Yesterday I visited the most attractive ongoing event in Kiev - exhibition of contemporary art called Reflection which is held by PinchukArtCentre. I went there with my mother and wife and, however, we have different tastes, we all admired the exposition.
Actually, it is unique situation for today’s Kiev culture life, that people could stand in a line for an hour in the street when weather is cold, rainy and windy to enter the such event. The waiting visitors are lively and bright. There are lots of different people - young and old, stylish and with plastic bags from the supermarket, Ukrainians and foreigners.
There are many pictures, photos and installations composed from objects, light and music. Some of them you can see on the press release page or comprehensive overview (in Russian). What I liked the most is the large photo of green rocky islands, I guess somewhere on North or perhaps in New Zeland. I could look at that picture for dozens of minutes. Also, no doubt, that the most fun for everybody is the foggy box - the large long room with transparent glass filled with very thick fog (I think permanently generated by any of ultrasonic fogger). You can enter it and walk there, and it’s hard to see anything further
then your nose. It looks like you’re flying in the cloud or milk. What are the most remarkable in the art center building - beautiful light design, amazing views on the city center and of course hi-tech futuristic toilets
Whats about the exposition at all, I would advice to add some description or clear titles to some extraordinary works. Because the distinction between such kind of art and nonsense is very subtle, it’s crucially important to direct viewer in the same way, the creator was thinking. I don’t mean that there should be only one right explanation without any other possible interpretations, but starting from it will be much easier to understand what was the author trying to say.

The exhibition is open till December 30, so you have plenty of time to visit it!

Last Friday, when I was about to go home, I was given a brand new laptop empowered with 2G RAM and a high speed HDD.
So, now my workplace looks like a Shuttle Launch Center:

This weekend I found out probably the best gift for a little child. I’ve got a 4 years old nephew, and I had to choose a toy to make him a present and congratulate on his birthday. Me and my dear wife spent about 2 hours choosing a right toy and eventually we bought an Infinitoy ZOOB building kit. We couldn’t wait to present it and play ourselves.

The kit contains lots of pieces of four different kind. Each piece is made from very durable bright colored plastic and has a life-term guarantee, so every broken piece can be replaced for nothing. The pieces work like a joints and can be connected with each other to form different shapes, creatures and vehicles. I think that it is very helpful in child creativity skills development. Beginning from the simplest shapes like snake, a child learn variety of bright constructs from the manual.
To sum up, I’d recommend to buy it if you’re looking for a good gift which might bring fun to both child and parents. In Kiev you can buy 250 pieces set for about 60$. Also there are some cheaper sets with less number of pieces.

Last Saturday we had a picnic with co-workers from Sonopia. It was my first time when I was on the Kiev Sea, moreover it was opening of the swimming season for me. There were lost of sports activity, delicious meals (especially grilled meat) and social chatting.
The most thing I liked at that day, that there were no any commandments from anybody, and people were relaxed and were doing things they liked. At the same time, It seems that everybody was involved almost in at least couple of activities like playing football, swimming or supporting the campfire. Excellent rest for the excellent team

I’ve just returned from the movie theater where I was watching the Pirates 3.
The Pirates is one of very few film series I’ve seen every part of them. Making a good trilogy is a tough job, especially if you care not only about revenues but about happy spectators leaving a cinema after the first night. Firstly, I liked the very first episode. The I was happy to enjoy the second one and started to wait for the continue.
Some impressions about tonight’s performance:

• New characters from Thailand on the stage.
• Still great Captain Jack Sparrow with his typical pirate humor.
• Amazing battles.
• Film lasts for too long, even with 15 minutes interval to buy additional pop-corn. There are too much action.
• Unpredictable ending which promises one more new series.
• It’s not boring, but there are definitely less fun than in previous series.

So, I’d rather recommend watching it for real Pirates’ funs.

In spite of the every evening thunderstorms and rains during last three days, the weather is still hot, and my working dress code is like on the picture.
I’m happy that I don’t have to wear a suit, and can afford wearing flip flops and shorts instead.

To make the our cat’s life more pleasant, we give him a bath. After some fear of the water, he got used to it. After the shower, he was cleaning and drying himself for a couple of hours, and eventually his fur became extremely white, like a snow. Next time, we’re planning to wash him with a special cat shampoo.

As I stated a few days ago, I mistakenly broke my previously used FastTrack theme. I liked it very much because of the main photo at the top. There depicted a young men with a rucksack walking along underground station. As his face was hidden and his picture was blurred, his character resembled me. I like wearing rucksacks and usually use subway if I need to get somewhere. This fact made the theme quite personal, and I didn’t need to customize it more for a long time. After I broke the theme and I had some hours to get down to WordPress Themes internal kitchen, I created my own theme.

To not take long, I’ll write my work log:

WP Theme editing on the local machine

Editing a WP theme remotely is a real pain. In this case, you have to upload/download your theme sources every time you change something. More easy way is a installing your WP copy on the local machine. There are lots of howto-s over the Internet. I’m little bit familiar with Apache+PHP+MySQL bundle, and installed it within 30 minutes. After this, I downloaded my current WP files from my hosting directory and upgraded it the latest WP version (2.2).

Tools

I took the FastTrack theme as a base for my new theme. The markup of all themes are very similar, because all of them uses the same layout: header, content, sidebar and footer. All parts are stored in few .php files with correspondent and clear names. The appearance of a theme is mostly determined by СSS file with styles of all parts. Hence almost all time you have to work with a CSS file editor. For this purpose I chose the great FireBug Add-On which show all comprehensive information about a web page including a CSS styles and HTML components on the page. PHP files I edited with Komodo and CSS styles with TopStyle. For choosing right color schema I found out cool on-line tool for color schema generation - kuler.

Creation

I took one of my photos which looked fine as a header image and cropped it to the proper size. Then I tidied up all unnecessary elements like top navigation, odd styles, etc. The width of the post area became wider on 100px. Then I chose a color schema using kuler. It took some time to play with links appearance and font sizes. And in a few hours the new theme I called harpsichord was done.

If you want to customize your theme, I can suggest you starting from Guides to creating your own themes.

P.S.
I eventually tasted the new-brand Eclipse chewing gum For those who are unfamiliar with my special interest to it, I’d say that Eclipse is the most popular open-sourced IDE for Java language (not only however).

I’ve broken the blog theme fasttrack I’d been using for a year. It happened while I was playing with now-reading plugin which allows to arrange all books you are reading at the moment , adding reviews and rating it. I’ve been delaying the moment of getting familiar with WordPress themes templating, and I’m afraid the necessity of doing it has just come.

Yesterday night we were watching Eurovision 2007 song contest final. Ukraine was represented by well-known in CIS countries show man - Verka Serduchka. Verka is a stage-name of an actor who plays a bad-educated, utter ignorant lady who originally worked as a train conductor. Verka speaks an illiterate, sometimes, rude language - “surzhik” stands for mixed Ukrainian and Russian languages. The jokes are extremely primitive and not for intellectuals. Most of intelligent people with good taste consider Verka at least as an offensive show to Ukrainian spectators. In spite of this facts, Verka is extremely popular among vast amount of people. I think that it is bright sign of culture crisis on post-soviet Ukraine.
When the final results were summed up, and Verka won 2nd place, I to fell into a snare. Of course, I was happy that Ukrainian singer took 2nd place, but I couldn’t believe that it did Serduchka.
I’m not good at speaking on culture specific problems, so it is enough for this post.
read more: Verka Goes to Helsinki!

I’ve just returned from Krakow. Basically, it was amazing vacations which worth another large post. I’m about to start it in a few days, and being under a great impression of the trip it is not easy to arrange all thoughts, photos, feelings and complete the post. However, I’ve already uploaded some of photos to a new gallery topic - Krakow vacations, May 2007. It is not a quick process because I have to sort a 2 gigabytes media I’ve shot on my new photo camera.

While I’m not get used to a working life pace after being on vacations, I’m little bit lazy, and allow to myself watching a video. Yesterday, we had a couple of hours before going to bed, and I chose a film which title I had heard lots of times but I’d never seen it. The film was Requiem for a dream. It was a one more indelible impression of the month. I don’t know what exactly authors wanted to say, but I understood it as a film about addiction, loneliness and pain. And of course about willfulness.
[This paragraph is for that people who have seen it]
There are few things I liked about this film the most. First thing is the possible difference in understanding of the story idea. There are many vectors where the action develops. For somebody the main idea could lay just in serious harm of drugs and dangerous diet pills. Another start blaming the irresponsible doctors who caused a lot of pain. For somebody the main character is mother (there are three mothers - lonely, imagined, and “ideal” parent), and everything are related with them. Also, there are love and friendship.
The second thing is the tension which is permanently intensifying without any relief till the end. There are no usual Hollywood happy end, but such story couldn’t have it. This film provokes spending many days in thinking.
Finally I like soundtracks to the film, it is very simple but exactly what that film needed to be a drama.

If you want to be free, try not to be addicted person as much as you can, and don’t forget your old parents!