Alexey Solofnenko blog

Technorati Profile

I have watched a film from "Digging for the Truth" serial about God's Gold. The film was about a possible path that the Second Temple treasures and the path ended in Saint Theodosius monastery. The film crew was denied visiting the monastery, so I decided to look at it in Google Maps. Well, it was not easy to find. The map in the film was not very detailed. Fortunately I was able to find monastery air photos and start looking for similar features on satellite's photos. Just by luck, I was able to find it: map . The images are not very detailed, but, at least, I found it and when eventually the maps are updated, we can see better what is behind the walls.

Yesterday I was driving home late. I entered a highway, sped up and lane by line went to the third lane from the left. I was driving slightly faster than traffic and on the left lane another car was driving with about the same speed. Few moments later I caught up with the traffic in front of me and slowed down, the car on the left passed me and was stopped by CHP. I do not know for how long he followed us. I guess it was a tough decision which car to stop, but, my experience tells me, that usually cars in the "fast" lane get stopped. I will be more careful controlling driving speed when there is not a lot of traffic.

Yesterday I was driving to work when it was raining. As usual the traffic was hard before 24 split and after that it was a fast drive. Surprisingly two cars passed me on a carpool lane with passengers sun shades open. Of cause there was no passenger in both vehicles. I still do not know what surprised me most - using sun shades during a rain or breaking a carpool law when normal traffic is going at a speed limit. I guess the second - my wife often uses a mirror on the sun shade to put her lipstick while I am driving - it is just efficient usage of a time.

Today I looked at the status of my recent Panoramio submissions and all but one were approved for Google Earth. Surprisingly (or maybe not) some of the photos popularity jumped twice after that. Especially this Golden Gate image from Bunker Road.

For only two days I was unemployed before my old/new company asked me back. It was too short time to relax - I just updated my resume, updated contacts, send emails few people about possible openings and trimmed my garden. The plans were much bigger including a long camping trip. Oh, well, that is life. I was glad to see people happy that I was back, but the future of our products is still unclear. I hope I made a right decision.

Incidentally I have gotten a time to update my blog. This weekend we went to Lake Tahoe. As usual, on the way we turned right on NF-11N46 and looked for mushrooms. It was humid and warm, but something was wrong - there were no mushrooms at all - not even poisonous ones. The nearby camping was still active, but people would not take death-cups and toadstools. I am still puzzled. Maybe it was too early for that area - the rains just passed. Last year we came too late - the only survived mushrooms were deep under the leaves. But the year before we found a lot of Boletus luteus.

Then we went to Emerald Bay. Near the destination we saw snow just at the road. It was surprising - the weather was still warm. This time we decided to go in a different direction - to Eagle Falls first. It was a lot of fun, but the most fun was climbing down to the lake. With Maxim near me we started the descent - from rock to rock, from ledge to ledge... Few times we slided on our butts. At the bottom we looked up and saw how far we traveled. Kids liked it very much. Then we went to Viking Holm. Unfortunately we were too late to go inside and it was the last day Viking Holm was open this season. It is going to be a tradition - we have never visited it. When we came up our car was the only one on the parking lot. It was getting dark and we went home.

Yesterday I participated in installing laminate floor in my friend's house. I am thinking to do the same in my house (and there is a discount coming in July in Costco), so I wanted to learn how it should be done. Well, I did learn something. For example, it is better to have a table saw (not any other circular saw) and an electric reciprocating saw (or a jigsaw) that can cut under door frame and to cut complex shapes of the tiles. Another surprise was that walls are not exactly vertical near the floor (partially because of layers of paint above plinth), so cutting new plinth by 45 degree does not guarantee good fit at corners. Otherwise, the task is quite simple and I feel ready to do it myself (maybe with some help from my wife to reduce running back and forth to the saw).

As promised, these are new photos:
Katya's Bowling party
Halloween school fair
and just off the presses...
Trick or Treat direct from Walnut Creek downtown.

Working from home I changed my router configuration and updated all internal IP addresses. Everything was fine until yesterday from office I found out that home computer is not accessible any more - DHCP gave it different IP address and port bridge stopped working. Oh, well...

I also updated b2evolution and installed new anti-spam measures. I just learned that my free domain (asolofnenko.cjb.net) is banned because spammers like to use cjb.net... I will need to see if antispam can be disabled for registered users.

What else has happened... Katya was filmed in a 15 minutes film. The director saw her last time we visited Sutro Baths and made an offer to shoot her in his next film.

Katya had her birthday party in Diablo Lanes in Concord (photos are coming).

We went to Sonoma and visited old Sonoma depot. Also we visited Sebastiani winery and bought very good Merlot. Later we compared it with a "5 cents" bottle from BevMo. The difference was big. I guess it is true, after tasting good wine, one cannot go back to drink cheap wines.