Movies and not Only

If I ever wrote about some movies there were only my comments on really good movies, since I like to share positive things for others.
But this time I will comment a very bad movie. On the last weekend I’ve seen 4 or 5 movies, two of them were really ugly so I had no desire to view them completely to the end. The first one was the “Against the Dark”, a latest film with Steven Seagal. I will not describe this movie since it just ugly thing about some vampires, really cheap and nasty and without any fucking idea at all. My patience was able to bear maximally 15 minutes But still I can understand why such movies are being produced and why actors agree to play in them: money. There’s never nothing bad with money making, it seems to run the world progress.

But the second movie was not ugly just because it is cheap and without idea, it pretends to be with the idea. Movie stars are never responsible for the content of the movie, they just play the scenario as good as they are asked. Director and screenplay writer are fully responsible here, they are filling the form with the content. Thus I would not say any shit to Daniel Craig who took a role in this crap called the “Defiance”. The real hero here is mr. Edward Zwick. I would like to wish mr. Zwick never ever again have any chance participate in movie making.
Now the reason why I am focusing that much on this movie… Well… History managed things in a way where between Western and Eastern Europe we have not only geographical division but so called “mentally” separation. Of course there are mental/cultural/other differences. But. I will despise any person who will try to deliberately cultivate the image of Ukraine, Russia and other Eastern Europe countries as the society of degrading people who only drink vodka full time and swearing. This film is all about this.
Quite often I have met people from Europe who never seen real Eastern Europe but who believe in this image. This is not good. I wish old good Western Europe all the best possible but people – be careful to not degrade yourself in taking so simple and rude provocations as the basis of your judgments. Those mental differences are no more such visible as it was 15 years ago, world is changing and vodka is not only being drunk in post-soviet countries, and people are visiting museums and listening to classical music not only in Germany or UK.

Now let’s start the work, it’s a fine day :p

Wonders of communication or how to lose money day by day

Part of my daily @work activities is a communication with different people.
It can be with people whos primary native language is English, Dutch, Ukrainian or Russian.
So I can choose way:

a) Always try to switch to the person’s native language. It can result in long term that your own command of that language will improve. This approach is nice in 1-to-1 communication. But it really sucks when you need to share information between people who are not in the same country.

b) Optimum.
In group of N person try to find the language that is accepted for the maximal number of people from that group. This never sucks I believe, this always win.

So if I ask you a question: which approach you would chose at your work, a) or b), the answer seems evident.
But nothing perfect in this world.
My current project shows me that people are acting sometimes irrationaly. I have a communication chain that can be reduced to simple schema: Netherlands -> Ukraine. Neither 99% of dutch understand Ukrainian language nor 99% of Ukrainians understand Dutch. But a reasonable amount of both do understand English.
It seems logical to agree (and perceive intuitively) that sharing info using English language will benefit and reduce response time and costs of information processing. Alas, I need to translate again and again. And that is not bad for me, it even makes me understand some NL words, phrases, etc. But that is bas for the customers and their business.

Life is wonderfull, smile