Interview with Misha

1. Tell us a little about yourself. Almost all of my life is about driving cars. I learned how to drive at 12. They had those funny little kids' licenses back then in the Soviet Union, which allowed one of this age to drive on public roads, when accompanied by an adult. I've been driving ever since. I've been driving for 36 years, never as a profession, but I do hold a Russian commercial driver's license in addition to Russian and American regular licenses and a Russian motorcycle license. I drove a vast variety of cars, trucks, and motorcycles; I can't even remember them all :) In 1982 I graduated with a Master's degree in Engineering from the Moscow Auto-Road Institute in Moscow, Russia. After that I served two years in the Soviet Army as a commander of the automotive platoon. This gave me some real life truck driving experience. After Army I worked for the State Automotive Research Institute in Moscow, Russia, from 1985 till 1993. My last job title there was Senior Research Engineer. I was researching the combustion process of internal combustion engines, and was also creating and improving equipment and tools for combustion research. Most of the time I drove in Moscow, Russia, which is very similar to New York by driving patterns and habits (I think most of really big cities are like this - I had a chance to see Cairo, Egypt, and it reminded me about both of those giants). Second largest in terms of time or miles driven would be US - Washington, DC area, mostly Northern Virginia. And there were occasional trips and rentals in different cities and rural areas all over the world, including the former Soviet Union, Turkey, Hungary, Thailand, US Eastern coast (all the way from DC to Key West and back to Niagara Falls), and even the island of Cyprus (did you know they drive on the left side of the road? - I survived, and didn't even do any damage to the rented car, nor to others :P ). My last accident happened in 2003 in Washington, DC, when I did not manage to dodge another car, which turned left from the right lane. The only excuse that I have is that I had just returned from a trip to Egypt and was heavily jet-lagged. My last at-fault accident happened in 1997 in Moscow, Russia. This time I was turning to the main road, following another car, and did not expect this car to stop completely due to the lack of traffic on the main road. However, it did stop, and I hit its bumper at around 2 mph or so. Other than that, I have not been in any accident for about the last 12 years. I had my fair share of accidents when I was young though, but I never was involved in an accident where somebody was killed or seriously injured. I routinely drive 90-100 mph on divided highways, and routinely drive 5-15 mph on local residential lanes. I get one speeding ticket every two years, on average, and pay $600 every 6 months to insure all three of my family's cars (two Civics and a Murano). I taught my former and current wives and my older son how to drive, and not a single one of them has ever had an accident with serious injury or death. No injuries at all for that matter during 20 plus years of their combined driving. My former wife and my older son still drive in Moscow, Russia - and this is like driving in Manhattan, or even harder. And everybody, including me, really enjoys driving. We all just love it!
2. What brought you to HubPages? Jack Humphrey (blog marketing). He recommended Hubpages as a good place to post articles and get quality backlinks. So I came here, configured my profile and set up my first hub. Then I decided to look around the place and stumbled upon Isabella Snow's hub on crazy driving. We got into some lovely discussion in comments over there, and this prompted me to explore the place in more depth. What I discovered really fascinated me, and still does. I don't know of any other place on the Internet that has such a diverse and intelligent community. So I got hooked, and I'm still hooked more than half a year later :)
3. What do you like Hubbing on, with respect to topics? Of course about my passion - driving. Half of my hubs are directly about driving, and one more is loosely related to it. However, recently I started a series on Google, and it is not finished yet. And what I love about hubbing the most is hanging out on forums over here, talking about any topic that interests me at the moment :)
4. What has been your best Hub so far (in your opinion)? Why? Now that's a tough one. I don't publish them too often, and every single one of them is a result of some serious work. As such, they all are pretty much equal for me. However, if we start measuring them on a not-so-vague scale, I can say for example that the one I love the most is this one. This hub reflects my worldview on many accounts, not only with respect to driving. However it's not terribly popular :). Another hub actually changed my view on the possibility of making money on Hubpages and stands out from my other hubs because of that is this one. It still reliably cranks in a few bucks a day while I'm busy with other things. The funny thing is I was very reluctant to publish it because I knew the information in it was not cutting-edge and thought it could damage my reputation. Yes, by that time I was already thinking about my reputation on Hubpages :). I pondered about publishing it for several days after it was ready and just could not pull the trigger. But as it turned out there are plenty of people who find useful information in this hub - geeks like me often don't realize how little people in general know about computers and the Internet.
5. What is your favorite Hub by another Hubber? Why? That's another tough question. I really love a lot of hubbers and enjoy their hubs and interaction with them. Trying to single out just one hub out of all available treasures seems to be a mission impossible. However, there are a couple of hubbers whose hubs I always want to come back and re-read every now and then. Those are Sandra Rinck and Jenny (Inspirepub). Jenny fascinates me with the depth and the scope of her wisdom and knowledge, let alone her skill to put all that stuff into words. She is like a mother to all humankind; you come to her to find answers to any tough question you have - and she always has it and lovingly presents it to you - like here. Sandy is so open and honest in her search for truth it seems just impossible not to love her. Her hubs are full of love and light, and sparkling humor - and sometimes of real, palpable pain. I love most of her hubs, and one I probably love the best is this one.
6. What is one nice thing about HubPages (the site) that many might not know? You actually can search forums. It took me a couple of months to figure out how, but it is there :) You just need to go to forums front page (i.e. click forums from the main site menu), and there is a second search box over there, in the upper right part of the screen. The button next to it says "search forums", and this is exactly what it does.
7. Name one thing you learned about from another Hubber's Hub that you didn't know about before. How to deal with bears. I actually had a kind of encounter with a bear way back in my teen years - bear visited my camp when I was sleeping. But I never knew such details that Rachelle (RFox) outlined in her excellent hub.
8. What kind of Hubber do you typically join the Fan Club of? Why? Well, I'm basically a fan of every hubber around - as long as they are not a spammer. At least it used to be this way when the number of hubbers was more or less manageable. Now the number of hubbers grows so fast I can't keep up and I become a fan of those who catch my attention only.
9. If you could impart one piece of advice to a new Hubber, what would that be? Observe what experienced hubbers are doing. There are patterns, and those patterns are there for a reason.
10. Tell us something that we'd never guess about you - surprise us! My workstation is water-cooled and has dual Xeon processors and SCSI RAID array of five drives. I built it myself in 2004, and it is still pretty good in terms of computing speed, and top-of-the-line in terms of disk operations speed :)