Lost in Translation.....

Going on 29 hours without sleep. Dave and I went out with the Viktor and Eugene for dinner last night. We found something healthy, sushi. For a landlocked country they sure eat a lot of fish here. I played it pretty conservative, a California roll and a spicy tuna roll. The sushi wasn't half bad, just very expensive. They use real crab in the California roll, hence the $15 price tag. Don't be fooled though folks, we're behind the Iron Curtain, but this country isn't exactly cheap. Dinner, and meals in general, run at the French pace here. Before you know it, it's 11:30.

Eugene is beat, so he bailed after dropping the rest of us at a club. It's Monday night and as predicted by Viktor, most of Minsk is deadski. We stay of a few drinks and then pile into a tiny taxi for the short ride back to our hotel. It's 1:45 a.m. when we arrive and my long night begins.

I'm highly susceptible to something called alcohol induced insomnia. Moderate amounts of alcohol consumed in the evening have a tendency to keep me up for hours. Tonight, I showed no fear however because I have the miracle drug Ambien! Right?! Wrong! Genius that I am I left my newfound friend, my iPod, and my computer in the office before dinner. Nooooooooooooooo. I decide to read a book on software design patterns, that should knock me out. Around 2 a.m., I begin to nod off, put the book down, but 10 minutes later, I'm wide awake. I remain in this state currently. I did not manage to sleep, even for a few minutes. I tried everything: covered my head with a pillow, more reading, watching television, nothing.

Speaking of watching television, it's an interesting experience. Belarussian soap operas, MTV, the all-sex-all-the-time channel, and a couple with cartoons all have audio, as you'd expect. CNN? No sound for you! No close caption either. There's quite a lot going on in the world at the moment and much of the subtlety is lost when attempting to read lips from Headline News. Additionally, the connection at the hotel for computers is via modem. 28.8 Kbps. Not sure if that's v42 bis or not. My Macbook doesn't even have a modem. Dave connected his Dell and managed to achieve a blinding 16.6 Kbps. Wow, even the mention of baud rate takes me all the way back to when I was working for TOPS (a now defunct division of Sun Microsystems). I had to manage a program that aggregated the configuration files for a list of about 100 modems for our installer program. Yee ha.

So, I've managed to struggle through a morning of code review and software architecture with our team here in Minsk. They're great guys and have managed to put up with me without getting too terribly annoyed. That's a challenge sometimes, just ask my wife. It's off to lunch now and then hopefully a nap.

I promise to post some pictures later this afternoon. We snapped some great ones yesterday, including a statue dedicated to the founder of the KGB. Sweet.

Peace.