Dec 14 2010

Police. Lib Dems. BBC. Scum

Category: In The Media,VideosChrisM @ 10:17 am

OK, so a more accurate title would have been SOME police who were present at the recent protests in London, the Liberal Democrat party as a whole and the BBC whilst talking to a protester give the impression that they have few moral qualms with taking actions that many would very easily interpret as being indicative of major flaws in their character, but that doesn’t fit very well as a post title.
What exactly made me post this? Check out the video below, then the pathetic interview conducted by the BBC’s Ben Brown with the assault victim afterwards…

To those few Liberal Democrat MPs who went against the party line and voted against the increase in tuition fees, and to a much lesser degree, any who didn’t pledge during the election to vote against such a policy, I’m sorry that you find yourself tarred with the same brush as your slimy brethren.

To the policemen involved in assaulting this dangerous and threatening protester, I wish you no physical harm. I do however hope that you have nightmares of being a quadriplegic in a wheel chair being pushed down a steep hill with spikes at the bottom, for the next couple of years at least.

I remember laughing at Not The Nine O’Clock News’ sketch on ridiculous reasons for a policeman to charge people. OK, so the miners’ strike was obviously going on at the time, but I was only a few years old.

For those wondering, the Conservative party don’t get a mention here, as everyone knows what kind of politicians and people they are. Whilst I don’t agree with their policies most of the time, no one can really claimed to be surprised by their approach to governing Britain.

Whether pulling a disabled man from a wheelchair twice in a day were simply the actions of a deranged policeman or, as suggested, a deliberate attempt to antagonize protesters into violent action, we’ll probably never know, but to those people who support the police’s request to be able to use water cannon to quell future legitimate protests, to those that think kettling is a valid method of crowd management, and to the few right-wing wuckfits who think recent protests are proof that the police should have firearms in such situations, I hope you will one day wake yourself from your stupor, and see what is going on in Great Britain right now.

To those wondering why I don’t make similar posts on the authority’s behaviour here in Kazakhstan, it is relatively simple… I will need to re-apply for my residency permit next year and I also realise police brutality and corruption is (currently) luckily less of a problem in Britain Kazakhstan is great and has no problems at all.

[edit]
Sorry, should have said, hat-tip to Lenin’s Tomb for bringing the videos to my attention, and to a friend who may want to remain anonymous for letting me know about that blog a few weeks ago.
If you are like me and live somewhere where most ISPs block have technical difficulties connecting to blogspot blogs, you can either add the RSS feed to Google Reader or use Opera’s turbo mode to view the site.
Also, I realise the protester has cerebral palsy, but the wish of nightmares involving quadreplegism on the police officers involved was to ensure a more intense feeling of lack of control.
Finally, to anyone who thinks that perhaps the protester’s brother was wheeling Jody at the police in an aggressive manner, I guess that isn’t totally beyond the realm of possibilities, I do however think that unless Jody was brandishing a spear or razor wire, that any other course of action than wrenching him from his wheelchair would have been a better idea.


Nov 21 2010

A headline I didn’t expect to …

Category: In The Media,TweetsChrisM @ 1:17 am

A headline I didn’t expect to ever see – Pope Benedict “condones condom use in some cases” – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11804398

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Nov 19 2010

Tory HQ (Or Not?)

Category: In The Media,VideosChrisM @ 1:08 am

I finally watched some footage of the protests that occurred in Central London, after a friend linked to them on FaceBook. Not surprisingly, there were a few incidents not covered by the articles I read and the few broadcasts I managed to catch at the time. One thing, there seems to be some confusion as to whether this was actually the Conservative Party’s HeadQuarters, or “just” their campaign HQ?

At approx 8m15s – OK, obviously not mature, but the Star Wars (Death Star?) theme tune humming through a megaphone raised a smile.
13m50s – of the little video footage in TV news broadcasts of the protest I saw, I don’t remember hearing the crowd’s reaction (boo) to when an idiot dropped a fire extinguisher from the roof.

Part 2

1m43s It is NOT a government building, not sure why he said that.
8m25s Mob mentality – we’ve got a stick!!!
9m30s Perhaps it was not fair to hold so many people, but very much standard practice I believe, often just to keep a demo on it’s allotted route/out of “no-go” areas. Here they are apparently being held to find the ring leaders.
10m08s good tune, however the image of a CCTV camera in a suit raises one question in my mind – how many policemen will be watching this YouTube upload to identify “criminals” that they didn’t manage to catch with police surveillance cameras?

In general, from these clips, the police seemed very restrained, I was expecting more thuggish behaviour. I could be wrong, but I think they all kept their ID numbers on their shoulders as well. Perhaps since digital video capturing equipment is so prevalent now, they are more careful. Or it could just be that the protesters were (in the main) tame?

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Nov 05 2010

No Subs Yet

Category: Anna's Videos,Dasha&Kittens,In The Media,VideosChrisM @ 11:44 pm

However, here is the video I mentioned earlier in the week. I’ll see if we can get some sort of translation done by the weekend, but the basic idea is a discussion on whether black cats are lucky or unlucky. I’d personally be more inclined to say they are just cats. If you push me on the point, I’d agree some are black. However as the journalist was a friend, and she needed a foreigner to give her a nice quote on some interesting good luck omens we apparently have back in Britain, I was happy to oblige 🙂
You’ll see Karra and Muska in there, as well as Anna enjoying playing with the cats’ toy.

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Nov 05 2010

Amsterdam Page Updated

Category: Amsterdam,In The MediaChrisM @ 12:29 am

Someone (who I assume wanted to remain anonymous) e-mailed me asking for my POI (Points Of Interest) files for Amsterdam. Although these still haven’t been tidied up (they were originally only intended for personal use), I had already put links up for the KML formatted versions of these files on the Amsterdam page here at this site. As this person wanted them for his TomTom, I have converted the latest versions to OV2 files, as well as GPX (as he requested), and added links to these on the page.

As ever, you are welcome to the files for personal use, however if they are to be used for profit in anyway, please do contact me for further discussion first.
Since Anna was born, trips to Amsterdam have been off the table, so any updates could take a while to get done. If anyone wants the files updated more quickly, and would like me to do it, please cover the cost of : flights (TSE<>AMS), accommodation, a full time nanny for Anna whilst I’m away and the biggest bunch of flowers, box of chocolates and a meal out to try and persuade Irina it is a good idea (99.5% joking) 🙂
If you plan to visit Amsterdam, and the number 420 means something to you, you may well want to visit sooner rather than later, as reports are coming in that the government over there is once again attempting to tighten controls on the grey area of selling something that is decriminalized for personal use, but still illegal to trade large amounts of. See here for a BBC article on the subject. There have been similar reports for years, but as the number of CS slowly decline, there may well come a day when my GPS files are of no use at all 🙁

Oh, and before I forget, I’ll be posting up the video that some kind soul has put on YouTube of Karra’s TV appearance, and also posting more Anna photos and videos very soon. If not tonight, then tomorrow.

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Oct 12 2010

Black And Other Colour Cats

Category: In The Media,PersonalChrisM @ 8:45 pm

OK so this post is being typed, whilst I am being filmed for the Astana TV channel. The news program is doing a piece on black cats, and how they aren’t unlucky.He will be filming for about two to five minutes, so I need to actually being doing something whilst the camera is pointing at me. At least it won’t end up like those TV dramas that wind me up greatly by having people pretend to type and just randomly hitting keys on the keyboard. Ah, the camera has stopped, so so has this post 🙂

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Sep 22 2010

Inertia, Apathy And Forgetting Mirror’s Properties

Category: In The MediaChrisM @ 2:51 pm

To any other system admins or those working in an area of technical support, may I make the humble recommendation you go away and read this article over at The Register? Whether you’re looking for a series on network overhauls, and what can go wrong, what is needed for it to go right and just how long should you go without sleep, or if you’re hoping for some light psychological insight into why IT bods and users act the way they do, click that link!

Also, on a completely different topic, please don’t be in such an auto-pilot sort of mood that you attempt to mirror two remote drivers to the same destination directory. This afternoon’s transfer of 40Gb worth of data was wasted when I proceeded to then mirror another 2Gb of documents from a different directory on our friend’s laptop. /E in robocopy or xxcopy would have been fine. /MIR mirrors, meaning all the files I had just copied over were removed, as they didn’t exist in the source destination! (Copying over a network as the laptop seems unable to consistently provide enough power to a USB socket for sustained data transfer to a USB (only) powered portable hard drive). Also wondering why a network transfer that is entirely over wires, albeit 100Mbps not 1Gbps is maxing out at just over 2 megabytes a second – never even peaking above 25% utilization. I think I’ll blame the laptop’s NIC. It can’t possibly be hardware I own and look after. Obviously. If I say it enough times, I’ll believe it.

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Sep 22 2010

Tracking Thieves

Category: In The MediaChrisM @ 8:57 am

I came across a piece online titled “My Relentless Pursuit Of The Guy Who Robbed Me”, and thought you might like to read it as well. When reading this article, just click on the continue reading after the first five paragraphs.
It reminded me of an incident a couple of years ago when Mum was buying something on e-bay for her and John’s wedding. One set did not turn up, despite having been paid for, and the seller seeming legitimate. As time was counting down, Mum was understandably starting to stress out about it.
Starting with a name and e-bay account, I decided to see what I could discover about the person, who’s excuses were starting to sound pretty phoney, and I hoped to at least name and shame the person if they didn’t sort things out ASAP. In the end, I found their home phone number, the names of their family members, the address, parish council they served on, their workplace and boss’s direct number, and a couple of other little things.
Eventually, armed with enough information to ensure we had the right person, and multiple avenues of approach re. turning up the communication of our displeasure a few notches, a friendly local policeman had words with the e-bay seller, and within a day or two, all the goods turned up! Pure coincidence, I’m sure. I don’t know if I could have started randomly calling parish councillors anyway, but her boss wouldn’t have phased me 🙂

My thanks to Matt Mullenweg (the creator of WordPress) for the heads up on this story.

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Sep 16 2010

Ony Vsur Derjit Kazakhstan Bezopasnom

Category: In The Media,Kazakhstan,VideosChrisM @ 2:11 am

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?

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Jul 09 2010

That Hub Looks A Bit Cleaner Than Yesterday?

Category: Aware Or Conspiracy Nut...,In The MediaChrisM @ 6:33 pm

Whether it is a TV, desk fan or wall clock, the gadgets you could buy from catalogues in the previous decades to spy on people were all pretty big. New Scientist has an article informing us that not only have the devices got smaller, but also that they are more high tech now. One similarity is that the objects used to hide the circuitry are still items that can easily be swapped in a home or office without people normally noticing. Fans, wall clocks and TVs are normally quite easy to swap, as there aren’t that many popular models that will be found in most homes/offices. The same applies really for USB coffee cup warmers, USB hubs or even keyboards. I’m currently trying to resist the urge to see if my combined hub and cup warmer is sealed or screwed shut 🙂

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