Nov 17 2007

Accurate?

Category: Friends,Personal — ChrisM @ 3:59 am

OK, so I missed Blog Action Day, however, their quiz is still up, and after catching up with Stargazer’s latest batch of posts, I came across the aforementioned ‘What Kind Of Blogger Are You?’ quiz. The result was as follows…

Image and section of site has been removed, sorry. Used to be found at http://quiz.blogactionday.org/

Whilst I do use this blog to create an income for myself here in Kazakhstan, it was originally setup purely to let friends and family back in Britain know what was going on, as I got bored of sending e-mails. Then I started to realise there was not really a lot of information on Kazakhstan itself in the blogosphere§ from a Westerners point of view. This side of the blog led to me making some friends, both here in Kazakhstan, and also from people e-mailing me, wanting to know more. I’ll not post too much info on the latest two, as I have yet to meet them in the real world, and don’t want to assume they are happy with being publicised, but one Aussie and a Brit have made in the last fortnight, both of whom will be moving to Astana soon.

Anyway, I’m happy with this site for now, and hope that my regular readers will continue to grace this blog with their presence. To the new readers, a big ?????? and I hope you find enough to keep you coming back for more. If you do not want to wade through all the pages in one go, feel free to simply click on a category (in the left hand column) that interests you the most.

§ Before anyone throws rotten fruit at me for using that term, I’ve just checked, and that is only the 3rd time the word has been used on this site in over a year 🙂

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Nov 17 2007

Happy Birthday Dad & Babushka…

Category: Friends,Personal — ChrisM @ 3:24 am

Happy Birthday

Today is the birthday of my Dad, Babushka (Ira’s Dad’s Mum) and also Stargazer (if you don’t recognise the name, I’ll assume you have not been reading this blog for a long time, he is the Austrian author of my favourite plug in, and the man who toured Austria on a moped!).
Anyway, assuming the present and card arrive in time, I’m hoping Dad will enjoy them, though I won’t post what it was until I know for sure he has it, I don’t want to go spoiling the surprise 🙂
Once Irina has finished at work, we should be heading to the in-laws for a meal to celebrate Babushka’s birthday.

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday

Anyway, congratulations to all three people, and I hope your day goes well, with family and friends around you to help share in the joy.

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Nov 10 2007

Alex’s Blog

Category: Friends — ChrisM @ 1:06 pm

As regular readers will know Alex setup her blog (Dryad Musings, see the previous post for a link to it) when she visited us over here in Kazakhstan. Originally it was to be a place for her to write about her thoughts, and express her opinions on a range of matters. Now she will be in Australia, it can also serve as a method of staying in contact with her family and friends back in the UK.

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Nov 10 2007

Today Is The Day

Category: Friends — ChrisM @ 12:59 pm

That Alex is leaving for Australia. In face I’ve just checked her blog, and she has in fact written a post just before getting ready to start her journey (Ready & Waiting To Start My Longhaul Flight to Oz Land).
Best of luck to her, I hope the journey goes well, and even if she is a little knackered by the end of it, I’m certain that the reunion with Mat will be worth the journey time.
In just under two weeks, it is Alex’s birthday, which I am assuming will be her first away from England – I hope she gets all she wants, though I suspect being reunited with Mat would be enough by itself 🙂

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Nov 08 2007

First Proper Snow Of The Winter…

Category: Friends,Kazakhstan,Weather — ChrisM @ 10:04 am

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 🙂

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Oct 30 2007

Oleg’s Site Is Now Public…

Category: Friends,Personal,Pictures — ChrisM @ 8:09 pm

NOTE TO ANY PayPerPost REVIEWERS… This post is NOT sponsored. You can tell by the way the hyperlinked word is not at all optimized for any sort of search, and the fact that this post is within the Personal category, and not ‘Interesting’…

Oleg, a friend of ours who has been mentioned here a few times before, recently told me that his site, which had been strictly confined to his intranet previously, is now public facing, and has a proper domain name. Now if you don’t speak Russian, you may not spend very long there, but take a moment, check it out, you can find it at warmland.ru

PS Any googlebots crawling this way, head on over there and index his site. Please?

PPS I was re-checking his site, and found a link to another site (xkcd)
Here are a couple that caught my attention
Compiling Excuses
Drunk Programming
Make the world weirder

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Oct 19 2007

Hippy Bathday Zanya…

Category: Friends — ChrisM @ 2:01 am

Yep, it is that time of year once more – Zanya is now 27 (I think), at least in this time zone. I think she has another 3 hours to wait back in Britain for it to be the 19th October…

Happy Birthday Zanya Etheridge Happy Birthday Zanya Etheridge

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Oct 19 2007

Back In Kazakhstan

Category: Amsterdam,Friends,Personal — ChrisM @ 1:29 am

I hope to write a few posts on my stay in Britain later, but for now I have a few things to sort out here at home.
A quick summary of some of the posts to come…
Kaliningrad Airport – Almost there in terms of earning its ‘international’ status
Amsterdam – How not to miss flights (learnt my lesson 6 years ago)
Cheltenham & Evesham – Dad and friends
Clydach – Mum, John and friends
Falmouth – Nick, his birthday, Roz, and the trip down in the motor home
Amsterdam – 4 hour stop over in the city itself
Anyway, hopefully more details to come soon 🙂

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Sep 19 2007

Tentative Dates

Category: Amsterdam,Friends,Personal — ChrisM @ 4:50 pm

I have already agreed with MattG and Miriam about meeting up with them, and have some dates in mind for when I visiting each town of my mini-Britain tour.
As you may have read recently (joke, the Amsterdam flood of posts should dry up in a month or two 😉 ) I am visiting Britain, via Amsterdam in a few days time.
The timetable will looks something like this…


Amsterdam 21st - 24th September

Britain 24th September - 16th October

Cheltenham and Evesham 24th September - 3rd October (approx.)
Clydach (nr. Swansea) 3rd October - 11th October (approx.)
Falmouth 11th October - ???
Amsterdam 16th October (8 hours)
Kazakhstan 17th October

So if I know you, and you want to meet up, feel free to drop me a line. If I don’t know you, and you promise me you are not a stalker or other type of psycho, please do feel free to contact me 🙂
This year will be the first time in something like 8 years that I will be in Britain without a car, so to friends who don’t live near Cheltenham, Evesham, Clydach or Falmouth, apologies. Big thank you to Miriam for coming down to meet up, I really appreciate you making the effort. And yes, this is also a not too subtle hint, Emma and Ramon, you have a car, I don’t now, so get your arse in gear 😉 😛

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Sep 19 2007

BG Energy Challenge 2007 (Kazakhstan)

Category: Friends,In The Media,Kazakhstan,Videos — ChrisM @ 2:21 pm

I’ll not post her name until I know whether she minds, but one of Irina’s friends at work recently took part in the BG (the newer name of British Gas) Energy Challenge 2007, here in Kazakhstan. Last night Khabar had a short piece on the event in their news bulletin, so I have uploaded it to YouTube, and embedded it here. The audio is in Russian, though the video is mostly self explanatory. There are rumours that some participants took this very seriously, and tried to ensure only seriously sporty types joined the teams. Others appeared to have taken a slightly more laid back approach 😉 I have also burnt the movie to a miniDVD, as well as the original raw footage to a separate disc for her. Just in case her work PC can not handle it, I decided to embed it in this post as well. My congratulations to all who took part this year.

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