It is true, if you write online for personal reasons (hopefully you make the extra effort if your published work is for a company), your spelling could have been better, and quite possibly your grammar could be improved as well. I’m definitely not immune to either issue. That said, if I see kids ties, I do know there is most likely an apostrophe homeless this afternoon!
Help is at hand, as although Firefox has a spell checking facility built in, the grammar side isn’t covered. After The Deadline is available as either a Firefox and Chrome add on or a bookmarklet you could use in Internet Explorer. When activated, it can check for grammatical mistakes, and even remind you whether you’ve checked your text over, before hitting publish!
I’ve just checked, and it is also available as a plugin for WordPress and a few other systems.
May 19 2010
You’re Spellen Cud Of Bean Bettr
Oct 13 2009
Broken Backups
Well that is a relief! I have a (spoken) English lesson to give in an hour, and I couldn’t find my lesson notes from a couple of years ago, when I last helped Kazakhs try and improve their conversational English. In the end it turned out to be stored on the memory card in my broken phone, which I had luckily backed up to a random folder on one of my hard drives. This sort of situation reminds why I need to use the one of the various online backup services I’ve already signed up for. If I’d lost connectivity to the drive (as has been happening sporadically recently), and not thought to randomly check the Kaiser for the documents, I would have had to start from scratch with tonight’s lesson :/
Oct 08 2009
Speeching English Is Easy, Innit?
Due to a friend already having an overloaded diary when it comes to teaching English over here in Astana, I will hopefully have a couple of new pupils soon. Although there are obviously a lot of Russians and Kazakhs that teach English as a foreign language here in Kazakhstan, there are not that many native English speakers with enough free time to have live chats, to try and improve the language skills of a pupil who has often not conversed with someone who speaks English as their first language.
I’ll obviously not be posting their personal details, but they work at KazMunayTeniz, which should look pretty good on my résumé, as my previous pupils have been school age or retired pilots etc. Whilst it was interesting teaching them, to teach people from a state run company should add a few brownie points 
Feb 08 2009
xn--j1aaavekek6ad3ame – Great Domain Name?
So why on earth would I consider registering the domain name xn--j1aaavekek6ad3ame.com ? If you type the current domain name for this site with a Russian keyboard layout on a UK QWERTY laptop, the Cyrillic characters produced equates to xn--j1aaavekek6ad3ame. OK, so minimal drive by traffic involved, obviously, but it would make my life easier to have a redirect on there, rather than have to retype when I forget to flip back to a UK layout
Jan 30 2009
Wordz Cum EZ Nou
I have recently found my English language skills improving a little, as the scrabulous app (now renamed and slightly remodelled to meet legal requirements) in now back in full force over at Facebook. I managed to get a pretty good score by changing port to portmanteau. I’m not certain, but I think it is when you add two words sounds and meanings to create new word. Would that make Fandemonium a portmanteau? Or is that simply an adapted existing word, with just changing one letter?
Nov 08 2007
First Proper Snow Of The Winter…
Just woke up to see the world blanketed in snow. Although there have been a few attempts already, this is the first time it has properly settled. Although it looks nicer, this now means getting properly dressed before leaving the house (even I admit a shirt and light jacket aren’t best for walking in now ), and pretty soon trying not to fall over on the ice, especially when crossing the road. Also spoke to Seb for the first time in a long while this morning, and discovered he too has relented to the inevitable and signed up over at Facebook.
Anyway, I will try and grab some photos later on, but I must go for now, as I need to get ready for today’s English lesson. If Mrs Dowling could see me now, I think she would probably die out of fear for the language’s ability to survive my slaughtering of it, but there you go.
Hope all who read this do so in good health, and apologies for the long delays in between posts, I’m finding it difficult to get used to this getting up early to go to work malarkey again. I will hopefully get back into the swing of it soon.
PS Good luck to Con for this Saturday, and also to Alex. One for the tunes, one for the intercontinental moving
Oct 30 2007
3rd Day Of Work
As I previously mentioned, I now have a second job helping Kazakhs and Russians that want to improve their English through conversation with a bona fide UK citizen
I will try and keep the details anonymous, as I’m not sure that the people would want their names etc. publicly posted. Today was the first time I met my school girl pupil. And before anyone cracks any bad jokes, she is just 13, so nothing dodgy please… She is not as confident in speaking, and appears to have a smaller vocabulary than the other person, but she at least wants to learn. The man is a little more forthcoming when it comes to conversations, but as long as I have a structure in place for her lessons, I think it will go OK. If things progress well, I may have some more clients lined up, as their is a company close by that may want me to help their staff as well.
The time away from the flat has both its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, getting into the fresh air, and a brisk 40 minute walk each day is bound to be good for me, but I earn less there than I could at home writing commercial posts. Also, I am not really looking forward to the steps up to the building when the ice and snow kicks in – they are already quite slippery if it has rained, so I will need to remember to keep awake. Speaking of which, Mondays, Tuesday and Thursdays I will need to be at the office by 11.15am, and Tuesdays an hour earlier, which means I have to go to bed a lot earlier. In isolation, this is obviously not a problem, but to get the best paying opportunities for this blog, I need to keep the same hours as Americans, which previously meant not heading to bed until 4 or 5am. Obviously staying up this late and then trying to get to the office would result in a zombie like Chris turning up, which would not look too good, nor really give my students a fair deal. We will have to see how it goes, however today I found out that rather than an 8.45am start, I can leave an hour later, as the girl was expecting a 10am start, not 9am as I was informed.
Oct 26 2007
Started A New Job This Week…
Thanks to our friend Walton, I started a new job this week, teaching English to Russians and Kazakhs that want to improve their language skills.
Before people start spitting coke/tea/coffee all over their monitors, I should point out that I am really just there to provide conversational practice, rather than drill the intricacies of grammar rules into the victims pupils. So far I have one student four times a week, and another just once. As they don’t know this blog exists I am obviously not about to post their names, but the first is a retired man who used to work in the airline industry, and wants to improve his English for speaking to foreigners when he travels, and the other is still at school. The first person will have their lessons at 11.30am, which is good for me, as I don’t need to worry about getting to bed before 3am the preceding night, however as the 2nd pupil is still at school, I will need to be at the office by 9am once a week! Don’t go expecting too many blog posts on a Monday night for a while
Although this blog earns me more money per hour of work than this ‘real’ job, any extra certainly helps, as Ira and I will be travelling to Britain this Christmas for Mum & John’s wedding. Hopefully either Ira’s Mum or both parents will be coming as well, with Balzhan and Ildar another possibility. Anyway, I hope to make a proper post on the planned happy events this Yule tide a little later.
Sep 20 2007
Spring Clean Of Bookmarks…
OK, this is one of the last posts I will make whilst in Kazakhstan, so I intend to use it to catch up with a few articles, videos and sites I have been meaning to post about in the last few weeks. Otherwise I will return in a little under a month, and forget all about them probably…
BBC article on the growth in high tech online crime.
Article on 50 Cent’s promise to quit, which he gave prior to his album being beaten to the UK#1 spot.
Related article on fiddy postponing his European tour.
Cool article on speech to sign language translation software. Most impressive.
Another article, this time on how DNA data could be at risk if funding organizations succeed in twisting researchers’ arms.
Article on how Chernobyl is to receive a new steel cover.
Were they pushed, did they jump, or were they stage managed dives? Check out a little background info here on the continuing political family soap opera that is Kazakhstan…
Article on beloved uncle Pres Nazarbayev not being nominated for the Nobel prize. Never mind, he got a consolation prize.
From 3 weeks ago, an article on arrest warrants being issued over the Aliyev case.
Piece on two bodyguard’s return to Kazakhstan and their confession live to the media. (Related to Aliyev’s alleged criminal activities).
VOA (Voice of America?) summary of the recent elections held in this country.
Is Kazakhstan to follow Russia’s example by moving in on, or at least re-negotiating contracts with, Western oil and gas companies? The International Herald Tribune’s website has a report on the goings on.
Reports from foreign diplomats/govt workers on Astana and Almaty. I had especially wanted to give these two pages their own post. Some of the information is incorrect, some is simply out of date, though there are some gems in there for those considering moving to this country. I may remember to make a more detailed post when I get back half way through October.
Finally a couple of YouTube vids that caught my attention, both from members over at the channels.nl forum I believe. The first is on a man with a lot of vision, and quite a variant on the static art you’ll see in most galleries…
Secondly, we have a video that will have little cultural reference if you are not in the right age band, but is about who would win if all the super heros and villans had a big scrap. Hmm, not sold that too well, sorry. Unless you have tight bandwidth restrictions per month, trust me, it is worth listening to
Sep 07 2007
Language Differences
We went out tonight with Walton, as a belated birthday celebration for him. (I will post up some pictures when I get round to emptying the memory card again, hopefully tomorrow). One topic of conversation was the difference between UK English spelling, and how the Americans can not spell properly. OK, to be fair, I am pretty sure he defended his nation well, explaining that they know how to spell, it is just that UK English has too many un-necessary letters.
Seriously, I discovered tonight that I did not know the UK English spelling of some words, and that in fact he occasionally spells some words in UK English. For example, he would write arguement, where as the American spelling is in fact argument. It looks as though all these years of not bothering to change the default language of my spell checker has effected me, as I did not realise I had been spelling it in American English myself. In fact FireFox’s spell checker is set to UK English, and even it does not like arguement! Sometimes though, different words entirely are used, for example, in Britain, estate agents ‘help’ (sometimes) with the process of buying and selling houses, whereas in America the same job is performed by a person called a realtor. (Assuming they belong to the official realtor association).
OK, well I need to help organize my neighbor’s aluminum gray colored jewelry in the center of his apartment.
Or if you prefer to spell that as an English person…
I need to help organise my neighbour’s aluminium grey coloured jewellery in the centre of his flat.
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