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.