iG.STUDiO: Ilya I. Gerasimenko

It's so amazing to observe the evolution of the idea in a creative environment. This is why I love ALA discussions. There is, I believe, an infinite number of ways for driving a nail into a board - starting from a hammer and working your way up to a microscope - and most of them get the work done. What to use - is entirely up to us. This article introduce yet another way - great. Even better, it works! Anyone wants to port it to .NET or any other platform - go right ahead, and don't forget to share. Waste of bandwidth? Hard to fathom without testing under real load; I would say, it might cause some issues in some cases, but this is not the point. The point is - the more ways of skinning the cat we discuss, the larger the world population of the skinned felines will grow. Ewe. I meant it in a positive way, actually. Hmm. Anyway, great work, great concept, and great discussion. Keep it up. Sidetrack: [LazyJim] ...Why not just have images for every letter of the alphabe...

In short: Shrek 2 (Theater) Very funny. The story is, well... weak, but who cares about the story? School Of Rock (DVD) Cute, but underdeveloped. Matrix Revolutions (DVD) The first movie set the standard. The last one didn't even come close to it. Once Upon A Time In Mexico (DVD) I honestly believe that Banderas and Depp owe me $2.50 each for this one.

Just some notes on the subject of digital video editing (iMovie4 and iDVD4). My first project with these versions of the software proved to be successful to the level of moderate satisfaction. iMovie4 is better and faster than it's predecessor; no audio-video sync issues, no empty-trash-loose-a-week-of-work disasters (never had those, however). One thing it does, though: if you empty the iMovie trash, it tries to screw up fade-ins/fade-outs of the imported audio clips (if you had fiddled with the volume graphs, that is. If you didn't, you are good), so you have to redo those. Not catastrophic, but annoying. The rest works as expected, as far as I could tell. iDVD4 is not any faster than iDVD3, at least on my machine. In fact, it's downright slow. Many new features of questionable quality, like menu transitions: dissolve looks very nice in the preview, but renders with hideous banding and pixelation - and that between menus with the same background image. Note to myself:...

I was wondering, when it will happen... so far, this blog is not affected, but the new one I just set up for April'85, already has an ugly table on top.

from response to email message ... The companies have, sometimes, a very peculiar principles of allocating their budgets. Lexis-Nexis (which makes a good buck by tricking lawyers out of their dishonest earnings by selling them fresh public records information, which later will be free - and outdated, of course...) would, without a blink, fly me to Washington, D.C. to a pointless client meeting - for nearly a kilobuck for a round trip - and yet I had to wait for almost a year to get DreamWeaver 4 upgrade for a lousy $400. Procter & Gamble - this is the matter of my professional pride - paid nearly 90 grand to Mycom for a SINGLE web page (OK, that was a portal page, fairly complex, etc, but, c'mon...) I was developing for them for seven months full-time, and they were happy kittens on a catnip, kept coming back with "changes" and "improvements" twice a week at least, at the straight rate of $75/h (I should've called Guinness Book Of Records, claiming...

I normally hate to complain, but, being a happy subscriber to the magazine for some time now, feel like I do need to express a concern about my recent experience with MacAddict forums section of the web site. Due to some server misbehavior, I had to re-register, my old profile disappeared, while I was updating it. My new profile was assign a label "n00b" (None Of Our Business, if I am not mistaken. This is some way to welcome a new member to the MacAddict community). It could've been cute, but it isn't. And I don't think, it was intended to be: from the post of "Scott": "...using tables for layout...is for lame-ass n00bs..." I have read several more posts in the "Web Design and Development" forum, which, for some reason, was for a couple of days named "George" (the name is back to normal now; but here is how forum moderator "Gipetto" reacted when he was asked about this oddity: "...poop, it blew me away tha...