Recently in Personal Category

Yesterday's catastrophic 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, left thousands of people homeless and in urgent need of medical help. Collapsed infrastructure and severe loss of food and drinking water are other imminent threats facing people after the earthquake.

I just donated money to the American Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders to help disaster relief in Haiti. So should you, no matter how small your donation is.

Update: Bill Maher (@billmaher) just tweeted:

Haiti: u know who gets away with murder? God. No matter what shit goes down, to the least deserving, he skates on "mysterious ways"

Sure, Tuesday's earthquake in Haiti further confirms that there's no fucking God out there...

Honestly, I'm sooo sick of winter! I can't stand the cold outside any longer! Can't wait for summer! Gonna spend some time in San Francisco and Napa this summer, then Boston and Maine in fall. Woo hoo! BTW.. the picture above is awesome, isn't it?

So it looks like that I will finally get some well-deserved time off next week. Unfortunately, it's gonna be only seven days. However, my boss assured me that I'll get two more weeks off before Christmas. Anyway, I'm planning on staying in the city, read a couple of books, drink some good wine and last but not least: blow some serious cash at my favorite record shops. Yup, nothing special indeed. Oh, and I also need to go to the Slovak Consulate here in New York to get my new passport. My current one is about to expire any day... jeez.

Hola! I just got my own Facebook vanity URL: http://www.facebook.com/sotek. Sweet! Don't forget to set your own ASAP!

To all of you who actually have time to read this blog: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Have a peaceful one and see you on the other side!

It kinda looks like me...

For last two days or so I've been furious over the upgrade from Movable Type version 3.2 to the new MT v4.21. Man! I had some fun with it, let me tell you! My personal blog template is gone, Filter27's comments don't show up, numerous server errors, etc.

Bottom line: Movable Type still sucks. Wish I could simply switch to WordPress... I'm sick of spending days and nights by upgrading a stupid software. I just want to blog...

So, yesterday I finally decided to upgrade my old Movable Type installation from version 3.2 to 4.21. Booo hooo! Guess what happened!? As you can see, all my templates are fucked. Damnit! And on top of that all comments are still in the database but don't show up.

Anyway... I'm gonna let it slide for today (I have to work all day long tomorrow) and do something about this mess on Saturday. Until then, stay tuned and sorry for the inconvenience! I will fix it ASAP.

I decided to do a little shopping today so I headed to Bloomingdales on 59th Street to get some new denim. I got two pairs of very cool True Religion cuts, both on sale. My total came up to $428 and change after discount - lovely. Anyway, so I paid with my debit card and headed to Central Park afterwards to enjoy the rest of the beautiful afternoon.

Now I'm home, looking at my account status online, and I am pissed of like hell. Those fuckers somehow charged me $148.21 on top of the $428+. WTF is that? An extra commission or what!? Calling customer service right now...

Update: The matter has been resolved.

So I'm using Twitter now. I registered a while ago, however, I haven't used the service at all. You can check out and follow my tweets at http://twitter.com/sotek.

I finally got my first-ever BlackBerry today: a fancy Curve in titanium. It was a pretty hard decision which one to choose - either the old-fashioned Berry or the fancy 3G iPhone. Berry won mainly because I just can't get used to a touch screen keyboard for some reason. So, my email accounts are now fully synchronized and up and running so I can finally start responding to all emails promtly. Well.. hopefully ;-)

So I'm almost done with moving and stuff. It's taking longer than I expected, however, everything should be finished in next few days. My new job is kinda hectic too - I'm friggin glad I've got at least some time to sleep. P.

Recently I had a couple of folks from Slovakia staying at my house for a few days. Good times, however, during their short stay I realized something very important: The sad truth is that in last few years I've been almost completely ignoring my old pals from back home. I feel like an asshole now. They were always there for me when I needed them. I better start calling them and keeping in touch again.

I decided to move out of my current apartment in Astoria, Queens at the end of this month. I haven't decided where I'm gonna move yet, but I'm thinking about staying in Astoria. The neighborhood here is nice, convenient and safe with lots of good restaurants, bars and pretty much everything else I need. It's also pretty close to the city and the subway has been running on time with no crazy delays at all.

I was thinking about getting an apartment somewhere in Brooklyn, however, that just doesn't seem like a good idea. Why? Well.. mostly for one reason: Have you ever ride the L train? Yup, that's exactly why.

Another day, another lame PR email spam in my inbox:

I came across your website http://www.filter27.com, and would like to propose a link exchange between your site and HotTanningBeds.com.

HotTanningBeds.com is a manufacturer and reseller of tanning beds for both commercial and residential use. HotTanningBeds.com currently has a PR3 as well as many prominent search engine rankings and we are constantly trying to do better.

Please consider adding our link to your site on your page: http://www.filter27.com/links.php.

[...]

Thank you for your consideration,

Angela Kanner
[email removed]
Cyberactive Marketing, LLC
9831 E Bell Rd. #110
Scottsdale, AZ 85260

Why the hell should I link to a site that sells BEDS on a site about electronic music!? Am I missing something here? Someone please give a few marketing lessons to this person...

DeepChord presents Echospace - The Coldest Season // Modern Love

This stuff blows my mind. One of the best albums of 2007.

Happy New Year to everyone! Hopefully it will be much better than the last one. As I wrote already a few days ago, 2007 wasn't very good to me in so many ways. Let's see what happens in 2008...

cv313 - Dimensional Space // 12", echospace [detroit]

This 12" blows my mind. The B side ("Space") is sooooo good I wanna cry. The deepness and warmth of that track is simply unreal. Possibly the best dub techno record ever. Jesus!

Note: I normally don't write about music on this blog but Filter27 is currently having a holiday break, so that's why...

Yup, one of the worst years of my life, period. 2007 also gotta be the first year ever that I failed to achive any progress, personal advancement, save some money or manage to make more money compared to previous year. And on top of that I'm about to spend Christmas alone for the first time in my life. Fuck that.

He got himself into accident few days ago and completely crushed his oldschool Russian-made car. The car he loved so much for so long is done, but luckily, he's OK with no injuries whatsoever.