Taking vacation since today

Heya! I am on my long-awaited vacation since today. Tommorow me and Lena are leaving to Russia. We'll be back to Internet oin three weeks only. Such a being away from civilization - there will be uninhabited island in the middle of Gorkovskoye water reserve on Volga river. No cellphone coverage, no water network, no electricity. Just 150 of people living in tents... That's gonna be fun - first (well, second to be honest, but largest anyway) backpacking at the age when others quit doing this :)

Partying in Sweden

That is a pity that I had not my camera with you on Wednesday. Me and two of my colleagues were inveited to summer party to Stockholm. Project was celebrating the important milestone and Sweds just love any reason to party at company's expense should I say :)

We even had a luxury opportunity to flight afternoon instead of early morning, as we usually do when we fly to Stockholm for business. Ca at 4 pm we arrived to the bank and moved all together towards Gröna Lund - Stockholm's Tivoli park. We had an awesome dinner at Krydhylla restaurant and then we had lot of fun doing all that silly contests (isn't a little bit ridiculous to compete in shooting from rifle after 3 beers? I do not know how I managed to shoot 45 out of 50) they have there and running some rollercoasters. I actually did not want to go to rollercoaster but Sweds persuaded me it's not that scary. To be honest, the only thing I thought when we passed all the way down, was "Thanks God I'm alive". No, attractions of this type are definitely not for me :)

Doing some business next day was a price to pay, though...

Troy and Teeth

Highlights of last week: Troy and teeth. As you can guess, Troy is watched at movie theatre, and teeth caused some ache. I do not know is it accidental or not, but things occured exactly in this order: first Troy, and then Teeth.

Actually I thought that movie will be cooler and did not expect that teeth will ache, so I can basically say that this week started badly. Searching something good in that bad that happened, I can say that I expect a better weekend :)

Well, back to topic. Troy looked like a movie creators of which wanted to surprise fellow watchers with scales of a Big War. They exploited Brad Pitt to save the movie, but despite of Pitt playing well, it was definitely not the best film of his. Keeping in mind the gigantic budget of film, the first thing that comes to mind after film is over is "How did they manage to waste so much money for this?"
IMHO "The Gladiator" was much more impressive movie about antic age.

Teeth surprised me the next day after Troy. Maybe because film was not that wise, the Wisdom Tooth reminded about its existance. Yesterday I visited dentist, but she did not start to remove it, and prescribed me some bad-tasted antiseptic water. Interestingly, it does some relief. Let's see if I will manage to keep the tooth...

My Russian-language blog started

Finally, I decided to run Russian blog as a separate entity. Please feel free to read and comment at http://barcodex-ru.blogspot.com

Sick advertisements

Politics

Well, well, any advertisement sucks by definition, but some ads suck even more. I often feel personally insulted when I am forced to see election campaign ads all over the city, with all that faces and numbers.

Fortunately enough, there are good campaigns which are at least funny. This year some parties here in Estonia cared to pay to quite creative agencies for their EU parliament elections campaigns. This does not come to surprise that leftist parties have the most boring campaign, while the brightest are belonging to parties which are somewhat to the right on political spectrum:

- Res Publica switched from good-old "choose Order" to even more abstract "We'll get through" and polluted the whole Tallinn (and I suppose that other estonian towns too) with banners that show our prime-minister talking to leading world politics, using imaginary and often funny texts. Quite predictably, US was the only country to send a note of protest. Amusing guys.

- Party of Reforms, while making quite boring main slogan, "Keep the Estonian success", surprises with creativity like "Don't you like Gräzin? Send him to EuroParliament to get rid of him!" and "Politics is a dirty play, stay clean and let us do it on your behalf!" and so on.

Telco

I have always laughed my ass out reading ads by EMT, our biggest GSM operator. These guys have no clue about marketing during price wars at all. Or, which is even more probable, are so self-inclined and arrogant to admit any thought that competitors are better in some aspect.

About a month ago RLE, the smallest GSM operator, introduced a new prepaid card with free airtime between all those who take this card during the whole summer. Tele2, second-largest operator, responded with offering free airtime from their prepaid card to any Tele2 number, keeping prices to other networks on level lower than EMT has itself. Also until the end of August. Market was waiting for EMT going with the price wars...

And they did answer. Such a ridiculous, miserable campaign! They proudly presented 0,25 EEK per minute airtime (which is about the real operating cost) ONLY out of peak time, ONLY between prepaid cards, and ONLY until end of June! I am wondering what is the sense to put huge banners across the town (and I guess that space is now more expensive because election campaign is running), if it is not able even theoretically to get new customers (there are two much better offers on the market!)? IMHO informing about new price by means of SMS to existing customers would be enough if they would realize that this campaign can hold old customers at most...