Aspirational Sugar

Instead of a usual blog post I decided to do something akin to a “trail” that Vannevar Bush was talking about in his famous essay. It’s a jumble of quotes and a story all on the subject of happiness and wealth.


My grandfather once told me a story about aspirations in 19th century Russia. Sugar was considered a luxury item back then, and did not come in highly refined granules. Instead it was purchased in the form a sugarloaf, a gigantic cone of pressed sugar. A sugarloaf would be stored in a special box, and pieces of it would be snipped off. These lumps of sugar were not like modern sugarcubes, they were darker and did not dissolve as easily. Those Russians who could afford sugar would usually drink tea “vprikusku” — through a lump of slowly dissolving sugar held on a tongue. It was considered to be more economical than dissolving sugar in tea, which was known as “vnakladku”.

So the story goes like this. A peasant is drinking tea with no sugar. But he dreams: if I were a merchant, I’d drink tea with sugar “vprikusku”. If I were a nobleman, I’d drink tea with sugar “vnakladku”. But if were the czar, I’d make a hole in the sugarloaf and drink tea out of it.


Felix Dennis’ rich/poor scale from “The Narrow Road: A Brief Guide to the Getting of Money”

£1m – £2m The comfortable poor
£3m – £4m The comfortably off
£5m – £4m The comfortably wealthy
£16m – £39m The lesser rich
£40m – £74m The comfortably rich
£75m – £99m The rich
£100m – £199m The seriously rich
£200m – £399m The truly rich
£400m – £999m The filthy rich
Over £1bn The super rich


The famous dialog from Office Space:

Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence: I’ll tell you what I’d do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That’s it? If you had a million dollars, you’d do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; ’cause chicks dig dudes with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chicks that’d double up on a dude like me do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.
Lawrence: Well, what about you now? What would you do?
Peter Gibbons: Besides two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Well, yeah.
Peter Gibbons: Nothing.
Lawrence: Nothing, huh?
Peter Gibbons: I would relax… I would sit on my ass all day… I would do nothing.
Lawrence: Well, you don’t need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he’s broke, don’t do shit.


The story about how Derek Sivers gave away his company.

How To Become Rich By Reading (Not Writing) A Self-Help Book

There’s a moment in just about every reader’s life. A moment when you get a temptation to pick up and read a self-help book. Well, what if I’ll learn how to win friends and influence people (you do it with positive thinking), study the 7 habits of the highly effective people (most of the habits have to do with positive thinking and buying a nice leather organizer), learn “the Secret” (“the Secret” is positive thinking), get things done (you write down all your brilliant ideas in a whole bunch of folders and buy a really nice label printer) — maybe then I’ll become rich, you think.

random self-help book

Yes, the self-help industry probably created a lot of millionaires. Most of them are the people who sell the books, seminars and organizing tchotchkes. I’ve also heard about one dude who found an obscure Victorian era self-help book, scanned it, replaced all the outdated words in it, turned it into an eBook and made some serious bank selling it on a website.

Maybe there are people who have awoken the giant within and now have a 4 hour work week. I simply don’t know. I’ve met a few billionaires and a many millionaires, and I’ve listened to many of them telling the story of how they became rich. Most of the stories involved luck, very good sales and people skills, perseverance, and hard work. But only twice I’ve heard a self-help book with a preposterous title mentioned by these people. This book did wonders for them. I’ll tell you what this book if you’ll buy my book or send me $100 via PayPal. Well, all right, since you’ve been reading my blog for so long I’ll tell you. That one book is … drumroll … Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours. The funny thing is that wealth creation can be accomplished with magic words that look similar to this:

my $dbh = DBI->connect(
        "DBI:$driver:$database",
        $user, $password,
    ) or die $DBI::errstr;

Side note: there’s no apostrophe in “Sams” because the company is named after not after somebody named Sam, but after Howard W. Sams, a contemporary of Dale Carnegie.

In any case, the internet is lousy with stories of absolutely ordinary people who became rich after picking up a computer language book. You don’t believe me? Read this one and let me know what you think.

The Turkish Coffee Syndrome

There are two Turkish restaurants near my house. Both are inexpensive, authentic places ran by native Turks. They sell the usual fare: lamb shish kabobs, adana kabobs, cigara boregs, tripe soup, fresh Turkish bread. There’s one thing that is missing from the menu: Turkish coffee.


Photo by vagabondtravels

That’s right. I’ve asked for it a number of times, and I’ve heard numerous other restaurant patrons ask for it only to be told that it’s not on the menu. Recently a friend of mine, also incredulous at this glaring omission, asked our waiter why exactly Turkish coffee is not served there. The waiter, apologetic, explained that they used to serve Turkish coffee in the past, but it encouraged local retirees to take up the valuable table spots while buying a single cup of coffee. He pointed out that they now migrated to the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts, where now you can’t find an empty table.

Interestingly enough, prior to learning the mystery of the missing coffee, me and my friend were talking about certain technological deficiencies which were caused not so much by stupidity, but by near-pure malice. I also told him about my (now over a decade old) theory that I call “Reverse Hanlon’s Razor“. I think “the Turkish coffee syndrome” is a much catchier name.

In looking at CMS design or hosting nightmare, I often remember this passage from Ellen Ullman’s book:

“It’s more like you’re hired as a plumber to work in an old house
full of ancient, leaky pipes laid out by some long-gone plumbers who
were even weirder than you are. Most of the time you spend scratching
your head and thinking: Why the fuck did they do that?”

Well, sometimes it is stupidity. But more often than not the problem is not technogenic in nature. Often it’s political or business-driven. It’s not that the restaurant owners don’t know how to make Turkish coffee. The coffee pots (cezve) and finely ground coffee are sold next door. It’s not even that it takes too long to make the coffee (although that might be a part of the reason). It’s just that the rents in my neighborhood are very high and the table space is at premium, and coffee drinkers tend to linger.

Valuable Photos

An acquaintance of mine spends a lot of money on travel and cameras, more than just about anyone I know. But you won’t find photos of famous landmarks amongst his pictures unless he’ll find a way to take a picture of something that nobody photographs – like a bathroom or a service entrance. His photos will stand the test of time.

Collectors of old photos know this: photographers have a herd mentality. In early photographs portraits are very common, but pictures of anything other than people are rare. Yes, old cameras were bulky and hard to use outside, but it’s still not a good reason: the earliest surviving photo is a view out of a window.

There’s a type of a photo that I despise the most: one of a flower. If you have an expensive camera with a nice lens you can go to a botanical garden and take a hundred gorgeous pictures of pretty plants with a pretty blurred background (coin-a-sewers of this type of photos like to discuss “bokeh” – the quality of the blurred background specific to a lens).

And then there’s one type that I like a lot: pictures of workspaces. My advice to you is to take more of those. Forget flowers, sunsets and landmarks: looking back you’ll enjoy these much more.

Here’s a blurry photo of my doorman’s desk from college years:
Screenshot 1:8:13 7:26 AM

And here’s my desk at TV Guide.
Screenshot 1:8:13 7:06 AM

A co-worker of mine kept a picture of his old workspace instead of anything else. He could never explain why he did it, but I found it funny enough to take a picture of it. I always kind of wished I had the foresight to keep taking pictures of my desks recursively – which is a great idea, I think.

Screenshot 1:8:13 7:00 AM-3

Startups and Other Problems

I cringe a little bit when I hear the word “startup”. This word has several different meanings in modern newspeak. In Silicon Alley (this is what New York’s startup scene was called in 2000) it appears in several typical phrases such as: “well, we can’t afford that – we are a startup” and “we are a startup, but we are very well funded”. This word is basically used either as an excuse for wanting below-market labour or an excuse to flaunt investor-supplied riches. In the first phrase it means that the company has been burning dumb money for at least a few years, in the second – it’s just starting. One “startup” that I worked for (and have fond memories of) began in 1997 and gave up ghost in 2012. UGO was truly the Dick Clark of companies (except not as successful).

Recently I was researching an engineer who designed the Wright 2600 keypunch. An article about him on Tripod (another blast from the past) has a very interesting quote: “After retiring from US Gov., he volunteered for SCORE, the retired executives helping businesses with start up and other problems.” Startup is not a type of a business! It’s a problem that businesses have!

The term “serial entrepreneur” has also acquired a thick patina of sleaze. The thing is, entrepreneurs are not really like flying aces (I think I read somewhere that most military pilots are either aces who shoot down 5 or more planes or the ones who are shot down). No. You only need to take a look at Jerry Kaplan, who wrote “Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure” and probably set some kind of a record in running companies that don’t make it. A large percentage of startup money is made through sales to larger, lumbering companies. Was broadcast.com a great deal? Nobody remembers it when watching its founder wearing relaxed fit shoes. There certainly a lot of money out there chasing some not very viable ideas. Unfortunately the startups of yesterday and today are either huge failures or huge successes. Or both (but not for everybody).

Luckily these days startup costs are at all time lows. To create a huge failure of a company you need a lot of money. On the other hand, to barely succeed all you need is some pocket change. Forget about Y Combinator. The Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud will “barely invest” and try to help you to “barely succeed” – in other words to encourage you to build a business that realistically aims to be profitable. Forget “go big or go home”. Just try to honestly to build a business. Screw freemium. Forget about “incubators”. All you need is $37. And The Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud will maybe give it to you. If you’ll get a rejection – dig deep.

December 11th – National Backup Awareness Day

Something horrible just happened to Jeff Atwood aka CodingHorror.

“ugh, server failure at CrystalTech. And apparently their normal backup process silently fails at backing up VM images.”

“I had backups, mind you, but they were on the virtual machine itself :(“

It’s a times like these we start wishing for a time machine, a cosmic undo button or reversible computing.

Jeff’s blog was read by tenth of thousands of programmers and system administrators for many years. It contains information that is very valuable for these people, and represents an unthinkable amount of hours spent by Jeff. An agency rate for somebody like Jeff is between $250 and $500 an hour, but this is like appraising a priceless family heirloom.

I am not going to go through the motions of telling everybody how to backup things, about how important offisite backups are, how disk drives are fragile, how I don’t trust virtual servers, how raid is not a backup strategy, and how version control is not backup strategy, etc, etc. JWZ wrote a good article about backups.

Here are things I want to say. First, we are all not backed up sufficiently and likely have already lost data that we would want back.

I can’t find my grandmother’s recipe book (I still hope it’s only lost), my wife’s first email to me, my first web page through which she found me, my first job search web page that had a picture of the Twin Towers and said how I wanted to work there, my early school grading papers, a rare book about fishing in the Black Sea, a stamp from the Orange Republic that used to be in my father’s stamp album, the password to my very short-numbered ICQ account. A lot of stuff.

All of our digital information is susceptible to an electromagnetic pulse, fire, flood. Spinning platter hard drives are particularly bad – they have very short lifespans measured in low single digit years. CDs are even worse – aluminum inside them rots (I have a cd with a lot of outlook emails that reads as a blank filled with 1s).

So the first thing that I would like to mention is that if you never simulate a failure, you’ll never know if your stuff can be replaced. It’s not an easy thing to practice, though – restores and failovers are tricky to do.

A few jobs ago we were getting a fancy new load balancer set up. It was up and running, and supposedly we had failover: if one of the servers died, we would not even need to do anything, the backup servers would pick up the slack. I suggested that we should test it by pulling the network plug on one of the machines off hours. My boss would not allow that, saying that we could possibly break things. My argument that it’d be better if something like that happened when we were ready it would not be as bad if it happened when the actual failure would occur. When the actual failure did occur the load balancer did not switch, and we had an outage that was a good deal longer (it happened at night).

Load balancers are not backup solutions, but this story highlights an irrational streak in system administration: nobody wants to practice failure: it’s just too nerve-wracking, and a lot of hard work. It’s much easier to assume that somebody up the line did everything correctly: set up and tested backups, startup scripts, firewalls and load balancers. Setting up and validating backups and testing security are thankless jobs.

This brings me to a another point. The act of taking a backup is not risk free in itself. The biggest data losses that I suffered happened to me in the process of setting up backups. As an example I’ll bring up the legendary story about Steve Wozniak (whom I met yesterday):

The Woz was creating a floppy driver under an extreme time pressure, not sleeping much and feeling sick. The end result was a piece of software of unimaginable beauty: it bypassed a good deal of clunky hardware, and thanks to a special timing algorithm, was fast and quiet. When other disk drives sounded like a machine gun (I dealt with a few of those when I was young), Woz’s purred like a kitten. Finally he wrote the final copy onto a floppy, and decided to make a backup of it. Being dead tired, he confused the source and destination drives, and copied an empty floppy onto the one with the precious driver. Afterward he proceeded to burnish his place at the top of engineering Olympus by rewriting the thing from memory in an evening.

It’s really the easiest thing in the world to confuse the source and destination of a backup, destroying the original in the act of backup! The moral of the story?

Do as much backing up as possible, while being careful not to destroy your precious data in the process. Have an offsite backup. Print out your blog on paper if it’s any good. In fact, print out as much stuff as you can. Your backup strategy should be like a squirrel’s: bury stuff in as many places as possible (well, except sensitive information, which is a whole other story in itself).

Zombie-free Mac Children’s Games

I was born at the beginning of the age of information. I welcome the content deluge.

I’m not a snob. I do not discriminate amongst the sources of content, gladly consuming books, television, movies, music, magazines, websites, wikis, and blogs. I like to think that thanks to technologies like ebook readers, blog aggregation, suggestion engines at Amazon and Netflix, and Tivo I limit my input to only the stuff that is “awesome” on the “Normal people” scale.

I remember the time when the flow of information available to me was limited to my father’s sizable library and a few hours a week of interesting TV culled from the 3 horrible channels of Soviet television, and really don’t miss it.

My 4 year old daughter is swimming in the sea of information together with me. We read books to her (the quality of children’s books these days is amazing), she watches dvd and tivo’d shows, youtube videos on a laptop. She really wants to play with a computer as well.

Unfortunately the only game that I have is “Plants Vs. Zombies“. We play it together usually as a reward for good behavior. She enjoys the “zen garden” part of the game, as well as the regular “zombie” part. This, of course led to the questions on the nature of zombies (uhh), their diet (brains), the nature of brains, and the absence of female zombies in the game (uhhh).

When Natalie was younger and I used to have a PC, there was a whole bunch of craptastic PC games (one even with a special keyboard, if I remember) that we used to play. These crashed often and were pretty retarded.

Now that I have a Mac, I’m looking for some better, zombie-free games suitable for a 4 year old. Finding good computer games is much more difficult than finding good children’s books. Do you have any suggestions?

Deadprogrammer Visits Odessa : Part II : Balconies and Yards

When I think about Odessa, I often remember the title of Robert Heinlen’s novel, “The Door into Summer“. Odessa is a summer city. If I were to pick one word to describe it in the summer, it would be sun-dappled.

The soil in Odessa is pretty bad, and there aren’t any local sources of fresh water. Because of that there are only three types of trees that thrive there: acacia, sycamore (locally known as “shameless” trees because they shed their bark), and horse chestnut. Acacia is one of the symbols of Odessa, and horse chestnut is that of Kiev. These trees are thriving in Odessa, and many hundred year old specimens provide a lot of shade.

The tree shade and the bright sun bathe everything in these spots of light, like in Renoir’s La Moulin de la Galette.

Here’s a very old acacia on the corner of the street where I grew up. Notice the parking sign: in Odessa the sidewalks are so wide that cars can be parked on them. Also, they are now selling melons out of cages that are locked for the night. Acacia blossoms cover all the sidewalks and produce and intoxicating aroma.

As I mentioned before, Odessa was built on the grand scale and by the best architects. Even the lesser buildings are very decorated. Atlases were very popular.

Apparently the current location of Odessa used to be under the Black sea, and the bedrock consists of a somewhat soft yellow sedimentary rock formed out of shells of sea creatures. It’s a type of limestone, I guess. This rock turned out to be a perfect building material: cheap and abundant, soft enough to cut and carve, but durable enough to build with, not too heavy, very good for thermal and sound isolation. So many buildings were built this stone that the quarries below the city formed a humongous labyrinth known as “catacombs“. It was used by contraband smugglers and WWII guerrilla fighters. It would have been super easy to build a subway in Odessa, but somehow it never happened.

There are two architectural features of the old limestone buildings that became very important in the Odessa way of life: balconies and courtyards. Just like the wide sidewalks, these are the artifacts of the town mostly built in 1800s, in the era of horse buggies, no air conditioning, and gas light. Balconies provided a breath of fresh air, and internal courtyards let architects let in light into all apartments.

Some balconies are very charming, with cast iron railings and pleasing shapes and aging gracefully.

Some did not survive and were replaced by ugly shitboxes.

Some are unsafe Frankenstein monsters.

Some are huge, with fancy statues, and in horrible state of disrepair.

Some are maintained.

Some are elegant, curved around gorgeous bay windows. Notice the hanging laundry.

Some instead of laundry are draped in grapevines.

I have no idea how these grapevines survive: they grow in the street, are peed on by dogs and are never watered.

Some of the most gorgeous buildings with the most awesome balconies are in such state of disrepair, that in New York they would have been immediately boarded up, but yet there are people living there…

These old buildings are what New York realtors are referring to as “pre-war”: they have very tall ceilings, big rooms, parquet floors, fireplaces, and other bourgeoisie niceties. After the revolution most of these apartments where turned into communal flats: instead of a single family with help, now 5-7 families were crammed into it. The process kind of reversed itself in the 90s, with rich people buying out communal dwellers, but some still remain: here’s a picture of the doorbells on one door. You can visit a site about communal living in Russia. Interestingly enough, despite the Marxist spirit, in communal apartments even the doorbells were hooked up to separate electric meters, and the excessive use of a lightbulb in bathroom was a major point of contention.

These buildings are old: many have horse hitches out front:

Once you tied your horse down, you enter the building through a gate.

Sometimes the gate is old and beautiful.

Sometimes it was replaced by a horrible modern monstrosity painted with signs like “angry dog” and “there’s no toilet here”.

Sometimes it’s missing altogether.

The gate leads you through a passageway. What will you find in that passageway?

A bunch of semi-destroyed soviet-era mailboxes. I am not sure if they are still in use. Here’s one of the better preserved specimen.

The passageway, a utility space, often has interesting ceilings, which are almost always mostly ruined.

Some are less ornate though.

Often there are very cool windows within the passageways.

The passageway will lead you into the yard. There will be entrances to apartments, parked cars, laundry.

Here’s something that used to be very common, but is actually a rarity now: drying plastic bags.

Some more cars and a kid riding a bike.

Grapevines, cats, old cars.

Restored all cars and walls that are in bad need of restoration.

Sleeping dogs and more drying laundry.

A non-functioning fountain.

A little garden. This one used to be my grandmother’s.

A granny reading a newspaper.

Peeling walls: I distinctly remember this particular wall from my childhood, it used to look exactly the same. It’s a testament to the quality of work of the old builders that with next to zero maintenance these buildings survive.

A seemingly functional pigeon coop.

An old tree. These old trees move move in the wind in a very hypnotic manner. Being so tall, they can be used to forecast the size of waves in the sea by the speed at which the tops of them move.

A decorative drinking well. I’m not sure, but it kind of looks like it could have been a real well once.

A woman feeding cats who will tell you to stop taking stupid pictures like the dumbass that you are and go and do something productive.

Walls with WWII bullet holes. Odessa is one of the few cities granted the designation of hero city for valiant resistance. When the Germans and Romanians entered the city there was a lot of executions.

A sad, sad sight: an ad for apartments in a newly constructed building.

Deadprogrammer visits Odessa : Part I : Introduction

Deadprogrammer visits Odessa : Part I : Introduction

I live on a high floor of an art deco tower facing a busy Brooklyn street. The acoustics of the building and the street are such that I can sometimes hear what’s going on in the street right from my desk. Once I heard the sounds of a minor fender bender followed by an angry exchange unpleasantness that was escalating into some creative Russian profanity. The driver who rammed the other car was pretty unapologetic and criticized the driving skills of the one who got rammed. Then followed the exchange that made me laugh out loud – the driver who got rammed said – “the way you behave, man, you must be from Odessa.” “Yes, I am,” – answered the other guy, and added – “and you still drive like a moron.”

Odessa, Ukraine, my hometown, is a very special place. It has a Bizarro mirror twin, Odessa, Texas.

Odessa is a resort town situated on the shore of the Black Sea, right across from Turkey. Culturally it’s a bit like Brooklyn (or Brooklyn is a bit like Odessa because of an almost constant infusion of Odessans) – a city with an attitude, a city where a lot of famous people are born and famous people come to live. Architecturally it’s a lot like Vienna and St. Petersburg: a city built on a grand scale (but with softer edges), by the best architects.

Odessa’s ancient past is obscure: a Greek colony, a small town controlled by Kievan Rus, the Golden Horde, various Khanates and Kaganates, and finally a Turkish fortress. Odessa’s fortunes have turned when Russian forces invaded it in late 1700s. Catherine the Great apparently wanted to fortify the newly won land, and committed the people and resources needed to make the new city of Odessa a success.

The founding fathers of Odessa were a bunch of distinguished foreigners in the service of the Russian crown: General José Pascual Domingo de Ribas y Boyons, Armand Emmanuel Sophie Septemanie du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, and Count Louis Alexandre Andrault de Langéron.

Richelieu, or the Duc, as he’s commonly known in Odessa, will forever be loved by Odessans for his accomplishments. The way I imagine the Duc is sort of like the 18th century Steve Jobs, with a reality distortion field of his own, except without being an asshole (Richelieu was known for his kindness and indifference to money). Somehow – nobody know exactly how – Richelieu got Odessa the status of a “free port“. This meant that goods could be unloaded without paying the taxes within the city limit. This brought about an unprecedented influx of wealth, which in turn fueled the building of Odessa by the best European architects in the European manner. Odessa’s opera theater is only slightly smaller than Vienna’s, and is by the same architect.

Another unique aspect of this new city was the ethnic makeup. Besides the usual for Ukrainian cities mix of Ukrainians and Russians, Odessa became a melting pot. Frenchmen, Greeks, Turks, Germans, Armenians: all rushed into Odessa. Even the Jews were allowed in, and not being limited to certain occupations or living in a ghetto. Odessa is a very Jewish town despite what the author of Everything Is Illuminated might have you believe.

I left Odessa when I was 16. I came back for a 10 day visit 15 years later.

Odessa is a a city that makes you nostalgic, and I kept seeing it in my dreams. Luckily there’s a small international airport in Odessa and President Yushchenko kindly lets the holders of an American passport into the country freely, with no need for a visa.

12 hours and $1300 later I was standing in Odessa, looking for a cab. A pushy cabby was very surprised when I did not want to ride in his clean BMW and chose a cheaper and dearer to my heart filthy Soviet-vintage car.

As far as hotels go, Ukraine is much more reasonable than Russia, but there are still no Marriott-like affordable and well-designed chains. There are overpriced hotels with decor that will burn your eyes out, cheaper, but scarier hotels, and apartments that you can rent which cover the gamut. Odessa has a population of about a million, but it swells to twice the size in the Summer season. Because of that there are thousands of very reasonably priced rental apartments with great amenities. Unfortunately I did not plan enough ahead, and ended up reserving a very cheap room in a brand new hotel Zirka that recently opened right in the center of the city.

For a very reasonable $35/night I lived in a tiny-tiny, somewhat flimsily outfitted, but very clean room with a fully functioning shower, air conditioning and beautiful views, right in the historic center of Odessa.

The hotel was still being built when I lived there, and I herd later that it was becoming a bit notorious for renting the rooms at hourly rates.

As far as I’m concerned, you really can’t beat their amenities, their location, and their prices. Also, the staff was very courteous and professional. It was very quiet there during my stay – but worst case scenario – you might overhear noisy sex, from which you are not guaranteed at almost any hotel.

It’s hard to see on picture, but the towels had little dollar sign designs.

My hotel room reminded me very much of the affordable hotel room that I lived in in Japan, down to the picture of soft drinks that I took there.

In Odessa I mostly drank Borjomi, a Georgian mineral water. Borjomi, as far as I’m concerned is the tastiest mineral water in the world.

Odessa has its own mineral water, Kuyalnik, but it’s not sold in restaurants for some reason. I found a few bottles in a convenience store closer to the end of my stay. More about Kuyalnik later – I have a very special connection to it.

Apparently in Europe Diet Coke is marketed as Coca Cola Light, is sold in frosted bottles, and as far as I can tell, in a different formulation. It did taste different, and I know my cokes.

I quickly unpacked, grabbed my camera and went for a walk.

You really can’t enter the same river twice. I left Odessa when the Soviet Union was still intact. When I came back, a lot of things stayed the same.

There’s still a fountain in the City Square, the live band is still playing on Sundays and the pairs still dance.

Acacia trees, the most common plant and the symbol of Odessa, are still filling the city with the aroma and sidewalks with their yellow flowers. Cleaning ladies (and men) still sweep the sidewalks with brooms made out of small branches. I brought a small jar with acacia blooms with me – the smell of nostalgia.

Remember that ethnic markup that I described earlier on? Well, somehow that mixing of genes resulted in the hottest women on the planet. Odessa is still the city of super hot women. This brings a large contingent of sex tourists and mail order (in this case – cash and carry) bride seekers. I was approached (probably because I was typing away on a laptop) by a most distressed gentlemen in a cafe: he could not get online. His hands were shaking. I fixed some gnarly windows crud setup options and wi-fi started working. All he cared about was getting to a dating site, and when it loaded, his hands finally stopped shaking.

Things have changed though. Odessa took on some qualities of Havana, Cuba. Historic buildings are deteriorating, old cars are kept alive way past what’s reasonable.

It’s not like Havana because people seem to prosper. Even the pensioners do not go hungry, there is a lot of new construction, and the rich are really, really rich. I’ve seen just about every expensive car I know in the streets, except maybe a Maybach.

A few things about the new Ukrainian economy. The salaries are paid in US dollars, but dollars are not accepted anywhere. You can easily exchange them into hryvnas and back very easily, and the rate is somehow kept at about 5 to 1, without even having to shop around for a rate.

Real estate is amazingly expensive: for instance the apartment that my parents sold for something like $5K costs about $500K. At the same time the mortgage industry is almost non-existent.

I’m told that the government officials are amazingly corrupt, and they constitute a major portion of the upper crust. A police captain can easily become a multimillionaire, and so can just about any government bureaucrat. There’s a practice of “otkat” – kickback from a government project is rampant. High ranking policemen and bureaucrats are almost outside the law, like in India.

At the same time, even with all the corruption and bribery, the economy is pretty healthy, even without Russia’s oil.

Price-wise Odessa is not the bargain that it once was. For most things I’d estimate the cost of living at about 60-70% of Brooklyn prices. Food and rent is pretty cheap, but electronics, clothing and cars are more expensive. In particular, cars are taxed so much that they cost about 2 to 3 times more than in the US, which makes all those Rollses that I’ve seen even more impressive, and explain the Soviet-era cars.

Deadprogrammer Visits Odessa : Part II : Balconies and Yards.