Well… It’s been a while… So trying now to recall past events… Right.. Oh yeah, our corporative Xmas party. In the middle of December. I must admit I love my company. I think the best two things about it is the atmosphere and people themselves. There are so many people to fall in love with :) So party time is the best time to get closer, to enjoy yourself and a nice people around.

And it was great, hugely enjoyable. The dress code was evening dresses for ladies and tuxedos for guys. Well… in my company no one wears suit and/or tie at work. Including directors. Only if they are visiting some huge client and wanna impress :) So all you see every day around are computer geeks in jeans and t-shirts and designers-rebels wearing some freaky stuff. Sometimes not that freaky. Anyway, it is very informal. All the time. So when you see all those people looking smart, I mean very smart, you think : “Wow! That’s something.” And you also realize that that’s probably the one and only time you’ll see the guys with a bow-tie. And then it all was champagne drinking, festive eating and socializing. The party was definitely a success.

One of the evening’s highlights was Oscar-style awards ceremony. We even had a red carpet for arriving guests. Not so many funs though… Anyway, we had six nominations voted by everyone in the company: Best Dressed Male, Best Dressed Female, Biggest Drama of 2006, Biggest Chancer of 2006, Best Comedy Moment of 2006 and Most Profitable Person of 2006. I really fancied the idea of winning one, I thought it would be a very good memory and then I could tell some stories to my grand kids about how cool I was when I was young :) (Not that I’m not gonna be cool when I am older ;) And considering all the possibilities I realized I had quite good chances of winning a Best Dressed Male award. And as you can guess from the title I did it! :) In spite of rather strong competition, I must say. So I was excited to win it. My man Aidan, company’s golden boy, won the Most Profitable Person award. Well-deserved. I voted for him :) And it felt like everyone was happy for all the winners, everyone was shouting, cheering and applauding. It felt great.

Actually I was not wearing a suit that night… Well, I tend to wear quite formal outfit at work lately (surprisingly enjoy wearing a tie :), so decided to do something different: to wear a kilt. Well it was not complete Scottish outfit, rather eclectic mix of clothes, but then I thought : “Is there any better occasion for it, since all my kilt does is gathers dust on a shelf?..” But looks like it worked well. So well that David told me that night: “Oleg, I should have voted for you”. :)

I guess the funniest thing is that this year’s I hate Xmas sales. Overcrowded shops with people running around hoping for some bargain. It gets on my nerves. I try staying away from sales this Xmass. Just one day gave myself a break. And what a waist of time it was! Did not buy anything. Actually, did not like anything… Probably just tired of all that. There are times when I hate fashion. I guess it’s one of them.

It was supposed to be a standard routine Thursday evening. But then Veronika called me and said she received her first cheque at her new job, so we decided to turn this evening into something a bit more special and instead cooking our dinner at home to eat out. We live in a very nice London area with our King road full of restaurants of all sort of cuisine from Iranian to Italian, so it was just a matter of short time to find the one for us, and so literally within 10 minutes of browsing we found ourself in the place called ‘Robin Hood Zoro‘ - a quite weird combination of names but then it sounds reasonable when you learn it’s an English - Mexican eating house.

Robin Hood Zoro is a quite small restaurant opened just a few weeks ago with a good choice of traditional food and gorgeous romantic interior. It feels very cozy and relaxed in dim-lit rooms of and old pub and with painted walls decorated with guns and sombreros and it is definitely more about Zorro then the English king of thieves. Latino-American music on the background and friendly personnel. It was not crowded that night so we had a choice of where to sit and opted to place by the window next to the fireplace.

The choice of food was really good including quite long drinks list. I went for vegetable soup and a traditional Mexican pork with pineapple and Veronika’s choice was garlic mushrooms for the starter and lasagna for the main. We were also entitled to a free bottle of French wine which was very nice and sweet. Everything was absolutely delicious. The main course was served with our choice of wedged potatoes which turned out to be the best wedges I ever had :) crispy and well done outside and soft and melting mush inside. As main course was served we realized that probably we should had passed the starters cause portions were big and we already felt like we were going to be full very soon. And we were :) Actually so full that we even asked to take half of a lasagna away with us, cause Veronika could not have any more of it, but it would be an ultimate crime to throw it away :)

So it was a lovely eating out. Out of regular night meals. Out of routine and boredom. I would definitely recommend that place to anyone. They also seem to be playing live music on Wednesday nights. And hurry up till they have they free bottle of wine with any two main promotion running ! :) Though prices are very reasonable there anyway. Check their website www.robinhoodzorro.com (I know I know it’s a sort of school boy made, but you can still find full menu as well as the location there).

PS. Pictures were taken with my gorgeous Nokia n73 :)

I was basically shopping online for Red Curtain Trilogy DVD set today, something I wanted for my collection for quite a while… I am absolutely in love with Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo And Juliet and Moulin Rouge (though haven’t seen his early work Strictly Ballroom yet), so £16 price tag seemed very lucrative to me and following my human nature which always wanna buy something on the weekend I thought it was the right time for it (my “weekend allowance” remained still untouched :).

The choice of e-shops was narrowed to two megagiants: hmv and Virgin, and not hesitating much I started the checkout with hmv. And then in the middle of the process I started getting sort of “Some sort of error. Please return in few moments” message. And this was almost the end for me as a client of hmv. Since Virgin offered pretty much the same price I was almost ready to turn my back on top dog and go to their rivals and it was literally the last moment when luckily for hmv, its checkout was up and running and I finished my order.

So, as South Park’s Kyle would say: “I’ve learned a lesson today”. With e-commerce until you have something totally different or significantly cheaper in your shop, your buyers will go to your competitors right the very second your website is down or something. There is no such words as “patience” and loyalty on the net. And i guess never will be.

Genre : Classic Acoustic/Alternative

Much-anticipated album. Ever since I heard his debut O, Damien’s music always has a special place in me. So here he is, the same Damien Rice. Almost the same. Still intimate, still delicate, still sad, still honest, just a bit more bitter, I guess.. I love gentle 9 crimes, Accidental Babies, i love overwhelming Rootless Tree and Me, My Yoke and I… For some reason this music makes me think, think about shortness of life, about things you will not be able to change, about what’s gonna be left of us. It’s so aimless sometimes..

I guess I love this sadness..

” Is that alright? Yeah…
Give my gun away when it’s loaded
Is that alright with you?
If you don’t shoot it how am I supposed to hold it..”

I get bored. Quite easily. And quite often. Bored with weather, bored with my jobs, bored with my clothes, bored with my look, bored with my everyday, bored with my life. So naturally i got bored with my website, ie portfolio. Though it served well and its minimalistic style appealed to many people I got soooo bored with it. Including the logo. So now logo goes to my portfolio but I’ve got a brand new identity.

So I did a slight redesign during my lunch break yesterday. But you know what? I was bored with it by the end of the day. So I revamped the site again :) finished late at night.. actually fell asleep on the couch where I was working and woke up at 3.30 in the morning because of the unnatural position of my head which eventually caused some neck pain. But I am quite happy now with my portfolio in the tones of greyscale. Shame though.. I wish I could have it completely sort of black and white :)

So couple of design changes are still to be done as well as I have to rewrite some part of the code to make it an absolute HTML. Soon. Probably. Hopefully.

Oh yeah yeah.. It’s Skrinda dot com.. right

So the second part of the “rock’n'roll gallery” is finished and open for public. And this time it is Kevin Max, a figure bigger than life, a rebel, an unique singer & poet, my huge inspiration and even a fashion icon.. Quite a lot for a single man, isn’t it? I have been following Kevin and his career since I got internet access :) so for around 8 years already. So you can imagine how excited I had to be to finally see him live. I guess the excitement would be even bigger if it happened, let’s say, 5 years ago, when we both were younger and a bit more enthusiastic, I guess, hehe… but this is something beyond my power so i was just enjoying the show.Well, as a matter of fact Kevin did not look very much excited during his session, may be because of a dull English weather or lack of true fans in front of the stage (which is quite a shame that younger generation does not really know the artist), but still it was Kevin Max himself, it was his distinguishing vocal, one in a million, it was his passion and soul of rock’n'roll. It was a “return of a Singer”. Respect to the Singer…

I also quite liked Kevin’s band, especially his guitar player, a “little prince” of whom I also took quite a considerable number of shots.

Unfortunately, no matter how i tried i did not manage to see Kevin personally and say “hi”, but was lucky to meet his boys and have a small chat with them. The last photo in the gallery serves as a proof of it :)

Updates in the Gallery. Finally sorted out some pictures from a September gig, where two of my most beloved bands were playing: Blindside and Kevin Max. I could not believe my eyes when I saw the line-up with both of them performing in the same night. So it was the right night for me. It was quite a low-key festival, and not too many people were gathered there, but that just gave me an opportunity to get closer to the stage with my camera, almost VIP place to shoot :) I took around 300 shots with my 12x zoom sony h1 during that night, which were eventually narrowed to 100 and something good ones, and around 20 best pictures.

So here they are: Blindside. I give you the rockers from Sweden. Ever since their Silence (the album, not the debut one) back in 2002 they remain on the top of my hard rock play list and always were a huge inspiration for my own music. Actually there are five swedish guys I love : my man Andreas, designer i work with and four members of this band. And they rock! The performance was amazing, exactly what I expected from them. Full of drive and passion. And this is what always impresses me most. If I move to live in Sweden some day, I’d love to make friends with them. Yeah… right.. sure…

Anyway, you are here to see them, so this is the gallery. Enjoy. The shots of Kevin Max and his band are on the way. Check back soon.

It’s just a shame I was not a part of the slamming and bouncing mosh pit in front of the stage. Had to protect my camera. Or maybe I am just getting older… Doh! I hate feeling like that.

Genre : Pop

Rudebox. Latest release from Robbie Williams. Not a masterpiece but definitely something very different. Quite electronic and old school. I’m not sure about Robbie rapping, a quite lame resemblance of Streets, but on the whole the album is probably worth listening, at least once :) . I really like the touch of electronica in it.

So these are my favorites (in descending order):

• Lovelight
• We’re The Pet Shop Boys
• Never Touch That Switch
• The Actor

The rest… Hmmm… I would not be bothered much.