Alexey Smirnov's blog

This summer in Russia is one of the hottest in a century. Already lots of forests and fields are burning. The amount of crops that it is still there to harvest is decreasing rapidly.

We have been walking a lot, one of our favourite routes is that to Oka river on which our town is situated. I have taken a few nice pictures of insects which there are plenty of in the fields.

The pictures have been taken by my Panasonic DMC-FZ8, a camera with a 12x optical zoom and lots of automatic modes to take pictures in. One of its coolest features is its ability to take RAW images but I should confess that over the period of two years I have never used this feature! Otherwise, I enjoy the responsiveness of the camera, its flexibility in controlling shutter speeds and ISO levels.

But I still wonder whether the cameras are at the bleeding edge of software technology. I mean, there is lots of post-processing that we often do in Photoshop or the like which we could do in the camera. Apple is working in this direction – a number of applications have been written that allow to adjust various parameters of a picture after you take it on your iPhone. Therefore, iPhone is the first computational camera or in other words a camera whose software you can tweak in arbitrary ways.

In particular, I would love to have the following two features in my camera:

1. High Dynamic Range imaging. Imagine you take a picture in a room with a bright light coming from window. Obviously, traditional camera allows you to see either inside or outside but not both. The reason is the limted range of light that it can absorb. The key is to take a number of pictures with different exposure levels and combine them. So simple but would make lots of people happy! Available on iPhone (proHDR).
2. Making panoramas – that is, stiching a number of continuos images together. Available on iPhone (PanoLab – FREE!!!)

But there is another way to make panoramas – use cool software called Microsoft ICE. It makes very nice panoramas and can save it as either JPEG or upload to Photosynth, a web site for sharing 3D models.

I used to read WIRED magazine a few years ago. Then when I started working I only had time to read what was absolutely necessary – Communications of ACM.

However, this spring I decided to subscribe to Wired magazine again. I was impressed when I got a copy of the magazine – it has totally changed. To start with, nowadays it is half advertising, half content magazine. I guess this is because of the economic crisis. In other words, it is possible to throw away half of the magazine right off the start.

What remains is also not necessarily interesting. I used to like wired-tired-expired section as well as those new pesky words from the underground that Wired was decyphering to the rest of us. Those sections are gone.

But there are few interesting articles still. In June 2010 issue a number of interesting people are mentioned including Nicholas Carr and Daniel Shirky. I have read books of these authors. The magazine advertises their new books which I definitely need to check out. There is an interesting research article as well called Traffic Cop. It describes brave attempt of few people to build a model of traffic in NYC as a giant spreadsheet. By introducing a number of parameters to the model and adding an ability to fiddle with them it becomes possible to optimize traffic in NYC. This work is so necessary for lots of cities with traffic jams!

To summarize, Wired magazine is always fresh and surprising but not necessarily what you want to read. I can only explain this as an attempt to attract more readers, for example causal technology enthusiasts are more interested in space junk and organ transplants whereas computer specialists are appreciating computer technology content. To me Wired looks more like Popular Mechanics nowadays, at least earlier it was more related to geek culture. On the other hand, the definition of geek is also changing.

A couple of weeks ago we have visited my cousin’s family in Semyonov, a small town in the north of our region. My cousin moved there after he got married.

Semyonov is known for its craftsmen. The whole northen area of the region hosts Khohloma painters in numerous villages. The idea behind Khohloma is to show the abundance of forests and fields of this part of Russia, various kinds of grass, flowers, and birds that are living here. However, Khohloma is known to exist in other parts of Russia as well but this medieval craft has survived only in this remote area. It is well known that the forests at the north of our region were home to various kinds of religious groups that separated from the official church during the reformation of 17th century.

Semyonov is known for its museum of Khohloma. The museum as well as Khohloma shop are located in a two-storied building. The earliest works in the museum are related to 19 century which is not necessarily very old. But the most impressive part of the museum is not Khohloma history but rather Khohloma present. There is one room in which every piece of furniture is painted in Khohloma. It looks gorgeous!

We have also visited cultural and church fair that was happening in Semyonov. A number of monasteries and religious organizations were taking part in it, including even representatives of Old Believers. Btw., there are still lots of Old believers in Semyonov, a very rare branch of Orthodox Church elsewhere. One of the most interesting parts of the fair was where they were selling books. I have noticed that last Tzar’s family is attracting lots of people, new books are published quite often. The attention to the Family grew when their remnants were found in Siberia in 1990s and then transferred to Saint-Petersburgh, even though their authenticity is still questionable. The books related to the Family that are published nowadays deal with historical evidence of various people who got to know them. I was more interested in the books that deal with Church directrly. I bought the following books: life of Patriarh Kirill, history of Diveevo Monastery, and Old Russian architecture.

As usual, I read a few chapters from each book only to tease myself. I will read the books after finishing few other books which I am reading now. I will also remember the amazing craft of Khohloma. In the museum we were told that it is possible to order anything we have seen. I wish I could get that wonderful Throne!

I love this company.

But what follows sounds like total abuse to its products. To start with, I always wanted to get Apple products even though I cannot describe myself as fan of Apple because I never owned any of its products. However, earlier I have bought a few books of Leander Kahney which deal with Apple culture. They are quite interesting because of their unusual formatting as well as content. I have been waiting for two years before there was a chance to buy an Apple gadget. I have been spending money on various things such as a laptop with a touchscreen similar to iPad but it works as a normal laptop as well (btw. I am very happy with it after 2 months of usage even though it is more expensive than typical laptop).

But on June 28th 2010 I turned 29 years old. What a nice number of years, it is not even 30. I guess next birthday will require me to draw big conclusions from the part of life I have lived so far because this stretch of years was by far the most important in my life.

But 29 years is also quite important date to get a special gift for yourself. So I thought yes I should get an iPhone! And I went to the only store in our town that was selling it. Suprisingly on the one hand and quite predictably on the other, most people are still using the kind of phones they were using 5 and even 10 years ago! Nobody here wants to buy an iPhone. Not necessarily because it is expensive but also because it is not trendy, at least in Russia.

But I thought it is trendy and cool and nice to have this amazing gadget. The unboxing ceremony went with lots of excitement:

Then I was able to turn on the phone. It asked me to insert the SIM card. Here is the interesting part. When I got the SIM card and removed the plastic frame that was protecting the hole to which I was supported to insert the card I realized that I had to insert the card with the plastic frame. I tried to do it but unsuccessfully because the frame got stuck in the middle. I removed the card with the frame and then I thought that I needed to insert only the SIM card (what a mistake) which is how it works in many other phones including those that I was using earlier. Of course, I was doubtful because of the plastic frame but I thought that it was possible to always eject the card from the hole or if that does not work to remove the cover of the iPhone to get direct access to SIM card as again is the case in many other phones.

However, when the SIM card got into the hole it got stuck there. There was no obvious way of removing it. Then I spent a horrible half an hour trying various ways to release the SIM card. It was possible to lift it up but during the final attempt to get hold of it it was falling back deep into the hole. I used various kinds of screwdrivers and needles to get into the hole. I have scratched my gorgeous iPhone. It looks so shiny after you buy it but when you treat it with needles the nice paint disappears and the phone gets a tough appearance.

Then my parents asked me why amn’t I enjoying the dinner and they realized what I have been occupied with. They joined me with their set of tools! They have used smaller needle and finally after an hour of intense fighting the SIM card was freed! Whoo-hoo! Now everybody was wondering if iPhone is still alive. Yes, it is working! Apple is such a great company, its products are so tough. On that day I even managed to get a free account at iTunes and downloaded a few apps to my iPhone.

Well, after using quite few other phones I should say that iPhone delivers. It is great and simple, and this is the only gadget that my parents found intuitive to use. I agree, its user interface is exceptional. And so is Apple’s hardware!

When I lived in Finland I visited every castle it had: Hameenlinna, Savonlinna, Turku Castle, and Suomenlinna. I liked those trips a lot because every castle had a museum which always mentioned connection to Russian history.

Nowadays I am living in Russia and therefore I used an opportunity to visit a monastery located on the other bank of Oka river on which our town is situated. In order to get there I got an inexpensive boat for only 2,500 roubles (approximately 70 USD). It is funny that all the other boats of similar size costed three times as much! The name of the boat is Challenger 2.

Oka is a wide slowly moving river with almost no boat traffic. It is funny that we had some kind of cruise boats until very recently when the river transporation in Dzerzhinsk was apparently stopped. Quite sad, but the river looks nowadays as wild as it probably looked in 15th century when the monastery was built.

Previously I visited the ruins of the monastery when I was in high school. Back then the frames of 17th century buildings were still there but the interiors were destroyed as a result of October revolution of 1917. The actual destruction was happening probably later on, in the end of 1920s. After years of oblivion, the rebuilding of monastery began in 2000s.

The monastery is located in the middle of the hills which are approximately 150-200 m in height and are quite steep. The horizontal area in the middle accomodated three churches as well as entrance gates and cemetery. It was a very densely packed area. But nowadays only one church has been rebuilt along with a bell tower. During last few years I have visited a number of monasteries many of which have been destroyed during Soviet era. It keeps me wondering over and over again that what was destroyed during a couple of days takes decades to rebuild.

I have looked at old photographs of the monastery. It turns out that the new white building on the photograph above is actually smaller than its predecessor. In particular, the old building was 3-storied whereas the new one has only 2 floors. I was suprised when I discovered what I thought was negligence to the history but then my mom exlained to me that they don’t have enough donation nowadays to build as large a building as they did in 1600s. It is a worrying sign that back then one merchant called Dudin donated enough money to build the whole monastery but these days Russian people as a whole are not willing to donate as much.

But still, it is good that such a large-scale effort is going on. The rebuilding of monastery has a few additional tasks associated with it such as building a road to this remote area. It turns out that this sparked intense discussion in the media because the machines used in this process have excavated the ground and part of an old cemetery. Now I think that it is a good idea to perform a careful examination of the soil which contains 600 years of Russian history. If a team of archeologists attempted to do a field trip to this monastery I think they would find lots of artifacts.

On my way back I discovered another artifact on the shore of the river which I cannot think the meaning of. To me it looks like organ pipes but obviously Catholic Church never managed to get that far. Therefore, the pipes pictured above have some technical meaning. To summarize, Dudin monastery is a great remote place. Every human will find interesting stuff here, either historical or technical mysteries.

Aidan Chopra. Google SketchUp® 7 For Dummies®. For Dummies, 2009.
41 Amazon ratings!

Even though Sketchup is quite an intuitive tool to use the book is a means to summarize the knowledge. For Dummies is a great series and this book is no exception.

Part 1 of the book describes what Sketchup is for. It is written for people who have not heard of Sketchup and therefore I decided to skip it.

Part 2 is called Modelling in Sketchup and it starts with explaining how to build a house. I like Dummies series because it is very practically oriented. I did not have to read how to draw a box or a circle, the stuff that most people will manage to learn on their own.

Modeling buildings is what I am interested in. The author of this book also thinks that this is an interesting topic. However, Sketchup can do a whole lot of other things – furniture, cars, trees, you name it. However, a building is a perfect example to demonstrate how to use various Sketchup tools. Indeed, a building has a roof, walls, and staircase. Each component has its tricks.

I think Sketchup is a great program because it has lots of tools. A saying goes Sharpen your tools. I think that Skethcup is on the front edge of innovation in graphic tools. For example, a Push/Pull tool can cut windows and doors in a wall, build a triangular roof, and finalize a staircase. Such a multi-purpose tool but still it is quite intuitive when you start to use it. Another tool called Follow Me combines the functionality of 2-3 tools in traditional CAD frameworks. It allows to extend an arbitrary shape along an arbitrary curve, thus making it possible to build a vase, a sphere, or a staircase.

Here are examples of what I could create immediately after reading the book. These complex shapes take only a couple of clicks to build with Sketchup tools.

Chapter 8 describes how to use photographs to facilitate creating of building models. An indispensable stuff if you want to model your very own house. Within hours from taking the book in your hands you will have a draft 3D model of your beloved mansion!

In Part 3 the author describes additional unexpected capabilities of Sketchup. It turns out that it supports multiple styles. Even though Sketchup offers non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) only, still there are lots of options from wireframe, to shaded faces, to NPR. Btw., it is possible to obtain a photograph-quality imaging from Sketchup using plugins (written in Ruby) and 3rd party tools.

Using Google Earth inside Sketchup makes it possible to geo-locate your building and watch it under various lighting conditions – at sunrise, at noon, or at glorious sunset. The building will cast appropriate shadows so you can decide where you want to plant your garden.

Chapter 10 describes how to browse buildings as in first-person game. You can even climb the stairs and walk round the corners smoothly.

In the remaining two parts the book describes how to share your model with the community as well as what the community has to offer. There are lots of cool tutorials out there. One of the great resources are the YouTube videos that the author of the book Aidan Chopra shot as compliment to the book. They are available here. Each video is quite short. Obviously, when I discovered the book I watched the videos first and then began reading the book. Overall, it a very enjoyable learning experience!

It is well known that Google spends a lot of effort on various cool things. Its advances in technology make it possible for people to do things they could not do before. I always wanted to express myself in art but when I was in school I never managed to draw a decent painting. But with Google Sketchup and Building Maker I can build models of everything with the assistance of computer and the web. A great combination of a number of technologies: satellite imaging, graphics, web programming, user interfaces.

Google Earth is a program that many people have spent hours playing with. But those attractive 3D models of buildings were a privilege of qualified engineers and designers until recently. Given the ambicious goal of modeling every city on Earth Google had to ask for help of the community. Because not everybody is a gifted designer, Google has created Building Maker, a tool that presents an image of a building to a user and asks to find a shape that matches its best.

A few basic shapes are available: box, prism, etc. A box is used to model the body of the house whereas a prism is used to model the roof. It is possible to define relationships between elements, that is to specify that one is situated next to another.

Once the user has aligned all visible points on one image she can move on to the next one. After aligning the model you can submit it for review. Once it gets accepted to the buildings layer you can see it using Google Earth and also everybody else will see it. All this beauty (including Google Earth) lives within a window of your browser. I wonder which language it was written in. Obviously, browser applications are matching desktop applications in their capabilities and functionality.

But this cool technology relies on so-cold bird-eye views of cities which are not available everywhere. Another limitation of this technology is the basic set of shapes that building maker has. This is why if you want to model more complex buildings you have to use Sketchup, a 3D drawing program.

Of course, Sketchup facilitates the process through image-matching technology. You can load a photo into Sketchup, align axes and use the image essentially in the same way as in Building Maker. However, a lot more shapes are available: circles, arcs, as well as tools to manipulate them. After constructing the first version of your model you can use additional photographs as textures of its faces. As with Building Maker, it is possible to get the model added to the buildings layer of Google Earth after review.

I have created models with both tools. Obviously, using photo matching in Sketchup takes longer because you have to apply textures to each face of the model manually. I have spent several days creating a model of a school next to our house. The model consists of several boxes. The main problem was connecting the boxes to make sure that there were no holes in the model. At one point I had a seemingly good model except that when I tried to build the roof it was breaking up into pieces. It turned out that the problem was in one wall which height was slightly less than heights of other walls, and therefore, there was a crack between the roof and that wall. Once you get used to measuring heights and widths of everything constructing becomes a lot easier. I would estimate the learning time of Sketchup as one week. But I have not started working with circular shapes yet! That’s the next level of skill!

These are the models that I have built so far. Click on the image to see 3D model.

Beautiful security, 1st edition. By Andy Oram and John Viega. OReilly Media Inc, 2009.

I have read another security book which a notable security expert John Viega has co-edited (the previous one is The Myths of Security). This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the today’s security, its problems and offers ideas for improvement. A number of people have contributed toward this book which makes it a lot of fun to read. Each chapter is written in its special style. This book is a potpurri of security topics.

In Chapter 1 the book mentions a number of reasons why security is so difficult to adopt in modern software lifecycle. The reasons are: learned helplessness, naivete, confirmation traps, and functional fixation. Examples are probided for each problem. It turns out that Microsoft has messed up a great deal with its network authentication protocols trying to preserve backward compatibility. As a result, an improved version of the network protocol was still carrying the features of the previous weaker version and the improvement was therefore nullified. Another great example was when a company which was undergoing security audit has successfuly exploited vulnerabilities in the scanner that the auditor was using. This way they were able to demonstrate that the auditor was not competent enough to audit their organization.

Chapter 2 is dedicated to the wireless networks. The books describes how easy it is now to earn money through faked wireless networks in public areas such as airports. Also wireless networks are very dangerous in corporate world because employees tend to use their personal unprotected wireless-enabled devices to access the intranet which opens lots of possibilities to road warriors. Shocking stuff which makes you think why are we still using wireless.

Chapter 4 sheds light on the underground security economy. This includes prices typically offered for producers of malware and owners of botnets. It is so detailed that it makes me wonder how the author got all this information himself.

Chapter 5 raises a well know problem of using credit cards in the Internet and the dangers of privacy breaches. A new scheme for Internet commerce is proposed. Its corner stone is the idea of using virtual or one-time credit card numbers. This idea has already been implemented in few banks but many users are either unaware of it or don’t consider it a threat big enough to sustain the overhead that it imposes (need to log in to the banking site to generate one-time number every time you make a purchase on the Internet). Obviously, one the biggest challenges that the community needs to address is removing this overhead.

Chapter 6 deals with online advertising. I never thought that it is such a battlefield for both white hats and bad guys! Everybody has heard of click fraud when advertising agency is the victim. What is surprising is that there are lots of malicious advertising agencies which employ a number of forms cheating, for example placing ads on top of each other with different z-values or displaying your ad only few seconds and then replacing it with another ad (indeed, your agreement probably does not mention how long the ad will stay visible because you think that it is as long as the user stays on the page) and so on. Then the book mentions several forms of online advertising: pay per view, per click, and per transaction (the last one means that the user has to buy something before advertiser pays to the agency). Even the most secure form pay per transaction is vulnerable to realistic attacks when a gang of malicious buyers buys things only to return them immediately to the shop! I could never imaging that this was possible but the book claims that the number of buying gangs is growing.

Chapter 7 – great overview of history of PGP and web of trust (I am running out of space to go into greater detail).

Chapter 8 – honeyclient. The book claims that client exploits are more dangerous than server-side because it takes longer to fix the former. Honeyclient was an academic idea which has grown into a useful product! It employs a number of virtual machines running unprotected Windows and visits various suspicious sites. When a change in the state of OS is detected (registry, file system) an alert is triggered.

Chapter 9 – new ideas for security industry. Mentions the need for better cooperation using social networking.

Chapter 10 explains how to integrate security into developing practices. Every stage of the process needs to incorporate security. A common mistake is to address only one stage, for example development and then expect overall improvement – not necessarily the case. Microsoft spent its 2 billion dollars not only running a source code analyzer on Windows but rather re-engineering the whole development cycle.

All right, lets skip a few chapters…

Chapter 13 explains the importance of logging and provides one real-life example of how an FTP server was hijacked. I was surprised to find out that many large organizations are still using FTP servers with a world-writable incoming directory. This opens them to bad guys who use such servers as illegal file shares. Only thorough logging can detect such uses. How do we sift through millions of log records?

Chapter 14 claims that the detection rate of modern IDS is only 32%. What a shocking number! This is due to limitation of signature-based approaches. A better idea is to use behavior-based methods which requires taking context into account to separate false negatives and false positives. For example, if a mail server makes 100 outgoing connections is it an indication of its being owned? Is it sending spam as a zombie? If yes, we need to stop the server immediately. If no, stopping it could disrupt the functioning of a large enterprise. What are normal activities of a mail server, a file server, etc? Machine learning algorithms are becoming useful.

Chapter 15 presents a new framework for secure databases. However, it is not based on encrypting tables using DBMS facilities. Instead, the data translucency approach stores encrypted versions of sensitive data such as user names. The key is generated from user name and password which makes it possible to identify the data belonging to a particular user. But the database still operates on the encrypted data.

Finally, Chapter 16 describes a framework for desktop security based on machine learning, snapshotting, and fast reboots. I recall that several years ago this idea was published in a paper from Stanford University researchers (Armando Fox).

As I am trying educate myself in the area of web technology I have read a book called Adding Ajax which title is self-explanatory. It is interesting that this book has only 4 reviews on Amazon, that’s the total number of reviews people have written, not book’s rating. This means that this book did not receive proper attention. However, I think it is a very interesting book even nowadays despite the fact that it was written in 2007.

Its author Shelly Powers is an active contributor to HTML5 standard, her blog is here. The book describes a number of ways in which Ajax changes the traditional state of the web. However, to start with the author describes what you need to do to prepare yourself for Ajax. I especially like the Start Clean section in which Shelly claims that the default CSS values are not necessarily good. For example, link underlining in a-tag is not always a good idea. I have heard this concept of starting from a clean sheet a number of times, so it is probably a good idea to zero out the default CSS values which I never did.

Also in the first chapter the author introduces the notion of Progressive enhancement, a web development methodology. Basically it says that the web site should work in various environments, even in the simplest. The idea is to make sure that your web site is still accessible on various devices after adding new features to it. The author stresses the concept of accessibility throughout the book. Indeed, web is an open platform for everybody – people in developing world, people with disabilities, etc.

Then there is a chapter on various web frameworks. The author explains the tradeoffs associated with using them. Obviously, a web framework often includes features you don’t need and that increases the loading time of your page, an important issue for people with slower connections. Among the frameworks, Prototype offers the best value. Its goal is to provide a cross-browser layer while staying quite minimal in size.

In Chapter 4 the book describes interactive effects that Ajax allows to add, for example instant previews, fade ins and outs, etc. Then it describes the widgets that Ajax allows one to use: accordion, tabs, overlays. After that, the book deals with more complex issues such as in-place editing and live validation which requires interacting with a server. Besides home-grown solutions that book mentions a variety of web frameworks and tools, for example JotForm – a nice framework for building forms and putting them on your web site. This is the kind of tool I need. I want to place a feedback form on my web site to make it possible for the visitors to drop me a line without having to write me an e-mail but this was always a low priority task and I never made it happen. JotForm will make my life a lot easier.

A special chapter is dedicated to advanced effects such as using Ajax with SVG. Finally, the author explains how to build mashups using web APIs. In this chapter the author explains the tradeoffs of using client-side and server-side mashups and explains how to implement a mashup in a non-scripting environment. Despite the fact that this is a book on Ajax the case in which Javascript is disabled is also dealt with. The reason is that many people prefer to browse unfamiliar sites without Javascript, the author claims.

Despite all its gorgeous content the book has drawbacks. The main disadvantage is that it is a bit hackish in nature. For example, there are well defined Javascript design patterns which the book does not mention. Instead, it offers its solutions as functions or snippets of code that the web developers are supposed to paste wherever appropriate. If next editions of the book are to appear it needs to take an object-oriented approach to all the beauty that it has developed.

Last but not least, this is the post number 300 in my blog! An important milestone has been reached! This is the day I have been thinking of for a long time, I was trying to imagine what would I write as a post number 300. I guess a review of a book on web design is a topic worth discussing in such an important post, it conveys a symbolic meaning! Joke.

This Saturday I participated in a race in Tuusula, the place where I ran a marathon last year. Initially I was planning to run a half-marathon because this was the first race in year 2010. In addition, I had only one long run this year after which I felt pain in the legs and was not running for another couple of weeks.

So my mindset was configured toward an easy half-marathon until the moment when I arrived to Tuusula. But I will start with what I was doing on Friday. In the evening I had a check-up training session under rain after which my mood was between not running on Saturday at all or running a half-marathon.

However, on Saturday the weather improved and the sun was shining. I went to the bus station and boarded the bus to Tuusula. It was quite a low-cost comfortable trip in a tourist bus. It costs less than 6 Euros one way, 30 kilometers from Helsinki to Tuusula. I was astonished when I got off the bus and breathed freshest air and saw the cleanest sky. It is a kind of feeling when you arrive to a village after spending time in the city. And I thought – such a beautiful life, why should I spend half of the day at home? I should spend all my time on the road today – and I decided to run a marathon against all odds!

A marathon is always a challenge. But I have learned the lessons of the past and started the marathon slowly. Because of the nice weather lots of people were walking or biking. Many of them were also participating in marathon but as cheerleaders. Look at these nice posters in the hands of children. They are saying Hyvää which means Good in Finnish. The spectators make the run a lot more enjoyable.

The course goes to the town of Järvenpää – the town of Jan Sibelius and Joonas Kokkonen, the two famous Finnish composers. It was surprising to see an amusement park there. Besides the traditional carousels a helicopter tour was offered for only 60 Euro! It is well known that in big cities it costs a lot more, probably 300 Euro or so. Of course, I did not fly the chopper this time but if I were visiting Järvenpää as a tourist I sure would!

After leaving the town the course goes through countryside. At this time of year the trees are not green yet and there is no crops on the fields. However, the spring has definitely come and the last patches of snow are disappearing under the shining sun. It is very nice to watch the nature waking up after winter sleep, such an enjoyable feeling.

I have completed the first lap 21km in 2 hours 25 minutes, slightly slower than last year when I was running a marathon. However, then I felt crams in my legs because I have not adapted to the shoes yet. It is one of the best shoes you can get. The original price is nearly 150 Euros but I got them on a sale for 70 Euros. I guess their biggest advantage is that they treat your knees well – a typical problem of an experienced runner. Indeed, I should say that on Sunday my legs were in good condition, much better than earlier even after half-marathons. However, during the second half of the race I felt lots of pain in muscles and thus had to walk, not run.

De-hydration is another typical problem during the marathons. I was in the winter pants, I used to skate during freezing temperatures in this pants. I decided not to buy the sports-suite because I thought the weather will get warmer and I will run in the shorts. But for this race I definitely needed a sports suite, not the winter pants. This is why during the second half of the race I needed to drink a lot. Even though the water stations were available here and there I felt thirsty at thirty kilometers. Fortunately, there was a Siwa shop near the road. Another lucky coincidence was that I had money with me, but only 3 Euros. It turned out that the energy drink costs 2.99 Euros. This drink healed my legs, the muscle pain was gone and I was able to run again! I guess I was super-lucky on that day!

So I completed the marathon walking the middle part of it but otherwise running. The net time is 5:16:41 which is worse than what I thought of in the beginning but much better than what I was thinking during the race when my legs started to hurt. I thought I would have to walk the second half of the race in which case my time would approach 7 hours.

Overall, nice run in a joyful atmosphere. A tough battle to finish the race but this is a marathon after all, the sports of Gods! From now on I think I should try marathons every time. Because a half-marathon is a shorter distance I am always trying to beat my record which takes lots of effort. I feel a lot more exhausted after a half-marathon than after a marathon. Also a marathon gives a lot more satisfaction – not everybody can do it.

And I just did it! Again!