Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

After hacking WordPress for a full week straight, it was nice to see other people hacking other things… These music videos were quite entertaining:

• Stringfever - History of music
• Stringfever - Bolero
• Fragment of the Russian television game KVN - similar to the Bolero.

All three found in this post and comments.

I try to stay as further away from hardware jobs as I can. But sometimes there is no way around…

I’ve been promising some fixes to Olga for about six month now. No music played in our living room during this time. And Maxim was continiously getting closer to power cables and outlets.

So, today I fixed everything. Appologies for a little downtime, by the way. I had to rearrange my harddisks and move about 80 GBytes of mp3s and oggs. I also had to disconnect power cables in order to properly move all cabling behind the table, so that Maxim won’t reach it. Or at least where he won’t see the cables so often.

Now everything is done and back to normal. I even got a bit of free disk space that I can use to refresh my music collection…

Listening to Raven’n'Blues show from BFBS I learned about Pandora.

Pandora is a result of Music Genome Project. Basically, what they do is analyze a lot of music for rythms, instruments, vocals, and a whole lot of other criterias and then help you find the music that you like.

Excellent science project with perfect end user appliance. You get a single box to fill in - write the band or album that you like and you’ll get a whole bunch of music that matches your taste. I’ve been playing around it for half a day only and I have to say that it works out great. Maybe my taste is too simple though. But anyway, I’ve heard many songs that I’ve heard before as well as a lot of new stuff.

You don’t even have to register to try it out for an hour or so. If you’ll listen for longer, it will ask you to create an account, which is as simple as giving your email address, adding a password, and specifying your birth year (you can lie, ma). They also aks for a ZIP code, which is USA specific, but you can always use the Beverly Hills’ 90210.

Enjoy! Let it be my Christmas present to all of you.

Update: You can also save your favourites to a list, share your stations, and do a lot of other cool stuff. My favourites page is here.

Luckily I managed to save a few pictures from KSP5. By the way, since KSP5 was held under the name “Nostalgy” this time, I decided to convert all pictures to black and white. Not that there were a lot of vivid colors anyway…

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-11-12_KSP5

It’s that time of the year again, when crowds of Russian people gather together in Kakomalis picnic place and do all sorts of cool stuff. Playing games, cooking barbeque, shooting lots of pictures, singing songs, dancing, and drinking lots of vodka.

While usually I rush to Kakomalis early after noon, today I only managed to get there by about 7:30pm. Still, I didn’t miss much. Most of the music part was still ahead.

This time was the 5th song festival. Each time it is different fromt he last and so it was today. First of all, the stage was at a different place. It was high up on the hill, so all the tables and people were reorganized quite a bit. Secondly, three core musicians (Albert, Doors, and Vladimir Kardash) had to leave early due to their own reasons, so the “pro” part of the concert was somewhat smaller. There was a new rising star though - Pasha. He was excellent. And multilingual too. And he didn’t limit himself to the usual Russsian and English. He went a few more, including the Turkish language. Truely, the music knows no borders.

Fewer people attended this time and most of them left earlier. I suspect mostly because it was rather cold - about +10C. Women and children are known to get frosty in such temperatures pretty quickly. Not to mention a few hours stay outside.

The party ended around midnight. Overall it was good, but I wanted more. That’s why I continued at one of my favourite kitchens down in Limassol.