Spent whole weekend moving this blog and forum to another hosting company and upgrading scripts. Hopefully the new company’s servers have better uptime and less database interruptions.

Hey guys! I’m sorry i haven’t written anything in a while, but there is a little change in my life — after thirteen years living in the USA I’m back in Russia giving it a try :-) Unfortunately I’m not in Sochi, as it’s tough to find an IT job there. I’m in Saint-Petersburg. And I’m a lot closer to Sochi now, plan to visit it more often, and for sure will keep this blog going!

I did go to Sochi a month ago, and you can find some photos from my trip on my Flickr account. Unfortunately, I forgot my notes on what I wanted to blog about in NY. I’ll try to remember, though, at least about the Investment Forum and how it’s organization affected people there.

Couple of hours ago, though, there was a little scare here in Russia when news agencies reported SkyExpress flight from Sochi to Moscow was being seized by unknown person, and that he demands for the plane to turn to Vienna, Austria. However, the flight safely landed in Vnukovo airport in Moscow, and the person who tried to “seize” the plane was arrested. Turns out the person who started the whole thing is a 30+ yrs old man who was released from psychiatric hospital, where he spent last six years, several hours prior to boarding the plane. On the plane he passed a written note with his demands and a bomb threat to the pilot via flight attendant. It’s all over now, though.

Oh, btw, good news for those of you who are in Moscow right now, or plans to be there real soon — SkyExpress has a good deal on Moscow-Sochi flights right now. Check it out on their website »

Anyways, now back to the happy stuff :-) Below are some of the photos from my trip. You can see the rest of them here: photos of Sochi – 12 pages + 8 pages from my friend’s wedding in Sochi which includes many photos outside.

My sis on Krasnaya Polyana

Sochi - where Past meets present: Vladimir Iljich looking over new buildings

Area near airport in Adler's center

Sochi sea port

My friend's wedding

Last night I upgraded blog engine and had to change the theme as the old one did not support new blog features. However, I like the new theme, and hope you do too — it’s light and clean, and it took me some time to pick the theme :) The design will change a little, and I’ll bring my Flickr photos back soon.

Upgrade did not go smooth, so you’ll see weird characters in old posts, but I’m planning to fix it within a few days (upd: done!). There are a few good changes that come with new engine and new theme:

• Most recent comments are now on top, so you can see what visitors are commenting on, and join the conversation;
• Now we have tags. See tag cloud on the right. I’ll try to tag old posts over time;
• Search is back! I had some problems with search before, but it works here now. The search box is on the sidebar;
• Trackbacks & pingbacks are now separated from the comments.

Soon I’ll add contact form, and, maybe, forum. I’m also thinking on switching my RSS feed to FeedBurner (I’ll notify in advance if I decide to do it), and adding RSS-to-email form.

If you’d like to see some other functional features on this blog let me know!

I apologize for not posting for a long while. I was in Russia since the beginning of August ’till past week, including two weeks in Sochi! St. Petersburg > Sochi + Nebug > Moscow. Unfortunately my camera was stolen in St. Petersburg first week I was there :) , so I didn’t brought many pics back. But I will continue posting real soon!

I’ve made my first website on professional hosting four years ago, and since then I went through four web hosting companies. And after awesome service I’ve received today on Skynet Hosting I wanted to voice a few thoughts on choosing web hosting based on my personal experience. Read the rest of this entry »

You probably have noticed I’ve added a couple more banners to the site. These are affiliate programs I’m trying out to see if they can make me rich :) So far they’ve been proven useless, but I’ll give it a few weeks try. Another way people make money on things like this (like new Olympics host city becomes known) is cybersquatting. I’ll admit, I bought a few domain names with Sochi in it, but don’t really like any of ‘em and don’t know what to do with them yet. I’ve never done anything like this before. Most likely I’ll release many of them next year.

Anyways, the reason I started talking about this is there are two domains are being sold on molotok.ru auction site: Sochi.pro, with minimum bid of €2500 (and there’s one person bidding already), and Sochi.info, with minimum bid of …  €3 000 000. It’s very unlikely he’ll be able to sell it for anywhere close to this price, though.

I uploaded more of my and my friend’s photos from Sochi to Flickr. They all tagged, so you can see them in My Sochi Photos section.

I uploaded few more photos from my summer trip to Sochi. Check ’em out in “My Sochi Photos” section.