Cheesescape

Here is a link to a wonderful game that tests your knowledge of European geography. I was occasionally able to get as close as 20 miles to exact location, but sometimes I failed totally. I know you will do better.

Also, here are some pictures from my last weekend, when I had wonderful time ice skating, eating Malaysian food and singing Karaoke.

Nashville it is. I must say that there is something special in this capital of country music and home of Jack Daniels. Happened to be there two weeks ago on a VC competition and because of winning this one our wonderful team will fly to Austin (capital of Texas) this week. We will probably have two sleepless nights in hotel and hopefully have some energy left for Saturday night to check out this special side of America.

Tribute to green grass of England. By the way, according to Estonian daily, only 23% of Estonians consider themselves religious (compared to 84% of Lituanians, 82% of Americans, 64% Russians, 64% Latvians, 57% Finns). I guess Estonians are just desperate to make it into some strange Top 5s in the world, kind of complex of a dwarf. I like it :)

Tate Modern

This picture is taken in December in Atlanta.

Bought new battery for my laptop ThinkPad T21. And it works. My original battery lasted only 5 minutes, but with this new one I managed to see 80 minutes of movie and computer claimed that it could show 30 more minutes. Funnily enough, IBM sells this battery for about $170 but from E-Bay I got it for about $50, including shipping. Me happy. I thought that I just save money for buying new laptop at some point, but if this laptop can serve me for 2 more years like this, then I'm quite happy.

Estonia in WSJ

Commentary: Hail Estonia. It is already old article from January 4, but I found it out today. Estonia has taken 4th place in economic freedom index table, while Lithuania is 23rd and Latvia is 28th. Somehow Estonia is still able to make it in the news and is able to keep the hype. For how long? And will this economic freedom enable Estonia to develop its economy further from being just about tourism, forestry, oil transit and cheap labor to something more advanced?

Icy Atlanta

Last picture I shared was about showy Atlanta. Well, it got even funnier later and we have only now recovered. Although Atlanta got only about an inch of snow, the day after had freezing temperature while we had constant drizzle of rain. In effect everyting got covered with a layer of ice and you can imagine, what load the treebranches had to hold. As a result we had large branches falling everywhere and as in Atlanta almost all power and telephone wiring is on "lampposts", large parts of town lost electricity. We lost electricity for almost 24 hours and after that lost phone connection, which we got back only today.

As an extreme tourist I went walking on Saturday night and saw branches cracking all over the place. Just had to run fast in some places, cause I did not want to be hit by a branch. Just some 50m behind one branch fell over lines and then little bit later I saw nice blue lightnings in various places, marking explosions of power distribution centers - all became dark. Quite and adventure.

A bushy rose locked in ice.


Magnolia tree - 5mm of ice covering leaves.


Grass ...






Speed limit enforced.




Icy branches.