iG.STUDiO: Ilya I. Gerasimenko

How come in the movies they never light up a cigarette from a disposable lighter? Seriously, it's either a match, or a "Zippo". I think, I only saw a disposable lighter once in my movie watching life—it was "L. A. Confidential", if memory serves me well—and the lighter didn't work. Sometimes I make very keen and equally useless observations.

How come the emergency fire drill always starts when you (quite unexpectedly) feel like working? I just figured out that "page contains both secure and insecure items" warning only pops up on the pages, where I have dynamically generated <iframe> with the src attribute set to "about:blank". The idiot browser (IE|Win) thinks that it is a reference to something outside the secure server domain. The nastiest part of the "procedure" is the siren, which never stops, followed by the incredible annoying male voice, repeating over and over "...you are in a safe area... prepair to receive evacuees......you are in a safe area... prepair to receive evacuees...". What a splendid word: "evacuee". There went my inspiration for today. Well, I did fix the security bug... Oh, yea: zeldman.com is now blocked by the Smart Filter as well.

Smart Filter at work has finally caught up with me. Now I lost access to ALA , Apple Discussions, BLOGGER, and some other sites, also "characterized" like "Chat". Good thing, it's not "Porn", or "Entertainment" (the last one, however, could be true to some point, for it's fun). I think, I might have called a wrath of gods called upon me. I should clean up my harddrive, delete all .mp3 files, uninstall iTunes, QuickTime, HarmonyAssistant, and all other "unauthorized" applications, delete all browsers' caches, and wait for an execution. Like my job is not boring enough...

OK, here is an idea: go to Apple Discussions/GarageBand forum, and holler "who wants to jam?". I wonder, how many people would actually respond... there is no way, however, to know, other than actually go and do it. So... The story is: Over the last week I have come up with a little jazz tune (sixties-style bossa-nova in C minor/Eb major at 140 bpm, 2x8 bars melody, no bridge yet - and may be never - neither there is an arrangement). I invite everybody interested to a virtual jam session - let's play and see what happens. Here is how it will work: If somebody answers this "ad", I will upload three .mp3 files to the Public folder of my iDisk: 1) 16-bar loop of the tune (melody + accompaniment), everything is "penciled in", for I have no keyboard (I am a sax player myself). 2) 16-bar loop of the jam track (accompaniment only), for you to solo over. 3) 16-bar loop of the melody (currently played by somewhat cheesy synthetic cello I found in Melod...

But, hey, seriously. It's a Jeep. It's supposed to be scratched up, right? Besides, I've done it myself many times. Not to THIS car, though. Just being a bit bitter, darn it. It's just the fact that I prefer to break my things myself. I have this little annoying obsession.

It's amazing, how it works. You drag yourself home from work (you drag yourself to work first, naturally), you do something (there is always something to do, isn't it?), you eat dinner, walk the dogs, and around 10 pm all you can think of is a martini and a movie. Short one, too, because you have to get up at 5:30 am. Instead of it you grab you horn and drive to a bar, where you might get a chance to play (good things come to those who wait. I must admit, though, that the waiting time is getting shorter and shorter; I truly hope, that this is due to my humble efforts to actually put some consciousness into the series of sounds I play - I better believe it, otherwise, why bother playing at all?), sit there, pretending to drink a cosmopolitan which has less alcohol in it, than root beer, greeting people you think you know (I am actually OK with faces, it the names I just can't attach to them, faces...), and listening to music. And it better be good, considering that martin...

I recently realized, that I haven't been doing any 3D work for month now. I also noticed, that the last movie I made, wasn't all that exciting of a project. For some reason my interests shifted - again - to another area, which is, in turn, split between standard-based web design, and making music with GarageBand. May be, I should concentrate on something; just may be. May be, I will achieve some sort of recognizable and reputable state in that area, whatever that area would be. May be, people will refer to me as an authority on some obscure subject, like cross-browser implementation of unordered lists, or making Apple-compatible loops, I will become famous, and will receive an incredible job offer (this last statement is about as realistic, as me winning a lottery, considering that I never play). Somebody just sent an email to my wife, asking if she still gives art lessons. I couldn't help noticing custom domain name in the email address, so I checked it out: very decent ...