iG.STUDiO: Ilya I. Gerasimenko

May be somebody will stumble upon this post and save some time for him/herself. Apparently—it only become apparent after several hours of trial, cursing and error, as it usually goes with IE—, Internet Explorer (up to version 7) throws a runtime error, if you try to modify innerHTML of the dynamically created element under certain conditions. The conditions, as it always go with IE, are significantly lacking consistent logic. For starters, if you assign innerHTML to the element before you insert it into a DOM tree, the error may not come up at all, but will surface later, when you try to modify it. So far it looks like the error mostly comes up, if you change innerHTML of the block element inserted into inline element (which is not kosher in standard-compliant HTML, so it makes sense), and some nested block elements (like DIVs inside Ps—why is that considered wrong, too?—for instance). So, if one really-really need to insert a division into a paragraph, and w...

...you should pick up smoking again. Seriously, you might live longer...

Sometimes you just know what's going to happen, like, when flying Delta to Moscow (happened some years ago, flight was cancelled due to horrible weather, then they decided to send us there through Amsterdam, then changed it to Paris), at that vividly remembered moment, when we just checked in our suitcases to the Amsterdam flight and someone comes and says "no, they are going through Paris" and we are sadly looking at our luggage being slowly dragged by the conveyor belt to that Amsterdam flight we are not going to board anymore, and we say "what about our luggage" and they say "don't worry, it is going to be taken care of" and you just know it is not true. And it wasn't, and we landed in Moscow in a middle of a snow storm, and most of our warm clothes were traveling to Amsterdam and back and it took them three days to finally reach Moscow. Sometimes you just know, and now I am having another déjà vu moment, different curcumstances, same feelin...

Neither there is anything to do on the way there, and, frankly, not much to busy oneself with on the way back. And if not for the hurricanes, we wouldn't even consider going there on our 25th wedding anniversary—and we hadn't, we actually bought a cruise to Bahamas, and even booked two shore excursions—but NCL just took us to Bermuda instead. Well, things happen and people have to deal with them. It would be, however, much easier, if the overall cruising experience aboard Norwegian Spirit left nothing to wish for. Unfortunately, it did. When it comes to cruising, the entertaining elements of a trip normally fall under three major categories: food, drinks, and shows. Those are supposed to compensate for an imminent boredom of being trapped aboard 13-story floating hotel for several days without even being able to marvel at the occasional car wreck down below from your room window. I did expect a lot from all three, since Evelyna (and Dar) were on a cruise once, and came back...

Time and again, life presents me with another proof that for some absolutely unexplainable reason I am not allowed to have money. Once I have any unspent funds on any of my accounts, something comes up and clears the offending surplus. This time I just didn't have a chance to shovel the unexpectedly timely security deposit refund from our previous place towards the credit card I used to pay for our vacation. That resulted in a chain of seemingly unrelated events, which, in turn, helped me to get rid of the extra money. 1. It rains cats and rats on Saturday, so we cancel our trip to Long Island, but since there is a parking spot right in front of our building I leave the car on the street overnight. 2. I totally forgot to take my car to the state emission test, of which I am gently reminded by a bright orange envelope under my windshield wiper with a $65 parking ticket. 3. I am taking my Jeep to the closest (and only one) Jeep dealership in Manhattan, (Manhattan Jeep Chrysler Dodge)...

Sounds a bit like a movie title, doesn't it? Or a book... So many things happened since my last post, it's difficult to even start. In short, we moved again (like-we-did-last-summer... no, actually, it was the summer before last, when we escaped Crown Heights in favor of Briarwood, small neighborhood on the edge of Kew Gardens). This time we decided to go for the gold, so we moved to Upper West Side, and Dar and Cassian—to Brooklyn Heights. Wow. I am still not sure if we are going to make it, but both areas are really nice (doh... location-location-location, as they say... almost makes up for our can-you-please-take-dogs-for-a-walk-I-need-to-open-the-fridge-size apartment... and Dar's is a basement burrow even smaller than ours...). It was about time for us to move, though. Life in Queens was a definite upgrade from our year-long Brooklyn survival experiment, but still quite far from a dream, considering a hefty commute on a barely working E/F trains (for Eva and Darya, and...

Something's telling me that there will be a lot of posts with this name, that's why I made up a special label for them. This post's issue is taxes, and the thing I don't get is: why if I dutifully put in all my dependents in my W-2 form, and then repeat the process in my 1040 form, I end up owing taxes? And I am not saying hundreds of dollars. I am saying THOUSANDS. The time for taxes is, of course, passed, and all I owed is paid, but why? I was naive enough to actually expect a refund this year, and that refund would help A LOT. Darn it, I am still not over. In addition to that my daughter's taxes, which I prepared with TurboTax, are proved to be wrong at least on the state level (the state of New York apparently disagrees with TurboTax on the matter of who can claim child care expenses as a deduction—long story short: my daughter and her son were both my dependents for the year of 2007, but she paid for the child care institution, Cassian goes to, and according to...