My coworker Christine walked in the office this morning and I said to her: "Guten Morgen". And she told me that in the elevator she had known that I was going to say exactly that - "Good Morning" in German. She swears to God that she is not making this up. I am blogging this to observe if it happens again with her. If if does, it may not be a coincidence but the fact that she is a psychic.

I was opening some newely bought dress shirts today and boy is it frustrating to take all those pins out!!! I swear there might have been like 10 pins in one shirt! I mean, do you really need that many pins to pack a shirt? And they can be just about anywhere, so going through the shirt is like going through a mine field. You never know where you may get poked.

Those of you who are fotki.com members, vote on my submission to the Winter Photo Contest. This photo is from this album, which is full of many other great winter shots. Voting ends on Saturday January 3rd, 2004 5:30 PM EST

I wish you happy Holiday Season full of joy, love and gifts!!!

I took my Sony Clie NX80V to a ski trip at Hunter Mountain to take some pictures. Since Clie can take videos, I thought it would be cool to shoot a video clip of skiing down the mountain. After taking a while trying to figure out how I could attach it to myself, I finally came up with the idea to attach it to the band of my ski goggles turned to the side as shown on the picture. This worked pretty well, except for the fact that my vision was partially blocked by the Clie hanging down in front of my nose and it was very difficult to see where I was going. This is why during one run I unexpectedly ended up on a steep mogul trail which I was trying to avoid during the whole day. This is when I had to put the Clie back in my pocket and finish that run without it. After a while, I got the hang of skiing while looking from one eye at a time and was able to finish the whole run while recording the video. Take a look:

Real Video format: Stream / Download (2.34 MB)
MPEG format: Download (4.25 MB)

OK, I finally switched to Mozilla as the default internet browser on my home computer. I was searchnig for MP3 encoder at download.com, so I typed "MP3 encoder" in the search box and this thing came up. At the time that I did this, they did not have the editor's note and I did not pay attention to the user comments. So I downloaded and installed that peice of sh*t. From that point on my computer was posessed with all kinds of adware and spyware. It kept freezing. I got all kinds of new tool bars in Internet Explorer and my desktop was filled with a dozen of new icnos pointing to all kinds of crap like casinos, money savings etc... After spending couple of days trying to delete the stuff by hand by exploring my windows registry and removing the applications via the control panel I still could not get rid of all of the spyware. So I downloaded SpyBot Search & Destroy and it removed some stuff, but I still have a problem where in Explorer I get certain words on the webpages underlined with links. So I decided to install Mozilla and none of the problems with explorer were present. So I decided to make Mozilla my default internet browser for now. I will miss Yahoo Companion toolbar which I used in IE. I used it for easy access to my Yahoo Bookmarks and a quick search field was handy. But now Mozilla allows you to use Google to search for anything typed on its address bar. I also was able to import my Yahoo Bookmarks into Mozilla. So we'll see how it goes... I do love Mozilla tabs a lot!

Not sure when exactly it has been released, so this may be old news, but I just found out about it today. WinAmp has been the media player of my choice for years. WinAmp 3.0 was buggy and had diffent plug-in API than the previous versions, so I switched back to WinAmp 2.91. And now WinAmp 5.01 is out. Why 5? Well it's the sum of 2+3. It combines the best of both versions.

Here is why prefer WinAmp over other media players:

I love the sub-string incremental search in the Media Library.

Visualizer has the most number of visualizations than any other player I've seen. I like the automatic random transitions from one visualization to another.

Click on the picture to download the best media player for Windows!

Today I added the Macromedia Flash Animations section to my newly redesigned website. To view the animations with your browser, you need to

Click Here

During my trip to St. Petersburg I only had a chance to take photos during one evening as I was walking to St. Petersburg University to find a book that a friend of mine wanted me to get there. This was around 7:30 at night, but at this time of the year the city gets as dark as at midnight. During the night the buildings and bridges in the center of the city are beautifully lighted up. I am not sure when they started doing that, but they did not do that when I was living there.

I'm off to St. Petersburg until December 11th...

This is the view from my office of the first snow of this winter. It came down pretty hard, but only for about 15 minutes. Since the temperature is above freezing, it did not accumulate.

Then the sun came back out. I guess it was a quick reminder that it is December already.

At night though it got really cold. This was the coldest day of the winter so far. It was a good preperation for my upcoming trip to Russia.

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.

This movie series based on the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has been my favorite movie when I was growing up in Russia. I am so greatful to my friend Sabine for getting the DVDs of this masterpiece of Russian cinematograph here in America. I've been dreaming to see it again during many years after I have left Russia and now I can finally watch it! Thank you so much, Sabine!

The series consists of the following episodes: Znakomstvo (1979) Krovavaya nadpis (1979) Korol' Shantazha (1980) Smertel'naja shvatka (1980) Ohota na tigra (1980) Sobaka Baskervile (1981) Sokrovishcha Agry (1983) Sherlok Holms v dvatsatom veke (1986)

Check out this page for more information about this awesome movie series.

I kept hearing about the Rainbow Room for years and finally got a chance to visit it with some of my friends. It's located on the 65th floor of the tallest building in the Rockefeller Center. A special express elevator zips you up there in the matter of seconds during which your ears get clogged due to the change of pressure. Once the elevator opens, you get into an ornately decorated hallway with the coat check and passages leading into various dining rooms. The main room pictured above is quite large. It has the dining tables situated around a circular dance floor which slowly rotates counter-clockwise. Next to the dance floor is a space for a live band. In the windows one can look down at the magnificent view of New York City.

When we walked in there at around 11 PM, there was a latin band playing salsa which surprised me because I expected to see a swing band. But it turned out that the Swing band was taking a break and the latin band was just filling in. The swing band that was playing that night was Cab Calloway Orchestra. They played a medley of classic swing songs like “Take the A Train”, “In the Mood”, etc...

The dance floor was crowded, but after midnight there was more room. Dancing was interesting since without moving around the dance floor you end up in a totally different place by the end of the song since the dance floor slowly rotated. There were some zealous swing dancers in zoot suits. One of them was showing off with some lifts and tricks once there was room on the dance floor.

At the table we did not have any food. The dinner would cost us $150 per person for a pre-fix menu. We just had drinks which were also quite expensive - $10 for a small glass of fruit juice. I don't remember how much were the alcoholic drinks since I was not interested in them, but they were more than that. The cover charge was $20. Still, the high prices were worth the elegant ambience and great fun we had. Too bad it was over at 1 AM. The time flew by fast. Next time we’ll have to make sure we get there earlier.

The attire is black tie or dark suit for gentlemen, evening dress for ladies.

If you decide to go, make sure you call them for reservations at 212-632-5100. The address is 30 Rockefeller Plaza New York N.Y. 10112

Photos

[photo id=gbfktwqtrdqwd type=vi link=custom href=http://rpungin.fotki.com/events/puglia/]
At a company dinner in a restaurant called <a href=http://www.restaurant.com/microsite.asp?rid=30920&rpid=1326&raid=108 target=_blank>Puglia</a> my colleagues have convinced me to perform a number together with a musician that was playing there. I did "New York, New York" just making up words as I went along.

Live demonstration of an artist using sand to draw artwork in the matter of seconds. This took place at the Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival (SICAF) 2003 in Seoul, Korea.

Stream Download (6.7 MB)

required to view the video.

Gotan Project is a French group that blends the sounds of tango and contemporary dance beats. My friend Julia was in love with their music. She introduced me to this band by playing couple of songs on their website. I liked the music too. The sounds of accordion and violin put on top of funky drum beats were quite intriguing.

On October 20, this group performed live at Irving Plaza. We got there by 7:30 PM and there was a pretty long line outside the entrance. At 8:00 PM they opened the doors. The concert hall resembled a night club. There were no seets, just a big dancefloor where people just stood around waiting for the concert to begin. Waiting and waiting and waiting.... The conert did not start until almost 10:20 PM. Someone told me that this is normal for concerts held at Irving Plaza. Even though on the ticket it says "doors open at 8:00 PM" the actual concert does not start until something like 10. Waiting for the beginning of the concert was a pain since there were no places to sit. Julia and two other of her girlfriends found a barrier in the corner on which they managed to sit, while me and another guy were standing all the time.

So at around 10:20 PM the concert finally began. It opened by a movie being projected on a semi-transparent screen behind which the band members could be seen. The movie was just some random shots of typical stuff you can see in dance clubs. They played couple of songs like that and then the screen lifted up. Now we could see a musician sitting behind a a big grand piano, a female vocalist, an accordion player, a guitar player, a violin player and behind them two DJs with some equipment which included two laptop computers and turn tables. All male performers were dressed in suits. It was fun to watch the two DJs popping along to the beat as they pushed various buttons on their gear while the other musicians expressively played their acoustic instruments.

I actually like the stand-up concerts (unless you have to wait for more than two hours) because you can move around during the performance. So we went into the back next to the bar and found a couple dancing tango. A woman approached me and asked me if I did the tango. So we danced for a while along with the other couple as the others were watching us forming a circle. This was my first time dancing argentine tango to the music that had so much beat.

All in all the concert was not bad. I wish they started earlier since on a Monday night you don't want to stand too late. We left around 11:45 PM.

Click on the picture to view more photos.

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.

In the office we noticed tonns of smoke outside the windows. As my collegues pointed out, it turned out to be coming from the roof of a building which was next to ours. Nevertheless a fireman came in to check it out. I started to get worried. What if the fire spreads to our building!. Better be safe than sorry! The fireman tried to examine the situation in greater detail, but concluded that we were in no danger and left. Christine was sharing the terrifying experience.