Three Straw Anna at Assorti – Just missed the eating of pizza with chopsticks! http://twitpic.com/2p9yuq
Sep 17 2010
Three Straw Anna at Assorti – …
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Sep 16 2010
Ony Vsur Derjit Kazakhstan Bezopasnom
I’ve attempted to spell out this post’s title in Latin characters, as the following Cyrillic characters will probably just appear as question marks still. ??? ??? ?????? ????????? ??????????.
First we have what appears to be a promotional video for the Kazakh navy, though it doesn’t actually exist yet. Hat tip to EurasiaNet for the video below and also this related article regarding orders for patrol boats and corvettes. I’ll just pretend I know what a corvette is for now 🙂 The Kazakh coast guard already exists on the Caspian sea, however a fully fledged navy would be able to sail further out, and obviously also be a visible deterrent to any ne’er do wells interested in Kazakh properties and installations.
I decided to check out the YouTube account that had uploaded this video, and found an interesting selection there.
Kazakh Special Forces – interesting that you only seem to see Kazakh faces there, I didn’t notice any Russians under the camo paint.
Here we have the Kazakh Presidential Guard, though the footage must be a little dated, as I believe that is Pope John Paul II being greeted around a minute into the clip, and our dearly beloved Glorious Leader President Nazarbayev looks a little younger at around the 3:45 mark. I’m not going to point out the ceremonies involved, especially as Britain has a similar set up with changing of the guard etc. in London. That said, I can’t help notice the Soviet style marching each time I watch this. I think this is from CCCP/USSR days, or do many other countries copy this style? There is a small section of non-ceremonial action at around 5:10.
If you have any military, specifically Air Force knowledge, I’d appreciate you taking a look at the follow clip. It is entitled “Kazakh Air Force strike the Manas Base”, but some of the footage (especially of the bombers taken from lower in the sky) seem to have been collected from other operations. Not as bad as one of the other videos on the channel that definitely had hollywood movie footage cut in to it. Anyway, feel free to leave an anonymous comment if you could clear up this query.
Finally, after all the military themed clips, we have a little b-boy action…
OK, I lied, I couldn’t leave you without this brilliant tribute to our most esteemed leader. I will not be writing anything negative about him here, nor publishing comments that contain insults, because of legal constraints in this country, and also due to the fact that there is nothing negative to write about him, his political party and the policies currently in force here. Obviously.
I should point out the use of the “Eye of the Tiger” could be misleading.
Face to face, out in the heat. Hangin’ tough, stayin’ hungry. They stack the odds ’til we take to the street….
You see you can not hold a protest on the street without applying for, and receiving the relevant permits. Perhaps we should alter the lyrics to ensure no Kazakh citizens are led astray?
Sep 16 2010
Double Trouble
The 16th of March saw us leaving Evesham, but we managed to catch up with Irina on the way back to Swansea. (IrinaG to be more specific. My Irina met IrinaG in Cheltenham, I think at her office. The spooky thing is that IrinaG also comes from Kazakhstan. The fact two ladies called Irina randomly meet in an office is probably reasonably rare, but then to add Kazakhstan as a common factor must make it reasonably rare!)
We met up at a pub that I’ve forgotten the name of (either Irina, can you help out here?), and Anna behaved herself very well whilst we munched through a delicious lunch. Cheltenham’s big race week was starting that day, and I’m glad we lived in Cheltenham for so long, as we managed to use a few country lanes to avoid the traffic that was beginning to pour into the area!
IrinaG And Anna Pub Lunch
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Sep 15 2010
Alexa Toolbar Comes To Chrome
The title for this post probably doesn’t require a great deal of clarification, but just in case…
Chrome – This is an internet browser made by Google. Like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera or even Safari. (There are others of course, but as people using them make up less than 2.5% of this site’s visitors, I’m happy to gloss over them for now).
Alexa Toolbar – This is some code that will tell you how popular a website is when you visit it. The lower the number, the better, so if your site had an Alexa ranking of 1, you would (theoretically) own the most visited site in the world. Until recently, only Internet Explorer and Firefox users had access to the official Alexa toolbar, and I believe it was only this one that actually registered visits to the sites you frequent, within Alexa’s system. (Other toolbars/extensions exist that will tell you the rank, but they do not tell Alexa to +1 to the number of visitors for a website on any given day.)
Comes to – It now exists 🙂 See their blog post here, or if it is down again and you don’t fancy checking Google’s cache of the page, head on over to here directly for the download link.
I should point out that some people (and anti-malware programs) will report this toolbar as something that needs to be removed. It does, after all, meet most definitions of spyware – a company records details of every site you visit. However, if you decide to locate the download, and then initiate the installation procedure yourself, I’m assuming you know what it does and are happy with this system.
Finally, many people make the argument that Alexa’s stats are not reliable (they only count people with the toolbar installed) and are easily gamed. So don’t go losing sleep if your site slips down in the rankings, or assume you’ll be able to sel your site for a 5 figure sum, just because you make it into the top 1000.
Sep 15 2010
Cold Showers And Radiators
Irina discovered why we still have no hot water in our flat. Unlike the lack of heating (which would not normally be on yet anyway), the blocks of flats in our area should be getting it turned back on sometime. We do have jumpers a plenty in the cupboard, and we can always borrow the electric fire from Irina’s parents. For a while now we were supposed to be connected to Astana’s city-wide central heating pipes, which would have meant cheaper bills and hopefully less days or weeks with no heating. However this never happened, and now we are looking at another winter where the company that is supposed to supply hot water (for heating, and a separate supply for the taps) will not be. There is talk of a compromise where we will pay the rates that people who are connected to the city-wide system pay, and someone will pay the extra to our company. However, just to add to the mix, we currently have no hot water coming from our taps, as they have run out of diesel to power the big boilers. They can’t buy any more because their bank account has been frozen (make your own pun here) due to some sort of tax issue.
We already had a hot water boiler fitted in our flat, so we have turned a few valves, flicked switches and turned a dial so that the bathroom has hot water. However, for some reason that hot water supply is totally independent of the kitchen hot water supply (separate meters etc.), so washing up requires filling up from the sink in the bathroom. It isn’t too cold yet, and living at the top of our block of flats, when it gets cold, (some of) everybody else’s heat will escape from their flats up into ours, so it should be fine.
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Sep 15 2010
Comparing Walkers
This is (almost) it! Four more photo based posts and this site will be up to date with pictures taken during our last trip to the UK! All the videos have been published already, and if you check out this site’s YouTube channel, you’ll see I’ve already uploaded the last 4.5 months worth of videos recorded in Kazakhstan. This means there are now 538 videos there! I will try and increase the amount of posts written per week until we get close to real time publishing again. I still need to go through and title most of the recent videos, and select which photos to use and then process them.
Anyway, these photos were shot on the same day (15th of March 2010) as the A Promenade Around Cheltenham Promenade post. Since March, she is now happy (sometimes too eager and wants to go solo) climbing stairs, and can almost manage all of the four floors up to our flat!
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- Anna And Daddy In Cheltenham
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- Anna And Grandad On The Promenade In Cheltenham
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Sep 15 2010
No Prison Time Today
Today I am glad to report that Anna has not managed to lock me onto the balcony, and that in general she has been very well behaved. I also noticed that I had been very slack in embedding videos and importing phone pictures from twitpic into the blog. So, if you look at the first couple of pages for this site, you’ll now see the pictures and video that previously required you to click on a twitpic or qik link. Unless you normally read these posts via my facebook profile, in which case I think the videos automatically embed over there? I’ll go and check some time.
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Sep 15 2010
A Real Manager
I was playing with PockeTwit yesterday, checking if all the features still worked OK, when I ran my saved search for tweets that mention Cheltenham. (For those that have only come to know me and this site since moving to Kazakhstan, I a lot of my childhood years in Cheltenham, after moving from Yeovil before secondary school.) Ignoring the tweets that were obviously for a Cheltenham in America (which apparently has a shopping mall that teenagers love to write about, and the residents there seem to think a local town is far inferior to their version of a Cheltenham), I came across some vacancies for customer service jobs, more specifically technical support manager. I favourited the tweet (I check twitter on my phone whilst having a smoke, and look up any interesting links on a PC later) just to see what the details were. It turned out the agency was based in Cheltenham, but the job was in London. The salary wasn’t too bad, and to my surprise I only lacked one essential skill, and ticked quite a few of the desired ones. I’m not sure right now if I’d want to be in a management role when we return to Britain (or if I’d be selected), but it was reassuring that there are jobs that pay a living wage or more that I could at least feasibly get an interview for!
[edit]
This post’s title refers to a point that was raised during the last English club I ran where locals reminded me that the title manager does not infer the same job responsibilities over here at all. You will most likely not be in charge of anyone, and can be quite junior within an organization and still be a “manager” in Russian.
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Sep 15 2010
A walk 2 the shop,then playing…
A walk 2 the shop,then playing on a slide means Anna will hopefully b tired enough2actually sleep during nap time! http://twitpic.com/2om2l7
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Sep 13 2010
#GeekGoof alert. BBC World jus…
#GeekGoof alert. BBC World just appeared to show man using a Sony Ericsson T610 in an advert for a piece on 3G technology in Asia somewhere.
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