Last night, we had another power cut in the flat around our area. Although a little frustrating, the part that really has begun to annoy is the fact that our ISP, or to be more precise, upstream of them, where Kazakh Telecom’s hardware comes into play, is unable to automatically enable internet access following suck black outs.
Normally, this would mean Irina waiting until 9am, phoning our ISP’s technical staff, and them then contacting Kazakh telecom to go and kick their server until it admits that the internet exists, and clients are wanting to connect.
However, as I previously noted on this blog, yesterday, today AND tomorrow are all public holidays. This means there are NO staff at the ISP, and no other contact methods are available. So it looks as though I will have no internet at home for a few days. I’m just hoping they and Kazakh Telecom both decide to do some work this Sunday, else it will be another day before I can get online.
In case any smart arses want to leave a comment, I am currently at the in laws, using their PC, as we came round for the day.
I really need to get on with my work over the next few days, to ensure I have some money available when I go to Britain, but it looks like I will just have to recalculate my spending money again.
It could have been worse, at least the power cut was in the middle of the night, so was not so frustrating as usual. That said my new UPS seems incapable of shutting down the PC properly, and so unless I catch it in time, the computer is just turned off; this is what caused the last hard drive to fail. I’ll hopefully trace what is causing the issue, and get it sorted soon.
Aug 31 2007
Another Power Cut
Aug 31 2007
21 Days To Go
In just three weeks time I will be in Amsterdam. Given the time difference, I should have hopefully just hopped off a train at Centraal Station, dumped my bags in a locker (to be picked up when Alex and ChrisD have arrived a few hours later), and found a nice coffee shop to… have a coffee in (?).
Four days of rest and relaxation there, and then onto Cheltenham and Evesham, to meet up with Dad & Jan and some friends from my old home town. From there, the plan is to get to Clydach, to stay at Mum & John’s, and finally meet up with Gwen, their little puppy.
Finally, the reason for my trip being timed for this period, will be to go down to Falmouth and see my brother, Nick, for his 22nd birthday. All in all, it looks to be a packed three weeks, and I am really looking forward to going back to Britain, and of course Amsterdam.
Aug 30 2007
Karra And Muska One Year Old Today
I can not believe it was really a whole twelve months ago that they were born. Until we had our own kittens, I was always cautious of cats. I liked them a lot, but if they were within my 50cm comfort region, I’d tend to feel uncomfortable. I have known a few temperamental cats in my time, who like to be stroked, seem OK, and then without warning scratch and bite hard. Part of the problem, I suppose, is that when the cats in question were not mine, I did not feel comfortable shouting at them if they behaved very badly. If our kittens start climbing the curtains, bite too hard or are trying to steal food from a kitchen surface, I feel ok to tell them off. Anyway, for whatever reason, I am now happy and totally relaxed around most cats (Siamese still require care), and will miss ours when I go to Britain in 3 weeks.
Search Terms That Led To This PostAug 30 2007
Tima Doing Well…
These are the photos we took of Dasha and Tima last weekend, when Balzhan, Ildar, Sasha, Dr. Natalya, Sveta, Losha, Igor & his wife, as well as Asen’s mum all came round randomly on one day!
First we have the traditional weigh in, which shows he has almost doubled in one week!
Next we have a couple of close up shots of mother and son
Now we have Dasha investigating what exactly is going on with the grey plastic box these weird humans keep putting in her box…
Finally we have Ira holding Tima, to try and give an idea of scale
PS Sorry for any blog readers who don’t find kittens cute. Tough. I do 
Aug 30 2007
Astana Day Concerts Videos #4
OK, as you may have read from earlier posts, I have been experimenting trying to find the best way to encode videos to ensure high quality clips on YouTube. So far things have not gone well. I have ascertained that I do need de-interlace the raw DV video from my camcorder. I have tried different ways of resizing from 720×576 to 320×240, including clipping, adding letter box strips, changing the aspect ratio, all to no avail – the video quality is still far worse than previous videos I’ve uploaded. I have tried both DivX and Xvid codecs, with medium to high bit rates, but I always seem to end up with quality that would look bad coming from an old mobile phone.
For now, I shall continue posting the videos as they stand. If someone has an idea about how to achieve better results, let me know. Similarly, if someone would like to have a copy of these, let me know which interests you, and we’ll sort something out…
First we have a short clip of the lasers being tested during the 7th Act at the Astana Day concert. Why have I included it? Watch out for a video taken later in the night, that shows just how impressive the laser show was 
As a small techy point, although the square and X don’t appear contiguous, to the naked eye, they were solid…
Here we have The 8th act singing in Russian…
Lastly (at least for this post), we have Alex, Ira and Ira’s Mum after the 8th act…
Aug 30 2007
Russian Copyright Obligations Clarified
A court in Moscow has confirmed that the head of the company that runs allofMP3.com is NOT breaking any Russian laws. Prosecutors originally bought a case against him for selling MP3s without (mainly Western) record companies’ permission, nor paying them. Russian music labels are not thought to have kicked up a fuss, as they have mostly signed up to a scheme to receive some royalties for each download. Check the BBC article for further information. It would basically appear that Russia has a different approach to intellectual properties, and if Western companies do not want to sign up to schemes that undercut their retail outlets (and so be seen to approve of AllofMP3.com) Russian authorities do not care.
Over here in Kazakhstan, although software is now a little more limited (it is now rarer to see pirated MS Windows or Office products on display for example), you can still easily pick up copies of Albums, MP3 compilations of a wide range of artists, and games for most CD/DVD based gaming systems, including PCs. It certainly saves a lot of money for the average Kazakh consumer, who otherwise could not afford to pay for the original real McCoy, especially at Western prices. The pirated copies are mostly produced in Russia, and other than being sold in CD cases, rather than larger sized cardboard boxes, are normally pretty indistinguishable from the retail versions in Britain. Manuals are often included as a PDF on the disc, and the case inserts are normally above average colour copies of the originals, though the back is often re-designed to include the contact details and logos of the Russian pirates/company involved.
- fre mp3 (1)
Aug 29 2007
The Barrel Restaurant
As I mentioned in the previous post, we (Ira, Me, Balzhan, Ildar, Masha, Dr. Natalya, Sasha & Sveta) went out to celebrate Dr. Natalya & Sasha’s new car. In the same way as you ‘wet’ a baby’s head, major accomplishments are celebrated with a drink over here; if you have something to drink, you should have a meal with it. So, we went to the restaurant that uses huge barrels as outdoor dining areas. We all had pork sashliq (kebabs) a little to drink, and generally nattered a little. Before hand, we went and inspected the VW Golf, which is a definite improvement over their old soviet-style car (could have been an old-style Lada?). After that, Sasha dropped the car back at the flat and walked to the restaurant, so he could drink as well.
Anyway, enough of the text, onto the photos…
So first we have a few shots of the car
Now we have the food, starting with the lovely, straight from the oven, lepioshka bread, followed by the potato sausage thingies, some (apparently) delicious salad and the main course – the sashliq
Oh, and the leftovers 
Finally we have the attendants of the evening’s festivities…
Lastly, Balzhan’s nails, of which she was very proud. We had been waiting a while for our food by this time, so Dr. Natalya was threatening to start nibbling on Balzhan’s hands…
Aug 29 2007
Weird Long Weekend – Kazakh Style
Due to the national holiday tomorrow (30th August), companies give their workers Friday off as well. Then make then come into work on Sunday. This means they have three days off in a row, then have to work six, possibly seven if the following Saturday bosses decide there is too much work and call everyone in again…
TF I’m working from home I have a very understanding boss. If only I could give myself a pay rise or company chauffeur… At least the selection process was painless for this role
Aug 29 2007
The Iraq, South Africa AND US Americans!!!
Thought I’d post a link to a YouTube clip whilst I wait to see if the new resizing method results in a much needed improvement in quality.
Anyway, click here to see the bright young future of America…
Although she has obviously been coached to include South Africa and ‘the’ Iraq in any of her answers. Unfortunately she seems to unable to answer the question regarding how 1 in 5 Americans can’t locate their own country on a map of the world, let alone subtly slip in the required references. I have seen better quality videos of the beauty contest, but the one linked to has helpful subtitles
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Aug 29 2007
YouTube Problems
Perhaps a more accurate post title would have been ‘Stupid, impatient Chris’…
Last night I finished uploading all 29 videos to YouTube from the Astana Day celebrations, specifically the concert held in the evening that Ira, AlexC, Ira’s Mum and I all went to.
BEFORE uploading dozens of videos that you’ve resized & re-encoded, in fact before the editing, resizing and recoding, use ONE video as a test. Do not assume all will be ok. My main problem is that I did not exactly follow the advice I gave to Alex’s brother (see the For Alex’s Bro – DV Video Transfer And YouTube post). For some reason, I decided that sticking to the aspect ratio was important, and ended up with a 300×240 pixel video set. Once uploaded to YouTube, they of course bludgeoned it into a 320×240 file. This led to an outstanding loss of quality…. Cue one day of work lost.
Lesson learnt… hopefully, plus it also forced me to learn how to save filter and codec settings to force me to use the correct settings in the future when using DV footage with YouTube. I’ve also got around to figuring out how to queue up jobs in VirtualDub. That way I can mark out the sections from each raw video I want to encode into smaller files, in one go, then leave VirtualDub to encode them all in one batch.
I hasten to add I am now testing one video to ensure the different approach (I’ve ended up adding narrow black vertical borders to ensure the resized video mantains the aspect ratio, and doesn’t crop off any video from the top and bottom), before re-encoding all the videos and uploading.
Next on the ‘To Do’ list is to figure out an easy way to accomplish 2-pass encoding without repeating the same steps 29 times over, and also find the sweet point in terms of encoding quality, beyond which YouTube will discard extra detail.
Live and learn…
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