iG.STUDiO: Ilya I. Gerasimenko

More of a mental note: for document.elementFromPoint IE/Mozilla calculates coordinates of the point from the top left corner of a viewport; WebKit and Opera - from the top left corner of a document.

Six years ago I bought a Sony MiniDV camcorder, which is still an a good working condition, and does what it is supposed to do. After initial euphoria of taping everything which moves for a couple of years, I kind of drifted away from home-made videography, moving towards home-made music production, so the camera was not used a lot. A little over a year ago I finally upgraded our family entertainment center to a flat-screen TV, which made me understand how poor the quality of the standard definition home video actually is. So the caressingly used camcorder is now used even less. But—Dar's new show is coming up, and needs to be properly documented for many important reasons. Preferably in a modern day video standard. So I stumble upon this one: Sony Webbie HD Camera MHS-CM1 Not only it costs about 1/6th of what I payed for my MiniDV cam, it is four times smaller, ten times lighter (no moving parts, duh) and records up to 5 hours in 1040 HD on a 16GB memory card. So I grab one. Did...

There is no US Embassy in Minsk, Belarus. As a result, people who need to go through an interview for a green card, like my mother, need to go to the nearest city which has one. In good old communist times it would be Moscow, the capital of the whole USSR. The trip there would entail overnight train Minsk-Moscow, spending a day in a city, and overnight train back. No visa required, naturally. Today, despite the fact that old Soviet Union fell apart and old Soviet Republics are separate states, the trip to Moscow would go pretty much the same way. But the wizards at National Visa Center came up with a different plan. Everything my mom needs is done in Warsaw, Poland. Why? NO IDEA. May be it's closer. So my mother had to pay for Polish visa, go through the medical exam they require, wait for ten days to get the visa, go to Warsaw, and all this just to find out that the medical form for her green card is not in a correct format (which was never specified, by the way), and—this is my ...

Campaign Worker: "Is there anybody from 13th district who is voting republican?... we, err... have a 13th district machine stuck on "republican", so if you are, you can just go ahead of the line and pull the lever... may be it will unstuck..." There were actually two brave ones who responded to the call... Made my day =), even though they sent us registration confirmation letters marked "district 15", and we are, as we now know, district 19 (we had to stay in line twice to find that out). Whatever, I voted in a morning, Eva had to return after work to cast her ballot. We did what we could. If McCain wins, we most likely will have to move to Manitoba.

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...