Georgi’s Blog

2007

2007 was an interesting year. I started looking for an internship and later I was invited by UBS for a 10 week period. I started making my own yogurt, I moved my entire gallery from Gallery to Coppermine and made themes for all my website so that it looks like one. Another big news was that PayPal started accepting Bulgarian payments. After my vacation in Bulgaria, I took the road test and got my license ( two days ago ); Leopard was released by Apple and Skype for Linux started to support video.
If course there were sad moments too…
—
We got some new gadgets. To list a few:

• phone: LG VX8550
• Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85 IS
• Front Projector: ViewSonic PJ503D
• Guitar: Deluxe Stratocaster® QMT
• Pream: Behringer V-AMP PRO Modeling Preamp
• mic: Shure PGX24/SM58 Hand-Held Wireless System

I can say that it was a goooood year.

I wish you all a very happy year.

After holiday

The last two days were pretty lazy. I enjoyed them a lot. Monday night we had on the table the following meals: Monastery Old black beans soup ( Ivan Zvezdev’s recipe ), baklava ( the recipe that Dary knows ), stuffed cabbage and grape leaves ( from Best Yet ), oranges, mandarins, homemade bread, almonds and potato salad. We ate pretty good and we opened the presents :). Dary and I gave ourselves a nice present and we each gave the other one present :). More about the big present in another post. Tuesday, we spent mainly enjoying our presents :). Today is Wednesday and I feel sleepy, lazy and I don’t wanna go to work! A couple of days are too little…

Spam in my blog

The spammers started a war with me 2-4 days ago and I started receiving 15-20 comments for approval. After I looked trough the various Captcha! and what not else plugins against spam I figured out that my problem is in the trackback comments. So I just disabled them for all my posts and now the spam disappeared ( knock on wood ). If they start again I’ll then put a plugin (along with Akismet that I already have ) to see how it goes.

While I was playing with my plugins I updated the live-comment-preview plugin and I updated my entire theme to support multiple languages. Of course I had to find a Bulgarian translation for wordpress, which lead me to this website. The people there have done pretty good job, but they have two .po files that I needed for all messages. So I had to merge them with msgcat, and to add a few messages myself for my theme.
If you’re interested in my .po and .mo files there are here. Now, at last, when you choose Bulgarian, everything in the blog is in Bulgarian, when you choose English, everything is in English.

Edit:
After I added the last few posts I noticed that my comments.php is not working after the “upgrade”. It was an additional if/else that I’ve added and was easy to fix.
Edit 2:
Thanks to Nikolay Bachiyski, for clearing out for me the localization thingy for themes. Now the messages from my theme are combined with the ones from the default theme and are in the theme folder. Soon I’ll clean it up a little bit and I’ll release it for the interested to look at.

Short break because of Christmas

At last we have a short break of a couple of days because of Christmas. We will probably make some meatless meals for the evening and some of the Bulgarians will join us. The sauerkraut is getting bad already (that’s good) but it is still a little bit green. I’d like it to become yellow. Otherwise we could’ve made some stuffed sauerkraut. Still about 4 days ago I made pork with sauerkraut and we didn’t throw any out

Drunken Chicken

A lot of people in Bulgaria know how to make drunken chicken in many ways. Here is the recipe that I use:
6 chicken drums
about 1.8lbs potatoes
about 12oz of beer
1/4 block of butter
salt, black and red pepper, savory spice, vegeta and curry

I first prepare the chicken. Cut the butter in 6 small pieces ( you can put it in the freezer for a few minutes for easier cutting ). With my finger I make some space between the skin and the muscle of the drum and I put a piece of the butter and some vegeta. I put the drums in a big roasting pan (without the grill) with the butter up. Next I cut the potatoes in about 12 pieces each ( half, half and thirds) and I put them around the meat in the pan. Next I add a thin layer of every spice on top of everything. I add the beer and water until I almost cover the meat and potatoes. At that time all my spices are on top. I do not stir them. Put them in the oven for about 45 minutes on moderate heat and all should be done at the same time.

It’s quite easy and rather tasty

Holder for spices

A looong time ago I decided to organize my spices somehow so that they are easier to get to and use. I looked around in the Net and I found this. I got the same containers, but I got different magnets. I got a little bit of EPOXY and one of these. You can see the result on the picture. I’m very happy with it.

Sauerkraut

This winter, because we are not going back to Bulgaria, I decided to make my own sauerkraut. There isn’t much to it. All it needs is just a little care every day for the first 20ish days. Needed ingredients are: A big container ( like a garbage pale, but clean ), a hose, salt, water and cabbage. Put everything in the big container, but setting up one end of the hose at the bottom (where the salt sets). Every day, using the hose, just take some water out and pour it on top. The goal is to stir the salt from the bottom. Depending on the weather, it takes about 3 weeks for it to go bad. But good bad, and ready for cooking. My favorite recipe is pork with sauerkraut, but more about that in two weeks, when mine should be ready.
Oh, the proportions are 20/1 cabbage/salt, or on 40kg cabbage use about 2kg sea salt. Also, the cabbage should be tight in the container and should be kept underwater, but water should just enough to cover it.
Also, do not wash the cabbage. Just remove the dirty layers because we want the bacteria that’s in it. And one last thing, if the heads are too big, just cut them in half or make an incision right in the middle.
Enjoy.

Flash and others

I is about two years now that I’ve been watching a video podcast that Geo told me about: Photoshop TV. They are at 109th episode and I have all of them. I decided to make a small web page as a catalog, for internal use of course, but without having to worry about players and plugins. So I decided to convert them all to flash. It turned out easier than I thought. All you need is mplayer and flvtool2. here are the commands:

mencoder "$1" -o "$2" -of lavf -ovc lavc -oac lavc\
-lavfopts i_certify_that_my_video_stream_does_not_use_b_frames\
-lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=500:autoaspect:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3:\
predia=2:dia=2:precmp=2:cmp=2:subcmp=2:preme=2:turbo:acodec=mp3:abitrate=56\
-srate 22050 -af lavcresample=22050


flvtool2 -UP "$2"

Where $1 is the initial video in almost any format, and $2 is the name of the flv file.
For about 30 hours I converted a little over 50 hours of video on my desktop

DJ Giver

Once upon a time, when I was a little younger, I really enjoyed techno music. I liked it so much, that I decided to try and become a DJ. I went to a couple of courses for mixing to learn about the art of DJing. Unfortunately, when I came to the US, I neither had the time nor the resources to continue my passion. Now I only enjoy it every once in a while and even that a lot less than before, because not everybody likes the music I like…

A few days ago I was going trough my picture archive ( that’s what they are for right) and I saw a small video clip. You can see here what I mean. For your convenience I’ve converted it to flash:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

The Digital Photography Book, Vol 2

I was just reading Scott Kelby’s blog and I learned that he is preparing a second volume of his great The Digital Photography Book. I like his writing style a lot and I would recommend his books to everyone who likes to take pictures. The best part is, that Amazon has the book at preorder here for less than $16 ( after 5% discount ). I look forward for our copy to arrive sometime in late December/early January.