A letter home from study abroad
Wow...today was certainly an action-packed day. It all started at about 9
am when I slammed the alarm clock. It started all over again at about 10
when I finally realized that the alarm clock wasn't simply taunting me. I
showered. (We've had hot water for over a week now...I don't get it.) I
threw on some clothing and headed out to Leningradsky Vokzal to pick up my
tickets to Petersburg. My Russian was so bad that the travel agent
commented on how much better it had been the first time. Then he tried to
get me to arrange a hotel stay for my mom through Intourist. I thanked
him politely, scooped my tickets up and returned to the metro. When I got
home, I looked at my tickets. It's interesting...They required both
passport numbers, but they don't appear anywhere on our tickets. *shrug*
At home, I shaved and brushed my hair and sat around for an hour
killing time. It was about 12:30 and Todd Labaugh was showing up with a
car to whisk me away to a job interview at 2:30. At about 1:30 I gave in
and put on slacks, a shirt, tie and jacket. The effect was a little
disconcerting. You see, I promised myself long ago that I'd never take a
job where I had to wear a tie. (The tie itself doesn't bother me....it's
that top button and the fact that I have to wear slacks AND button the top
button AND that I have to be sure to pull my hair back AND that I look
like a suit. But, I guess that's fairly normal for your average computer
geek.
I ended up watching TV downstairs for about 45 minutes to kill
time before heading up to Park Kultury metro to meet Todd. Rachel (one
of the Brits) came in with a computer magazine. She was astounded at the
advertised price for a 16Mb EDO simm--$100. I honestly can't remember
what it is at home.
Well, in the car over to our client's (Renissance Capital
[rencap.com]) office, Todd started telling me about them...apparently they
handle 60% of the Venture Capital in Russia at the moment. Quite a
staggering figure. Apparently, they're buying new Compaq PentiumPro 200
Workstations at the rate of 15 per month. The consulting I'll be doing is
Mac consulting....and it will probably be on an as-needed basis. Todd
started to talk about CCI (his company) springing for a pager for me.
When he heard that I'd done work w/ e-commerce, he said that he might have
other work for me--apparently CCI just fired the last guy who was working
on commerce-enabling their web site.
Anyway, RenCap is in a really spiffy modern building...everybody
there has magnetic ID badges...not even swipe...just proximity--they open
when you wave your badge at the lock...pretty cool. They've got a really
nice setup...except they're running NT almost everywhere...except on their
two macs---an 8100 and a 9500 w/ a 17" screen and 64 megs of RAM. The
powermacs are meant to be desktop publishing stations. Apparently,
they've got a copy of Quark Xpress 3.31 and a copy of 3.32 and they want
to run 3.32 on both, but the serial #s aren't interchangable...and quark
does one of those network licensing things...it polls for other running
copies. Well, I tried to ftp an updater...but they're behind a firewall
and the techie assigned to me insisted that they didn't have any form of a
bastion host....instead, he opted to reconfigure their firewall to let the
mac FTP out. It only took 15 minutes once I showed him how to find the
mac's IP address (he insisted that TCP/IP wasn't installed on the macs...i
thought this was a bizzare claim as I'd already gotten out using
Netscape...) While we were in the machine room (it puts anything I've
ever seen to shame...except for the conspicuious absence of blinkenlights)
the tech who was reconfiguring the firewall telnetted into a
unix box "slon" (elephant) and telnetting to the outside world....It's
funny...that's kind of what I'd meant before. *shrug* My time--their
money. In the end, it turned out that the tech didn't really want to buy
an upgrade to 3.32 (which, i believe, is payware) and asked me about
ways of tricking the programs into not telling each other that they
existed. I opted for a solution that would be pretty unthinkable in the
states--I showed him where to find a "Cracks & Serial #s" file. He was
generally very defensive...he didn't think I'd need to show up
again....then again, care and feeding of the two macs is (part of) his
job. He and I had tea and he called a car to deliver me to the metro.
I took the metro to Universitet--where I met my contact family.
They took me to see Twelfth Night at the "Blue Bird" children's
theater...except it was an opera...I understood just about nothing. As we
were leaving, my contact mom gave me a packet with a pair, two pieces of
pie and a chicken sandwich. I'd never seen a chicken sandwich w/ the
chicken still on the bone before...
Once I got home, I discovered that Olya and Tanya (the girls who
live across the hall) had decided that I'd been kidnapped, as I hadn't
come home from my "Interview". Later, Jerry and I hung out and geeked out
for a while (chatted about programming languages, hardware, RFCs, etc) He
read me entries from a russian translation of "The Jargon File" that he
picked up today...quite amusing. I verified that it was the real thing by
asking him to read the entry for Hobbit...which does indeed mention
*hobbit* as the keeper (literally: landlord) of lasers. I think I'll
probably get one more journal entry off before I surrender my computer to
the ACTR main office for the duration of our trip to the baltics. We
leave friday afternoon. If I don't get another journal entry off before I
take off, I'll talk to y'all in november. (Barring the discovery of a
cyber-cafe in the baltics...Jerry and I have decided to try to find one.)