As you know, I enjoy my hobby of photography. I’m nothing, but an amateur, yet I think over the past years I’ve come up with a number of really nice photographs.

However there is a certain type of scenery that always gave me trouble - landscapes on a bright day. Usually you see beautiful sky with detailed clouds and nice shadows on the land from the mountains and trees. You take a picture only to find out later that it didn’t capture any of the beauty that you could see. Either the sky comes out great with all the details on the land lost to underexposure, or all the land details come through to have all the clouds and sky colors lost to overexposure. Read more…

I’ve been working on a video of our new place since last weekend, and now it’s complete. I have still much to learn about making these, but I’ve got to practice on something.

I used a new Canon HV10 HDV camcorder that my parents bought (based on my research). It produces really good videos with amazing quality, but it goes through a lot of compression on it’s way to YouTube, so it doesn’t really matter in the end.

I’ve had a lot of problems with Adobe Premiere, as always. First it wasn’t able to capture the HD video. Then when I used something else it wasn’t able to load the m2t file. After I converted the file to MPEG4 it wasn’t able to load that either. At this point I just decided to look for an alternative. Why should I go through so much crap every time I try to do something?

I ended up trying out Sony Vegas, and I’ve got to say that it is my video editing software of choice from now on. The interface is very intuitive and everything just works.

Watch the video and let us know what you think of our little tour.

Читаю сейчас 99 Франков Фредерика Бегбедера. Честно говоря, впечатления смазанные ввиду того, что уже читала “Духless” Минаева - русскую “версию” этой книги (по слвоам Игната). Тем не менее, книга заставляет меня постоянно лазить в интернет - то поискать фотографии упомянутых моделей, то послушать песню, поставленную героем книги в каком-то ресторане, а то и просто посмотреть на YouTube ролики с Каннских Львов. Вот этим роликом не могу не поделиться. Мы с Данькой долго и громко смеялись.

Yesterday we got to talking about car buying with Ignat and Alena, and I recalled the story of my first car purchase. I remembered that I had it published on one of my sites, but then then site itself was not live since 2002.

I started digging through my old back up disks and actually found a version of it. I have uploaded it back at its original address of speed.4adrive.com. The site is very outdated by now, but it’s a nice piece of history. The story itself is there too, but I’ll quote it on the blog as well.

It has been written somewhere in the year 2000 and the picture above has been taken during the spring of 2001. Below, for your reading pleasure, is my Caprice buying saga. Written by a much younger version of me.

I don’t exactly remember when the Caprice craze hit my best bud LM13, and me [DR2000], but when it hit, it hit hard. With time not only it got better, but it also spread on many of our friends.

All these events were taking place somewhere in November of ‘99. Our friend, EliGC, was looking to buy a car, and since I was driving 1987 Ford Crown Vic (Police Interceptor) at the time, I suggested to get some ex-cop car. Since the Crown Vics of the 90’s looked damn ugly, and had a lame 4.6 engine in them, the only choice was Caprice. And what a choice!

Read more…

The sun is setting down already and it just stopped raining. The sky is covered by a thick blanket of dark gray clouds. The mood is grim.

Two days ago we did something I didn’t think we’d ever do. We delete all of our characters in WoW, including our main ones, that we played for years. But this way we have no way back to something that became so frustrating and un-fun.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a sunny day.

When somebody sees our apartment for the first time they usually tell us that the cutouts in the wall between the hall and the living room look cool. Only Moisha exclaimed: “Who put a hole in your wall?!” As in “now you’ve got to fix that.”

Anyhow, we put the metal statues into the top holes as soon as we moved in. But for the bottom one we didn’t know what to do. We found a pair of cool looking modern metal (glass just doesn’t feel safe there) vases in Chiasso catalog. Last weekend Vika and Serge gave them to us as a present. Yesterday we want to local artificial flower store, picked some things out and made our compositions. I think the end result came out looking pretty cool.

I was on my way out when Sag called me and convinced me to check the traffic conditions before driving off to work. When I opened a map I was slightly shocked. I’ve never seen things look so bad. Needless to say, I spoke with Brian, and it was decided that I’m going to work from home today.

Below is a short quote from one of the news sites.

Heavy rains have caused major disruptions in New York’s subway system Wednesday, flooding a number of transit tunnels, and a city transit official urged riders to stay home.

New York Transit official Paul Fleuranges said in an interview with TV station NY 1 that no subway line was unaffected and that “if you can stay home, please do so.”

Heavy rains overnight tapered off Wednesday morning.

On Saturday we had a little housewarming party. Since both Daniel and I are not fans of big gatherings, this time we only invited Daniel’s parents, Vicky and Sergei, and Ignat. I spent a couple of days choosing light and interesting menu, and was very pleased with the results. I found some splendid ideas on Kuking (although, I modified some recipes) and served braised beef in red wine as a main course.

The following appetizers can really give a character to any dinner and are easy to make.

1. Fresh figs marinated in red wine with Roquefort cheese.
You need to cut ripe figs in half and marinate them in a red whine (the original recipe asks for Porto or Marsala, but you can use whatever is at hand) for 3-4 hours. Then just put some roquefort chees on top - and it’s ready. Read more…

Yesterday when we went to bed our bedroom kept being lit by non stop lightning bolts that were shooting outside. I decided to get up and close all the windows in case we would get heavy rain during the night. After seeing that a lightning bolt would hit the ground every 5 seconds I decided that I need to try to do something that I wanted to do for a long time now - try to capture it on camera.

So I took out my trusty tripod, woke up my even more trusty wife and we started taking shots. After a short while I figured that the easiest way to take a good shot and catch a lightning would be to just set a camera on long exposure and hope that a bolt will strike in the right place. All in all I ended up with about 5 good captures. Above is the best one, in our opinion.

В продолжение рассказа про наш отпуск, хочу написать о поездке в Брекенридж. Ехали мы через горы. Долго. Почти целый день ушёл. Очень красиво, конечно. Как выразился один журналист, едешь словно через меняющийся ряд красивых открыток. Данька купил специальный Neutral Density фильтр для линзы - он наполовину серенький, наполовину прозрачный. Этот фильтр помогает убрать лишний свет с части фотографии и делать более качественные снимки. Например, небо обычно получается засвеченным, и фильтр частично решает эту проблему на первичном, так сказать, уровне. Read more…