The Diablo Swing Orchestra concert from Sweden at Aurora on February 23 was unexpectedly great. Based on the description «metal, operatic vocals, orchestral instruments», I expected some gloomy Scandinavian death metal with summoning Satan. But the band was a very pleasant surprise.

Something very strange happened with the sound, though. It recorded only into the left channel, so I had to fix it, although I checked the gear and everything seemed fine.

Today (well, already yesterday) I filmed The Ghost Inside from the States at Arktika. Surprisingly, the camera microphone held up. The sound on stage is of course completely different, but the result turned out dynamic.

I got back from Thailand. On the way home I had to wait six hours at night at Phuket airport before check-in for my flight started. I was really counting on the Irish pub at the airport, but it turned out it was open only until 11 pm. As a result, everything at the airport was closed except the flight check-in counters. During those six hours I explored all three floors of the airport, shot some video, and even found a power outlet to recharge.

I wrote this little script before New Year. It goes through all databases in CouchDB and builds all views one by one. Leaving it here.

<?php

            set_time_limit( 0 );

            // all dbs
            $ch = prepareCurlResource();
            curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://localhost:5984/_all_dbs' );
            $data = curl_exec( $ch );
            $dbs = json_decode( $data );

            foreach ( $dbs as $db ) {
                // skip _users and _replicator
                if ( substr( $db, 0, 1 ) == '_' )
                    continue;

                // getting all databases
                $chCC = prepareCurlResource();
                curl_setopt( $chCC, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://localhost:5984/' . $db . '/_all_docs?startkey="_design/"&endkey="_design0"&include_docs=true' );
                $data = json_decode( curl_exec( $chCC ) );

                if ( false === empty( $data->rows ) ) {
                    foreach( $data->rows as $design ) {

                        // creating views of design
                        if ( false === empty( $design->doc->views ) ) {
                            foreach( $design->doc->views as $viewName => $tmp ) {
                                echo 'Creating view: ' . $db . '/' . $design->id . '/_view/' . $viewName . "
";

                                $chCC = prepareCurlResource();
                                curl_setopt( $chCC, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://localhost:5984/' . $db . '/' . $design->id . '/_view/' . $viewName . '?limit=0' );
                                curl_exec( $chCC );
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }

            function prepareCurlResource() {
            $ch = curl_init();
            curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_PORT, 5984 );
            curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false );
            curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
            curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array( 'Content-type: application/json' ) );

            return $ch;
            }
            

The year was insane. Packed. With everything that follows from that.

Vuokatti

We saw the year in again in Finland, at the Vuokatti resort. Spent a whole week riding great slopes — completely wore ourselves out. By day two or three the regular slopes had got boring and we wandered onto various extreme runs. Forest, drop-offs, you’re tearing along a track between trees and thinking, how the hell do I stop. That’s where I learnt that braking by grabbing trees is a really bad idea. That’s also where I jumped off a small mound badly and pulled some ligaments in my knee. No real consequences, apparently — even kept riding the same evening, just on slightly bent legs. Bend them more and there’s hellish pain. But it was awesome.

The resort, with a view onto Lapland.

The New Year holidays went well. I didn’t spend long in St Petersburg. A couple of weeks later Anya and I went on a trip — Tallinn–Barcelona–Tenerife. My first more or less serious trip into Europe.

Tallinn.

Tallinn was very cold, but warm in its cosy atmosphere.

Barcelona.

Barcelona is beautiful in its own way. We were there in February — it wasn’t cold but not hot either. Few tourists. A pleasant, calm atmosphere. Even the rain didn’t spoil it.

Tenerife.

Tenerife is wonderful in its own right. A volcanic island of eternal spring. Once we got there, we couldn’t avoid an adventure. We were going to rent a flat, but on landing we couldn’t reach the guy who was supposed to hand over the keys. Had to spend the night in a hotel — which we had to hunt for, since prices in the hotels there were insane. Luckily it all worked out, and they even gave us a discount on the flat equal to what we’d paid for the hotel night. Some day I’ll post all the photos from that trip.

Then work began — I worked this year solo, which I think I more or less managed. A series of concerts followed. I went to a huge number this year. The most memorable:

MC Xander (UK), Aurora, 18 February 2012. Just very cool.
Rocky Leon (Austria), Orlandina, 16 March 2012. The man is pure positivity.
(hed) p.e. (USA), Aurora, 4 April 2012. Style.
...And My Friend Lorry (...И друг мой грузовик), Zoccolo, 13 April 2012. Finally caught one of their shows.
Delfin, Zal Ozhidaniya, 21 April 2012. Emotion.
PTVP, Orlandina, 1 May 2012. Power.
Zebrahead (USA), Aurora, 17 May 2012. A blast.
Slugabed (UK), SKIF XVI, day 1, 18 May 2012. One of the most pleasant musical discoveries of the year.
The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble (Netherlands), SKIF XVI, day 2, 19 May 2012. Outer space.
Za! (Spain), SKIF XVI, day 2, 19 May 2012. Madness.
Est Est Est, Zoccolo, 25 May 2012. The right words.

And there my 2011/2012 concert season ended. Summer arrived. That spring there was an unexpected, banal realisation — that nothing is impossible. Vanya had a birthday; I was on the metro thinking what to give him, no ideas, almost ready to walk into Pir O.G.I. and ask Misha Fenichev from Est Est Est to record a video greeting… That’s how this video was born:

Summer came, I was listening to Slugabed and other post-SKIF stuff non-stop, and Anya and I went on holiday. Such a holiday that I still can’t quite believe it happened.

Beautiful Lisbon.

In Berlin we partied. In Porto we walked and admired. In Lisbon we were at the Optimus Alive festival, where I saw The Cure, Radiohead, The Kills, Warpaint, Tricky, Zola Jesus and many others. I even put together a little film about the trip:

Summer passed, and autumn came along with a lot of unpleasantness. On the bright side — concerts started up again.

Yet another wild rave-out at Enter Shikari. Glavclub, 14 October 2012. Photo: Svyat Bunkov.

A Place To Bury Strangers were finally brought over. With a new album, no less. Zal Ozhidaniya, 16 October 2012.

PTVP did a great job presenting their new album at Zal Ozhidaniya, 8 November 2012. Photo by Vanya.

Then came a mind-expanding episode in the form of the Elektromehanika festival — a lot of cool, varied music.

Byetone (Germany). Threw a techno rave and dropped us back into Berghain in Berlin (Elektromehanika, 23 November 2012).
Pantha Du Prince (Germany). Made everyone dance to non-trivial music.
Jacaszek (Poland). Opened the proceedings.

Probably time to wrap up the concert section.

Towards the end of the year our efforts to record interviews with artists started bearing fruit. We recorded quite a few of them over the year. And at the very end we launched a new website for the [uho] project, with a new programme guesting Shigeto. We recorded that interview a year ago at Elektromehanika; it’s the first programme I had a hand in — even my voice is at the start of it. Over the year Shigeto managed to release a new album, Lineage, which is very different from his first album but no less wonderful. It’s the music in the programme.

Literally tonight a New-Year edition of Record Dubstep went out, finally including our interview with Emika, which we recorded for the anniversary edition of Record Dubstep — but the team ended up holding it for dessert and put it out today. The second programme I had a hand in. This time fully as a translator — Sasha is on air speaking my words; I recently translated the entire audio of the interview for him.

God knows what else to add here. So much happened, but nothing else comes to mind.

Film of the year: Seven Psychopaths

Album of the year: Est Est Est — «Satan on Vacation»

City of the year: Berlin

Bar of the year: Chayki (I’ve finally got a favourite spot)

Loss of the year: Anya

This year I turned 25 — which I marked in a thoroughly trashy fashion :)

A lot of new people came along. Many of the old ones revealed themselves in a new light. Thanks to everyone who was with me this year. Thanks to the new ones. As one of my favourite musicians put it — «Truly valuable are people who somehow appear in your life and stay. The more friends you have, the richer you are spiritually. The important thing is that they don’t remain mere acquaintances. The closer they become, the better. And when they appear very unexpectedly — that’s like a gift». If you’re reading this — then most likely I mean you too. This little blog is read by no one but friends anyway.

And the track of the year — and the artist of the year. That’s without a doubt Kuedo, whose music, as the saying goes, is so soul-crushing. From spring all the way through to the end of the year.

May the new year be better than the one that’s gone. Hello 2013 — I’m walking into you with an almost empty battery. As for 2012 that’s passed — it can go fuck itself.

Now I'm cleaning up and I'm moving on, going straight and choosing life. I'm looking forward to it already. I'm gonna be just like you. The job, the family, the fucking big television. The washing machine, the car, the compact disc and electric tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure wear, luggage, three piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing gutters, getting by, looking ahead, the day you die.

Trainspotting.

Management at the office started uploading images with Russian filenames into news on the portal — things like Фото-Ресторана.jpg.

Images from news items are shown inside the app, so the app fetches them by these URLs.

The URL arrives in the app already percent-encoded, e.g.:

http://allcafe.ru/s/pic/news/!_2012/2012_12/%D0%A0%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD-Graf-in-%D0%A1%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BA%D1%82-%D0%9F%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B1%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B3-%D0%B7%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BD%D1%8F%D1%8F-%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B0.jpg

The app uses a class called AsynchronousUIImage that I found online about a year ago. It just loads the image asynchronously via NSURLConnection.

- (void)loadImageFromURL:(NSString *)anUrl {
    anUrl = [anUrl stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding];
    NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:anUrl] 
        cachePolicy:NSURLRequestReturnCacheDataElseLoad 
        timeoutInterval:30.0
    ];

    connection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request delegate:self];
}

The catch turned out to be in stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding. Since the URLs come in already percent-encoded, it looks like double-encoding was happening and the image simply wouldn’t load. And if the NSURLConnectionDelegate method connection:didFailWithError: isn’t implemented, you get a crash — which is what hit me.

The funny conclusion: if you have URLs containing Cyrillic characters, you have to escape them either on the server before sending them to the client, or in the client. Doing it in both places — doesn’t work. Doing it nowhere — also doesn’t work :)

Luckily I fixed it on the server side without breaking anything and avoided shipping an emergency client update. By the way, on Android there is no such problem.

Recorded an Est Est Est show for the third time.
They were presenting the new album «Satan on Vacation».

Cover photo by Dasha.

Tracklist:

01. Intro
02. Homer
03. Victory Day
04. Brodsky night, Svyatki skit
05. Svyatki
06. Plyonka
07. Kapitoshki
08. The Journalists
09. Already
10. Heroic Poem
11. Satan on Vacation
12. Spring
13. Résumé
14. Lisbon
15. Palette
16. The House Painter Duck
17. Autumn

Download (mp3, 320 kbps, 230 mb): Narod | Rutracker