Year: 2008

February – the month of family migrations

My family is not very big.  And it’s not very mobile.  My parents are divorced and they leave in Russia.  My brother lives in Cyprus, where I stayed together with my wife and kid.  And has been so for a long time.

And suddenly, here comes the movement.  First, just before February started, Olga and Maxim went to Russia.  My mother-in-law is very sick and my wife went to stay by her side.  Then, my mother came over to Cyprus to visit us for a few days, as well as relax for some time in the mountains and take a short break from her work.  She then left back to Moscow.

But she didn’t go alone.  My brother went with her.  The guy stayed in Cyprus for a few long years, and now urgently needed to leave the island for a few days, related somehow to his paperwork.  I’m going to pick him up from the airport tomorrow.

My brother wanted to travel to Togliatti, Russia, where our dad lives.  Dad celebrated his 50th birthday recently (Happy Birthday, Pa!) and it was very unfortunately that neither I, nor my brother could attend the party.   It so happened that the planned trip to Togliatti had to be canceled – once again due to the virtues of the paperwork.  However, dad took the initiative and the train to Moscow, so that he could meet with my brother Alex even if just for a few days.  I hear that they had some really great time.

Maybe for some, this all looks like a routine. But not for me.  People in our family don’t travel all that much. (Except maybe with the exception of my mom, who moves around a few times each year.)  And during this month they all jumped up and moved somewhere.  I managed to stay so far, but the month isn’t over yet.

Weird, very weird…

Snow in Limassol

Yesterday I observed a really weird thing – snow in Limassol.  The temperature dropped down to +2 degrees Celsius, it was very windy, and it was snowing for at least two hours.  Of course, the ground is too warm for the snow to stay, but other surfaces, like, for example, my car, were covered in snow.  That was really wicked!

In my 12 years in Limassol, I’ve seen snow like only two or three times.  Previous experiences weren’t even close to yesterday’s.  They seemed more like accidents.  But yesterday … it was snow for real.

Flickr makes Lolcat official

For years now Flickr has been greeting newly logged in users with messages in different languages.  It’s a really nice touch with helps one learn something new each day, but without getting in the way.   While I do pay attention to these messages, usually they don’t puzzle me for more than a couple of seconds (as in “how do I read that?”).

Today, however, was different.  It was the first time ever that I was greeted in Lolcat.

Flickr Lolcat

Lolcat, if you don’t know, is a sort of broken, but funny, English language, which usually goes together with an image of a cat.  The name comes from LOL – an acronym for “laughing out loud”, and cat – an animal on the picture.

As I said, it was the first time I saw Lolcat used somewhere outside of a lolcat web site (like  i can haz cheezburger).  And I was surprised to see at Flickr, which is not exactly the most serious of web sites, but is still rather big and popular.

My second reaction to this Lolcat spotting was to write this post.  My first reaction was “Oh culz!!!”

Theme fixes, improvements, and polish

If you have a lot of attention for details, you probably noticed a few things moving around and changing on this blog in the last few days. You weren’t dreaming – I indeed moved changed a few things. Here is a round-up for those of you who enjoy these sort of things:

  • List of categories moved up. Since I am interested in and blog about many different things, I don’t blame you if you would like to skip some of them and read only things that you care about. I moved the list of categories higher up in the sidebar, so that you could jump directly to the topic of your choice.
  • Full posts in categories, tags, and archives. This should also make reading posts about specific things easier. You won’t need to jump to the full post page all that often now. Less clicks and all.
  • Category header images. Some categories (see Photography, Movies, and Technology for examples) will greet you with different header images (once again, thanks to Igor Gorbulinsky for his talent and time). This feature should help you out a bit while navigating the site – instant indicator of where you are.
  • Highlight of category name, tag, and search query. When you navigate to posts of a specific tag or category, you should see the term at the top of the page. Sometimes the term is highlighted, like, for example, in case of search query. Also, sometimes, you have a link to RSS feed which provides easier access to similar posts.
  • Improved RSS feed auto-discovery. Depending on where you are on the site, your browser will suggest a different set of RSS feeds to subscribe to. I’m trying to make these things as intuitive as possible.
  • Improved browser compatibility and standard compliance. A few small glitches here and there were fixed. All RSS feeds are valid now, except for those rare cases when content of specific posts causes problems. CSS is now valid and many warnings are fixed. HTML is now almost valid. There are a few issues which which are caused by WordPress bugs, but fixes for these seem to be available in the upcoming version of WordPress. In any case, it seems all theme and plugin specific issues were fixed.
  • Upgraded WordPress to version 2.3.3 .  This is the latest version with all the security fixes and such.

As you can see from the list above, all of these changes are rather cosmetic and can be classified as web site polish. None of them should cause any issues to you or your browser, and much of the misbehaving functionality should be fixed now.

If you have any ideas on suggestions on further improvements, or if you notice any misbehavior at all, please let me know.

Web technology behind Cyprus presidential elections

Cyprus is preparing for the presidential elections, which will take place this coming Sunday – February 17th, 2008 – and then another Sunday after that – February 24th, 2008. Unfortunately, most of the information about the elections is in Greek, so there isn’t much point in linking to it or quoting it.

Anyway, I came across this post in Linkbox blog, which links to web sites of some candidates, as well as the main web site of the elections.  Being a curious web worker, I wanted to see which tools these web sites use, and how well they use them.  Here are my findings.

Continue reading Web technology behind Cyprus presidential elections