Restaurant at Best Western's Tbilisi Art Hotel

11 April, 2017 | Restaurant reviews | 9 seen

This article is about restaurants review at Best Western's Tbilisi Art hotel located on Apakidze street 11 (behind the sports palace)

We visited this place on a Valentine's day 2017, ordered some basics, like Caesars salad, meal from fish and a dessert, also we ordered some glass of pink wine. Yeah, the basic stuff when taking your girl out.

Salmon with risotto 

Now, I wouldn't call this something special, let's say it was decent, not gourmet but decent. 

Lounge at Best Western's Tbilisi Art hotel

Chocolate fondue

Could be better, but still decent.

Hee Korean BBQ Grill in Chelsea, New York Review

10 April, 2017 | Restaurant reviews | 14 seen

Our latest trip to the United States was accompanied a lot by visiting local Asian cuisines, a Japanese Sushi place in Financial district (Zen Ramen and Sushi House, New York City) or Chinese noodle house in Philadelphia (Spice C - Hand Drawn Noodles in Philadelphia). Now it was time for Korean cuisine.

Hee Korean BBQ Grill is located on the corner of 6th Avenue and 27th street, which was just a few blocks away from our hotel room and INNSIDE NoMad hotel.

Frankly speaking, I do believe this was the first time for me visiting a Korean restaurant, and my first impressions were really good - unfortunetly I don't remember much from the names of the dishes we ordered, but they were great.

Menu at Hee BBQ Grill

As you can see prices are pretty affordable, and though I'm not an expert in Korean cuisine it was easy get to the point, by choosing among beef, shrimp, chicken or salmon base dish. I optet for some Beef Teriyaki which was just excellent

Beef Teriyaki

Served with grilled vegetables and rice. .

How To Order Goodies From US to Georgia - Usa2Georgia.com

9 April, 2017 | Living in Georgia | 103 seen

For those of you looking to ship goodies, like electronics, clothing, perfume e.t.c. from online stores located in the United States to Georgia, there is a simple, easy and affordable service - usa2georgia.com

I've been using usa2georgia.com for years, ordering items like hinges for my laptop (see: New hinges added to my HP Compaq 6510b), a laptop, equipment for DSLR camera, kitchen tools, even some food, clothing, perfume and more.

There is a small catch still, basically all of the items received in the US before been shipped to Georgia must be declared for customs, for items which price is more than GEL 300 a custom tax must be paid. Items worth less than 300 GEL are exempt from tax.

I always try to order some small items under $100 to avoid dealing with customs, as it might get really painful - you must go to Revenue Service to get some special tax payer code and taxes you are paying at the end are really not worth all of this process. 

In fact lately things in Georgia have developed pretty good, and there is little you cannot buy here. Back in 2012, 2013 and even 2014 it was tougher with product supply, and then I…

INNSIDE New York NoMad Hotel Review

8 April, 2017 | Hotel reviews | 36 seen

From the footsteps of mount Kazbegi in Rooms Hotel (Georgia) to the footsteps of the Empire State Building in New York city - that's how I could describe in short our hotel choice during the holiday season of 2016/2017

We booked Hotel Innside by Melia in New York city after our return from Philadelphia, for a 4 day sat and paid about USD 600.

This sophisticated hotel in the NoMad neighborhood of Manhattan features on-site luxury dining and contemporary accommodations. Madison Square Garden, Penn Station and the Empire State building are within 20 minutes' walk of INNSIDE New York NoMad.

Queen size bed

Though we booked a king size bed, we got a smaller queen size bed, us our room was on the 17th floor the nice view towards empire state building, especially in night - fully compensate this minor issue.

Floor-to-ceiling windows and contemporary decor are featured in every guestroom at the INNSIDE New York. A flat-screen TV, Bluetooth connectivity panel, Nespresso coffee machine, a complimentary refreshment centre including water, soda and juice, rainfall shower heads and complimentary WiFi are standard in each room as well…

Speed Up Drupal site by 76% Using Image Lazyloader

7 April, 2017 | Drupal Development | 10 seen

In this article you will learn how I managed to increase load times for a Drupal powered site (the one you are currently reading) by more than 76%.

Now the following tip will apply for Drupal sites heavily loaded with images. My website, which is now more than 3 years old,  features about 80% of photo stories, over the time, I have tried to limit my picture articles to 3 or less images, posting online the best of my work, but yes, there are articles with even 136 pictures, see Keukenhof tulips gardens in the Netherlands.

For each of the posts I'm using a head photo, done by using image fields from Drupal core, to make stories more Open Graph friendly. See: How to add Open Graph protocol for your Drupal site.

Now, I have tried many image optimization solutions, starting serving thumbnails ending compressing images in Adobe Lightroom, that have helped to speed up load times a lot, well  a 16mb image uncompressed in a post and then multiply it to at least 3 - 16x3 = 48 MB for a post with just 3 images. I compress my images specially for blog to about 100-200kb each, that helps a lot.

At one time I noticed…

Spice C - Hand Drawn Noodles in Philadelphia

6 April, 2017 | Restaurant reviews | 15 seen

I first discovered Spice C noodle house in Philadelphia back in 2013, and mentioned it on my article about streets of Philadelphia.

Now about 3 years later, re-discovered this place again, after arrived to Philly from NYC and stayed at a lovely Chinatown hotel - Sleep Inn, it turned out that Spice C Noodle House is just about a block away from our hotel.

Spice C Noodle house in Philadelphia

One of the things visitors will enjoy at this place, you can actually see how your noodles are prepared

Hand drawn noodles

It's allowed to photograph inside, but not allowed to make a video.

Shrimp noodle soup at Spice C

Mmm, yummy

Seagate Backup Plus Slim 1TB Portable External Hard Drive Review

5 April, 2017 | Gadget Reviews | 67 seen

I bought Seagate Backup Plus Slim 1TB Portable External Hard Drive at the Best Buy store in Manhattan, New York City at the start of 2017 for about USD 69. 

Now I could probably get a better price if opted to ship it online from Amazon store, see: Seagate Backup Plus Slim 1TB Portable External Hard Drive with Mobile Device Backup USB 3.0, Black (STDR1000100)

Back at the end of 2015, I bought a brand new Asus laptop with 500GB internal disk storage, the main goal for this laptop was to post-process photos taken by my Canon EOS Rebel T5 DSLR camera, after switching from JPEG to the RAW format, laptop started to run out of memory in about a year. To free up some space, I accidentally deleted some important pictures, which luckily I was able to restore. See: How To Recover Permanently Deleted Files (Canon CR2, JPG and more) on Windows

It was just the time to have a reliable backup for photos and videos. And here comes in Seagate Backup Plus Slim 1TB Portable External Hard Drive

Seagate 1TB Portable External Hard Disk

It comes with a 2-year limited warranty…

How To Shoot Indoor Photograpy

4 April, 2017 | Digital Photography School | 4 seen

Indoor photography covers a huge range of situations – from kids’ birthdays to high-end interior shootings. Basically, everything that is shot indoors.

Assuming that you don’t own studio lighting gear, all you’re left with is a light that’s already in your space. Because of that, indoor photography is often not-so-easy to shoot. Why? Because most of the time, the light in indoor spaces is poor and you need to learn to set your camera for low light situations.

Here, we’ll focus on some basic principles to follow while shooting indoors.

Problems disappear if there is a plenty of natural light

The indoor photography is a real test on how much do you understand your camera and settings that come with it. When you shoot indoors, manual mode is a must. Otherwise, in low light situations typical for indoors, on automatic mode, your camera will fire a built-in flash pretty much always. In such situations, you should avoid the built-in flash because it gives an unnatural, flat light that makes your subjects look unflattering.

Make the most out of the…

How I Lost 4.4 Pounds In 5 days In The Gym

1 April, 2017 | Health & Wellness | 18 seen

With this article I'm starting new blog series on blog - fitness, my first article, kind of warm up article for beginners,will cover details on how I lost my first 4.4 lbs (2 kg) in the gym after first five days of training.

For a prelude, I have been overweight for years, not obese, just overweight. My body weight have been in the range 210 - 242 lbs (95-110kg) for the past 10 years. My ideal body weight as I believe should be under 200 (90kg).

I live medium healthy lifestyle, with the biggest treat to health being smoking, which I want to get rid in the foreseen future. Though I eat pretty healthy and live medium active lifestyle including cycling and hiking in my weekly routine. See: Outdoor activities

Now, loosing body weight might be a tricky thing, I'm not into some diets, trying to starve my body in order to loose weight. 

It was bout 3 years ago, I started to think more about my health, and almost enrolled to the gym - see: Aspria -Fitness club in Tbilisi

Unfortunately I didn't enrolled back at that time, though coming years had been good for my fitness (at least in Summer months) I have been really busy with…

How To Build a Drupal List Page With All Users

31 March, 2017 | Drupal Development | 20 seen

In today's Drupal tutorial series I'm going to show a simple way how to build an authors page listing all users with their profile information + some other neat features.

A few years ago I was working on a Drupal project for large media organization and I was required to build an extended user profile system on Drupal. Recently I hired few freelance writers for my own blog / website and idea of having a nice author overview page sounded a must have.  

The further written can be applied to some micro social websites powered by Drupal, but for the ease of this tutorial I will stick with an user / author overview page for multi user blogs or media organizations.

Here is the final result:

Authors overview page on Drupal

You can see a live view here: Authors

In above view I have displayed info for authors taking info from profile field, which are following:  author picture, author bio and categories author writes articles about, as well displaying total article count for each author and sorting authors on page by total…

House of Madatovi - Tbilisi Restaurant

30 March, 2017 | Restaurant reviews | 15 seen

House of Madatovi is a really lovely Georgian style cuisine restaurant, located on the recently renovated part of David Aghameshabeli avenue.

See: New Life for Agmashenebeli avenue, Tbilisi

Madatovi restaurant features not only authentic Georgian cuisine with amazing serving, it's crafted of lovely details, like chandlers with paper house shades, wine bottles, shelves, more shelves. Tastefully.

Interior at House of Madatovi

Stylish places with rustic elements are popping a lot lately in Tbilisi. The interior seen here reminded a little bit something from Restaurant Barberastan

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Chandlers with paper house shades

Now, this is something nice, not seen before. I really like that and I might use this idea for our upcoming home remodeling works.

Georgian Cuisine at House of Madatovi

Now this was the biggest surprise - I thought I know a lot about Georgian cuisine, turns out - I don't. They had some great salads with baked pumpkins, which was just delicious (and I don't love pumpkins). Some really good veal meal and mcvadi served with pomegranate seeds. Not to speak about delicious Georgian…

ISO Settings for Night Photography

29 March, 2017 | Digital Photography School | 86 seen

The purpose of this article is to familiarize the user with the best practices regarding ISO settings for night photography. We will go over a basic introduction to ISO as well as a short guide on using different ISO values in relation to other camera settings in order to achieve best results.

One of the reasons casual photographers decide to upgrade to a DSLR camera is so they can capture quality photos during night.

However, DSLRs often require understanding of different camera settings and shooting parameters in order to achieve best possible image quality for night photography. One of these settings is called ISO.

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In film photography, ISO number is an indicator of film’s sensitivity to light. Similarly, in digital photography ISO number determines light sensitivity of a digital sensor. Higher ISO levels will produce brighter images, but it will also introduce more grain (noise) into the image.

With most digital cameras, ISO can be set to Auto, meaning the camera will automatically choose what ISO settings to use. It can also be set to manual, where the user chooses the ISO value himself. 

We…

Champions Academy Tbilisi

28 March, 2017 | Health & Wellness | 99 seen

Champions Academy in Tbilisi is a gym/ fitness / crossfit training facility, located on a 4-storey building on David Agmanashebeli avenue. 

I've enrolled at Champions Academy at the start of February 2017, with a goal to train my heart using cardio vascular trainings, also I'm using a little bit weight lifting and some crossfit workouts. 

The gym seem to be open starting 7:00 AM, which is great because of two reasons - first I love to exercise in the mornings, and second yes, this gym is located really close to our apartment. 

Unfortunately during the early hours, there are no trainers / coaches available, and I'm left to train my self using knowledge I have from my previous almost 20 years (though irregular training sessions). Luckily YouTube helps a lot.

The price per month without a trainer (which still is not available at 7:00 AM) - 160 GEL, with kind of limited access, just to the buildings second, third and fourth floor. Unlimited access, and probably some individual graphic from a trainer - 200 GEL.

The first floor seems is for power lifting, second floor is for dog sled and ropes, third floor is equipped…

Restaurant Kus Tba (Turtle Lake) in Tbilisi

26 March, 2017 | Restaurant reviews | 18 seen

Restaurant Kus Tba is located next to the popular recreational area Turtle lake in Tbilisi, here serves a traditional Georgian cuisine in a touristic sauce. 

I have been to this place several times, I cannot tell neither good, neither bad - I'm more neutral regarding this place, it definitely is not the cheapest, but also not the most expensive, from what I have met in Tbilisi. See Tbilisi restaurant reviews.

I have my favorite Turtle lake restaurant, maybe that's way I cannot be objective today - Intelligentsia Coffee Bar Tbilisi, which actually is located just few meters way from Kus Tba.

Cozy interior at Kus Tba restraunt

Salads with chicken filet dressed with matsoni

Sleep Inn Philadelphia

25 March, 2017 | Hotel reviews | 11 seen

Offering a fitness centre, Sleep Inn Philadelphia is located in Philadelphia. Free WiFi access is available. Each room here will provide you with air conditioning and cable channels. There is also a microwave. Featuring a bath or shower, private bathroom also comes with a hairdryer and free toiletries.

We booked this hotel at the start of 2017 (January) and stayed here for about 3 nights, during a short, but remarkable trip to Philadelphia. We paid about $120 per night. Though this hotel is listes as a 2 star hotel, it actually is really good, I realy love the location of this place, it's just a few blocks away from famous Terminal Reading market, and Greyhound terminal is very close.

Sleep in hotel in Philadelphia

The hotel is 100 m from Pennsylvania Convention Center, 800 m from Liberty Bell and 1.1 km from National Liberty Museum. Philadelphia International Airport is 11 km away.

King Size Bed at Sleep in Hotel