Dennis Gorelik's Journal

7:52am: Wordle from my resume
Here's my resume:

And here's a Wordle created from it:

12:33pm: Learning sales tricks

It's a very valuable lesson for everybody: salesmen, buyers, and shareholders.

2:46am: My Next Door Neighbor wants to BAN all GUNS

My Next Door Neighbor wants to BAN all GUNS!
Their house is NOT ARMED!
Out of RESPECT for their opinions
I promise NOT to use MY GUNS
to PROTECT THEM

Found here

3:44pm: In Florida
We are in Clearwater, Florida for short vacation.
(Actually leaving tomorrow).
The weather and water are nice here, and it's good to take a break, but staying in hotel room (even nice one) instead of the house back in Kentucky and using netbook (Eee) instead of desktop with a full keyboard is not as nice.
:-)

Anyway, we are leaving tomorrow.

8:42pm: Five things I don't like in the US
The United States is my country of choice.
I chose it in 1999, came for the first time in April 14 2003 (I remember that day for multiple reasons) and never left the country since then.
I like many things in the US, but not everything is perfect.
My friend asked me what I don't like in the US.
These things come to mind:
1) High taxes.
2) Too strict and not very consistent immigration policy.
3) Wars (on drugs, porn, and terror).

Here they are in more details:
1) High taxes
Relative to most of European countries US taxes are not high at all. Still effective tax burden that US government puts on private sector is about 40% which is at least two times bigger than I’d like it too be. Government (any government, not only in the US) is too inefficient to allow it distribute that much of resources.

2) Draconian and unpredictable immigration policy
It’s very hard to immigrate to the US. I was able to, but still I think it should be easier. Getting Green Card is the process that takes many years even if you qualify, and how many years it would take – is hard to guess when prospective immigrant starts it.
Making legal immigration faster and more straightforward would make the US economy work better.
Overall immigration policy in the US is neither the worst nor the best. Australia and Canada have better policies. Many other countries have worse immigration policy.

3) War on Porn
US legal system explicitly states that porn is not covered by freedom of speech. Certain forms of porn are severely prosecuted. For example porn with participants who are younger than 18 years old is considered illegal.
In theory that system is designed to protect children, but in fact it hurts them. In some cases teenage girls are prosecuted for porn distribution simply because they sent out naked pictures of themselves.
This doesn’t hurt me directly, but adversely affects freedom of speech. I consider freedom of speech one of most important tools that improves our lives, so I don’t like when freedom of speech is limited without need.

4) War on Drugs
I don’t use narcotics and generally don’t like people who use them. Still I think government should not criminalize narcotics trade as much as it does now.|
Government should heavily tax narcotics, but not criminalize them.
When it was illegal to sell alcohol – it made Mafia grow way too strong, so even those who didn’t drink alcohol were negatively affected.

5) War on Terror
Unfortunately War on Terror caused much more lives being lost than terror itself. US military stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anti-terror security practices negatively affect businesses (for example, many people don’t want to fly, because it’ more expensive and less convenient than it was before war on terror began).

10:03am: My bicycle is stolen. Again.
Less than two months passed since my previous bicycle was stolen from outside of my work office and now I lost another bicycle. This time somebody took it from outside of my garage in the subdivision I live.

My bicycle got stolen last night (July 22-23 2009) some time
between 8 pm and 9 am.

It was 10+ years old dark 18-speed bicycle which can be sold for ~$50
(anywhere between $10 and $100 depending on how hard you try to sell
it).
I kept it outside of my garage unlocked, so it
was an easy target...
I just thought that it was safe to keep it like that in our
subdivision... and it was -- I kept my bikes like that for about a
year.

An observation: both times my bikes got stolen it was in a rainy weather.

11:09pm: Yoga -- Russian style
http://www.drive2.ru/users/patrick/blog/4062246863888188228/

7:36pm: Balancing California Budget
Can you balance California's budget (it has $24 billion deficit)?
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-statebudget-fl-2,0,6957202.htmlstory

I balanced it and even made $2.9B surplus.

I would spend this surplus on lowering income state taxes.

In order to balance the budget I had to cut stuff heavily and increase taxes on gas, alcohol, and tobacco.

I didn't have to borrow from future years budget though.

What would you do?

7:23pm: Your political compass


Economic Left/Right: 4.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.26

3:32pm: Stolen bicycle
My bike mysteriously disappeared yesterday.
I "parked" it under a tree between our office building and state police station:
See the tree in the middle of that map.

Unfortunately I forgot to lock it to the tree that day, and now my bike is gone...

9:45pm: Google Street View car doesn't fit well under low bridge
Google Street View car in front of the low bridge

Move forward, but don't try to fix map image -- just keep moving :-)

12:47pm: Google lays off 200
Changes to our sales and marketing organizations

today we have informed Googlers that we plan to reduce the number of roles within our sales and marketing organizations by just under 200 globally.

I hope that would bring GOOG price down (currently it's ~$349/share).
Disclosure: few days ago I bought GOOG PUT options (.GGDPF).

6:25am: I bought NOK for $8.60 yesterday (2009-03-06).

4:07pm: Google Street View
Wow, Google Streets really expanded pretty far!

Here's the view to my previous apartment complex and my previous office -- NFS in Kalispell, MT.


Here are two apple-trees near my current office in Frankfort, KY (yammy!).

Heritage Subdivision where I live.

A townhouse in Memphis, TN where I lived in 2004.

An apartment complex in Jacksonville, FL where I lived in 2004.

4:07pm: Ideas are cheap
Steve Pavlina wrote about his experience with Juice Feasting:

Instead of getting a boost of action, I’ve been getting a boost of creative ideas and insights. However, I really don’t need that right now. I’ve never had a shortage of ideas. I have an overabundance of great ideas already — for new articles, projects, books, etc. So getting a boost in this area is absolute overkill for me.

That's another proof, that the ideas are cheap.
I think that abundance of ideas is caused by abundance of information in general.

So, if ideas are cheap -- then what's important?
I think it's the ability to recognize good ideas, put multiple obvious ideas together, and make them work.
Actual working products matter.
That requires somebody pushing forward product implementation.

10:49pm: On the streets of my home city (Chelyabinsk)

4:39pm: I got a Green Card
Finally my I-485 application is approved. That means that in a few days I will receive US Permanent Resident plastic card ("Green Card").
Green Card allows me to work for any employer in the US or work for nobody and still stay legally in the country.

It took a little bit over 4 years to complete Green Card process (and over 5 years since I came to the US).

Update [2008 November 10]: I received Green Card itself (pretty fast).
It came with several tips about how to settle down in the US.
Clearly the tips are for newcomers (find a place to live, find a school, find English class, find a job etc.). I went through all that settling down many years ago...

10:11pm: My first weeks in the US
Take a visual tour of the place where I lived 5+ years ago in Cincinnati

Right now it doesn't look appealing to me, but back then (summer 2003) it was all new and exciting -- my first weeks in the US.

It was just few minutes walk to the University of Cincinnati, which was nice.

11:47am: US Elections
US Presidential and Congress/Senate elections would happen in a few days (November 4 2008).

What would happen
Most likely Obama would win.
It seems Democrats would gain couple more seats in Senate and 10-20 more seats in Congress.

What would I like to happen
- Presidential election:
I'd like to see Obama elected. The reason -- the war in Iraq and other terrible spendings by Republican administration went way too far. Republican administration is too corrupt at this point and needs to take a pause to clean itself.
If McCain is elected (which is, fortunately, unlikely) -- Republican administration will get spoiled even more, and that's not good.

- Parliamentary elections:
In ideal world I wouldn't like to see Libertarians in the Senate and Congress.
But in the real world it's not about to happen anyway.
So, I would like to see Republicans in the Senate/Congress.
The reason -- Republicans would limit Obama's spendings, and Obama would limit Republican Parliament's spendings.
When government is busy fighting with itself then economy is booming. Here's nice quote from 4 years ago (2004):
http://www.lewrockwell.com/latulippe/latulippe33.html

The two parties essentially represent opposing, rapacious gangs who fight at election time for the right to pillage the taxpayers. The worst thing that can happen is if one gang gains undisputed control of the entire apparatus. If this occurs, the victorious gang gorges itself on America’s wallets like hyenas at a zebra carcass. When Clinton was Emperor and the Republicans controlled Congress, they fought so much that hardly anything got done and relatively few new spending programs were enacted. As a result, the deficit shrank and a small surplus arose (though this surplus was largely illusory due to accounting gimmicks).

But when Bush II came to town, the Republicans went on a spending bender. Even discounting the war on terror, non-security spending has mushroomed. Bush failed to veto a single bill, apparently agreeing with every spending outlay sent his way. Consequently, our deficit has exploded and our nation is plunging towards bankruptcy.

Unfortunately this time gridlock won't happen, and Democrats would control Presidential and Legislative branches for at least couple of years. I hope that would change in 2010 parliamentary elections.

4:51pm: The world according to Americans

4:01pm: How sleazy banks made me pay their bad debt
US Government took $700B of bad debts from private banks.



That's $2333 for every inhabitant of the US (300M population).
My household impact is $11667 (for 5 people).

8:40pm: Writer's Block: The Things We Carry
Cell phone and keys.

12:52pm: Москва глазами русского американца
Автор утверждает, что даже с очень хорошей зарплатой в России жить плохо.
Москва глазами русского американца

7:04pm: Happy Birthday!
Real meaning of "Happy Birthday"
:-)

2:16pm: How much your blog is worth
Find out how much your blog worth at
business-opportunities.biz

My blogs and other web sites worth $0 so far.
:-)

But some of my livejournal friends worth something:
hobober: $2,822.70
olegvolk: $18,629.82
azbukivedi: $36,130.56
mozgovaya: $55,324.92


And some more fun:
www.microsoft.com: $53,452,340.82
www.google.com: $0 (Zero!). Probably because they are not for sale anyway :-)
www.yahoo.com: $453,597,728.28
www.msn.com: $612,297,825.84