The Notes of Glitch the Hamster
Alexey Gerasimovich's blog about books, music, Cyprus, and everything else
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Just a couple of weeks ago, I knew nothing about The One Minute Manager until a colleague told me about a book he had just read. He mentioned that, in his opinion, as a manager, I was already following all four rules for “managing monkeys.” That piqued my curiosity, and I decided to figure out what kind of monkeys I was supposedly dealing with.
Ken Blanchard, a well-known author of management books, coined the term One Minute Manager in his book of the same name. By this term, he refers to a highly productive leader who follows some fairly simple rules. Blanchard’s first book, co-authored with Spencer Johnson, sold millions of copies and has been translated into nearly 40 languages worldwide. It kicked off a series under the same name, in which Blanchard, collaborating with various business authors, presents different productivity methods.
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Olga Gromyko continues to write about the beloved world of the near future, where seemingly kind humans have learned to create cyborgs, but ultimately treat them worse than furniture. They look like humans, but they can be casually used to clear minefields.
The main difference in the new book “The Cyborg and His Forester” is that it’s the first novel without the characters from the main series. The setting is the same, the location has appeared before, and the main characters were introduced in a previous short story. However, the beloved team from “The Space Brain-Eater” is absent from this book.
This is both good and bad, in my opinion. It’s good because Olga took a step sideways and tried to develop the universe without relying on the endless adventures of the team. She partially did this in the previous book when she shifted focus from road adventures to the fate of intelligent cyborgs finally making their voices heard.
But it’s bad because the book turned out to be less interesting and colorful. There are fewer main characters, and only two protagonists. Their color is also different. This is the first book in the series where I caught myself losing interest while reading. The main story is a light detective plot. But it didn’t captivate me like the previous books. The detective aspect is very “light,” because the relationship between the characters clearly takes precedence over the detective line. But even the main characters sometimes became tiresome with their behavior. At times, it felt like a circus, with the protagonists acting like clowns. And they seemed exhausted by it, performing this number for the ten-thousandth time, but unable to stop—because it’s their job.
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Lately, I’ve become increasingly interested in economics. It’s not that I want to become an economist, but market principles are useful in many areas. What’s especially interesting is that back when I was a student, I had no interest in economics at all. In fact, I failed my second-year exam miserably and had to retake it in August. But by the time of the retake, I knew the material inside out. Perhaps that’s when my gradual interest in reading about economics started.
The book Economics: The User’s Guide by Ha-Joon Chang came highly recommended to me by various platforms (“you might like this”) and colleagues alike. Supposedly, it covers everything. The book certainly has a strong marketing presence. The author is originally from South Korea but currently lives and teaches in Cambridge. He’s consulted for many well-known banks, and the president of Ecuador almost worships him.
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As an experienced father, I hadn’t heard of Lyudmila Petranovskaya. Turns out, my wife has known about her for a long time and reads her articles. I discovered her book on the recommendation of a colleague, a man. That’s when I learned that L. Petranovskaya is a well-known child psychologist in the modern world. And her book The Secret Support: Attachment in a Child’s Life introduced me to her as an author.
The book’s main message is to show that children always need their parents and that they seek support from them. However, they do this in different ways during different stages of life, which is why certain behaviors and “problems” manifest.
What really stood out from the first pages is that the author doesn’t try to present her opinion as the only correct one. She immediately states:
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I have written more than once that the topic of the Holocaust is very important to me. I’m certain this is directly tied to the fact that the extermination of Jews during World War II personally affected my family. But this is also an example of something people must never forget so that it never happens again.
The book Auschwitz by Laurence Rees didn’t exactly fall into my hands by chance; modern algorithms recommended it to me because I had read other books on this topic. Until that day, however, I knew nothing about the author. Laurence Rees is a British historian who has devoted much of his career to studying Nazism, its causes, and its rise. Auschwitz: The Nazis & the Final Solution is just one of his books, in which he attempts to explain not only the history of one of the most infamous death camps but also the development of such a horrific concept as the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
Before I share my thoughts on the book, I’d like to quote the author’s own words with which he concludes the book. I couldn’t put it better myself (I have read the book in Russian and couldn’t find the original quote so here I place the back translation from Russian, sorry):
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How could I possibly pass up a book with such a trendy title these days—Spy Secrets That Can Save Your Life? And the subtitle—A Former CIA Officer Reveals Safety and Survival Techniques to Keep You and Your Family Protected—just grabbed my attention. I got really curious about what we could change in our lives, since I do have a bit of a paranoid streak in my personality.
However, literally on the first few pages, it becomes clear that the author, Jason Hanson, was indeed an officer, but not exactly with years and years of training and service—he worked for just under seven years before deciding to ditch it all and start his own business, where he now teaches people how to protect themselves using these “spy techniques.” To be fair, though, he has also appeared as a security expert for many well-known companies, including The Wall Street Journal.
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Most Soviet children of my generation were probably quite knowledgeable about Greek mythology. And we owe this to the magnificent book by Nikolai Kun, Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece. Moreover, after having spent quite a bit of time recently with real Greeks, it seems to me that we knew their mythology better than they did.
That said, even I don’t remember much now. So, what do we remember about Perseus? That he killed Medusa the Gorgon, who could turn people to stone with a single glance, and that he avoided looking at her directly by using her reflection in his shield. And that’s about the extent of my knowledge after all these years.
The same goes for many other characters. The book contained an enormous number of them, but we mostly focused on the feats of various heroes: Perseus, Theseus, Heracles, the Argonauts… That’s who was interesting. As for the rest, we left them behind. Can you remember the names of Perseus’ grandchildren? Or that he even had grandchildren? And do you know who was Heracles’ mortal father (since Zeus was his official dad)?
Well, Perseus’ grandson and Heracles’ mortal father were actually the same person—Amphitryon. It was he whom H.L. Oldie made the main character of their dilogy The Grandson of Perseus, the third book in their Achaean cycle. The first was A Hero Must Be Alone (dedicated to the story of Heracles), followed by the dilogy Odysseus, Son of Laertes. It was with the first of these that I began my acquaintance with Oldie’s books.
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A month ago, I celebrated my 10-year anniversary working at the game company Wargaming.net. However, my entire professional career actually began with video games, back when I used to write out the program for a computer version of Monopoly in a notebook. I never finished it—making games is tough, especially when all your work can vanish due to a faulty audio cassette where it was saved. But even my first programs were related to games: business simulations, educational, and card games. So, you could say I’ve been in the industry, with breaks, for over 25 years.
That’s why it was especially interesting for me to read Jason Schreier’s much-talked-about book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, which, as its subtitle suggests, reveals “stories behind how video games are made.”
Read moreI’ve written about healthcare in Cyprus several times already. But now, everyone here is talking about a long-discussed government initiative that’s finally arriving at our doorstep. Its name is GHS (General Health System), or GESY (pronounced “yesi”).
And since I’m naturally inclined to dig into things, I decided to figure out what exactly this is and how it might affect me personally. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I’ll explain what I know and understand..
Overall, the concept behind it is good. The thing is, healthcare in Cyprus can be divided into two groups: public and private. Public healthcare is cheap, but there are few doctors, which leads to long waiting lists—sometimes months ahead. Private healthcare costs around 40-50 euros per visit, and there are almost no queues (except for very successful doctors who are in high demand, but even then, it’s usually just a matter of a few days at worst).
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