Interests

This page is about my interests and non-work related activities. I led a group of people to develop a website for my church. We continue to get together once in a while to update and enhance the church website. Other than that I like

Sports

My favorite sport is soccer. I very much enjoy playing soccer (although I am not great at it) and I enjoy watching it as well. But I like playing more. I also like playing tennis and again I'm not great at it.

Music

I like all kinds of music i.e. I have favorite songs and melodies from all music genres except maybe jazz and very hard rock or metal. I very much enjoy listening to Armenian music especially Ruben Haxverdyan, Artur Meschyan and Nune Yesayan. I also enjoy many songs of Tata and Aram Asatryan (my brother will kill me for writing this, he hates "rabiz" music).

Poetry / Literature

I love Armenian poetry and literature. We have a truly wonderful literature and if Armenia were even a mid-sized country, our literature would have been world famous and read by many nations around the world. My favorite poet is Hovhannes Tumanyan and I know some of his long poems ("Maro", "Tmbkaberdi Arum", etc.) by heart. I also like the works of other great Armenian poets - Paruyr Sevak, Raffi, Vahan Teryan to name a few.

I also very much like the Western literature. During my teenage years I've read a lot of European and American novels similar to the "Three Musketeers" by Alexandre Dumas. They were quite interesting and I enjoyed them. Few years ago I read a short story collection of Jack London and those stories impressed me as they described in a simple yet interesting manner the human psychology and behavior during a crisis and/or near death. I read the Armenian translation of those stories and I assume the original English version would be even better. A year or so ago I read a book by Richard Feynman titled "Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman". It was great and really funny. Feynman is a Nobel Prize winner from physics and this book is about his interesting life experiences. The book is not at all scientific, although you'd appreciate it more if you have a good understanding of math and/or physics. The later chapters of the book are probably more interesting than the beginning chapters.

I haven't read any non-technical books lately, which is quite bad.