Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Alena’s Kitchen

Over the past years Alena has cooked so many different and delicious things for me that no restaurant can compare or compete.

All this time I have been taking pictures, and Alena posted some of them, but a lot of them were collecting virtual dust in the depth of our hard drive folder structures.

I decided to put them all together in a separate gallery and make it public.

I’m sure Alena will be glad to share a recipe in case somebody likes how something looks like. Just ask.

In: Food & Dining Tags: cooking
Time: 14:01 Comments: 8 Comments Post a Comment

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Domain Mania

I’ve been trying to come up with some permanent domain name for my and family personal sites and e-mails with no results for a while now. Yesterday I mentioned this to Artem, who immediately registered his last name as a domain. Lucky him. Mine (last name and all possible variations) were taken a long time ago.

Artem proceeded to hook up his domain to Google Apps per my suggestion, which was exactly what I wanted to do. E-mail on my own domain through Gmail interface. For free too.

Either way, I pretty much gave up on the “name” domain and complained about it to Alex. He spent a while coming up with all kinds of ideas when in the end he came up with a bit of gem: rubinary.com. It’s the next best thing to rubin.com itself, I think. Has a name in it with a suffix which suggests a place for Rubins (as in planetary), and has a word binary in it. This is a binary — digital — virtual ‘verse we’re in after all, right?

This is where it all ended. Domain is registered and that’s what I’m going to stick to for the foreseeable future. All the members of the family are hooked up with personal emails as well. Those who know me well won’t have a problem figuring out what my new e-mail is.

P.S. Looks like Alex ended up with a domain of his own after all too.

P.P.S. No more confusion with zeros in DR2ooo.com. New domain points to this blog as well.

In: Software Tags: domain, Google
Time: 19:00 Comments: 2 Comments Post a Comment

I stumbled upon the TV show “Heroes” a couple of times during the past week. I saw a moment from one episode on TV and then saw 1st season for sale in Best Buy. We decided to order the show on Netflix and saw that we can watch instantly through the site. We’re up to the 10th episode in two seatings. The show is very interesting so far.0

I have been working on a new design for the site for the past week or so. I’ve made a lot of progress and got all the major design elements down including the layout, but I seem to be having problems with minor details. For example I can’t think of a good placement for the author avatar in the new implementation, however I feel that it’s been a great addition to the old design, usability-wise that I don’t want to leave it out. Need more time I guess.0

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Autumn

I can feel the breath of autumn on my skin. It makes me sad, because the warmth of summer is over. It brings the feeling of anticipation, because I love golden beauty of the nature getting ready for dormant months (the leaves are still mostly green tough). Autumn used to smell for me like crispy apples, rain, wet oak-trees, decaying colorful leaves, and fresh chestnuts. Now I’m not sure anymore. Need to try to figure the New York’s autumn scent out.

In: Life In General
Time: 12:34 Comments: 2 Comments Post a Comment

Таня says:
November 7, 2007 @ 13:45

А я еще пока осенью думаю о Минске и студенчестве. Вспоминаю канал, как мы заселяемся в общагу и все только начинается. Наверное, пройдет какое-то время и эта стойкая ассоциация со студенчеством пройдет. Но пока очень и Минск идут вместе в моих ощущениях осени…

Alena says: Subscribed

November 8, 2007 @ 17:43

Я тоже осенью всегда вспоминаю о Минске. Первое сентября, желтые клёны, антоновские яблоки, ожидание холодов, колючие ёжики каштанов (помнишь, как много каштановых деревьев в Минске?), шуршащие листья под ногами… А еще день рождения. Он мирит меня с ноябрём. Но ноябрь- это уже совсем другая осень – холодная, голая, серая.

Do you cry at the movies? I do.

We just finished watching The Notebook, and while we were at it I felt the scratchy knot in my throat, and just couldn’t help it. Sometimes I even cry watching Star Trek.

The thing is that I like being overwhelmed with emotions, I like those embarrassing tears. Do you cry sometimes?2

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Design That Will Never Be

I spent all my nights and weekends of the past week or two on a new design for the site. I felt it was about the right time to refresh the blog style and make something with the new domain name in mind.

First I built a concept in Photoshop. After I was happy with it I cut the images and put down some code. I haven’t used a single table and did everything using CSS. Now that the site is pretty much done, with the exception of small details I find it that I’m liking it less and less.

I’ve been contemplating killing the redesign for the past 2 days, while trying to improve some of the things that I didn’t like. Now I’ve made the decision. The final product is not good enough. Not my kind of thing I guess.

I figured I’ll post the screenshot of whole thing anyway, considering how much time I spent on it.

In: Software Tags: CSS, design, Photoshop
Time: 16:25 Comments: 1 Comment Post a Comment

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Chicken Kiev

This recipe was also provided by one of the very talented housewives of kuking.net – Иша. I tried a couple of her other recipes, but this one is probably my favorite from her repertoire.

Chicken Kiev Continue Reading

In: Food & Dining Tags: chicken, cooking, recipe
Time: 19:41 Comments: No Comments Post a Comment

Thursday, October 18, 2007

New Rubinary

After many more evenings and sleepless nights I’m actually very excited to introduce a new version of the blog design.

As you can see I’ve reused several elements from the design that I have decided to scrap, but everything else is brand new. I for one am very happy with the end result. It’s a far superior product compared to the one that I decided not to use.

I would very much like to hear your opinions about this. Things you like, things you don’t like, compliments and constructive criticism, if you notice some glitches or problems. Everything is welcome. I hope you’ll take a couple of moments and leave a comment.

On the tech side of things I want to say that this is my first site with no tables. Everything is done through CSS. Firefox is a great browser, and if you’re not using it yet, you should switch. IE on the other hand took hours upon hours to get right. Also not a single pixel was “borrowed” from somebody, 100% of work was done by me.

Anyhow, as I said, I’m very happy with the end result and I’m waiting for your comments!

In: Software Tags: CSS, design, XHTML
Time: 18:40 Comments: 11 Comments Post a Comment

Next project — make it so that when a user clicks on a photo in the bar on the right the picture changes to the first photo in the album. On a 2nd click another, next, photo shows up. I think I’m going to use Google’s AJAX Feed API for that.0

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Greek Gyro And Pocker

Yesterday was a fun day. Well, apart from the visit to the ophthalmologist in order to figure out what’s going on with Danya’s eye (the diagnosis is “floaters”).

So after the 2-hours visit to the doctor, we met with Ignat, and took a D train to get to the Greek Gyro place located in Downtown Brooklyn. Now, if you know Danya personally, you probably heard him talking about that place.

It could’ve been something like “the best gyro I ever had”, or “nobody can make the white sauce like those guys”, or “Ooo, I would so eat that gyro from Greeks now”, or… Continue Reading

In: Food & Dining, Games & Sport, Life In General Tags: gyro
Time: 15:27 Comments: 8 Comments Post a Comment

Completed the AJAX project today. Try clicking the images in the little photo windows on the right part of the screen. The code came out quite ugly though because I kept experimenting along the way. But the functionality itself is pretty cool I think.0

Now, I’m a very thorough person. If somebody leaves me a comment, I would definitely look through that person’s blog.

That quality of mine rewarded me with a beautiful song a couple of days ago — The Way I Am by Ingrid Michaelson. Love it!0

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Grand Canyon

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing through some old photos and I’ve stumbled upon this little gem. The photo was taken during our Phoenix, Sedona, Grand Canyon, Las Vegas trip somewhere in October of 2005.

The hiker was just coming up from the bottom of Grand Canyon after a several day stay there. He said that after he’s been to the bottom once he fell in love with Grand Canyon all over again and has been doing this hike every year since.

To those of you who haven’t seen Grand Canyon — you just must. There is just nothing like it anywhere on this planet. One of these days we must look at it from the bottom ourselves as well.

In: Photography, Travel Tags: Arizona, Grand Canyon, hiking
Time: 12:05 Comments: No Comments Post a Comment

Friday, October 26, 2007

One Shot HDR

Above is a result of a small experiment I tried yesterday. Took a single shot from our window in RAW format. Put the file into Photoshop and saved 3 version of it — normal, underexposed and overexposed. After that I put them in Photomatix and generated an HDR image. Pretty good results for something as simple, I think.

In: Photography Tags: Brooklyn, HDR, landscape
Time: 13:11 Comments: No Comments Post a Comment