All - Leonid Mamchenkov

Blues and Classic Rock at Krasares Tavern, Pafos

A friend of mine sent me an SMS with the following:

Krasares Bar and Tavern are presenting a Blues and Classic Rock evening on the 8th of January at Krasares Tavern. Live music by Cold Shot and friends with special guest from UK Davey Woodford. Only 100 tickets will be available. Tickets are 25 EUR and include a full buffet. Tickets are available at Krasares Tavern and the Music Gallery. Or call on 99-115957, 99-457483, 96-510378.

This sounds like a lot of fun. I’m a fan of blues and classic rock, especially when it’s live music. I’ve heard Cold Shot perform before and they are really good. I have no idea about the quality of either sound or food at Krasares Tavern, but that shouldn’t be too bad.

What’s too bad is that I won’t be able to make it due to scheduling conflicts. However, I’m interest to hear how it went from all of you who are lucky enough to attend to the event. Please let me know.

Fargo

A few days ago I watched “Fargo” once again. I saw it before, but couldn’t help falling asleep somewhere in the middle. Thanks to many pints of beer beforehand. This time though I was hooked and watch it through. And I really enjoyed it.

Like most other Coen brothers’ films, this movie is funny and sad, easy to watch, but with something to think about. It is an atmospheric masterpiece with splendid visuals. The soundtrack is great as well. Lots of good acting. And somehow, while having very simplistic appearances an slow pace, this film feels rich and enriching.

5 out of 5, highly recommended.

Delicious scare

During the last few days I’ve been asked by several people what I think about the scary bit of news regarding the shutdown of Delicious. I’ve replied individually several times, but I feel that a blog post is in order. So here it goes.

First of all, Delicious is not being shutdown. Here is a quote from their blog:

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

– No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.

Secondly, if you are worried about your data, just make a backup of it. Delicious had an export option for years. Login to your account and you’ll be able to export your bookmarks from the Settings page.

Thirdly, I can understand that news like that could throw some people into a search for alternative mode. And here are alternatives of them out there. I haven’t tried any of them in years, since I’m a happy Delicious user. But if I were forced to choose one day, Xmarks would be my first choice. My reasons are:

All features that are vital for me are a part of the free subscription. More features are available for premium subscribers.
Cross-browser support that covers all browsers that I care about.
Support for sharing of bookmarks. That’s the main reason for me to actually use a social bookmarking service instead of a much simpler bookmark synchronization service.
Support for private bookmarks. I want to share as much as possible, but not everything.
Easy integration with third-party tools and services. For example, using an RSS feed.
Support for direct import from Delicious.

But with all that said, I want to stress it once again – Delicious is not shutting down. So if you use and enjoy the service, simply continue doing just that. No need to worry.

Smile with “Рождеством Христовым”

A couple of days ago DailyPost suggest the following topic for a blog post: Share something that makes you smile. I wanted to share something, but so many things make me smile that it’s hard to choose. Today though I came across something that made me smile, and even laugh. It’ll take me a bit to explain, so please bear with me. And if you choose not to, here is an entertaining and short explanation of “bear with me” versus “bare with me”.

Anyway, here we go with the facts:

It’s just after the midnight on January 7th.
Russia, as well as some other countries, celebrate Christmas on January 7th, and not on December 25th. Wikipedia explains why.
“Merry Christmas” in Russian is “С Рождеством Христовым”.

So, what we have right now is a lot of Russian-speaking people sending “С Рождеством Христовым” via any means possible to a lot of other people. One of those means is Twitter. One of many Twitter features is Trending Topics (aka TT). This is an automatically generated list of most common phrases used across Twitter in some recent period of time (like an hour or two). And as so many other automated features, this one has its side effects.

Firstly, it seems that it doesn’t much care for the language or alphabet. It grabs any frequently used phrase in any language or any alphabet, puts it in the list of trending topics, and shows it to any user, no matter what his location or preferred language is.

Secondly, it seems that it tries to minimize the phrase by removing very short words. Like those consisting of only one or two characters.

So what we have by now is “Рождеством Христовым”, and not “С Рождеством Христовым”. And that phrase is a number one trending topic, shown to all Twitter users everywhere. Here is a screenshot.

Here starts the fun. Most people who see this, have no idea what is it all about. Many of those, who are trying to find out get confused by incorrect spelling and by the fact that Christmas is over already for most of the world. That I find funny.

But that’s not all. Since the phrase went up to trending topics, it got a lot of special attention. Humor. Some people started spreading rumors. For example, that “Рождеством Христовым” is the name of the new Russian nuclear bomb. Some others started using the phrase in famous quotes. For example, “I love the smell OF Рождеством Христовым in the morning!” (original quote talks about napalm and is from the movie “Apocalypse Now”). That I find hilarious. You can have a look yourself at everything that has been tweeted with this phrase.

And even that is not all. Twitter has been known for having hard times during activity spikes. Today is just one of such spikes. So Twitter is unstable, falling over the edge. And when it does so, it shows the famous Fail Whale.

This is cute and worth a smile, but there is still more to the story. The meaning of Fail Whale varies between people. Mashable once published an interview with the designer of the image. While I know the background of this image, I can’t help a different association. The one that Denis Lebel mentioned in the comment to that interview – the story of the Sperm Whale from Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Universe.

It is important to note that suddenly, and against all probability, a Sperm Whale had been called into existence, several miles above the surface of an alien planet and since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity.

Innocent “Merry Christmas” wishes, weird Cyrillic letters shown to the whole world, rumors of nuclear war from Russian, word play with famous quotes, Twitter outages, and flying whales – I find the mix hilarious. I hope you do too.

P.S.: To all those of you celebrating – Merry Christmas and С Рождеством Христовым.

Blog a day, or blog a week

New Year is the perfect time to raise hopeless hopes. Like any given Monday, or the first day of any month, it’s the time to start something that you hope to finish. People promise they will start (or stop) doing all sorts of things – quit smoking, start exercising, stop procrastinating, and so and so forth. This is non-sense of course, but that’s just what we, humans, do.

So in the spirit of a new era start, WordPress.com issued a challenge for 2011 – blog more. To help you complete the challenge, they created a separate website – DailyPost. This one will be updated daily with ideas and other bits of inspiration. All you need to do is post a single blog entry every day throughout 2011. If that sounds like too much, they have a lighter variation – a post a week. You don’t have to follow their subjects – post whatever you want. Just write something either daily or weekly. And to help others find and follow your stuff, tag your posts with postaday2011 or postaweek2011. That’s all.

I’ve done similar challenges before. Not necessarily they were centralized or aligned with someone else, but I did put myself to such a task before. And not only in blogging. For example, I’ve learned most that I know about photography in just a couple of months. It was when I followed someone advice to make a photograph every day. It didn’t matter what I was making a photograph of. Just that I made one. Of course, there were days when I didn’t have the camera around, or was too busy, or too lazy. But I was pretty close to a daily picture (see POTD – Picture Of The Day tag archives).And it did magic to my skills. And so did a blogging challenge.

Someone said somewhere that creativity requires fluency. In order to be creative, you have to be fluent. If you want to be creative in photography, your camera and equipment shouldn’t stay in your way. If you want to speak or write better, you shouldn’t need a dictionary for every other word. If you want to do experimental dancing, you should have good control of your body. And so on and so forth. But there is only one way to get better at something. It’s do that something. The more, the better.

So, if blogging sounds interesting to you, you should blog more. And it’s much easier to do it when you are not alone. Now is the time.

I’ve been quite busy last year. And I blogged much less than in previous years. I wanted to do more. And now I think I will. I will follow up with the challenge. Will you?