Opera Software University Tours

Astrakhan, May 12
We arrived in the first city on Tuesday, the first working day after the biggest Russian holiday, Victory Day. We do not yet have Opera Campus Crew members in the Astrakhan State Technical University, but university officials (special thanks to Alexey Khortonen) showed a very big interest to our project and later we understood why.

In ASTU we had our highest number of listeners, with more than 220 students meeting us in the Red Hall - biggest conference room in the university. For two and half hours we spoke about Web standards, answered a lot of questions, and discussed new technologies.

At the start of the seminar we awarded the qidget competition winners. ASTU students presented a few very cool Opera widgets related to the education process. We was surprised - in ASTU there was not only a university's web portal, but a full-featured online library service too. And this service was integrated into the best widgets - students will be able to use all library service features directly inside widget.

After all our meetings we had a very interesting excursion across university buildings (thanks to Alexey Khortonen too). So, the Volga river and the Caspian Sea are well-known habitats for sturgeon, sterlet and a lot of other perfect fish. Yeah, you think correctly: famous Russian black caviar. However, we did not even try a gram of black caviar, as its production is prohibited by Russian law. We had plans for visiting other Russian cities too and these plans didn't include a few years in jail!

Oh, of course. I can't hide it longer - on a lot of computers in this university the Opera browser is installed already.

You hear it? To-do-to-do, to-do-to-do... Yes, it's the wheels of a midnight train wheel telling us that we should move to the next city...

Volgograd, May 13
So, many people know nothing about Volgograd. But everything changes if I say Stalingrad - the previous name of Volgograd. Hundreds of thousands soldiers died around and inside this city in the cold winter of 1942-43. Look at this photo - this house keeped unchanged since 1943, many other buildings were destroyed.


Today the Volgograd is a big industrial city. And of course - VSTU students have the same interest in modern and future technologies as in Astrakhan (and all other universities, really). We had about 160+ attendees visiting our seminar.

This seminar was unique compared to others - we had a few hot discussions about SVG and other modern technologies with the students which at the same time are employees of local web-design studio. These guys are a Mac-fans in general and you can understand which discussion we had. After the seminar the unplanned meet-up was organized and we had a more unofficial talks with these guys. And what I can say... I think now we have a few converts to Opera's vision for the future of the internet.

We had just a few widgets creators in VSTU. But one the best widgets was awarded - Student's Scheduler. Hopefully, we will have more interesting works from Volgograd students in the programming competitions we discussed with the uni officials. They're ready for regional competitions and believe that their students will be the best of all.

So, the second day of our fantastic trip is going to evening. Two hours of looking around the city is finished and the next train already awaits us at the station, and we're ready for a 12-hours-long voyage to the next city.

To be continued...