Pictures

Here are new photos of my life in NZ:

http://picasaweb.google.com/lysunkin/LifeInNewZealand#

P.S. I'm busy all the time - I'll write more articles later...

Industrial production of holy water

Recently I remembered famous phrase of Rudolf Sikorski from "Beetle in the Anthill" (Boris and Arkady Strugatsky):
"As members of COMCON-2 we are allowed to have a reputation of ignoramuses, mystics and superstitious fools. But we are not allowed one single thing - that is, to underestimate a threat. And if our house suddenly smells of sulfur, we must suppose that a horned devil appeared somewhere near and take any necessary measures, even if that means organizing an industrial production of holy water."
I remembered it in a case where someone asked me "Slava, why are you so nervous?" :)

At last - I'm in New Zealand

Well at last I got to New Zealand, the land of my dreams!
My trip was uneasy as I may say: 16 hours by train and more then 30 hours on airports and flights.
I'll tell more details later, when I take some rest.

How to decompile CHM files

Recently I bought Sony PRS-505 e-book reader. I reads a lot of formats (like PDF, RTF, TXT). Also it reads EPUB (public) and LRF (Sony internal) formats.
But I need to read my CHM books on that device.
So I see the following way of converting CHM into something readable:
1) decompile CHM into a set of HTMLs
2) create EPUB file

I found that every Windows user already has an ability to decompile CHM - it is easy as a pie, just execute

hh -decompile [target folder] [CHM file]

Now I'm searching how to create EPUB file (it must not be difficult, because EPUB file looks similar to zipped set of xml files).

Now I'm a resident of New Zealand!

Friends, I've received my residential visa for New Zealand!
I started my application for residence long time ago (about 2.5 years) - and I passed this long way.
Cheers!

Interesting training I attended - Situational leadership

There was a training in our organization last weekend. (to be precise: June 5 and 6). We studied "Situational leadership".
I was very surprised that it is quite old technique (end of 60s) but I've never heard of it and some my ex-bosses pretended to be very skilled managers don't know at all (or manage people without using of this technique - they just use one style of management).
I can repeat: training was surprising and simple ideas from such style of leadership were shoking for me (I realised that I did a lot of mistakes in my previos experience and how this method could be applied on me from the side of my bosses to avoid miscommunications and problems).

One of the most important Project Management skills

Currently I think that the one of the most important Project Management skills is the Vision of the result.

So PM may not know how exactly things go and created, but it is vitally important for PM to know how complete things must look like. Sure the result have to be achievable (sometimes we can imagine such impossible things...)
And PM must be able to inspire his or her team to implement such Vision.

Well, the formula is quite simple "The Result = Vision + Possibility to Implement".

I'm sure these simple principles can be obtained from careful reading of books (and important SMART model), but as a rule information in books is digged in and sometimes it is not easy to get it correctly.

Trip to London

Recently I've been to the UK. To be precise, from February 14 till February 17
Here you can see my photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/lysunkin/London

I'll write about my opinion and trip details later... Nevertheless, the whole trip was just awesome and I love London very much!