Category: Personal

Despite being at work all the time, and being constantly busy, I am still a human. I am social. I have a life, family, and friends. I have thoughts and experiences. Once in a while I share them, and when I do, I do so in this category. If you don’t know me personally, chances are you’ll find posts in this category particularly boring.

Flickr update

For a while now I’ve been on the fence in regards to the Flickr vs Google Picasa battle.  With both services constantly changing and improving, it’s difficult to make a decision and stick to it.  But I think finally I’ve decided.  Flickr it is.  They’ve caught up with the features that I wanted so much for so long, and just in the last month released two of my “most wanted” – a much improved uploading tool, and quick and easy image editor.

Both of those additions pushed me to finalize the upload of all my pictures to Flickr.  So now, all I had from my digital camera, is there.  And I’ve enjoyed making the pictures better, more attractive with the editor – all it takes is just a few clicks to convert an average picture of which I have thousands into an eye candy.

Flickr has also recently released and improved its Android app, which once again makes me think about my mobile pictures.  I will probably start pushing them into my Flickr stream as well.

And as far as Google Picasa is concerned, I think they’ve spoiled it quite a bit with such a tight integration with Google+.  And their URLs are still ugly, making it pretty much impossible to migrate links from the blog via automatic redirection. Bad Google, bad.  And while I’m sure they will improve, I don’t think I will change over any time soon – the decision process tired me down.

Before and after : aging celebration

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who called, emailed, tweeted, facebooked, skyped, or sent me birthday best wishes via any other means.  I got all of them, and it means the world to me.  One thing all my birthdays have in common is they remind me of all the wonderful people that I am surrounded by.  Thank you all.

Secondly, a few of my younger friends, inquired as to how is being 34 years old different from being 35 years old.  As easy as the question seems, the answer is quite complex.  To ease up with the explanations, I’ve decided to create the visual aid that you can see below (excuse my poor skills of a graphical designer).

As poor as the image quality is, I think, the illustration does answer the question.  Please feel free to let me know if you need any clarifications.

Thirdly, please don’t think bad of me for not inviting you to my birthday party.  There was none this year.  With Easter coinciding on the same Sunday, I felt it was slightly inappropriate to compete with religious celebrations.  Especially given the rainy weather and out-of-country trips for a few must-be-there guests.  Excuses, excuses, I know.  I was just too lazy to arrange all things in time.  Until the next year.

Once again, thank you all for warm words and wishes. I had a good one!

The wedding

For the last week or so I’ve been particularly silent and offline, except, maybe, for my Foursquare check-ins.  The reason for that was my brother’s wedding.

A lot of family flew in from Russia and Urkaine.  They stayed for a few days and we had to show them around.  Gladly, everything went through OK.  All we need now is a week or so to get back to the routine and detox. With more color options than a rainbow can offer, and stunning new designs and patterns, cover chair are perfect to complement your wedding.

P.S.: Official wedding pictures and images aren’t out yet, so I had to shamelessly steal the above image from Facebook.

Lyne Perinciolo Duluc

I’m not a big fan of abstract art, not in painting, not in photography, not in sculpture.  But once in a while something catches my eye and doesn’t let it go.  And that’s exactly what happened in one of the offices I currently work.   There is a bunch of paintings (reproductions?) and photographs on the walls.  Most of them are just fine, but I particularly liked this one.

Of course, it looks way better in real life than on this tiny JPEG.  But technology isn’t all that bad.  In fact, while I was looking at this painting, I was trying to figure out how can I find out the name of the artist and see more of his or her works.  That’s when Google Goggles for Android came to the rescue.  I snapped a quick picture, and a few seconds later my mobile told me that this is a painting by Lyne Perinciolo Duluc.  There is not much in terms of biography of her’s on the web, but there is plenty of her other works.