This is the second and last post regarding my journey through Kaliningrad ‘International’ Airport. I made notes up until this point during the holiday, for some reason things get a little hazy during my time in Amsterdam….
The big screen I mentioned in a previous post was now visible to us. Wow, it was high quality, had flight numbers, destinations, and even the weather at each destination! Unfortunately it lacked any sort of column for flight times or estimates of delays involved. (Can you tell where this story is heading yet, dear reader?). I was not too worried, as there were only six or seven departure exits from the area, and you could even find a seat in the smoking section that gave a view of all but one of these When it got to 10 minutes past the approximate boarding time for my next flight, I was a little concerned, but had seen no one leave for any flights at all. There were a few announcements, in Russian, but these seemed to be more procedural statements (don’t leave luggage unattended etc.) than flight info, so I asked the Germans if they had flown through here before (only to discover two spoke English), and if so did they know what happened when flights were delayed? A friendly shrug informed me they were currently as clueless as me.
I then decided to tour the perimeter of the area, determined to find someone who spoke English, or at least would be prepared to listen to my attempts at enquiries in Russian. (Don’t laugh too hard, several times officials (not just in Kaliningrad) who realised my Russian skills were not sufficient to conclude any conversation quickly had walked off, with no clue as to my next suitable avenue of enquiry.) I quickly found a friendly lady who pointed me in the direction of a young girl who worked there and spoke better English than my Russian. I was informed that there was nothing to worry about, that a flight from Moscow had been delayed by two hours, and that three passengers hoping to get to Amsterdam were on that same flight. And no, neither announcements nor TV screens had yet revealed this info. (Again, I mainly wanted to know so that my next time in the airport would not involve so much mystery). There were a couple of things I had not fully understood, and when Ira called me up, to check I was about to get on the plane, and hadn’t fallen asleep somewhere silly, I was about to ask her to double check them with someone at the airport, if I handed my mobile over. However, Irina had been told by the airport a few moments earlier that my flight to Amsterdam WAS on time, and that all passengers were boarding this very second. Obviously this left Irina concerned that I had mightily goofed, and was about to miss a flight involving the Netherlands once again. Eventually the lady who I had previously spoken to proved to be correct, and the person who had spoken to Ira was full of crap. I had already called Alex and Chris, to confirm that they had left Cheltenham and were on their way to Birmingham airport (more on that later). Unfortunately I found I was not able to make calls to Kazakhstan at all, though calls to Britain had obviously worked. Two hours after our planned departure, our plane left Kaliningrad, and I was most glad of the 1.5 hours of sleep I grabbed on the flight.
Schiphol, Amsterdam itself and UK trip info to follow in other posts soon.
I had a nagging feeling I had forgotten some of the videos I uploaded to YouTube a while back. I eventually got around to opening all the posts within the Video category on this blog, then checked which videos from my YouTube channel had been posted. So we have a batch of four here, taken from when AlexC was still here in Kazakhstan, and we had all gone round to Ira’s parents for a nice relaxing evening, some food, and a little drink. I am still impressed that Alex was able to hold her own reasonably well when it came to downing vodka, considering she hadn’t had a drink in some five years!
Here we have Babushka (Ira’s grandma), her Dad, Mum, Alex, Myself, some Wild Strawberries (really little fruit that make great jam), and of course Irina filming. In fact I think she handled all the camera work for these 4 shots…
Ira’s Dad is a little old school in some respects, and so was not happy with the prospect of her chopping some wood up for the samovar§. This despite the fact that if I had done it, we would have ended up with wood splinters, sticks that were too wide to fit in the tube, blood, tears, sweat, and possibly a three-fingered Chris. Compare this to the nature loving, camping, tree-surgery-considering Alex, who knows how to handle sharp tools, and you can see why I giggled (oooops, sorry make that let out a manly guffaw…. hmmm why does that sound so unbelievable?) at the idea that I was a better choice to chop wood. Ira’s Dad did it himself in the end.
The big barbecue thing is, well a barbecue, made by the guys ar Ira’s Dad’s work. He complained that most barbecues are made for shorter people, so they made one with extra long legs It looks like I had been demoted that day from my normal duties of burning things. hmmmm, fire, flames, burn, petrol……. sorry, where was I? Seriously, I normally manage to burn the wood well enough, as it is not too difficult task to ensure that wood is burnt well to provide the charcoal needed to cook the sashliq (skewered kebabs) later on.
Finally we have almost everyone at the table before dinner, with Babushka chilling in the reclining garden chair. Alex tries out a little Russian, and Ira tells a blatent lie - the cake can’t be have more than my 43rd!
§ - A tea urn with a difference - the heat is provided by burning wood within the tube that runs through the middle of the area that the water is boiled in. You can now buy electric versions, but there is no fun in that, IMHO.
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…
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.
A few more photos before I go and grab some dinner.
This is Irina and Alex at the War Memorial here in Astana, just before we went on to the map of Kazakhstan I mentioned before. As I said before, you may well run across similar photos to these over at Alex’s blog, especially as some of these were taken on her camera. However, she will hopefully have a few more interesting words on the days we spent, and from a different perspective.
Here we have Ira and I (modelling one of Tom’s t-shirts) on a pedalo, with Alex taking the picture. We were on the river Ishim here in Astana, and after half an hour could almost steer the boat in the general direction we wanted to go. No one fell in the water, and we did not sink any other boats foolish enough to get in our way, so we had quite a good time. From here, we went on to a restaurant. More on that place later.
He has been away in Moscow studying for almost a year now, so it is really good to have him back around, if only for a couple of weeks. We (Ira, myself, AlexC and Oleg himself), all went out for a meal this evening. We headed over to where Irina works (KMG), as she was called in on her day off (quel surprise), and once we were all together, headed to the Uzbek restaurant near there. It turns out they now have a outdoor section, shared with the Samovar restaurant (Russian food) next door, which was based on the roof. For once, the food was tasty and hot, the service was incredibly good by Kazakh standards, with smiles and a few English phrases thrown in by the waitress. Hopefully have a few pictures to follow soon .
on Alex…
So, as you will already know if you have read the previous posts, our friend Alex is now here in Kazakhstan. Her journey over here was a little more eventful than any of us thought it would be. Her flight originally had a 2 hour stop over in Kaliningrad, before completing her journey here in Astana. Unfortunately, some flight time changes were made, and the e-mail the travel broker sent to Alex explaining this was not at all clear. We discovered a day prior to her leaving Britain that she would in fact have to spend 26 hours in Kaliningrad. As she did not have a visa, or a place to stay there, we were hoping she could simply stay in the transit lounge between flights.
Unfortunately, Kaliningrad airport closes over night! Eventually, they locked her in the mother and baby room, which at least had beds, and made sure she was accompanied by airport staff at all times. Although it is obviously not nice to have your movements so restricted, once they had decided she was not a dodgy person trying to slip into the country, they made sure she was as comfortable as possible, and even fed her for free! (In fact over fed her, but that is a story for another time.)
I will hopefully be posting some pictures of where we have visited since Alex’s arrival, and may even be able to persuade her to write a post describing her views of Kazakhstan…
We originally thought she would be landing at Astana airport in 3 and a bit hours from now. Unfortunately none of us checked her tickets properly… instead of a 2 hour wait at Kaliningrad airport, it turns out she had a 26 hour wait!
At first we saw this as a pain in the bum, but nothing too major. After all, spending a day in a transit lounge is not the worst thing in the world. However, it turns out the airport does not have a transit lounge, so she had to go through with all the other passengers who were staying in the country. As she did not have a visa, the passport control people were obviously unhappy. Then it turned out this oblast’s (it is actually part of Russia, though isolated geographically) airport CLOSED over night. Several phone calls later, and she has now been allowed to stay the night in the mother and baby room with a staff member who volunteered to spend the night there.
Hopefully we will now see Alex in around 27 hours, and if nothing else, she has an interesting start to her holiday to tell her friends about back home. I might even be able to persuade her to make short post on here
Just a quick note to let you know that courtesy of the Subscribe To Comments v2.1 Plug In, you can now be e-mailed whenever someone replies to a post that interests you.
Of course, you could always subscribe to this blog’s RSS feeds (Yep that big orange button on the right is for the feed of posts, and you can also subscribe to the comments feed). However, some people are not yet comfortable with feeds, and others may simply only want to be notified when comments are made on the posts that interest them.
Anyway, give it a try the next time you leave me a comment (oh yeah, Dad, Nick, Alex Clarke, Seb & Con, Balzhan, Chris Barry, Christina, Dana & Asen, Emma F, Gavin, Jo Swale (neé Yates), Kate (she who must be obeyed), Keith, Natalya K., Ramon, Tom, Tanya & Steve you are all VERY naughty… I know most of you have occasionally checked the blog out, but haven’t yet left a comment! It really is very simple, and it reminds me that you still check in here) ChrisD gets a special mention for commenting once in a blue moon, and still having not posted his comments on his last trip to Kazakhstan, some 6 months later. He is hopefully coming over again this year, some time after Alex C.
So you miscreants are being e-mailed a link to this post, to remind you I’m still here I’m hoping some of your e-mail accounts don’t have over-active spam filters.
PS This post isn’t sponsored, I’d been looking for a plug in with this sort of functionality, without any need to modify the theme’s files.
Found a link to a UK Government beta web site that held a petition on the price of Windows Vista, compared to USA prices. This next caught my eye - …..petition the Prime Minister to Recognize Borat As The Leader Of Kazakhstan (!) This petition should be of interest to AlexC. This petition will be of interest to John as it concerns proposed legislation on taking photos in a public place. Here we have a petition that publicly funded (UK) software should be released under a free licence, so the whole nation may reap benefits. This one came as news to me
Fingerprinting is being introduced in thousands of UK Primary Schools as part of a subsidised library package called Junior Librarian that they have purchased, encouraged by central government. New schools are joining the scheme at the rate of around 20 a week. To date, more than 3500 schools and nurseries (manufacturer’s official figure, given to the Daily Mirror) have fingerprinted and photographed 3/4 million children, ranging in age from 3 to 11; impressionable, trusting and naive. Involved companies have given premier partners with access to their SQL database AND a commercial arrangement for the reselling or endorsement or their products.
This is always done without explicit parental consent, and even in some cases, without parental knowledge.
Schools strongly resist sending parents the opt-in consent slips that are used for just about everything else. Some parents only find out AFTERWARDS
Finally, we have a petition for Seb & any other schmokers out there…
Oh yes, and we finally have ADSL installed at home. I’m going to have to use the internet LESS than I did on dial up, as we only get 700 megabytes per month (up AND download :< ), but it means I can do my work in the daytime, so I’m really chuffed that it has arrived.
Helloooooooooooooooooooooo Alex. Really glad to hear from you again. Don’t feel bad about the delay in comms - most UK friends haven’t contacted us in ages, some since we left the UK! Anyway, will mail you when I’ve finished off current batch of work this evening…
Back to stuff other people might find intersting…
I was looking at some random USB gadgets, and found this page, which actually grew from the original, but that page is in Japanese, so check them both out for the fuller picture. A quick summary is that someone decided to crank up the heat generated from their USB coffee cup warmer to the point that it now fries meat!
Next we have some interesting news about a batch of Video iPods that came pre-installed with some delightful code for PC owners. Apple deny any deliberate subterfuge on their part.
Finally, whilst checking out pages to place links on for my clock website, I discovered this little gem. I’ve considered petitioning Irina to get a similar setup in our living room, but gave up quite quickly. I think I’ve been lucky enough to get this nice PC desk…
When it got to 10 minutes past the approximate boarding time for my next flight, I was a little concerned, but had seen no one leave for any flights at all. There were a few announcements, in Russian, but these seemed to be more procedural statements (don’t leave luggage unattended etc.) than flight info, so I asked the Germans if they had flown through here before (only to discover two spoke English), and if so did they know what happened when flights were delayed? A friendly shrug informed me they were currently as clueless as me.
