On Tuesday evening, we invited DanS and Justin over for a meal and a bit of chill out time. With Justin due to escape Kazakhstan very soon, and Lara and the kids (as in the rest of DanS’s family) still away on a holiday, it seemed like a good time to fill up with food, talk, empty the cupboards of beer and drive and just spend a bit of time together without a bar’s sound system making conversation nigh on impossible without BSL 🙂
We decided upon burritos (I discovered that tortillas with food inside, wrapped up, can be called burritos, as not all burritos have a hard shell) as a) I wanted something tasty and b) everyone else is a lot less picky with their food. Given that we could take out pick from home cooked battered chicken, Heinz baked beans, cheese, peppers, chillis, tomatoes and of course a bit of ketchup and mayo, this seemed the easiest way for everyone to have exactly what they wanted for dinner. Justin was working late, so the rest of us ate and drank until it was time for Tim and Anna to be made ready for bed, at which point Justin arrived. Irina kindly fried up some more chicken, and we all sat round the table enjoying more food (and perhaps a little more alcohol 🙂 ).
Once the food was out of the way, the question of entertainment reared it’s head. I suggested the xbox, as it has been gathering dust for months now – Irina isn’t a gamer, and once the kids are in bed most days, if we have spare time, we try to find something we would both like to watch. Anyway, I remembered that the console wasn’t actually turning on last time I checked, so after triple checking all the connecting leads were OK, and then unplugging everything, leaving just power and the HDMI cable, there was still no activity. After applying the engineer’s touch (short sharp shock to the box), it kicked into life. We decided to use the kinect, and to play Kinect Sports after a little driving fun.
You can see a montage of our sessions below – sorry about the low quality, I am sure last year’s clips were better. I’ve cleaned the lenses since just in case. Anyway, first we have Dan and Irina – I can’t remember who won overall. Dan is VERY keen to point out he didn’t lose at the boxing mini game.
Justin and Me – This was a draw, however given that Justin hadn’t ever played this game before, I suspect any subsequent rematches would not end as flatteringly for me. Especially if the javelin game was involved (I never learn it would seem, as I once again pulled some random muscle/ligament type thing in my arm when over-exerting a virtual throw of the javelin, as I did last year)!
Jul 19 2012
Friends And Injuries
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Oct 28 2010
Friends, Guns, Roses And Burgers
These are the pictures I previously mentioned. DanD, Walton and I all met up with DanC (who was back in Astana for the weekend) for a meal and a few drinks. Although DanD and I had already been to this bar since the Guns n’ Roses chain had taken it over from Northwind’s management, we weren’t sure if the prices, ambience, layout and staff attentiveness were all just boosted for their opening week, or whether we could consider adding it to our list of regular haunts.
As it turned out, the G n’ R management seem to have noticed all the little issues that prevented North Wind from ever really filling up with customers, and addressed them from the very start. The layout of the bar and surrounding tables has been changed, the prices, whilst not cheap, are certainly a lot more reasonable than previously, and the menu (in both English and Russian) has enough variety (from traditional Western bar food to steaks and garlic bread) to meet most people’s needs. Both times we have been there, there was live music and the normal tables were full up with people enjoying themselves. Finally, the dance floor was occupied most of the evening.
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- Bacon Cheeseburger
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- Hot (Chilli?) Steak
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- Walton And DanC At Guns n’ Roses, Astana
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Oct 27 2010
Astana’s New Stadium
This is the last of the videos that didn’t quite make it onto this blog. It is actually from a few weeks back, when Dan and I went to watch Kazakhstan’s football team play Germany in the EUFA cup tournament league thingy. (Anyone who claims I’m not a true football fan can just go and… pat themselves on the back). I know the quality isn’t great, but I’m hoping two things will change that situation in the future – I’ll eventually find a streaming video app that lets me use the full 640×480 resolution of the video mode on this phone and secondly, once I’ve caught up with Anna’s pictures and videos, I’m hoping that new photos and clips recorded on our proper camera will be put on the site in a matter of days, not months, as sometimes occurs now!
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Oct 13 2010
Last Night’s Football Match
As with last video post, these shots were actually taken yesterday at the Kazakhstan vs. Germany EUFA football match here in Astana. I forgot to upload them when I got home to a WiFi connection last night, hence the slight delay…
http://twitpic.com/2x9xwp
http://twitpic.com/2x9y80
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Oct 12 2010
From Plain To Recursively Interesting
In the last of today’s posts on WordPress plug-ins, I wanted to take a quick look at a very versatile stack of code. The Executable PHP widget plug-in makes it possible (in many cases) to create a brand new type of widget without having to write an entire plug-in to create it. Obviously you can create widgets that display text or images with just a default installation of WordPress, however if you want to use some PHP code to create a dynamic area that reacts differently according to some variables, or actually has some code to process, you would normally need to get your hands pretty dirty and either actually write a plugin to backup the displaying of this section, OR hardcode it into your template’s sidebar.
The first involves too much work for me (DanD is the coder amongst my friends here, I’m a bodger when it comes to software creation), and the second isn’t ideal if you upgrade or completely change your theme – you need to remember to keep a record of your changes, and re-integrate them into the new theme’s files.
So, by placing a widget in your sidebar that is allowed to contain PHP code that will be run, you can suddenly do a lot more with your site, very easily. At one point, about three years ago, I had a lot of widgets that used this system, however I eventually managed to realise that load times were more important than having every possible bell and whistle integrated on the front page. That said, if you run a blog dedicated to digital cameras, and simply want to run a little script that pulls in information on the latest models’ zoom levels or ISO speeds, or perhaps grab the best live prices for huge memory cards, the possibility is there for you. The recursive reference? PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor…
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Oct 01 2010
More shots from the yurt htt…
More shots from the yurt
http://twitpic.com/2tnwoj http://twitpic.com/2tnxgl
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Aug 03 2010
Good Evening And Dan’s Birthday Meal At Tiflis
OK, I’ve removed the six posts that were submitted by my phone on Saturday night and amalgamated them into this one post, with the videos embedded.
It was DanD’s birthday the next day, and so we headed to one of his favourite restaurant’s – Tiflis. I forgot to check in on foursquare or Google Latitude, so don’t have the exact co-ordinates, but I’ve searched on Google Map with Irina, and put where we think it is. The road is called Imanova St, but Google has a different label for some reason. However it is nearly opposite Cinema City, so that is the right street.
The old outdoor (well it had a roof but cut down walls to allow fresh air through) section had just finished being renovated, and we were all very pleasantly surprised by the new look. There are two floors, with an open central courtyard. Downstairs there was a normal seating area with lots of tables, and upstairs had some one table rooms. This worked out well, as they had a Georgian band playing for a lot of the night (see the videos below). The band were great, but when we wanted to talk, it was good to be able to shut the double doors, stick on the air conditioning, and not have to shout.
The food itself was great, with some sort of cheesy bread as a starter for me (salads still haven’t snuck onto my menu!), and a lamb sashliq (with chips obviously) for main. We were there for around three or four hours, and had a chance to congratulate Dan on his upcoming birthday (25th if you believe the normally otherwise honest Dan), and talk about life over here. The service was good, especially by local standards, and I’d happily recommend the place for eating out if you want to try something a bit different. You may find you need to reserve the rooms in advance, and I’m hoping Dan will read this post at some point and leave their telephone number here.
A couple of clips of the room, the company and the main course…
Everyone was still very sober by then, not many beers drunk or shots of Cha Cha served. The restaurant has definitely switched suppliers when it comes to the Georgian spirit of Cha Cha. It didn’t feel like paint stripper going down your throat, if anything it was a little closer to brandy, but not overly so.
OK, onto the entertainment…
Aug 03 2010
Serenaded For His Birthday
OK, I’ll be tidying up the front page later by compressing all the individual Qik based tweets into one post, with some information on DanD’s birthday celebrations at Tiflis on Saturday night. The short version is that the renovations have much improved the experience there (nothing wrong with it in the first place TBH). Anyway, the live music made a refreshing change, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and I’ll stop now as we are taking Anna for a walk to a local mini-park that I’ve not been to before. Will try and remember to take some pictures…
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Jul 17 2010
Crayfish and Ceasar Salad at P…
Crayfish and Caesar Salad at Pivavarov. Not mine, obviously. With DanD, John, Inessa and Ira http://twitpic.com/264wh3
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