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Category Web Findings

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

History of Valentine's Day

Friday, February 2, 2007

Russian Internet Radio

The following is the list of Russian Internet Radio Stations. Copy and paste the URL into your favorite music player. (Windows Media Player/iTunes - press CTRL-U, Winamp - press CTRL-O)

Music
  • Russaya Reklama http://212.48.125.69:8400
  • Russian Town http://38.96.148.22:8480
  • KaTeK.NET http://85.214.51.87:8128
  • Russian Fantasy http://85.25.134.43:8000
  • Radio Energy http://213.21.225.40:9000
  • ruMIX http://91.121.8.48:8112
  • Russian Power Radio http://217.172.178.128:8000
  • Luxus Radio http://84.16.235.66:8000
  • SanFM http://81.177.16.151:7032
  • Russian Radio NY http://66.109.28.155:8000
  • Russian Radio in Europe http://87.98.218.30:8080
  • ANYWAYNEWYORK http://24.185.154.8:8000
  • Radio Borneo (Voronesh) http://live.borneo.ru:8888/128

Monday, April 17, 2006

My photo in Yahoo News

During the Easter Parade a photographer from REUTERS took a bunch of pictures of Kerrie and I dancing. The photo that was submitted to various news agencies is below. Help me out and recommend it by clicking on the 5th star below RECOMMEND THIS PHOTO inscription! You must have a Yahoo ID to vote.

The URL to the above page is:
http://news.yahoo.com/photo/060416/ids_photos_ts/r390552444.jpg

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

On-Line Video Publishing Sites Compared

The latest developments in Macromedia Flash technology now allow streaming video be played by regular Flash plugin in a browser. The cool thing about that is that almost 100% of browsers are compatible with Flash plugin regardless of the platform (Mac,PC, Linux, etc). Using the Flash technology many websites now allow users to upload and share their videos. I've tried several of them would like to share with you with what I found. I've tried the following websites:

I uploaded the same video in Windows Media Video format 320X240 30 fps to all websites and below are the resulting videos:

Not only the video is blurry, but also the frame rate seems to be low. Definately the worst.

The video is very grainy! Also half of the time it does not even come up. You may need to refresh the page to see it. TagWorld is still in Beta so they are probably still ironing out the kinks.



youtube.com is the pioneer of the mass video publishing site. The quality is better than that of tagword.com. Still is not perfect, but I guess they are trying to save on bandwidth.



myspace.com is the best out of the three. The video is played at the resolution of the original file (320x240 in this example) and although it's smaller in size, it is sharper in quality. myspace video player offers you a choice to magnify it by clicking on the right-most button and you get pretty much the same quality as youtube.com.



Approval process takes several days!

Tuesday, March 7, 2006

Mind Game

This is strange...can you figure it out? Are you the 2% or 98% of the population? Follow the instructions below one at a time:
   

Proceed to Mind Game 2.

Wednesday, March 1, 2006

Can you read this?

The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid -- aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

Monday, February 6, 2006

Fotki Users Yahoo Group

I created a Yahoo group for the users of Fotki.com
Click here to join fotki-users
Click to join fotki-users

Wednesday, October 5, 2005

Google Earth

Can you imagine to zoom in from outer space:
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all the way to the street where I live:
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For a while I was impressed by Google Maps - the way you can just drag them with your mouse. But today I discovered a whole new dimension to viewing satellite images - Google Earth. You can literally fly from one place on Earth to another (you zoom out all the way out into outer space, see Earth rotate to the direction of your destination, and zoom in up to the street level where you can see cars and people! You can drag the image and it will pan over redrawing the new area on the fly! You can change the viewing angle and see elevation. You can also display local attractions, restaurnats and hotels right over the images of the streets. This is suuuper cool. Since it's a stand-alone desktop application, as opposed to something that runs in your browser, Google Earth can take full advantage of your computer's hardware. Speaking of which, you do need to have a supped up computer to be able to run it effectively. Try it now! (Currently works on Windows only).

But there are good news and bad news. The good news is that areas such as New York City are mapped out very well. The bad news is that my hometown St. Petersburg, Russia only has part of it mapped out to high resolution. Also to find it, I had to enter Moscow in the search box and than pan over to St. Petersburg which is spelled on the map as Sankt-Peterburg (to match Russian spelling).

Thursday, October 7, 2004

Motion Pictures

The following previews have been rated G by the Motion Pictures Association Of America.

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Finished the new layout of quadrilleball.org

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Stayed up late tonight and finished the new layout of quadrilleball.org. One of the x-quadrille dancers Luba has desinged the background images from some of the photos taken at the ball. Nice job! I am glad she made the push and created something that made the website look more professional.

Oh by the way, if you are a young (in your 20s) New York City professional who would like to become a part the feature performance at one of New York's most elegant events, poke around the website and if you decide to join this year's Quadrille dancers, fill out the application form to be invited for an interview.

More information about Quadrille Ball:

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Sky Ride

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How would you like to get on a ride like this? Sure beats any roller coaster doesn't it?

Well the truth is that this photo is just one example of the submissions to the Photoshop Contest run on the website worth1000.com. Too bad. I'd love to go on this ride. Here are some interesting photos of animals. Now I am no longer surprized looking at the pictures in Inquirer.

Thursday, December 11, 2003

Handwriting Clock

Sunday, November 30, 2003

5:21 AM  Changed my website to use fotki journals

Fotki.com on-line photo sharing site has recently added an ability for the users to maintain on-line journals a.k.a. blogs (abbreviation of "web log"). I have started to add content to my journals as soon as they have added that feature. But today I noticed that they enabled co-branding with journals. This means that I can make my journal entries look like whatever I want by adding my own HTML. I was waiting for that for a long time and was very happy to discover that they finally did it. So now it's 5:30 AM and I just finished incorporating the journals into my website. Now I have my blog on the front page.

I've been using fotki.com for more than 2 years and it has been the best experience ever. I now have more than 4.7 gigs of photos stored and organized on this site. The site is very fast and allows people to view the photos at original resolution - something that many other popular photo sharing sites don't allow you to do. As a webmaster, the co-branding feature very cool and fotki.com is the only website that offers it. I would like to thank the staff of fotki.com for creating the best on-line photo sharing service that I have ever seen.

Monday, October 20, 2003

9:39 AM  Euro/Italo Disco On Internet

During my teenage years in Russia my favorite kind of music I liked to listen to was what is now known as EuroDisco or ItaloDisco. This music was produced in the 80's and is characterized by a steady 4/4 beat with all-electronic instrumentation and easy to follow melodies with well defined chord structure. Some of the artists that perform in that style are Radiorama, Dan Harrow, Scotch, Baby's Gang, Fun Fun, Fancy, Ken Lazslo, Modern Talking, Bad Boys Blue and many others. Me and my buddies used to trade compact cassettes with this music because it was impossible to get it in music stores. It was not easy to get new music this way. When I was about to leave Russia to USA, I was looking forward to finally be able to listen to this music on the radio and buy it in stores. On my way to USA via Austria and Italy my dreams came true. The radio in those two countries played a lot of the music that I could only get on cassettes from my friends in Russia. However when I came to the USA I was very disappointed by American radio because they did not play any of that music. I came to realize that a lot of this music was produced in Europe and it never made it accross the Atlantic to the US.
Now thanks to the Internet, all of us EuroDisco living in the US can enjoy this music coming to us 24 hours a day thanks to this greate internet radio station - HurricaneFM.com. They broadcast at CD-Quality 128kbs and the music selection is great. To listen, use WinAmp, hit ctrl-l and enter this address: http://62.212.81.121:9012
There is also a nice site with tonns of EuroDisco and EuroDance video clips Dance and Disco.

Friday, October 17, 2003

12:45 PM  My MIDI Rendition of 'Amazing Grace' featured in About.com Christian Music Page

<table border="0" width="100%" background="http://raphaelpungin.com/music/creations/midi/background.jpg";><tr><td><font size="-1">
<img src="http://mp3.about.com/library/graphics/africachrist.gif";align="left">Got a phone call today from a woman in Pensylvania. She got my phone number from my website which she found via About.com. She was searching for Christian music MIDI files and found the page in About.com which featured my MIDI rendition of Amazing Grace: <a href="http://mp3.about.com/library/weekly/aa072098.htm"; target="_new">http://mp3.about.com/library/weekly/aa072098.htm<;/a>
The woman was asking if she could add that MIDI file to a webpage that she was designing for her church. That's not a problem, all of my MIDI files are public domain. Here is the page with all of them:
<a href="http://raphaelpungin.com/music/creations/midi/index.html"; target="_new">http://raphaelpungin.com/music/creations/midi/index.html<;/a>
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