Hoho, an americans votes. You can't vote. Can you ? I don't know.
This is what I wrote down while the voting period was progressing.
It took me 5 tries to get the order 'something' to how i felt.
Then we were surprised how low Cyprus went, and how high Denmark finished.
For the past few years, Turkey and Romania have been 'vote getters'.
This year was no different.
Here is who I liked, and how the points disperse:
12 points toooo - Greece . They finished 8th with 140 votes.
10 points to - Cyprus . They finished 21st with 27 votes.
8 points to Moldova . They finished 22nd with 27 votes.
7 points to Germany . They finished 1st with 246 votes.
6 points to Serbia . They finished 13th with 72 votes.
5 points to Belgium . They finished 6th with 143 votes.
4 points to Albania . They finished 16th with 62 votes.
3 points to Romania . They finished3rd with 162 votes.
2 points to Georgia . They finished 9th with 136 votes.
1 points to Ukraine . They finished 10th with 108 votes.

I wanted to give more,more,more. So I listed a top 20:
11 France They finished 12th with 82 votes.
12 Russia They finished 11th with 90 votes.
13 Bosnia and Herzegovina They finished 17th with 51 votes.
14 Belarus They finished 24th with 18 votes.
15 Turkey They finished 2nd with 170 votes.
16 Denmark They finished 4th with 149 votes.
17 Spain They finished 15th with 68 votes.
18 Iceland They finished 19th with 41 votes.
19 Portugal They finished 18th with 43 votes.
20 Ireland They finished 23rd with 25 votes.

I found it slightly surprising that Russia gave 12 points to Georgia.
For our top songs, 1-4 were the easy part. After those, we wanted to vote
for France...but they ended up 11th on our list.
........READ ON FOR MORE ABOUT OUR ESC 2010 FINALS .........

We hope you were one of the 'over 120 million' people who watched the Eurovision
finals on May 29th, 2010. I see www.eurovision.tv has released the voting results for the semi-finals . Finnland and Malta came in 11th and 12th in the first.
http://www.eurovision.tv/page/news?id=18323
And Sweden just missed out; Croatia needed double their votes, and Slovenia
amassed 6 total votes. And if that was bad, Swiss only received 2 votes.

Now for the Finals, and all I can remember is Germanys' Lena - Satellite is the winner ! Congratulations, and we know next years show will be grand.

I'll get back to more about the finals voting in another post. Here are my notes
on tonights performances:
1 Azerbaijan - She sang well and the dancers did fine. was not impressed.
2 Spain - Great performance, singing . No votes as usual ?
3 Norway - he can sing.Nothing great.
4 Moldova - Beautiful. The music is kind of jumpy,vocals and dance Great.
5 Cyprus - Great song and performance. Maybe too good for ESC.
6 Bos & Herz - The message 'melt the ice' my playback started looping over.
7 Belgium - So intimate, and a crowd favorite? He did great.
8 Serbia - My playback was skipping..so simple a song and great fun.
9 Belarus - Their english was very good tonight. A delicate song, so deserving.
10 Ireland - Very crisp native english vocals. Very good song.
11 Greece - I love the music tempo,the dance, and the leads confidence.
12 UK - So friendly and polite. Kind of 'blah' performance.
13 Georgia - Wonderful song and singer.
14 Turkey - Opening vocals were hard to hear. Pretty good act.
15 Albania - Great lead singer, and a solid performance.
16 Iceland - Sounds terrific yet not much of a song.
17 Ukraine - Very strong vocalist. I listened intently,and its a good song.
18 France - Smile! Not much of a song, just fun to watch and hear.
19 Romania - Um speechless. They are great in the performance.
20 Russia - A great band. The song doesn't stir my emotions at all.
21 Armenia - Not my type of music. Wonderful hair!
22 Germany - Lena,Lena chants before she started. Really classy music.Happy.
23 Portugal - Hard to hear her opening vocals, she finishes strong.
24 Israel - definitely not my type of music.
25 Denmark - By now, i just want it to be over. Very good song performance.
And then, for some reason Spain did a repeat performance.
I had several problems with playback; songs 8,9,10,12,13,14,16,21,24,and 25.
Apart from Lena, and the Russian dirge, there wasn't much 'cheer' or humor
in the show. It was all drama. Yet the music is a great collection of
diverse talents.
Alright, I am going to end this post. And I will reveal my 'vote' next.

Well, the eurovision.tv servers must have had a full load tonight. Me, I got wrapped up in a project, and missed
the first 6 songs. I should have been on in time for Switzerland, but I kept getting 'blank' pages from the
website. I mean blank, nothing there. when we finally did get a page, it had no CSS. No style.
The website did a fantastic job, by providing an alternate page; one without the FaceBook feeds.
My contest was flawless ! Thanks and hope to see you for the final.
So, for the first six songs, all I had to judge them by was the 'snippet' they showed while the voting occurs.
Here is my notes:
1 Lithuania fun.
2 Armenia - well not enough to form an opinion.
3 Israel - they usually have a great vocalist. Not enough clip to judge.
4 Denmark - great song .
5 Switzerland - why do they always seem to be out of style ? my apologies for that.
6 Sweden - good, but not great. missed the performance.
We did get to see the rest of the show:
7 Azerbijan - Nothing special , and not bad. First song we heard of tonights show.
8 Ukraine - She performed well. song was unimpressive.
9 Netherlands - I loved it.Best Dutch performance I ever saw. GOOD
10 Romania - It was a simple song, performed well. Nothing bad.
11 Slovenia - That was awesome. Song, costumes, performance=WOW. GOOD
12 Ireland - Started out great. The song was too long for me. It kind of dragged on.
13 Bulgaria - Not much of a song.
14 Cyprus - In English! Great performance. GOOD
15 Croatia - They are great! Would anyone vote for Croatia ? (no)
16 Georgia - That 'wink' was superb. GOOD Probably bomb in the finals ?
17 Turkey - So average a song and group. But really GOOD.

When it was all over, and nine countries had advanced, I had to wish for the Netherlands to get in.
They didn't. I figured Sweden would get it. They didn't. The tenth winner was Denmark.

Overall, Greece was the best song. However, I do not think they will win.
Tonight, Cyprus topped my memory of Belgiums song. We will see who gets more votes in the final.
The Turks could do well with a better performance...and
Romania deserves another look.
I am afraid Ireland will probably be in last place...but I wish you the best of luck.

Albania, Moldova, Belarus, and Georgia will probably be middle of the final list.
Serbia, one of the few 'young guys' needs to find the magic, and the Azerbijan and German young ladies
are certain to get many votes. I am leaving out of few contestants, but France has a great song,
Spain has a pretty good song, and the UK song is very good.

ESC 2010 OSLO First Semi-Final
For the first few somgs, I was cheerily surprised to hear such a vast display of ethnic music.
This was a good contest, although nothing real exciting to talk about.
I had a terrible time with my connection. But it got better once i figured out the FaceBook
feed was feeding me crap , and messing up my audio/video of the contest..
In firefox, I right clicked and selected 'Block Images from FaceBook' .
I didn't have any problem after that. Well the sound was out of sync for a minute.
After all was done, I only had nine contestants that I marked as GOOD.
All that aside, my notes:

1 Moldova - GOOD. That's all i wrote down. They may have been second only to Greece.
2 Russia - ...my feed was too bad to judge. A cool ethnic sound.
3 Estonia - very pop song, had a nasty echo or loop that was disorienting. Was that intentional?
4 Slovakia - Dark song. My feed jumped into Finlands song before this was over.
5 Finnland - I liked it ! The performance felt like Abba was back in the contest. GOOD.
6 Latvia - She can sing well. But screeches at times, and the song was too slow.
7 Serbia - Good, clean fun song. A popstar in the making. GOOD
8 Bosnia & Herzegovina - Would have loved to hear it. I rebooted because my connection was bad.
9 Poland I got back just in time to hear ...next country is Belgium... my feed had lagged so far behind.
10 Belgium - Reminded me of James Taylor; a man and his guitar, on stage with a microphone. GOOD
11 Malta - GOOD
12 Albania - Cool song and performer.GOOD
13 Greece - Pretty awesome song. GOOD
14 Portugal - A true ballad type song, and a fine vocalist.
15 Macedonia - The song seemed so out of place and cold. Like a rap artist on family hour.
16 Belarus - For once, I think they did GOOD.
17 Iceland - The audio jumped all over when i was watching/listening. GOOD

The qualifiers : Bosnia&Herzegovina, Moldova, Russia, Greece, Portugal, Belarus, Serbia, Belgium,
Albania and Iceland .

The contest didn't seem to have as many shots of the crowd 'flag waving' as in past years.
That is good. The atmosphere was very much like a family gathering. Very sweet, indeed.
What was lacking was a young man, or woman seeking the crowds approval. nobody requested
'hands in the air' or tried to make a statement. And each performer received nearly the same amount
of applause. There was no apparent 'crowd favorite' , as far as i could tell.

The Estoniis seemed to have dropped a horrible acapella number, where they usually have a vote getter.
Belarus took a huge leap forward. Greece has a veteran performer again, and he is excellent.
Belgium. Alas, they got in to the finals. Never have i seen Belgium make the finals. WTG .
I felt so bad for the Russians, and then 'surprise' they made the final.

After all songs were over, and finally I heard the 5 automatic qualifiers clips.
The UK song sounds good, I had to look to see who Germany was, Spain I could tell,
and I don't remember France or Norways songs.

I'm sure it seems rather trivial as to what operating system we use to write and upload our web pages. Yet, this is a first: our
May 18,2010 front page
marks the first time we did not use a Windows application.

We are spending more time working with linux. It's not that much different.
All of our 'files' are still in our Windows folders, so we feel kind of naked.
We are using our Tumblr
blog to write our opinions and likes/dislikes of the Vector Linux 6.0 KDE Classic
distro we installed a couple of days ago.

There are so many important things IRL we need to attend to right now. Wish us good luck. We hope to have some Eurovision favorites and story links in our next post.

The YouTube scene has been pretty quiet. The MySpace scene is quiet also. Facebook is busy 'linking' everything to absolutely confound you as to what people write in their profiles...maybe ?

Our pages are probably out-of-date.
We noticed a new Despina Vandi forum created at http://www.devaqueen.gr/ , and they have uploaded several Despina videos on YouTube . We wonder if the creaters came from the abandoned despinavandi.info site. can't say.

We were thinking about creating a 'default' front page.
For these times when we have no news. That way people who are new to cleaverb.net can get an idea of what we offer.
But here we are playing games at pogo, again.

We are distracted by http://www.pogo.com new Risk game.
So we created a

Pogo Risk page, and added a few help pages
and then... we worked in our 'old' Linux to update our software.
that was quite an experience, for a windows user.

We are getting ready to try Microsofts' Security essentials,
just to keep our Windows partition protected.
Yet we intend to switch entirely into Linux before June.