Jul 19 2012

Car Videos Coming Soon! Maybe?

Category: Kazakh DrivingChrisM @ 2:26 pm

In case you are not the sort of blog reader who notices when a tag cloud changes, this site has had a few hundred old posts properly tagged recently. That means I only have a few thousand left to trawl through! Why make this effort? I hope that when Google (other search engines are apparently available 😉 ) next crawls this site, and comes across the tags pages via the sitemap, it will lead to me picking up a few more visitors who are interested in the same topics I write about. Traffic has dipped a little bit recently, from around 10,000 unique visitors a month to just 6 or 7,000.
Also on the To Do list for this site are the Anna and Tim photos that are always piling up waiting to be published (I was reminded just how far behind I am when tagging some of the older Anna posts). There is also a huge pile of car videos (from our in-car recorder) that I would like to go through and either delete (most of them), or edit and upload to YouTube for embedding here. I don’t know how well some of the recent WTF! moments were caught, but there should be a few.
Recently we have seen a lot more Suzuki SX4s (the same as our Kazakh car) here in Astana, and we occasionally exchange thumbs up or waves. It is good to finally see a little diversity in the cars on the road, as although all the Toyotas mean that should you buy one yourself, spare parts and expertise with repairs will be in abundance, it does get a little monotonous. We do see nicer cars around, like Mercedes SLs, various AMG tuned cars and 4x4s and full on super cars, but our budget didn’t run that far when we bought the car!
On Tuesday we saw a bumper sticker that read “Astana Street Racing” on a car in front of us, which didn’t seem like a great idea, should they get stopped by an English language reading traffic cop during an illegal street race…

Hello officer, why did you stop me?

You were racing your friend

Me? No, I am just on the way to pick up my granny from hospital

Points at the bumper sticker

Oh… Yes… Umm…

Ignoring the issue of self-labelling oneself as a street racer, we know some people use the local car park to impress their friends with high powered engines and much squealing of tyres, but I hadn’t realized that Astana does actually seem to have a real established street racing scene, as a friend was invited to attend such an event in a suped up Scooby.

I would be interested to see if any local drivers (cars and golf clubs) would be up for trying to beat that record, though I’m guessing it would need to be at the airport, not one of the golf range/courses outside of Astana in the Steppe somewhere!
Right, I am going to go away for now, I need to drag my body to the gym and try not to collapse or break anything 🙂

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Jan 20 2012

To those waiting for Anna’s 20…

Category: TweetsChrisM @ 2:46 am

To those waiting for Anna’s 2011 photo posts, Tim’s recent pics, or completion of the Amsterdam photos… they should all be published soon.

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Jun 14 2010

Frustration

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 11:37 pm

A few nights ago I tried to use a service from AniMoto, where they basically make videos from your photos. A slightly more interesting slideshow basically. I signed up, decided which photos to use, selected my song, and then it decided to lose all the photos I had just picked out and uploaded. Have a look at their site here, but I’d recommend trying out a simple video first. I’ll probably revisit them and try again some time. (This is not a paid for post, I just found the idea interesting. I’ll try and dig out who sent me the link originally and give credit).

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Mar 01 2007

ADSL arrived and We, The Undersigned Petition

Category: In The Media,Internet Connections,Kazakhstan,PersonalChrisM @ 2:13 am

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.

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