Belinsky Coat of Arms

1781-1917 The upper part (three sheaves, wheat, barley and millet, against the green background) is taken from the Penza Region coat of arms. The golden crane symbolised the abundance of such birds in the area. The city had the name of Chembar until 1948. The actual dwelling appeared in 1713 and it got a city status in 1781, together with the first general plan and its own coat of arms.

1861 (Project)

2006-   In 1948 Chembar was renamed Belinsky after Vissarion G. Belinsky who spent his childhood in Chembar.

Images are taken from: Heraldicum.

Mom is 73

Mom is 73 today. But frankly she looks and behaves as if she were 50 something. At least to me. She definitely has lots of health problems, but the many errands she has to run for her elder sister and our little family makes her forget or disregard those.

Besides today they celebrate the Russian Day of Air Forces and Air Fleet, and in December this year there will be 50 years since the United Kuibyshev Aviation Unit of Aeroflot was formed. She worked there as a stewardess in 1963-1979.

So this is usually a double holiday: her birthday and Air Fleet Day.

One more reason to celebrate is that for the last three months she hasn’t sworn at me whenever I left to my boyfriend’s and she talks to me cheerfully. Are we through the rough period or is it just a temporary peace?

DUTraffic Dial-Up Monitor/Statistics

I finally changed my Internet connection from dial-up to ADSL. Not that dial-up was slow for me: I didn’t download music/video/software at home. But the amount included into my plan was too small for me and I had to pay extra every time my 200 MB ran dry. Plus I had to check if there is anything left there. And here I found a great helper in DUTraffic.

DUTraffic is a dial-up Internet connection monitor/statistics application that is perfect. It is a small program that shows statistics for current connection on pointing your mouse cursor at the program’s icon in the system tray. There is also a graph window (transparent and can be always on top or always under all other windows), that I didn’t use. Plus DUTraffic keeps records of all your connection statistics (dates, times, download/upload traffic) for any past period. So I could check how many hours I spent online last August or how much I downloaded last May. The program never crashed and never caused any problem for my computer. Also, in case you installed Windows anew, you could save the backup history files and paste it again after you install Windows (in case you format your hard drive and all programs were lost). Thus, you never lose the records, no matter how many times you lose Internet connection, switch off your computer or refresh the system altogether.

You can get it from here: .

Now that I am on ADSL I wanted the same, but there is no broadband version of DUTraffic. And three other monitors I tried were no good. Netgraph was the best in that it (apparently) showed the right download traffic. Bandwidth monitor crashed on first and subsequent runs. BitMeter showed twice the size traffic in comparison with standard Windows statistics. Besides, neither seemed to provide back history.

So it looks like dial-up users lose in speed and download freedom, but gain a lot in terms of correct and overall statistics/monitoring.

Is New Better Than Old?

Airlines always try to make some difference (or at least we’d like to think that) to always be ahead of their competitors. Sometimes they change logos, and sometimes even names. Is new here better than old? Let’s take example of two Russian and one American airlines.

Aeroflot is the flag carrier of Russia. This name is more than 80 years old (my mother has a medal commemorating Aeroflot’s 80th anniversary: she was once an air hostess). The name was left after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the united Aeroflot. At one point they thought of saying goodbye to Aeroflot’s sickle and hammer in wings’ logo. But after most customers said they liked it, the logo was left to shine. It is indeed a very nice emblem going very well together with Aeroflot’s typeface. Here how it looked until early 2000s:

. Then some English company was chosen as an advisor to Aeroflot’s rebranding campaign. It was that company that initially suggested discarding sickle and hammer. Aeroflot was wise enough to consult its customers (I recall taking part in an online questionnaire). In the end, they came out with new livery colours for crew costumes and planes, and a new logo. The sickle and hammer in wings was left, but they added an orange smile ending with a tricolour tip symbolising the Russian flag.

  The smile goes now with Aeroflot’s new motto, Sincerely Yours, instead of decades long Fly on Aeroflot’s planes (which sounds better in Russian than in English). Personally, I’d live with the previous logo, but at least the new one is not so bad, or not as bad new logo as it could have been.

Now comes an example of how a new logo could be worse (again, to my personal taste). The example comes from over the Pond on board of Delta. The decades long logo here was a blue triangle with red foundation. The foundation always went through perturbations resulting in sharp or smooth edges:

Here’s Delta of the 80s with sharp edges. And here’s Delta from early 90s and then late 90s.

      Still sharp edges but different typeface. Plus “AirLines” added in the 90s. Then comes the 21st century that left “AirLines” to the past, but played with shades of blue and smoother border between blue and red between 2000 and 2004. The second logo below lived until 2007 and had sharp edges again. And I like it that way.

 

But some people in Delta’s headquarters thought differently. They decided that there was too much blue for years (blue years for Delta including, in the sense “sad”) and they needed something brighter and radiating new energy of a company trying to emerge from bankruptcy. The result (below) is an all-red new triangle.

The triangle is sharp and has a middle line that accentuates a slightly 3D look. But the triangle is smaller. The typeface is also quite unorthodox for Delta, sans-serif, though still blue, yet darker aggressive shade. To me, that is not quite (maybe yet) a change for better.

Well, sometimes airlines even change their names. Here’s again a Russian example from a company I’ve never flown. Siberia Airlines is a chunk of former Soviet Aeroflot and the second largest air company in Russia. I quite like their classic logo with the name Siberia in Russian.

  This logo is from early 90s and Siberia’s childhood. Look how nicely the letters are connected with each other. In late 90s they separated the letters (isn’t divorce a bad thing?).

    The incline (smaller), though, is still there. In early 2000s Siberia bosses for some unreasonable reason decided that Siberia was a name closely connected with the Soviet past (though there wasn’t any Siberia Airlines in the Soviet times) and with the old service of the Soviet flavour. The company was rebranded S7 Airlines (S7 is Siberia’s IATA code) and they painted their planes in green. The company is trying to present itself as a somewhat analogue of European low-cost airlines, though it is not. Hence, the poisonous green and pink.

  If you can agree to new colours, I wouldn’t but won’t fight. If it comes to the name (and frankly the very first logo), I wouldn’t agree at all. The word “Siberia” is as easily pronounced in English as “S7″ (pronunciation was also mentioned among the reasons why the name was changed). The service can be altered, the image is based on many factors including air safety records, punctuality, customer friendliness, etc. But the image is a tricky thing and I do not see any reason in why this radically new image is better.