Irina has had her request for a Schengen visa (specifically to visit Holland) approved, which is a big relief, as we had to buy the plane tickets and book our accommodation before we could even apply for the visa. It is now just 30 days until we arrive there, and after that we’ll be going back to Britain to see some family and friends before heading back to work again. I hope to be able to report back how the apartment was, and depending on my memory, any coffeeshops, museums and other distractions we visit 🙂 I’ve had a few ideas to improve the apartment-owner’s website, but I’ll keep that under wraps until we’ve actually met with him.
Mar 11 2008
I’m From Holland, Where The Frick You From?
NSFW (Not Suitable For Work (viewing))
My thanks to Cheese over at the VDF forum for pointing these out to me. The first video is Bobby Burns’ track – “I’m From Holland”. Why NSFW? It has the ‘F’ word multiple times, so if you have headphones or turn your speakers down, you should be fine – no naked ladies or anything 🙂
The second video is made by Boom Chicago, a comedy troupe based in Amsterdam, basically a parody of Bobby Burns’ vid, with a few stereotypical insights into Dutch life. Once again, NSFW due to F word usage.
If we have the time and money, I’m hoping Ira and I can go to the Boom Chicago theatre to catch their improv show, though this time we’ll eat somewhere (cheaper) first to save a little money on the tickets.
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Mar 05 2008
XKCD Again
You may remember that Oleg directed me to XKCD some time back, and I posted a few of the images. Well I took a look at the more recent strips, and wanted to post a couple. Click the ‘Continue Reading’ link to see the rest.
This first one is for Irina, and her patience with me 🙂
Feb 21 2008
Tickets Are Arriving Soon :)
For our upcoming trip to Britain and Amsterdam, we ended up finding the cheapest deal was to buy tickets from two separate suppliers (travel o city and ex pedia (without the spaces, but I’m not giving them free keyword advertising without knowing how their service turns out first 😉 )).
Anyway, one supplier just sent an e-ticket, as is normal, however the other decided we couldn’t pick up the tickets from our airport, or have handy e-tickets, so we had to pay an extra 60/70 pounds to get them DHLed. DHL have just phoned Ira, and stated that the courier is on his way, so in a few minutes, I’ll hopefully have the tickets for TSE>FRA>AMS AMS>AMA>TSE (Astana – Frankfurt – Amsterdam and the return trip of Amsterdam – Almaty (the old capital, still better served by international flights) – Astana) in my hands. The AMS – CDF and later CDF – AMS (Amsterdam to Cardiff, Wales and return) tickets were electronic, so they are already sorted.
As the apartment owner in Amsterdam has already confirmed receipt of the required deposit via PayPal, this trip is slowly coming together 🙂 Just Ira’s visas for Britain and the Netherlands (a schengen visa) left now. If only Kazakhstan would accept dual citizenship, such holidays would have been so much simpler if we both had UK passports. There you go
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Feb 20 2008
Saving People From RSI?
I remember seeing a segment on a TV program back in the 90s that showed a Japanese research scientist playing space invaders without touching anything. He basically thought Left/Right/Fire, and a hybrid EKG machine ‘read’ his though patterns and sent the appropriate command to the computer.
It looks as though this technology has continued to mature, take a look over at this article for more details.
I imagine the price will be a little prohibitive at the beginning, but I’d really like to play with investigate such a headset. Eventually I hope we can progress beyond voice-control, dictating and generally having to insert slow mechanisms in the human computer interface. That said, unless headsets remain obvious and large, and I can see the conspiracy theorists worrying about involuntary ‘scannnig’. Don’t even get me started on the farcical situation with modern ‘secure’ passports with RFIDs in them…
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Feb 20 2008
Amsterdam Trip IS On
Almost all the details are now sorted… We have bought the plane tickets, paid a deposit on the Apartment, now we just need to sort out a pet-sitter again. Either that or re-unit Karra and Muska with their Mum (Dasha) and younger sister (Tishka) that they’ve never met. Ira thinks 4 cats in one house would be too much work for her parents, so perhaps Mira fancies trying out living on her own again?
Anyway, see below for a map of the general area we’ll be staying in.
Sadly Alex and Mat won’t be coming this year, as was originally hoped, as their flights cost even more than ours. btw, congrats to Alex – Dryad Musings has just got an Alexa rank… around 12 million, but that is better than the dreaded ‘no data’. At one point this site almost broke into the 200k region, but since then its bounced back up to the million mark again. Which is a little odd, as my unique visitors per month have been steadily increasing, but there you go. ChrisD (who doesn’t have a blog, so doesn’t get a hyperlinked name 😉 ) can’t come either, as his new work randomly tests its employees, and he is worried about passive smoking whilst he drinks.
The apartment we are renting has internet access, but it is wired, so unless Ira’s laptop comes for the journey, we’ll in communicado for a while (my PDA/phone has WiFI and BT, but is obviously lacking an RJ45 socket LMAO)
Anyway, enough on Amsterdam for now, I’m sure I’ll be boring you with more info a lot more over the coming weeks…
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Feb 16 2008
Another Shopping Mall Opens
Just a little further up Sary Arka (the street we live on) from ‘Mega’, the shopping centre that opened up a few months ago, we now have another one. This one appears not to have a supermarket in it, though it does have (another) multi-screen cinema. The thing that surprised me (thanks to Walton for pointing it out) is that both Mega, and this newer one, have a cinema from the same chain. So that within 5 minutes walking distance, we have a 6 screen and an 8 screen cinema, apparently competing with each other, but both from the same company.
Anyway, Irina popped over this afternoon to check it out with her mum, so should there be anything particular interesting about it, I’ll post further details later.
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Feb 13 2008
Pizza Delivery In Astana!!!
Irina found a pizza place that delivered, so we treated ourselves to a film and pizza last night. A little pricey (1 litre of coke/fanta cost 800 tenge (about quadruple the cost in a shop), pizzas were 1600-1950 tenge (around 7 pounds/$15) each), but mine was tasty. Without going into gory details, if you happen to use Napoli (or ‘Neopol’ depending whether you trust the pizza boxes or the bill) pizzeria, you may want to ensure you have a supply of Immodium to hand (the severity was enough to wake me at 3am and send me running to the loo!).
That said, the pizza was good enough for me to hope it was a one off, and so I hope to try them out again in the future – will post if it turns out they should be avoided 🙂
Oh, and I know that pizza delivery isn’t exactly ‘Eating Out’ but I don’t have a category for ‘Eating In’ 🙂
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Feb 05 2008
Slow Week Here…
There has not been much happening on this blog the past week; the main reason being that I have been working hard on converting my other sites to blogs. Also, we went out a few times to celebrate Ira’s birthday, and so I’ve not had as much time at the keyboard as usual. The process of changing hosts and manually importing old site pages into blog posts is quite intensive, but I’m hoping to earn some more money from my other 18 sites soon, so it will hopefully be worth it. Thanks to those that are still checking in to see what is new, your repeat visits are appreciated 🙂
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Jan 31 2008
Happy Birthday Irina :)
Today is my wife’s birthday. She is at work right now, but we are planning to finally visit a restaurant with some friends tonight (we have talked about checking it out since Tom was last here, but not got around to it), another meal with her work friends and colleagues tomorrow, and then finally some of her other, less happy with mingling with others, friends on Saturday. Less cooking for her, though over here, people tend to pay for all their guests when celebrating, so we need to make sure we’ve enough in the right bank accounts 🙂
Anyway, I hope Ira does not have too busy a day at work, and that she enjoys the meals over the next few days. I’ll attempt to write a little on each restaurant, and we can hopefully use her new camera to snap a few shots.
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