Blog of Alexander Mamchenkov

About Me

Interests

There is a number of things I am interested in. I’ve been doing some of them for a long time and some I have just started, but no matter how long I’ve been involved in any of those activities, they play a great role in my life. Below is a list of activities I like doing as well as references to people who either introduced me in those activities or helped me there in some ways:

Information Technology

I was always interested in IT and got more and more involved into it especially for the past 6 years (from the time I left Russia). I had no problems with computers in Russia (have killed couple of home PCs while trying to figure out what’s there and how that supposed to work). Then I fixed a computer class in RBSM school while I was in Malta and as a benefit, got full access to that lab from the school. I registered as a Computer Science student immediately when I came to study in the Intercollege and since that time a lot of stuff around me had to do with IT. For now, IT is my hoppy, my profession, my way of living. I have experience in it’s many fields (though not necessarily deep in each one) like system administration (on MS Windows and Unix-like systems), web development , programming, networking, maritime satellite communications and others.

Currently I am very interested in the Open Source community and Linux since I have very strong belief in them I really like a lot of things around them.

Great thanks for getting me involved in the IT goes to my brother Leonid Mamchenkov who is working in IT for a long time now and who gave me a lot of help there. In addition, there are a lot of people who were always helpful and who shared a bunch of their knowledge in this field with me.

Mountain Skiing

This activity probably stays for the longest time on the list of things I just love to do. I started skiing around the age of 7 when my mom came from Switzerland (?) and introduced me to this sport. The first year I was learning to ski on my own, then I had around 3 years of ski school involving active training, competitions and even got the first junior skiing degree around the age of 8-9 years old. After the ski school (which I left because of the change of the trainer) I was still skiing a lot, giving some private ski lessons to the newcomers and helping the ski club administration with local issues.

Except from the small slopes in Togliatti, I have been skiing in Ural and Kavkaz mountains, but my dream in this area is to go and ski in Alps one day.

Now that I am in Cyprus, I do try to ski some time in winter, but the ski season is very short here, as well as the slopes are kinda easy and always crowded. Anyhow, I got my equipment from Moscow (thanks mom) here and I will try to do as much of skiing as possible.

The great thanks for this activity goes first to my parents, my mother, Zinaida Mamchenkova who introduced me to this sport (she is also skiing), my father, Sergey Mamchenkov, who tool me both to Ural and Kavkaz and also thanks to the best ski trainer I’ve ever met - Oleg Kravtsov, who was my trainer for something like 3 years.

Downhill Bicycling

I was a fan of bicycling from the time I got my first bicycle (very early ages of mine). A lot of things happen to me while I was riding the bicycle, but my family and I managed to overcome all of them. Through the time I was growing, my bicycles were changing to bigger and better. I got to know everything about this mechanisms, I could disassemble and assemble any of them very fast, but my dream was to have a downhill bicycle (with all those gears, suspensions and the rest) while I was having one gear simple ones. Finally my father got me one and that what did a revolution in this area of mine. I started doing all those crazy stuff like not only doing down hill, but also riding stairs, jumping from wherever I thought I could and so on.

One year (or so) before I left Russia, my bicycle was stolen and I didn’t do much of that activity until recently. Last months I bought a brand new GT bicycle with from suspension and a lot of cool stuff for Olga, and I do ride it myself when I have chance. I am also planning to buy the same (but bigger) for myself sometime soon, since due to my heavy involvement in IT I rarely do any physical exercises, but I really need to do some. Hopefully, this activity will resume very soon.

Thanks to my parents here for providing me with all those fancy stuff for this activity as well as for keeping me alive after all those crashes.

Billiard

Billiard, especially pool (American type of billiard) was always a game I enjoyed. I tried it some time ago when I was in Russia and got to play it a lot when I came to Cyprus. It is a kind of a game which forces you to combine both, the mind, so that like in chess you have to think a lot about your moves and also the physical force and precision, so that you can perform the actions from your mind correctly. Billiard makes me feel relaxed and quite, it is nice to play it in special clubs, where there is no noise and where everyone comes to play, not to talk or watch football play on TV.

A couple of months ago I bought myself a personal cue which brought some more attraction to this game and recently I also tried snooker (English type of billiard) and I found it very attractive as well. So now I am playing both, pool and snooker and unfortunately I can play Russian billiard since we just don’t have it in Cyprus (actually we have, but bad tables in not the best places).

For supporting me in this activity I’d like to thank my brother, who played pool some time before (and unfortunatelly stopped doing it now), my father, who likes this game and makes me a complany whenever we have change (last time some years ago when he came to Cyprus), Dmitri, who is my main billiard partner for the past years as well as Lev, who introduced me to snooker not that far ago.

Yachting

Oh, this seems to be a family activity. My father was doing yachting from his childhood (and he still does it), my brother was involved into yachting for years as well (but seems like not anymore), and actually the whole spirit around our family has a lot to do with yachting.

So as you might guess I was attending yachting club as well and I did sailing with my father (though mostly as a passenger those days), but now I got a chance to become a crew member of a cruise yacht in Cyprus and I become more and more involved into this sport every week.

For yachting, I want to thank my father, since he is the first person for me in this area. There are also a number of people who helped me to get into yachting in many ways, whom I also would like to thank here.

More of Me

My LiveJournal (russian blog)
My Flickr (photos)
My BrainBench (certificates)