Irina is still doing fine, but no signs of a quick drive to the hospital have yet been observed. Not a great deal to write now, just wanted to keep people updated, as some have been asking what the situation is now. AlexC is now coming over to Britain from Australia for three weeks, which is brilliant, as she’ll be able to meet our baby, we’ll be able to meet Mat for the first time ever, and we’ll see her for the first time since she came to Astana back in 2007(?).
As you may have noticed, I’ve been experimenting with different ways to update this blog, facebook, twitter and so on simultaneously, from a mobile device. This has led to a few v.short posts, sometimes without explanation. If something makes no sense whatsoever, it is probably a tweet @ someone that didn’t work out again 🙂
Feb 10 2009
10th February T +1 ?
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Jan 21 2009
Waiting For A Foreign Dawn
The last few days I have been trying to sort out Dave’s laptop. Unfortunately, he is in Astana, which makes technical support a little difficult. With the assistance of LogMeIn, we discovered that his old install of XP was shot. We put a new customised one on, and discovered that this too was not a stable platform to operate on. Unfortunately, we didn’t get far enough this evening for me to be able to carry on with this new OS install, as there is still no network connectivity. As David is using our flat, where ChrisK+GF live, he has a curfew to follow, and so had to leave this evening (as it was already a lot later over there).
Jan 21 2009
Ali Ba Ba
Here we have Walton, Asel, Dr. Ken, David, Irina and myself, all eating out at the Ali Ba Ba restaurant in Astana, just after out return to Kazakhstan from Britain and Amsterdam. Which reminds me, I still have a lot of Amsterdam pictures hiding on one of the hard drives that need to be published along with a few coffeeshop reviews.
Walton Asel Ali Ba Ba Astana
Iria DavidG Ali Ba Ba Astana
Dr Ken Ali Ba Ba Astana
As you may have noticed, this blog now has a very light weight gallery plugin installed. When you click on a thumbnail, you should see the original, higher resolution image pop up in a new box. Do let me know if you encounter any problems. Smart alecs are not welcome to leave messages complaining of no images whilst using the Lynx browser ;-P
Jan 21 2009
Tom The Pilot
Here we have a picture from back in May 2008, when we finally got to meet Tom #2 in Astana. We’d been in contact for a while over Skype, and this was the first opportunity he’d had whilst rostered with an Astana leg in his flights. As you may guess from the facial expression, we ensured our throats weren’t too dry whilst eating at the Face Pub, by drinking a fair amount.
Tom Chris Face Pub Astana
(querying the post title? The first Tom we met in Kazakhstan was an American non-pilot person, this Tom was second in line, and so labelled Tom the Pilot in our house, to simplify matters. Oh, and yes this Tom is indeed a pilot…)
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Jan 17 2009
Busy Saturday
Busy day so far, as there have been lots of little things here and there to sort – finally received an Orange 3G SIM card for my phone today, so been trying to test speed improvement over the old EDGE/GPRS connection. The aerial guys (Hayden Communications) came and fitted an aerial, amp and wiring fitted for the house, so can get freeview in each room, and have Sky piped upstairs to the older TVs. Finished off recovering and reinstalling Kevin’s PC – put Windows Vista Ultimate on after recovering his data, and another one that is taking a while this evening is sorting Dave’s laptop. Another case of recovering data (this time through a Knoppix Live CD), wiping drives completely and then reinstalling the OS. Certainly a lot easier once you have network connectivity and can just access keyboard, mouse and display via LogMeIn. Thanks to Oleg once more for the heads up on their free service.
Anyway, hopefully all will be sorted on Dave’s laptop, or at least stable and able of carrying out the basic computing functions.
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Jan 12 2009
Belated 2009 Greetings
Wow, no posts in almost 12 days. That has to be improved upon, sorry. The (somewhat predictable) reasons for my online muteness were recovering from Christmas, seeing in the New Year, travelling around meeting friends and family, some of whom we hadn’t crossed paths with in a couple of years, friends coming over to sunny Wales to see the house for the first time, oh and also maintaining, repairing and improving four different PCs. Getting used to Vista from a technical support point of view has taken time, but I at least no longer involuntarily shudder when I hear the OS’ name 😉
After flashing my TyTn II (Kaiser) to a custom WM6.1 ROM (it was working boringly reliably, something had to be tweaked/modded 😉 ) and getting TomTom, music and voice commands to work whilst in the car, I installed Ubuntu onto Ira’s laptop (dual-boot obviously, didn’t think the love of my life would appreciate me nuking her Windows install), finally got around to properly securing the wireless network at home in Clydach, got the PCs all happily working as far as UPnP was concerned. This needed to be sorted as the internet radio I recvd. for Xmas could also play files on the LAN, and I was having issues just using normal folder sharing on a couple of the Vista machines.
Ante natal classes have been an interesting and mostly informative process, it is hard to believe we are now probably less than a month away from seeing our daughter’s face for the first time 🙂 We now have a lot of the items new borns need, and even the pushchair/pram/car-seat optimus prime styled transforming thingy has turned up. Ira has done some more photo shoots with John, obviously centred around the theme of pregnancy/new life etc. See previous posts for the last published examples – though hopefully John will get around to adding new posts to his blog, and new photos to the gallery soon. Which reminds me, don’t forget to check out ConJoinery if you are in need of carpentry or joinery skills… when Con came over here for a few days, we got around to setting up a quick blog to promote his work, and showcase previous projects. It obviously still need more content, but the basic framework of WordPress 2.7 and useful plugins are in place.
After all that I finally noticed that this site is once again down to a PageRank of 0 (see many previous posts regarding Google and post links-for-money issues. Anyway, I now know why there is a lot less work around again. From n/a to a 2, then up to 4, spanked by google down to a 0, recovered to 2, then back once more to 0. As the only thing this alters for the worse is the potential income for this domain, I’m not crying into my cereal. The unique visitor numbers per day has been steadily bouncing between 250 and 600 a day, even when no fresh content has been added, so I know the search engine traffic, and regular repeat visitors have carried on regardless. It is a little strange to find out which of your posts are popular, and the search terms people googled to get there. If you’ve not already enabled AWStats on your site, it might be worth popping along to your CPanel interface and turning it on…
Dec 31 2008
Almost There
This is just a quick post to wish this site’s readers a very Happy New Year.
We currently have Marilyn & Peter over (Chris & Tim’s parents), as well as John’s son and daughter-in-law and their kids, with midnight fast approaching. To our American visitors, I hope you are warming up to the evening well, to my UK amigos, just under four hours to go. To my Kazakh readers, Snovum Goddum, hope you are already having a great 2009. (Over there, Western Xmas is barely noticed, Orthodox Xmas is observed, but New Year is the big deal.) Big HELLO to Walton, Assel, DavidG, ChrisK, The Dans & their respective familys, DrKen, lovely friendly Northern bloke I’ve temporarily forgotten the name of, Mel, the in-laws, Dana & Assen, Mira, Bayen & son and everyone else – thanks to all for your support over the last year/months (delete as applicable 🙂 ).
With Arriving to Britain, settling in, Christmas, New Year, and the baby due in February, it is possible that site will see a few less posts in the future, however the blog will remain here (assuming I remember to renew the hosting 🙂 ), and I’ll try to get back to regular posting ASAP.
Dec 24 2008
Friends Roundup
KZBlog has recently started posting again, following a break. You can catch up on the first podcasts in Kazakh, the state’s reaction to people demonstrating and attempting to invade a mayor’s office and finally a piece on the Religion laws currently being considered by the president, including what is possibly the first publication of the American Kazakh Embassy’s reaction to criticism of the restrictive regulations.
Also, Alex has started blogging again regularly – her birthday last month is covered, as well as her new job, her new place (see here and here), a great Christmas novelty find, and a post on Nick and Roz’s visit to her place.
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Dec 12 2008
Con’s Site
I was speaking to Con earlier on today when he mentioned he was hoping to get a website up, for his joinery (carpentry? whatever the right term is) work. I explained the basics of what was needed – a basic idea of how the site should look, choosing a name, register it and find somewhere to host the files etc. CRJoinery.com should soon be hitting your screens (I’ll make the link live once it leads somewhere), if all goes to plan, so if anyone in the South Gloucestershire region is looking for some high quality wood stuff (OK, dovetail joints and chisels were never my forte at school, you may notice), make sure you check back for the site soon.
Until he has enough money generated from the site to cover his costs, I’m hoping to host him on my server, something which we still need to sort for Alex’s blog (Dryad Musings, more on that site later).
(Not a commercial/sponsored post, though if Con wants to buy me a drink for this plug, I’ll not refuse…)
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