February 2, 1998

This morning I bought a train ticket to Moscow. So on Wednesday I am going to Moscow with the ILP folks! It will be a blast. Tonight there was a family home evening at Yulia's. There was no electricity for some reason and we burned candles the whole time, it was really cool.

January 28, 1998

 Finished translating Presidents of the Church video. It's my only job now that I am not working for Volodia any more. 486 sux. I have a Fazer chocolate bar on my desk waiting for me so I'm off to the fridge to get some milk :o}

January 27, 1998

Still sick, stayed home all day. Today Volodia Baykov came over and took his Pentium back. He showed me his new car - Saab 9000. Vobshe.
Found a new radio station at 107.8 FM and I declare it the best station in St.Petersburg!
I downloaded some TF maps from the net today. I thought Border1 was pretty cool - it's very unusual. No forts, no flags to capture. There are three teams. One team consists of illegal immigrants trying to cross the US border in a truck, second team is the American border patrol trying to stop the Mexicans and the third team are MIB folks helping the immigrants.

January 26, 1998

Got sick today. Heard a new song on the radio - Tamagochi. It's funny that now there's even a pop song about those little beasts. They are everywhere! I swear every kid in St.Petersburg owns a tamagochi these days. They even feel like they have to take care of them during sacrament meetings. It drives you crazy to hear little happy tamagochi beeps from different parts of the sacrament room. :)

January 24, 1998

Man that was great! Today I went to a TeamFortress tournament. When I got there I found a clan that was lacking a player and they invited me to play for them as a pyro on the offense. The coolest thing - we were playing against Firewolves -- the best Quake clan in St.Petersburg. Naturally our team lost. :) But I enjoyed every bit of the match. The funnest part was that all of my teammates stayed in the fort to defend the flag and I was the only person who was expected to capture the enemy flag. So just me against two Firewolves waiting to kill me in the flag area. Uhmmmm... how does that sound? It sounds just right - I was beat into the ground again and again. Even when I managed to burn their Pyro with my napalm, the option I had was die on their Demolition Man's pipebombs by the flag room. We played on 2fort4. It has only one narrow passage leading to the flag room - perfect place for demoman to set up his traps....

January 23, 1998

Getting ready for TeamFortress match tomorrow. I have polished my keyboard layout for TF and created my own configuration file with all the settings. Today I downloaded a Tfbot program from the internet. The proggie lets you play TF as a single player game against bots - computer opponents. The bot kind of sucks though, they all just come flocking to the bridge on 2fort5 and then jump into the water. The bot doesn't support Medic, Spy and Engineer characters, I guess they simply lack intelligence for that. :)