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I found a link to stoplight concept of Damjan Stanković on dirty.ru. Designer offers to add sectors round the stop light so the drivers could see how soon they can move again and stop their engines thus saving gas and nature. Read more

I don’t get excited drinking coffee. One cup is enough for me to fall asleep. That’s why I wasn’t drinking coffee that night. But I answered the questions of Arsart who was writing the big article about web design in Russia for Smashing Magazine. I act as a bystander who’s somehow involved in the Russian web design scene. The article that includes my interview is fun and interesting: Showcase of Web Design in Russia.

I’d like to tell you more but I am veeerrryy sleepy and see no way to wake as long as coffee is not the answer. So I’ll stop right here. ;)

Sorry, this entry is only available in Russian.

I ventured to install Mac OS X Snow Leopard on macmini yesterday. Mac Pro was trying hard to show me on the next display that he is good working under Mac OS X Leopard and was trembling when I offered it to instal Snow Leopard on it. So I won’t update OS on Tough Monica and will let Monica help me with Mac OS X Snow leopard testing. Wonder why? Read more

Vasco da Gamma station in Lisbon

It’s easy to imagine lifelike situation when two photos with pale pictures on them talk to each other:
— Hey, you’ve been on vacation. Haven’t you tanned?
— I did but I was saved using Safe for Web after that!

I think that everyone met this problem when using Safe for Web — pics become lighter and kinda pale. Looks like someone mysterious used levels to adjust it. Read more

There are three ways to make a tasty dish. You can take everything you consider to be tasty, mix it and throw into boiling oil. It would be fried and even can be tasty. My friend, who came from London to have a pint of beer with me in Kiev, told me about Fried Mars — you have to fry Mars in boiling oil. Someone can even find it tasty, but let’s get back from Mars to Earth. The second way to make a dish is used by chefs in restaurants: you’ll have to know how to cook masterly. But this is the hardest way and not everyone can do it while the first is within everyone’s power. There is one more way where you don’t have to be virtuoso of cooking but still will be able to make a tasty… erm… result ;) Just cook like it’s written in the cookbook!

I’ve just realised that the metaphor would only win if I use cocktails instead of dishes but the I’ll have to get rid of Fried Mars, so let’s leave the things they are.

So, the choice of the way to cook for a person, who just wants to make tasty dinner but isn’t in any way chief cook, is obvious. He or she takes the cookbook and cooks instead of throwing pickles, Skittles, two sausages, vanilla and unagi in boiling oil, expecting for acceptable result. Read more

Long time ago you have to think of real-sounding story to explain your lies. Today in 21st century you can just make powerpoint presentation. One day it comes to every designer — he has to stare at icon that
looks like hebrew qoph letter jumping in his Dock. When this glorious event happened with me I decided to make professional good looking on every PC or Mac presentation and try not to kill all the people while doing it. The first statements were okay but I wanted to kill all and everyone when I finished making the presentation. So I made a list of advices that can help to save not whole Earth population, but at least it’s half. Read more

Tell me the first thing that comes on your mind when you hear Google, Apple, Microsoft, Flickr or Twitter. No, it’s not the technological stuff or something. It’s feeling about that tech things you would think in a second. As in one of episodes in Dilbert series, the artist asks for association on caterpillar phobia. It’s grey octagon as to artist, but other think about another colours and shapes. Same here — we think personal thing about these companies and their products. Some are mac nazi (I really like this term), some just hate macs and adore, dunno, Microsoft or Linux. But we strongly have that feeling about companies. We give it a soul and as the soul as striped as Frankenstein, it is demon, that doesn’t know what to do with it. Read more

The idea to celebrate my 26th birthday in Rome was perfect: we didn’t succeed in robbing the city in 4 days (we’re not Etruscans, you know) but we paid attention to it’s masterpieces, wine, asti, pastas, pizzas and lasagnes. Almost forgot: there was a lot of ice cream! Read more

After redesign of the blog I mentioned, I needed to find the way to display my twitter messages on mega.genn.org. I used Twitter for WordPress but it doesn’t load message from time to time because of timeout when fetching RSS. So I improved it a little bit to cache the latest RSS of twitter messages, so we could load that cache if RSS from twitter.com is unavailable at the moment. Read more