Tennis

Blog Comments

  1. kleo's Avatar
    It looks logar no more (Feb.13 ) we're growing better now - I have used some new recipe with Google ads.. hmm..
  2. kleo's Avatar
    Just write me , I'll create one for you. The person who opens a lounge would still be you.
  3. RusTV's Avatar
    I did not understad how to create a new lounge.

    Only found a fixed number of lounges and no option to create a new one.
  4. tennisforlife's Avatar
    Please watch this! This is a video of my friend and he is trying to go pro someday! he doesnt know that i posted this haha. Watch and pass it along! Thanks!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_dVpVKR5yE
  5. kleo's Avatar
    I have translated both "FAQ" and "Rating" docs which I believe are crucial for understanding the TMM's ideology; don't miss them if you're in favor of TMM! Hope my English is tolerable.
  6. kleo's Avatar
    I chose a different hosting plan from my TMM's provider and NOW IT RUNS TWICE AS FAST! Why should I not have done it before? It was very discouraging I suppose to see this wonderful program running THAT slow! I just wrote to the provider's support asking, guys, i've tracked timings for my pages, they are slow. They replied instantly, why don't you just try a better hosting plan? -- I also spen a week trying all types of Google ads system work for this site. I scrapped several scripts from other people and finally composed a working one for myself. What stunned me is that Google generally opens its ads in the same window with iframe, but "for some countries like China we find it more feasible to open a new window". O-kkkkay! Is Russia like China? They probably think so. If my IP tells them that I'm from this country, they just launch a new window and redirect the ad to it. But you don't have handles, and the parent window does not receive any status. Therefore, all those nice astrack.js scripts turn usless. Check for my script at the bottom of the TMM's start page to see how I bitched with this problem.
  7. kleo's Avatar


    Here is some more stats: counting only summer season matches (Apr 16 thru Oct 15), time series expanding for 5 years; RED (matches played), BLUE (players). Look, there was a drop in 2008; but we recovered all right.
  8. kleo's Avatar
    Finally come up with hooking up the marvelous GeoIP package (free database of ip-to-world-city). Now, when you hit TMM the first thing it does is look up your world location and select language for the interface, [currently of English French or Russian]. It also puts a site visitor home city to a list "today who visited us were from .." - cooking a nice evening pie. It looks like our Moscow lounge is mostly visited by moscovites, but occasional birds also occur from all other world. -- The other good thing I did is putting an ad to Facebook with promo of TMM. It gets something already. Certainly this is a way to drain funds from my PayPal card which I made this summer but hardly have had a chance to use since paying for the domain services.
  9. kleo's Avatar
    Just put the players list into an Ajax container. JS forums are full of naive questions why the hell my js code is not run in ajax box? Well, here's a mootable (= mootools-powered zebra table with sorting, dynamic column widths, etc) run in ajax box And a pretty big table, too.
  10. kleo's Avatar
    I have had a run with issues I scheduled above a month ago. The stuff is now fully in unicode including chat box. The design has been raised 100 points to the extent of self-increased knowledge of the subject. Not artistic yet but still good... ehhh better. I also did French translation using online Prompt English-to-French dictionary. My French is very basic, I guess. I can read French magazines and Jean Paul Sartre, too. In programming, I overdid myself and concluded with a hi-fi demo on every click on that main window.. now that runs perfectly as I like. It's 20,000 lines of Perl code and whenever I hear of php I always think best of the man who wrote "php is good but to me it always looked like a scissored perl.. so why try php if you can write in Perl?" Indeeed. -- That stuff needs finishing in every language, though. It lacks authentic look in every other language. Well there has to be a local guy to kindle that candle, and I hope I can produce some little money for these efforts.
  11. kleo's Avatar
    Just completed with the Appro One:

    Looks good! It may as well be called "My first CSS windou". Once upon a time I used Blender 3D soft to make a girlie 4-second animation clip. I had to create a brand-new raquet for the girl, from scratch I used my own Wilson for dimensions. Here is the same Wilson and am again a happy copyright owner.

    Well, I admit it looks like authentic "early 90s" webdesign. I have used grey colors to make it look dull because I know that merry colours will make me sick in two days to look on a dumbass page like this.
    Updated 08-29-2010 at 02:02 PM by kleo
  12. kleo's Avatar
    Yet another 4.0 guest received, and I lost again 18/24,16/24 - but one must lose being 3.5 against 4.0, anyway. It was +37C, actually the very first time to play in such heat for me; I couldn't have done better, and I took almost all the points I should have, consuming all the water from the bottle. As I mentioned above, it's easy to talk conditions of the match beforehand, using TMM's offer, and I do stipulate playing long tiebreaks rather than usual match because it's much harder to withstand the heat serving for 5-6-7-8-9...points on one's serve than just let it pass over on every two points.
  13. kleo's Avatar
    The tennis match machine worked fine for me, as I had 4 matches during the last week with four different people coming to play against me, mostly from Moscow, on a court known to be free of charge; let them pay 15-20$ per hour in Moscow, having said all about their real social value; all they need is a public outcry - @Dokole? ; but as stated above, there're two free and accessible clay and asphalt courts in my banleau to where I place TMM offers to come and play against me, regularly through the last week, and bingo! - I have had 4 matches(1 win, 3 lost).
  14. kleo's Avatar
    The guy was actually 4.0 and he did it 24/10 in a long tie; that's a good score for me, the ball was really fast. It's a good way not to get 6/0 against someone who's sure to beat you by talking into playing a long tiebreak. An it's also alternative better to us fragile amateurs in hot weather. -- I wonder if I start using PayPal soon, they say its available now here, and I wish I had ordered one of those electric boosters for my bike earlier. It's amazing weather for biking, and with those boosters I could enjoy visiting locations with nicer riversides.
    Updated 07-21-2010 at 07:37 AM by kleo
  15. kleo's Avatar
    Redemption comes upon me for putting ostracism upon my opponents favorite tennis weapons. - I was so much upset after losing that match that for three or four days felt no nostalgia for my raquets, at all. Then an old partner of mine called me to settle a stage for battle between us. I agreed because I can hardly remember if I ever lost a set against him. We met on the only hard court in town, at the city stadium (10$/hour), and played two long tiebreaks, which I won 24/20, and then 24/15. I hit some down-the-line aces and also one classical backhand return winner, making my opponent wonder at the speed and angle. [I can't put a link to my opponent photo as I did before, because he's not in Motivation list any more. There is "a Door Out" for people who would like to disengage from club, and I guess he used it when his h2h stats against me became bad .] - Thus I had a pleasant time on court under the evening sun, and after talking cheerfully and shaking hands with my frusrated partner I leave the box. My bike was standing near the box, but too outside it, as I found out the back wheel was completely deflated. I suppose some young criminal with a long needle did it, because the camera was prickled twice. What a mess for one evening!
  16. kleo's Avatar
    More screenshots of the stuff:

    A: This is a court reservation online utility; written back in 2007; it takes online courts info from the courts host site and converts it into online-clickable format on my site; it was a good and challenging task, programming this kind of interface. I hope some day it is used:



    B. This is a courts WIKI start page: the nested accordion mootools taken from a German site http://blog.medianotions.de/assets/d...accordion_1.2/



    C. This is a forum: simple but effective, and almost everybody likes it:



    D. This is page with matches played, in date order. Anybody can leave a comment:

  17. kleo's Avatar
    Two good things I did last week - A) I tested the program in UTF environment - it works; Vietnamese language supported, - in order to suggest using my program to local foreign communities here in Moscow; and B) I have made a census of Moscow courts by means of the WIKI courts database. Such a tool (courts WIKI) had been added to the program at the very beginning (4 years ago) , now it seems right time to analyse the results. It seems to be the best data ever collected on Moscow courts. It struck me not so long ago when I read on New York park courts system that one can play tennis 8 months in New York for 100$, 20$ for pensioneers, 10$ for juniors, and there are 600+ courts available for that in parks of NYC. I wrote about that in our Motivation forum. It would not be easy to make people believe that. We have had a long tradition of making back-to-back comparisons with America in Soviet times, saying "they have to pay for medicine! for education! for electricity! etc.. we are lucky not to live there!" Here we are in 2010. There are (according to our WIKI database) 650 courts in Moscow, 33% of these are indoor courts, 40% are open clay courts. These courts are located in 140 addresses; they can be categorized as follows: A) courts available for hour rental at commercial price (summer 2010): 25$/hour for open clay courts and 45$/hour for indoor courts - 44%; B) V.I.P courts available to club cards owner and/or for prices starting from 75$/hour - 11%; C) courts belonging to city stadiums, prices starting from 15$/hour for open and 30$/hour for indoor - 24%; D) courts belonging to various city owners (institutes, plants, municipal bodies, etc.), usually available through phone calls, pricing from 15$/hour for open courts, - 7 %; E) courts owned by tennis schools, mainly not available for hourly rent - 6%; F ) parks courts, prices ranging 8$/hour to 15$/hour - 3%; G) courts owned by closed institutions, used by their personnel and friends - 3%; H) free, wild, abandoned courts - 2%. So, there is not much to compare. Playing full summer season (April 15 - October 15) here at least once a week, (25 matches) makes 50 hours, 20$/hour average, you are at 500$/season, paying 5 times more (and playing probably 2 times less) then anyone similiar in NYC.
  18. kleo's Avatar
    Moscow, May 2010. -- I can't stand making another vivid comparison : you're operating an old-fashioned nuke core and slowly putting off the graphite rods.. What happens? Neutrons become extremly multiple, reactions grow exponentially. -- That's how warmth and sun affect us in May, tennis amateurs in Moscow. No more solitary voices in the dark: "Hey, is there anybody out there? [.. = another idiot like me to pay 150USD for couple hours in a cold pumped structure just across the Moskva river?] Indeed, there is no better time to come and see how the Kleo's Famous Tennis Match Machine works. It's appalling, those powerful Linux server guts push Apache throttle up in the red sector..
  19. kleo's Avatar
    Well, not so good in St.Petersburg. The second largest, 4-million city in Russia has had already something long-standing for tennis amateurs - creyda.ru; to me, this is a dull example of static content, nothing interactive. But it's got history, and all active tennis players are there , so chances for their migrating spontaneously were low... An unless really big money were spent, or some influential propaganda were triggered, or creyda.ru were fell to ashes by local executive branch, - Motivation is doomed in this city. However, there is a promising start in Kiev. I like how things go there . In 4 months, they have got 30 active players. We have just started a 3-months-long ladder tournament, a club T-shirt to winner, just to get more players involved.
    Updated 05-10-2010 at 11:57 PM by kleo
  20. kleo's Avatar
    Who benefits most from this program, this is an active and enthusiastic tennis beginner, most probably in late twenties or early thirties. These guys may progress very quickly in tennis, because their health conditions, muscles, ancles, heart, lungs - everything is ok, and given all the free time and enough money to spend on tennis, this yearns results. Most likely, years can completely erase this enthusiasm. Enjoy it from time and play mere 12 matches in twelve months, this is what I can see from statistics of over-forties people like us. So, having all these sorts of public around in one room may cause trouble, for sure. There are ways used to set back the tensions by creating a cold and formal atmosphere of IDs, I even saw a site where a profile photo was a must, and a new player was supposed to come and make a photo at the office so they all looked the same. This is what I think is completely boring; we do not have any ID requirements at all, instead, we all know each other by nicks. If you like it, you may put all this info into the profile, give photos, too; but one is not required, all that he or she wants is find a match opponent.
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