so much study the objects of my interests, hoping to elicit their secrets, but rather aspire to get to know them so closely that they reveal these secrets to me without coercion. And if I used to spend a fair amount of time reading about how “how many lines / mm lens A is better than lens B”, now the equipment for me is no longer a value in itself, but a way to see more and remember better, and the technical parameters interest only as a very rough answer to the question "is it good enough to capture what I like the way I want it."

Didn't you get a serpent? Was he a tempter, I can not know, but it seems that you, too, was able to photograph?

Snakes are interesting to me since childhood, very graceful creatures. I, of course, more than once saw them in terrariums, but it’s one thing to look at a cobra sitting behind a thick dusty glass or a python beefed up to complete indifference, and quite another to personally see and photograph at least the most puny but wild snake. But for some reason they all for a long time did not want to meet my eyes. For thirty years I, no matter how many times I have been in the surrounding forests, have not met one, and I was sure if, and where I happen to fulfill my dream, then in Southeast Asia. To read the Internet, snakes do not allow tourists to walk there: either in the bushes in the city center they will lull out, then they will crawl to the pool, or they will spend the night in the shower stall. And since not all the snakes there are harmless, before I left the path, I just in case looked to see if someone rustled in the grass and was not hanging from the tree. There even lives a very beautiful and, moreover, completely non-poisonous, but paradise serpent that can fly. However, just as I did not seek them out, I didn’t see a single snake: either they really weren’t there, or they were hiding very well. In general, I did not happen to see the paradise snake. But as compensation, the native nature presented me with a meeting with a bright black and yellow spider with a plate the size of which was arranged in a web of two meters in diameter.

And only this spring, in the beginning of June, in a place literally literally up and down, I was finally lucky to meet the real snake itself, by happy coincidence of circumstances having a camera on hand. I had to run after him considerably, but I still managed to get his portrait. True, I almost paid for this photo on my rest in a hospital bed - there was a strong temptation to “fix” the snake with my hand for the sake of a better angle. After all, I was almost certain that I was only harmless. And only when “too” somehow hissed badly at me, I decided, just in case, to refrain from closer acquaintance. At home, having carefully examined the photo, I noticed that the pupils of the snake are not round, like snakes, but vertical, which are laid on any decent viper.

As for the fig leaf ... All your travel adventures, all your texts, programs, photos and stories smell like a certain definition, the determination of reality around you with a touch of loneliness. Do you feel lonely?

But isn't this why people drive far away? Many go just for "voluntary loneliness", which is not even loneliness, but only a refusal to live "for the public." T-shirt "with elephants", breeches and sandals hide the national identity no worse than the invisible cap, at the same time eliminating all associated obligations. I can not say that the Russians are somehow worse than other tourists - a time when only characters with gold chains went thick in arms, unable to connect two words without a mat, fortunately, already in the past. However, communication with compatriots too often results in the ritual shifting of sun loungers into a common pile - “everything is here”, drinking, even if you don’t feel like, and talking about who was where and how it is now in Russia. If local sights are still being discussed more or less vividly, then talk “about the house” - occasionally - tiredness from impressions so new that you want a piece of something familiar, and for the most part just a ritual. I have already had time to get over the “indigestion of impressions” on my very first voyage, and since then this has not happened to me, but the historically established ritual, for me, is so simply boring. Therefore, I do not think that I was the most lonely foreigner in the tropics; But when I want to communicate even with someone, if only he understood in Russian, it would really be utterly lonely for me.

The feeling of loneliness rather evokes my style of presentation. Once a friend reproached me for being self-centered, because I too often use the pronoun “I” and its derivatives. That is why, probably, the impression of detachment from one and all: in my texts there is “that which is around,” and gliding through it, contemplating and memorizing, but not confusing and not dissolving in the surrounding “me.” For me (here, I used this word again), this is just a way to convey the perfect subjectivity of the universe, which everyone sees in his own way. Therefore, I present my impressions in such a way that the story is a story about what happened once, and maybe unique, and not promises in the style of a tourist guide: "you can see, you can try ...". Yes, and I write to the blog slowly and, as a rule, not without “hot pursuit”; any text “crumbles” in my head, matures, and after returning from a holiday I don’t want to do anything for a couple of months. When you write about something, even just a week later, you unwittingly separate yourself from the current and past events, even if you were carried away and involved without a trace. , , .

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