Tell me what you read and I will tell you who you are

Today, my friend Brittany published an interesting post, which started with these instructions:

1.] grab the nearest book.
2.] open the book to page 23.
3.] find the fifth sentence.
4.] post the text of the next three sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5.] don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! i know you were thinking about it! just pick up whatever is closest.
6.] tag five other people to do the same.

Ok, then. Here is an excerpt from my closest book:

"What is ORM? In nutshell, object/relational mapping is the automated (and transparent) persistence of objects in Java application to the tables in a relational database, using metadata that describes the mapping between the objects and the database. ORM, in essence, works by (reversibly) transforming data from one representation to another."

The excerpt is from Hibernate in Action by Christian Bauer and Gavin King. This book has been on my desk for a year and it will probably stay there for some time as I use it for my work. I have to look in it every once in a while to find some information regarding to a tool we use in our application. It is an excellent reads, but if you aren't a software developer, you won't enjoy it too much.

I like the excerpt from Brittany's book, so take a look at her goethewannabe's Xanga site. And of course, don't forget to publish 3 sentences from your book!

My pictures

As you can see here, I don't blog for too long. But for some time I collect and maintain my photo albums online, something like my "photo diary". You can find these albums on a server that hosts my domain - radonsky.com. It sometimes contains pictures that I don't consider "good", but they are included in my gallery just to give some additional point of view. As you know, nobody wants to delete a picture after it was taken, even if it's bad! I'm just not strong enough.

Let me know what do you think about my galleries.

Thx, M.

Another blog - Changes Abroad

Last time I wrote you about my friend J.R.'s and his blog. It looks like he has problems with connectivity in Ecuador, so his blog is getting old. But that's understandable as he has probably a lot of other things to do than to write an "internet diary" for all of us, who just lazily yawn in front of our computer screens.
Today, I want to tell you about a blog of my other two friends - Brooke and Brett. They also left United States and decided to spend a year in New Zealand. You can read about their adventures here in the blog called Changes Abroad.
These young Americans decided to leave comfort of their home and spend some time in a foreign country. I think that it will be a great experience for them and they will return as different people, with much better understanding of the world. (I know what I'm saying as I'm experiencing something similar right now.) I think that such experience enriches everybody and so it should be mandatory for every young person, to go abroad and spend there at a couple of months (instead of going to a military service, for example). If everybody did that, there would be no wars. Don't you agree?