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Again, I haven't written in a while. The reason is part laziness and part not having a topic worth writing about. Some recent policy changes at the office have put an idea for a rant in my head. It's something I've been stewing about and I guess until I vent or rant it won't leave my poor brain alone. I don't like being upset about things for a long time, as it affects my generally happy demeanor and digestive system. This Dilbert is not aimed at anybody really. I know folks who are leaders in the best meaning of this word and I do not belittle their accomplishments as leaders in any way. Maybe this image will make more sense. Again, a little extreme, but you should guess the gist of what I am trying to say. There is this strange notion in the world, it's several years old, that engineers need to collaborate. A notion that they need to be close to each other or talk to each other and stay in the same room. A notion that they need watch over each ot...

Doesn't really matter. I have hit a small roadblock in my work today, so I decided to take a break and keep on writing about our trip. Bruges - what a wonderful little town. The center of it, where we stayed, is chuck-full of little streets and restaurants on the corner and churches and historical buildings, and everything else you can possible image a historical European town should be. Burg and surroundings behind Church of our lady of Bruges  Who cares, it's pretty. Bruges considers itself to be a chocolate capital of the world, so there is a chocolates and sweets store every 20-30 feet or so, especially around more touristy spots. Every and each one of them claims to sell the best Belgian chocolate there is. We of course tried a few, and then a few more, and actually ended up in Chocolate History Museum, curated by on the major chocolate producer in Belgium. Because they are not paying me for it, and truth to be told I don't remember, I will not endors...

It's getting harder to recall some of the things, so I have to keep on writing. It just happens to be a slower work day today than usual. Delft was a one night stop over for us. The town itself could be perfectly described by words "quaint" and "little". There are a couple of churches, like most of ones we've visited they are devoid of decorations and sport high beam beautiful ceilings. There is a big central square with restaurants and souvenir shops around it. It fun to peruse those for a little bit, but most of them try to sell the famous blue Delft glaze in one form or the other. The square gets some traffic, so ignoring "tourist trap" vibe of most restaurants, you get a good "people watching" experience. The locals seem to eat and drink there as well. so it's not a bad sign. Being a "student town", as we were told by our wonderful B&B owner, the town is mostly quiet and dead in the mornings. After spending an even...

My brother has asked me to search deep within and give an opinion of Anne Frank's House museum in Amsterdam. I think in my previous post the only thing I mentioned was that the lines were huge. I only know the gist of The Diary, having never read the book in its fullest. Going into the museum I had very little expectation of what I would see and what would be presented. By the way photography is strictly forbidden inside, so I can't share to many pictures. The museum is small, by design actually. It really does reside inside the house where the families lived for couple of years during the Nazy invasion of Holland. The point of the museum is to show how cramped, dangerous, and harsh the living conditions were for those hiding. The exhibition rooms are devoid of any furniture, since that would hinder the movement of visitors. The walls are a restoration with paintings, old photographs and writings that Anne herself used to brighten their existence. One of the interesting t...

It was suggested by my lovely wife that I should post more pictures of the trip with the blog posting. While I would rather have words, I think it can help the narration. But fear not! I am not giving up creative control. Before we move on from Amsterdam, let me share several more wonderful and weird sights we saw. Fish on a tree Rembrand's Night Watch sculpture A crab biting fox's tail View from Westerkirk Me holding my crap together while climbing up Westerkirk We had this bright idea of driving from Amsterdam to the rest of our destinations. There were couple of small roadblocks along the way to that. First off, it is unusually hard to find a car with automatic transmission in Europe and it costs more, with me learning how to drive in US, I have no clue how to drive manual, nor do I wish to learn at this stage of my life. Another is, that renting a car in one country and returning car in another will more or less double you rent price. This didn...

I better take off my lazy shoes and keep on writing, the memories seem to dull with time and start forgetting things. Amsterdam - our first stop. My first impression? Cold and windy, unfortunately. The weather did not favor us the first couple of days, with intermittent rain and fairly windy conditions. Admitting to too much wind is really something for somebody from the plains of Midwest. This trip we did not stay in any hotels, but decided to go with renting apartment space. This leads to my second impression of Amsterdam. These are the stairs that we had to drag our luggage up, and then down. We've climbed so many stairs during our stay in Amsterdam, that we've decided to avoid it for the most part for the duration of the trip. One of the things that we do when arriving to a new city is search up if SANDEMANs free tours are available, We always have a lot of fun on those and get information of the place, also occasionally good advice from the tour guides. Amsterda...

Dam panoramic view, Amsterdam NL Oh, what a trip! We've hit so many places during the twelve days in Europe that sometime's everything is a blur. There are many memories, however, that are sharp and will stay with me for a very long time. I am not going to list all of the places we've been to and all of the locations we've seen. This is not the point of this post. I will rather focus on specific details, and small stories that are interesting to me. I may also ask Lena and Maya to contribute to the narrative, maybe they'll offer a point that I either missed or re-interpreted differently. We've build our original list of destinations based on the simple fact of where we could fly on miles, what we haven't seen yet, and the availability of non-stop flights. The starting point of the trip was to be Amsterdam and the final destination before going home was Brussels. Because of the tragic events in Brussels several weeks before, at almost the last moment ...

I have, some time ago, noticed that my Lego collection has outgrown the space I allocated for it. It has also outgrown my desire to spend significant amounts of money of them, therefore I have decided to take a break from purchasing anything big and exciting(Still dreaming about the Death Star though). Then, on our family's trip to Michigan, I've noticed a bunch of models that are made out of pressed and engraved tin. I grabbed an X-Wing right away, but then noticed something I wanted for a long time. In my collection of geeky/nerdy shit I don't have a single representative of Star Trek verse. The model itself looks OK, given the material being used to assemble it. There was a lot of frustrating moments in assembly, where alignment could not be achieved. The latching system is so small, that there were instances where I seriously considered a magnifying glass. The end result is also a bit front heavy, making the model topple forward, that is why there is a pen holding i...

I feel that recently I haven't been that interested in science as I used to be. But at the same time I would like to pass on my love of science to my kids. They are assaulted every day with games, videos, and reading that don't give them any clue that the universe is wondrous, and won't wake any kind of curiosity in them. Well, I think, it should start with me. I have decided to forgo reading fiction for now. I have set a goal of going through a bunch of modern science books. Hopefully, after reading all these books, I can talk to my kids about the things I've learned from books, and peak their interest a little bit. It's a slow go, since I don't have a lot of time to read, but any time I can pick up a book it will be a work of non-fiction, and written by a contemporary scientist. So far I have read "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking. I did it last year actually, this is what spurned me to read more books of this kind. I have also recen...

I've listened to this song a bunch of times before, but only recently (yesterday) I forced myself to pay attention to the lyrics and realized that it's about Dune. The books easily rank themselves among top 10 for me, and weirdly I liked David Lynch's version every time I watched  it. Here is the song interposed over some of the movie.

Progress is moved by basic human desire to achieve maximum comfort while lounging on the couch. The latest achievement was spurned by our decision to forgo cable or satellite and enjoy internet streaming services sometime ago, which are more than adequate for our TV viewing purposes. It came with a small caveat, my basic need to watch NFL games on Sundays, or Mondays. or Thursdays. We have a roof antenna which I was unable to make use of, for different reasons. Therefore we relied on two indoor UHV/VHF numbers. They worked fairly well, however the selection of channels was limited. Again, we didn't care that much, 90-95% of what we watch is streamed, either through Hulu or Netflix. I was getting excellent reception of FOX, NBC or  ABC, for Sunday or Monday Night games. Until push came to shove. Last weekend's, disappointing i may add, game was translated on CBS. I could not get CBS to work on those in-doors, and I've had enough. Several months ago, during the routin...

And by that I mean garbage. Hello loyal reader. I haven't written since January, but recently I have come upon the idea. We are in the initial pains of a big move. Yes, the Burlak family is moving exactly 8 miles north  to a new house. As we are going through the crap, we've accumulated quite a bit over 8 years at our current residence, I have discovered a treasure trove of old things. This that used to interest me, things I used to collect, some of the things I actually remember bringing over with me from New York and haven't seeing them since. Anyway, my next several posts will have pictures and hopefully memories of some of the things. I know they are worthless, but I don't have the heart to throw it out. Talk to you later.

There has been a lot of posts about apparent writer's block. People moan back and forth about how they promised themselves to write more, and failed to do so. Well, I am not one of them. I've never promised to write more. My writing seems to be in decline for a while now partially due to work-load partially due to general laziness. I stopped caring if I put a post out even once a month. Now I've joined my blogging friends in complaining by writing a whole paragraph about it, I think I might actually have something to say. Not a lot though. New Year came and went. We've had a whole bunch of celebrations. By the way, Cards Against Humanity game is dirty, disgusting and a whole lot of fun, if you are in to the low brow humor. My 37th birthday also came and went. I would like to thank,again, all of those who congratulated me on achieving basically nothing but getting a year closer to retirement. Still it was very nice. Thank you one and all! I got some very nice pre...

Yes, we had one of those. A rare and welcome thing. Me and The Awesome Wife have been working our asses off last couple of months and it was beginning to show.  Three days before we left for vacation I had to go back to Atlanta and spent two days working stopping only to take a piss and munch on a bags of chips. Drugs were not provided by the company. We went to our regular destination in Cancun Mexico, changing only the venue where we stopped. The resort was smaller than the last one we visited, but I think it made it nicer. The ocean was calm for the most part and warm too. We spent a lot of time on the beach, much more than we usually do. I think the water in the pool was actually colder than the ocean, plus the pool itself was pretty boring. The evenings were filled with all sorts of variety shows. Some of them were pretty lame, and yes I can be a snob when being tried to entertain. The inexperience of some of the acts was clearly showing through, still my  usual appro...

I have been remiss about posting, again. I also have a lot of things going on with my life, with the the renewed interest in all sorts of sport activities. I may do a separate post on it too. This post is about 3 major movies that I have managed to see in the last couple of weeks. Avengers. Everyone have been touting it as THE MARVEL movie to see. Personally, I have little personal investment in the heroes of the movie. For some strange reason X-MEN are my Marvel heroes of choice. That being said, I am more than familiar with Hulk and Iron Man lore. Less so with Thor (always preferring the Old Norse version to Marvel's) and close to none familiarity with Black Widow or Hawkeye. I must admit I really enjoyed the movie. The movie had lots of big action sequences, some of them lasting more than 3 seconds before camera jerk. I think the subdued but mischievous performance by Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Banner was the best of them all (I'll come back to that later). Iron Man ...

Sports are back on the TV for me. NFL season has started with a big win from Bears. Granted they were playing Colts, a team in rebuilding after Peyton Manning's leave. But, there was a scary moment with Jay Cutler's pick six mistake at the start of the game. For us who watched Bears go through Jay's interception riddled season couple of years ago it was a gasp moment. Overall, after this small mistake the team looked good. There is a certain connection between Jay Cutler and freshly acquired Brandon Marshall. Matt Forte looked leaner and ran very very well. We'll see how the season develops, but at the moment I am a very happy fan!

The best way to get rid of the annoying song in your head, is make everyone else listen to it. This way I know I'm not the only one being annoyed and it will calm me. I also haven't a clue why my brain picked it out from random noise. Try not to enjoy too much. I actually never liked this song, but the chorus is catchy. A true trademark of an excellent pop tune.

One of my all time favorite songs. Von Morrison , just a cool song about doing it with a right girl. Enjoy.

I am not a religious person. Far from it, but heaven help me. She is turning 8 today. I only have couple of years before the crazy sets in for teenage years. I should start stocking up on ammo. Happy borthday Monkey! I love the look of bewilderment as she is coming out of the tank.