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No, seriously, I was not, although had a raquet and balls. This is a city for soccer and basketball. You may find the playgrounds everywhere for those two - but I had seen no tennis courts. There is one near the Stamboul University main building seen clearly from the satellite. Meanwhile I spent half a week looking out for beaches because of the heat (+41C). There is a wonderful Kilyos just north of Istanbul on the Black Sea (a.k.a. Kara Deniz), with white sand and long gentle beach, and I'd been ...

these are two finalists of MO-2011. The big box in hands of the winner (Valery) is a 70 mm aperture refractor telescope, the main prize of the tournament. We have had also a smaller box for the satellite tournament among those losing in first round of the main one (can't remember what it is called in English.. "grief-relief :0"?) OK, and now in July will start the Motivation Ladder. This is a long-long way ...

Today is April 16 - means everything to the club leagues. Them leagues are overwritten every April 16 and October16, but today is special sixteenth because it's actually the first day I could pass by most of the sidewalk free of snow. What a start of the springtime this year! You tell me now about the global warm. -- The traditional Motivation Open is under way since today, too. We have two annual events - the MO mentioned, and Motivation Ladder summer through October. This year, we will have two ...

I've recently calculated my mean of daily expenditures on providers for two sites are ~1$/day. So, if we want Google ads pay off these, we will need 10 times more clicking people, (10c/day currently). I'm rather concerned on the stats issues on both of TMM sites using google-analytics and a couple of runet-based counters. By March 1 this year, motivation.ru (M) used to collect 100 unique visitors a day, and tennismatchmachine.com (T) - only 10. Here we go and set up a redirect from M to T on March ...

and March here is just another winter month. So there are two more winter months to endure. I had spoken to my wife about going to Egypt (having arranged a 5-star for three all of us), but she said "No!" - and it was just a week before riots broke out there. Wise men and their wives. Then I had arranged a trip for just myself (secretly), booking flights to and from Cairo, and a hotel, etc. Yes, I did know about riots in Tunisia, but kept thinking of Egypt as a peaceful sunny place. So, ...