We just spent the past week in a place with no internet connection.
Well, my cellphone lets me connect for $1 a minute. But that is
my fault, for not adding a better data package to the contract.
I hate to say it, but i had time to think about things.
Could not think of anything i would change on cleaverb.net .
Instead, i wasted my time designing a 'dream' house.
And playing several old , old - we are talking DOS games.
Scrabble, Space Invaders, Battleship, Block Breaker, Reversi,
Anti-Ballistic Missile Command, chess, and more games.
It was fun to recall how simple games used to be.
I also played some World Empire V and tons of Slay.
Those are great games that don't require human competitors or
internet connection. Or a CD in your drive, for that matter.
Alas, I also spent many hours playing Star Wars: Empire at War .
But I can't get beyond 'easy' mode. The AIs get powerful on medium.
.........
So, we shall have our 'Top 5' uploaded around the 20th,
and we will try to add at least one more update to the cleaverb-dot-net
home page before then.
Happy Holidays !

November has been a movie marathon for cleaverb.
We started a blog on Vox to list the movies we have watched in November.
We just accidently found Vox, and it looks really cool.
Check my vox blog at : Cleaverbs Vox .
There are around 40 titles listed... but we would have to add -
9 Sherlock Holmes movies from the 1940s,
25 Abbott n Costello movies, wow. They made around 45 all together.
3 Charlie Chan flicks from the 1930,
5 Marx Brothers films,
and
9 Godzilla movies from the 1960-70s.
we are talkin' bleary-eyed, all day all night hardcore movie extravaganza. This has to be a first, at least in my lifetime.
Oh, I forgot to mention over 18 hours of Dr. Who and a few
Mystery Science Theatre 3000 , all of which are free to watch
with a Netflix account.
Mmm, maybe we should take a look at the Guiness World Record for
movies in a month.. who would not want to hold that record ?

We have decided upon a name for our A to Z index of music , it is now called Music Corner .
There is not much change, except for a nice title graphic made at
CoolText .. We briefly thought of
moving the pages over to .org, and changing the background, etc,etc.
Then we changed our minds.
We did some minor changes to the look of our TV Corner ,
which involved 'centering' the content. then we added a small graphic
to the alphabet pages and added a nav bar at the top of those 26 pages.
Site navigation is important to us ! It's better than always going 'back'. We also added about 25 new shows, most of which are from the
late 1940s and early fifties. Interesting that the Internet Archive has many
great old shows to download. We found 30 episodes of "The Lucy Show"
there, among many titles, check them out ! Each episode is about
175MB , not bad for viewing on a computer.
And related, we found and read an article about the early days of
television broadcasting in the usa. It just seemed odd that so many
TV shows started in 1949.. so we looked it up. And yes, that was the year when what we know today as TV programs began. Sixty years ago !
Before that was mostly 'low-res'. Read the article on Wikipedia at:
History of Television.
We like our new "BEE" . He appears to be helpful and able.
Hope he/she can write hyper-text !

I don't know what to say, really. It started out innocent enough;
we were watching a bunch (10) Dr Who features for free on NetFlix,
which you do have to have an account to view.
at the time, we were finishing our TV Corner section, and i started
looking for ways to watch TV shows online.
I found so much stuff, that we hooked up a vcr to the S-video jack on
our computer...and started recording episodes to tape.
Thought it would be cool to have a classic TV tape. Then, i guess i got greedy, and i ended up making 7, 4 hour tapes that each have :
Gilligans Island, I Dream of Genie, Get Smart , Lucille Ball Show,
Hogans Heroes , Bewitched , Beverly Hillbillies , My Three Sons,
and finish with an episode of My Favorite Martian.

And then it snow-balled: I started finding full length movies online!
It started out with the Marx Brothers and Sherlock Holmes ...
and i even found several of my rarest favorites !
Gargoyles, The Night Stalker (TV movie,led to the show),
and now i just figured out something that has been eluding me for years: A 1969 movie named Doppelganger or in usa -
Journey to the Far Side of the Sun ..
There is a scene where one astronaut discovers that doors open the wrong way, light switches are on the wrong side too.
Really weird stuff !
I guess it was time for a break from music ??
Hope i 'get well' soon .

We spent the last couple of days piecing together a
(caution:loaded with pictures, several hundred kilobytes!)
Tribute Page to the IAAF 2009 Championships , using images from the IAAF website,
Getty Images, a few pictures from universalsports.com, and even
some screenshots taken while watching the games webcast.
There are 31 pictures on the page now, and we are still looking for
the finale picture, something meaningful to end the page...

I have made a CDR from the current playlist on our site,
with exchanging Anna Sedokovas - Gde Bi Ti Ne Bil in the place of
her song , Selyavi .
I can't get over Yulia Savicheva - Goodbye Lyubov , it is such a sweet
song,, as foolish as it seems (to me) she is making a serious bid
to be on our Top 5 of 2009 ! And maybe two more songs from the
August 20th, 2009 playlist will be in that top 5 as well.

We finally replaced the ancient Bananarama photo.It's not exactly
what we wanted, but it is recent. we also changed a few of the preview
(small) photos on the Favorite Artists page.

I'm still trying to decide IF we should host pages for previous years to accomodate our favorites of 2007 and 2008 ..

And we added three new songs to our latest playlist on the audio page, uploaded 'higher quality' for 6 of the songs, also.

And finally, we have uploaded the songs and info for the May 2001
and September 8,2008 playlists. Now all are working.

Have a great weekend!

We just did a 're-design' of our "Favorite Artist" page -
have a look at :
the new faves page It looks super in 1024X768 resolution.
i'm guessing it will not look so perfect at 600x800...

We also uploaded a new playlist on the audio page,which includes
several new songs and some older rare and or favorites.
We also removed the "Top 5" playlists from the faves page,
and put their links on the audio page now.

After making pages for Svetlana Loboda and Alena Vinnitskaya,
we actually took the time to give their music a serious listen.
Alyona really has some good music, and we are contemplating buying
her Kukli CD, or maybe one of the others.
Svetlana has some awesome remixes of her songs, and after buying
the Chyorni Angel Remixes CD, I think we'll probably also get her
latest CD,too.

It seems as if after writing 18 pages, I need a break from the
'Who's Who' page for awhile. it's funny, I sit here and wonder if
what I have read, and wrote about the 'girls' is accurate...
all I can say is, give me time, and we will have them corrected.
If needed.

Playlists featuring actual songs we know and love!
My personal favorite is the 6012004 list, which was a CD-R
I made and listened to in my car on the way to work!
A close second is the Jan 10 2008, which has a great variety of artists,and just listen and I find it rather soothing!

We are slowly starting the project,with an uneasy feeling.
I just hope we are a small enough website community, that we won't get slapped for having some music on our site....
We feel it very important to share,unfortunately the 'legal' world
doesn't jive with reality.
The facts is, people send me messages, asking 'where to find' songs
from CDs that are out of print and rare. So by hosting a few playlists,we can at least refer people to a place on our website to hear the music!
We still love the Imeem service, but having to login , and then be subjected to 'whatever' their users have named the songs.
This made for an odd situation of relying on data that was
not always accurate. It worked fine for well-established artists,
given that their name was consistent through language.
" So much ado about nothing " my favorite quote from the song
'All Dead' by Queen. From the News of the World CD...ciao for now.

As written on the main cleaverb.net page, we have given a 'new look '
to three artist profile pages..
I love it, and have added a few more:
Blestyashchie ,
Elena Risteska,
Janna Friske,
Kristina Orbakaite,
Paola E Chiara,
Tereza Kerndlova,
Tina Karol,
and
VIA Gra !
We have been trying to update the Tina K and PeC photos for a few
months, yet we didn't find any photos worth using. Tinas didn't turn out
as well as we would like,but it was the only size available.
Incredible, is the new Tereza Kerndlova photo, she looks fantastic!
The photo is from a show in May 2009..I just regret that the dancers
were not in this photo, because those girls work really hard to be where they are...sorry Ali, we will have you immortalized one day.
;-) You are great, my dear!
I am off to watch a movie, and possibly will 'update' more pages later.. problem is, I have 1,000 things to do with my life this week.
Wish me luck, I am going to need it .
Ciao for now !

We built pages for the 5 biographies that cleaverb wrote for :
Blestyashchie,Gisela,Leslie,Stoja,Vera Brezhneva, and VIA GRA
and uploaded them to cleaverb.org. The links are on the main page,
which is really lacking for content. It's like trying to keep the
personal creations separate from the cleaveb.net music website..
==========
We added several names to the cleaverb.net search page ,
including all the former members of Bleatyashchie and VIA GRA .
So I thought it would be nice to list the dates for which each member
was active in the group, and suddenly it hits me that Meseda is no longer in Via-Gra ; she was replaced by former and now current
member Nadezhda Granovskaya !!! I scrambled for pictures and soon had the
pages all updated !
=======
We did manage to complete the process of incorporating links to
the pictures for Blest and Via-Gra on their bio pages...
I am thinking seriously about adding a small BIO page for both
current and former members, with a small picture and some personal
data ( birthday, etc) just in case 1 person on earth does not know
what faces go with the names ;-) .. and well, I think it's time
for a Linn Berggren page to explain she's no longer in Ace Of Base..
too.
The hardest part would be getting a small 'facial' picture of all of them. Most would be easy, but all of them may not be so easy.
We shall see ! Ciao for now, have a great weekend !!!

We have just finished up with replacing about 50 image files on
our favorite artists pages. We started by reducing the quality of
many Album pictures , and then we focused on reducing the photo sizes
of our artists main picture.For a long time, i have thought about making
those pictures'hot-linked' so they would open a 'pop-up' window with a larger sized version of the pictures. Then, I just decided to put up
the large pictures, and forget the pop-up s. Well, in trying to cling to
our "Flexible sized' pages, the right column would get pushed off the screen in 800 x 600 screen size.
But after realizing that all the Blestyashchie pictures added up to
almost 200kb of graphics , we went ahead and reduced the quality of
the group pictures on that page,as well as the album pictures.
The same for Via-Gra. Then, we realized that some other groups album
photos were too large; for example, each of the E-Type album pictures
was about 30kb , each! For a picture that is 200 pixels square,
they should only be 5-10kb . we also reduced the photos for several other groups who have 7 or more albums in their discography.
..........
Anyway, if i can find the original pictures that we used in the
various Blest and Via-Gra group photos, we will upload the larger sizes
and link them to open in a pop-up window...you are thrilled. i can tell 8-) Ciao for now..

With the recent restoration of the Official Sopho Khalvashi website,
our Retro-Mania section has lost its reason for existence.

The Screenshot pages will be taken down, and combined with our wallpaper page. It may be a few days before the new pages are online.
These changes will take effect immediately

Our Joomla experiment on cleaverb.info is over.The page is still there,
for now. The fatal flaw in many content management systems seems to
be having the left column for navigation. I did find one, named
WCMSphp that looks promising,but our .info host doesn't support it.
These systems are great for website management, but all I want is
an RSS file that updates itself when I add new pages . My filing
system works okay, I just keep forgetting to update the .xml file
that tells people something new was added...
I shall have to ask around for a solution that tells my server to
compile list of pages by date(new first), and writes the information
to an xml file. I don't know where to look; in Perl or maybe it's
a cron job. All anyone says on the subject is; if you update your site
manually, you will have to update the RSS feeds manually.
On the 'fun' side, I have been updating my computers Vector Linux .
Finally, it updated Firefox to version 3 ! Learned something new,
and without any help..!
On the Windows partition of my comp, I tried out the free FileZilla
FTP program. It works fantastic ! I always wanted to backup my site
locally, and the download feature truly amazes me. Much better than
the old system of : visit each page, 'save as' ...

Was surprised to see my youtube video views jumped over 1,900,000 .
It seems like the Via-Gra - Ne Nado viewers have slowed down.
and now the Janna Friske and Despina vandi videos are going strong.
La Femme D'Argent is also doing well in western europe,Including UK.
I thought they banned youtube stuff in the UK ?
Funny, but I came across a video that, when I opened the page it gave
a 'warning' that the video is not allowed to be viewed in my country.
I thought to myself, Oh shit. Now they have done it.
Then on refreshing the page, the video played like normal.Kinda funny.
what was I watching ? It was something that turned up on a search for
Kristina Orbakaite or Tina Karol...just a simple music video. wish i kept track.
But it was uploaded on May 2nd, and i thought it was strange.
Because Kristina is touring in the USA and it was a Russian TV show.
An old video, that raised more questions than answers.
Okay, well this isn't making sense to me,either...have a great day!

Started out the day working on the banner for the cleaberb.info
Joomla template. I was asking myself, you sure you want to start
editing graphics, now ? Ten minutes after waking up, and i was
editing the banner. It looks alright,for what it is...
I'm experimenting with putting my old features into a page template.
Problem is, even though they look plain and ugly,they are very compact.
Can't forget the dial-up and other connections running slow.
Once you get down to it, a 20KB page loads pretty fast, without
any page graphics or style sheets. There's enough photos already.
......
I did manage to 'cook up' two new pages -
the first one can convert simple measurements into other units.
Kilos into pounds, meters into inches,etc.

Height/Weight

And the second one lets you convert hexadecimal color values
into Hex values.
RGB page

Those come in handy once in awhile...

We have been wrestling with the Joomla interface on cleaverb.info .
The program is so easy to use, we can't believe it !
Although none of the links are setup for our sites, you can have a
sneak peek of the (maybe) new look on
cleaverb.info Joomla page.
We started out with a different template, but we ran into the same old
problem: banner graphics waste too much space ! It sucks when you have to scroll down to find anything to read, doesn't it?
Or maybe you like the pictures. But still.
So what does Joomla do for the owner ?
A: Instead of wasting all your time writing data into the page,
you just click a feature 'on or off' the page.
A@2: New posts are just like blogging,then you add or delete the
articles you want on the page. It's going to make me lazy.It's great.

Now the next step will be editing the Home page links.
I think there is a pizza with my name on it, somewhere, first....

Alright, I have been writing pages all morning, and need a break!
We have also searched around, reading about CMS or 'content management
systems, which manage the pages on your website. Believe it or not,
I have always 'hand-written' every page on cleaverb.com, and cleaverb.net. Yet now, we are going to experiment with Joomla on
cleaverb.info, to see how effective the program runs things like,
automatic feed updates, and to simplify page building by using templates. We will make a custom template, and use it for our pages.
Then, if successful, the long and tedious job of 'transferring' all our old pages to the new system will start.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend !

I just finished putting a Java script on most of the cleaverb.net
pages. It's the "Last Modified" script that will print a date
at the bottom of the page,saying last modified 00/00/0000 .
One page had a code at the bottom which we didn't intend to be there.
The Blestyaschie page contained lines similar to this:

function __RP_Callback_Helper

twice at the bottom of the page. I don't know why.It was placed there
the same way last year. Either I re-used an old 'offline' copy to make the new page, or someone hacked the page.

This is to my knowledge, the only page on cleaverb.net which has been
copied and pasted to Wikipedia... where I wrote a page note,
declaring the material as "Creative Commons" free use.

The code is described as something from Real Player,and harmless.

We just finished up our re-design of the cleaverb
Calendar opens in new window..
with new colors and a slight design change. There was also a problem
with the 'Ordinal' day numbers; from September 1 to December 31,
the numbers were off by 2 days !
While searching for a way to find news widgets, and imbed them into a
page on our site, we found this great flash-based translator :
.........cannot imbed objects here,sorry.I'll soon add a translator
page to cleaverb.net !
............................ ...
Incidently, we found out that we missed Ksenia Novikovas birthday,
on May 19th ! Our apologies and a sincere Happy Birthday, Ksenia !
We also found an April 30th,2009 photo gallery of Ksenia at:

StarStory photo gallery opens in new window
................................
She looks really pretty, and alot younger than her later Blestyashie days ! Check it out ! ................
We are, going to create some type of a 'live page' ,
a page with RSS feeds or other content widgets. it will be a basic
page, and maybe we will develop into more bigger better sometime.

Well, my first thought was; what happened to the hosts from
the first two shows? and a Russian judge resigned before the final ?
I didn't bother to read any news on the show, was too busy doing
chores around the house since wednesday!

Congratulations to Norway ! It became obvious early in the voting,
that Norway was going to win. Here are my notes, written after each
country performed:This is picky and honest,do not squeam!
Lithuania - A+, Flawless performance, going first is not good.
Israel - C, one of the singers had voice problems.
France - A, very classy.(the audience applause was great).
Sweden - A, awesome to see her perform well in the final.
Croatia - A-.
Portugal - C, the singer was too 'hissy' sounding on her S(es).
Iceland - A+, another flawless performance.Great pop voice.
Greece - C, i really hate this song.its so cold,not lively.
Armenia - C, Singer off-key.The music tempo was wrong for the event.
Russia - C, a background singer was annoying me.not my style.
Azerbaijan - B, the female did not sing well enough.great song.
Bos&Herz - A, better than in semi-final..can't see this winning
Moldova - A+, the arena was very quiet,like they payed attention.
Malta - A, weak on her first two lines,then strong.
Estonia - A+, for real, she is good.
Denmark - B+, 'best song' in contest, singer too exuberant.
Germany - C, the back-beat sound was out of time for the arena.
Turkey - B+, a very warm welcome..the dancing was toned down.
Albania - A+, star-quality performer,i like her.Song not so good.
Norway - A+, great english vocalization, great show.
Ukraine - B+, inspiring!
Romania - B, I just do not care for the song.
UK - A+, classy . for once,the UK brought some talent.
Finland - B, the singers were 'on top'! the song is dull.
Spain - B-, she was too sincere,should sing strong.
+
===
My vote -
1 point - did not write anything, later added France.
2 points - did not write any. later added Denmark.
3 points - Lithuania.
4 points - Sweden.
5 points - Iceland.
6 points - Moldova.
7 points - Albania.
8 points - Norway.
10 points - Estonia.
12 points - Malta.
But honestly, I had trouble writing Malta next to the 12.
In the replay, she doesn't sing very well .So drop Malta into
the 5 points, and everyone moves up a spot!

The grades I give in these posts are :

A+ is the highest 'grade', followed by : A (straight A),
A-,B+,B,B-,and C which is for average.
These are my impressions of the performance on stage

Croatia - straight A ,
Ireland - C much better than a turkey!,
Latvia - C ,
Serbia - B interesting piece.
Poland - C ,
Norway - A- ,
Cyprus - B (loved the singer),
Slovakia - C ,
Denmark - C (great song),
Slovenia - B ,
Hungary - C ,
Azerbaijan - B- ,
Greece - C (not a good performance today),
Lithuania - A- ,
Moldova - C,
Albania - A+ ,
Ukraine - A+( unbelievable),
Estonia - A (loved the singer),
Netherlands - B- .
we all have our favorites,and i noticed a trend in my
favorites-each year, I like: Estonia,Cyprus,Portugal,and Turkey.
Only Cyprus didn't make the 2009 final.

We are occasionally working on a re-creation of Rays Packard Bell site.
From GeoCities. More than half-way complete,but not finished.

The Risk~World project is on hold, while we search for new material.

We found a Charlie Chan website, and a one page tribute to Cheech and
Chong that we are going to re-create later on.
There is also a Godzilla movie guide coming in the next few months.
It has a synopsis, and a rating, but mostly we liked the timeline.

I almost forgot: we uploaded a www.risk.com re-creation last week.
You will have to check the retro-mania page for risk 2007 !

My on/off switch for Depeche Mode went back to the 'off' position
with their latest album. I didn't like much of the music, or any songs.

I played the ESC 2009 playlist through 5-6 times now.And its pretty good.

This wil be a long post, with a simple sentence for many of my recent
downloads, albums and songs..

Mr. Meeble Never Trust the Chinese is good background music.
Nothing to make me increase the volume, but there is some soul to the effort.

and while looking through my media for Mr Meeble, I found a forgotten
download of Mr. Credo - Chudnaya Dolina from 2001. Good album.

Olya Orlova - Esli Ti Menya Zdyosh I haven't listened enough to know.
But i really like the remix version of Ya S Toboy in my playlist on site.

the Vera Brezhneva songs I have are all good...

I'm dying for some more anya Sedokova songs.in fact, she is better than
Vera ...

Schiller Senhsucht is very good music. It deserves a full post!
We'll get back to you on that one.

Ah, well. First post. But it gets most memorable albums up to date!

Alright. We had no problem with watching the program !
I wrote on paper my impressions of the performances,
shoot me but I used the only grading format that comes to mind..
Montenegro - A- really good performance. The guy tugging at her skirt
near the end was interesting. He was panting, it just looked cool.
Czech Republic - I wrote blah! . Did not like it at all.
Belgium - straight C Elvis impersonation. It wasn't bad.
Belarus - straight B the guy could sing well.
Sweden - straight C she could have performed better.weak.
Armenia - B+ I loved the song already, performance was just good.
Andorra - straight B better than sweden or Romania,too bad.
Switzerland - C but really a yuck.nice background scenes.
Turkey straight A bellydancers !
Israel straight B I can't remember why, but it was good.
Bulgaria - C
Iceland - A+ I really thought their performance went great.
Macedonia - straight B I liked them better than B&H .
Romania - straight C nothing bad, just personal choices.
Finland - B+ It sounds too western for me.and that creepy guy..
Portugal - straight A every year I like Portugals entry.
Malta - A+ that lady has an awesome voice the best singer of all.
Bosnia and Herzegovina straight C I was disappointed .
I kept crossing my fingers for Montenegro to get into the finals,
all the while shamefully thinking; where is Montenegro ?
- To sum up my experience: there were no 'bad' songs in this group.