iG.STUDiO: Ilya I. Gerasimenko

In no particular order: You can safely skip the detailed description of the food being served. It rarely has anything to do with the way people consuming the food will die. Besides, there are only two cuisines in Westeros: Northern, where everything is glazed with, braised with, or dipped in honey, and Southern, which is a hot snake stew. The rest of the world eats horse and puppies on a stick. You don't have to try to memorize ancestral lineage of every character in the books. Most of them will die soon enough, and the rest will talk about their fathers, grandfathers, and grand grandfathers endlessly, so you will learn anyway. Regardless of how carefully and meticulously somebody plans something, that something will never come through. Once you embrace this simple concept, you will save yourself a lot of disappointment, because everything always goes terribly wrong. Strangely enough, all that does happen is commonly a result of an elaborate plan of some shadowy character, o...

I stumbled upon this oddity when upgrading to iOS 6 while working on a mobile advertising project, and it took me a better part of the day to figure out what is going on: all of a sudden an element {position:fixed} stopped working in a correct manner (which is staying put, while the page is scrolling), and started "sticking" to the scrolling page, moving out of the viewport, and then just "jumping" back to the correct location after the scrolling was finished.If you scroll this page , you will see it—hint: that's the one labeled "broken"—assuming that you have a correct device/browser combination. Mine was iPhone4 and iOS 6.0 (6.0.1-6.1.3 behaves just the same). On the original page, where I first encountered the problem, all of my elements were created dynamically using JavaScript, but at the end of the day (literally) it become clear, that the glitch is in the iOS 6 CSS implementation.Here is what happens: if you have an element {position:fixed} whic...

I have the original yellow Kaossilator, and I am a big fan. This app, although visually similar in many ways, is fundamentally different in the way it handles the phrases you create; it's not better or worse, it's just different, and if you are to use it, you just have to learn. First of all, it does not record and loop sound, like the original Kaossilator does, it records sequences. The downside of it is that one can't endlessly overdub the track, using the same voice, it will start erasing previous loop eventually (but they do give you five layers to play with, so there is plenty of space to build your riffs). The upside is that you can save, undo, redo the sequense, return to it, re-record, reassign instruments, change the key, tempo, scale, everything, all in real-time, and then save it again.That is big. And the mix play is a very nice feature. WHAT IT NEEDS: Ability to export MIDI Ability to import MIDI (there is no way the tracks in app's library were made w...

It looks like I haven't posted anything for a year. Apparently, nothing to say. How about some music, then? Leaving Manhattan —bossa-nova @ 130 bpm, by yours truly, written sometime in the fall of 2010, after we stopped pretending being rich and moved out of the shoe box size studio on West 95th Street. Technically we didn't leave Manhattan, just the Upper West Side, but the new neighborhood feels quite different... miss the easy acces to Central Park dearly, so the tune is a bit sad. Like 99.9% of all my tunes, really. This particular version came alive with the help of Pat Felitti (piano), Ian Pellow (bass), Raul R. (drums, percussion), all @ kompoz.com. I play tenor sax and EWI. Leaving Manhattan by iG.STUDiO

I absolutely love this little gadget. It does what it says it does, and does it very well. You just have to know what to expect. In my testings, the device recorded the sound of saxophone equally well through the internal and external microphone (I used Shure SM58, just because I have it, I would imagine that the quality can only be better if one uses more advanced studio recording equipment). The recording of a full range performance through the internal mics, taken from the middle of the small auditorium, came noticeable dry on the bottom, just as one would expect from a small handheld mics; once again, using a high-end external mic would definitely improve the results. The recording of the same performance from the mixer's "line out" was absolutely perfect: I use backing tracks and play live over them; the backing tracks sounded identical to the original ones, and our playing and singing over them was captured just as it was going into the system through the stage mics...

I do hate the annoying gnome, but that's not the reason. We (my wife and I) just had a very strange and unpleasant experience with online booking through Travelocity. It started in a pretty normal way—on Friday she booked a flight for her father, who doesn't have a computer, so she usually does it for him, I printed the e-ticket, put it into an envelope, mailed it to Cincinnati, where he resides, and we went on with our life. That wasn't it, though. Next day, in the evening, my cellphone starts ringing, I cross the room to pick it up, it stops. Missed call. From... let me see... a person named "0050". Not that I know anybody by that name, and no voicemail message left. Whatever. Back to dinner. Three hours later I go to the computer to check email, to find three messages from memberservices@travelocity.com First message - at 6PM (about 24 hours after original booking): 1."...For the protection of our valued customers, all reservations are subject to review by...

I seriously think that LOST is a phenomenal show, being made by the group of individuals who have balls of the size of melons. The latter is the only explanation of the confidence they exude when faced with necessity to further develop the convoluted story lines of the plot which a) never existed b) collapsed several times already during previous attempts to develop what never existed to start with and c) still not coming together (really? alternate reality is the cheapest cop out there is, next to the person waking up and realizing that all of it was a dream...). I can only admire the commitment of that team, and extend my deepest sympathy to the writers who actually have to put words on paper, and make them sound natural without conveying any sense (which looks more and more like a policy of the show, like "no direct question should be dignified with an answer, ever" or "if in doubt, make a character tell a random lie or cry")—amazing writing indeed. ...