Andrei Zmievski

I had always wanted to see the Mediterranean, and I finally got my wish. Earlier this year, while still at FAST, I booked a 14 day Mediterranean Highlights tour with Contiki, a company that organizes and conducts tours all over the world for 18-35 year olds. The time I picked was the middle of July, and actually it worked out quite nicely with my relocation and change of jobs since I started at Yahoo! right after the vacation.
The tour started in Madrid, progressed through Barcelona, Avignon, Aix-en-Provence, Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, Florence, and ended in Rome. We traveled by bus and spent 1-2 days in each city with shorter stops along the way. We had about 50 people altogether, including the tour manager and the driver. I must say that our group was simply great – very friendly, funny, and affable people from many different countries: Australia, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, USA, and so on. We had a lot of fun on this trip and saw most of the famous sights, all of which is detailed in the pictures I took with my new Canon S45 camera. I would do it again in a second and recommend you try out one of these tours yourself.

While on my trip to Europe this summer, I took something like 450 pictures with my digital camera. Not content to put them up as they are and loathe to use one of those one-button-does-it-all photo processing tools, I have been going through them one by one and cleaning them up: adjusting contrast, removing red-eye, doing a bit of touch-up work, etc. It is quite a slow process! I still have 50 or so to go before I can even begin to upload them. And then there is the matter of writing the travel journal from my notes and linking to the pictures…

Only a short 6 weeks later.. Time flew by. I ended my relationship with Overture Services on July 3, saw fabulous Boston fireworks on July 4, and went to Bay Area with firm intentions of finding an apartment in the city. I must have walked a dozen miles around there, and I did find a couple of places in Marina and Telegraph Hill that matched my requiremenst and price range, but.. After thinking about how far I’d have to commute and discussing it with friends, I realized that I’d rather not spend 2-3 hours of my life each day on the train or in the car. Hence, I changed the search area to Mountain View and Palo Alto. There were lots of suitable apartments, they were cheaper, had better amenities, so the selection was a bit more than I could handle in my one remaining day. I had to fly back and depart on my vacation trip to Europe.
The trip lasted from 11th to 27th, and I had an unbelievably great time. Much more info and many pictures will be coming up shortly. One thing though.. Whilst on the trip, I went to check my email for the first time in a week or so. My inbox had a few messages with subject lines such as “Sweet irony” and “You could have just waited”, and I gathered without even reading them that Yahoo! bought Overture. So funny.
I have started in my position as a Technical Yahoo at Yahoo! on August 4 and spent a productive week setting up my machine and being introduced to the development practices. I did find an apartment in Mountain View that should be good for the next year or so. Mountain View is definitely not San Francisco, but it does have a livelish downtown, is close to work and other areas, such as Palo Alto downtown. If you are in the area, drop me an email and tell me about good places to visit for food and drink around here.

Last week I took my parents and brother on a trip to Las Vegas. They have never been before, and I wanted to experience it in the summer, rather than going in the off season, like I did last time. Needless to say, it turned out to be a great visit. Some gambling, some sight-seeing, some dining, and so on. The highlight of the trip was seeing Mystére by Cirque du Soleil at the Treasure Island. If you have never been to one of the productions, buy a ticket right now. You won’t be sorry. The pictures from the trip are here.

Getting to New York for PHP Con was easy, getting back though was miserable. I had to drive from New Haven to Boston in a dreary, disgusting, all-obscuring rain that continued all day. Probably one of the worst drives of my life. But the conference itself proved to be good.
Some recommendations for places I visited this time:

• Gallagher’s – a very good steakhouse
• 53rd Street Cigar Bar – located in the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers
• Le Souk/Harem – Middle Eastern-themed lounge, complete with belly dancers and hookahs

Bizarre person of the month: a long-haired blond man wearing nothing but tight underwear and cowboy boots and hat, all white, strumming the guitar in the middle of Times Square and singing “I’m a little blonde girl…”