Month: April 2004

New colors

As you can see, there is yet another new color scheme for this site. Since some of the visitors complained about the previous one being “suicidal”, I decided to change it. Finding few colors that work nicely together is not an easy task. Especially for the guy who never had any color-oriented education (like designers). So, I thought “Why should I reinvent the wheel?”. I did that once already, so I decided to use the same colors I use for the Intranet that I am building at work. Nobody is firing me over a CSS. :)

Next time anyone complains about the colors, he/she would better send me a color scheme as well.

Am I alone?

Vladimir Ivaschenko. No crap. Very serious. Last updated on January 6th and started with the words: “It’s been over year since last updates…”
Lev Chouvalov. Forgot to pay for his domain name and doesn’t bother anymore. His site is down for more then a week now. Used to have some useful things over there.
Alexander Mamtchenkov. “O Brother, Where Art Thou?“. My brother that is. Haven’t paid his Internet bill for some time and doesn’t care about his site being down for few weeks (month?) now.
Olga Mamtchenkova. My wife. She doesn’t even want to have one. The rest of my family is not different about this in any way.

Did I make all that crap that I put on the web shine like a piece of gold already? :)

Family tree update

Tree Family tree has been updated today with some more information. Everyone and their brother knows now that I am somewhat interested in the genealogy and it pays. My mother (through her sister) has found out some more bits regarding my relatives in Belarus. Apparently, they moved there from Astrahan when my great-great-grandfather returned from the World War II. Few more surnames have been added and dates of birth and death were filled in for a number of relatives.

Database summary now says that there are 343 individuals that I know of. There are about 100 families and about 50 surnames overall.

I am still waiting for my father to enlighten me about his branch. There are a lot of people there that I don’t know anything about.

By the way, I haven’t yet regenerated the graphical maps. They are too huge notice any difference anyway. :)

Google ads

I’ve noticed recently an increase in advertizing of Google ads. Lots of sites do have Google ads, so I decided to try it out. As you can see, I’ve added a vertical bar on the right to all blog pages. I’ll see how it will go and if I like it then I’ll add it to other parts of the site. I guess that “Writings” would be the most appropriate place.

Signs

Watched “Signs” on DVD. It’s the second time I see and it’s the second time I don’t like it. It has some nice bits and it’s funny at times, but overall the movie is boring and does not deliver. The whole movie is spent in preparations for the aliens to come, but all I got was a greeny guy for about 1 minute of screen time. Also I am bothered with the fact that these aliens were very much technologically enhanced, but couldn’t figure out that water is bad for them, and that 2/3 of Earth is covered with water. Strange.

Special effects are also rather cheap. Aliens and their ships were supposed to change colors and become transparent. But I all got was no one single ship in the movie and the alien guy had this transparency working only half way for him. He was mirroring some random things from the other side of his body, he was not even close to transparent. He didn’t have any weapons either. All he got apart from his greeny skin was some kind of undeveloped finger that was releasing gas (hehe) and it’s not even obvoius if that gas is bad for people. To cut the long story short – these aliens sucked big time.

This movie needs more action. Having Mel Gibson in there was a good idea, but he needs to kick some serious alien butt. Until he does so – this movie sucks.

Update: I am not the only one who thinks that movie sucked. The movie “Signs” in four easy steps.