with a few weeks to spare. I happened to open up the blog and I was visitor number 50000 🙂
Two years, 1823 posts since this site was started, a lot has changed in my life, as well as the blog itself having undergone several face lifts. Thanks to those that have been regularly visiting, and a big hello to those of you that are relatively new to this site.
Anyway, I’m off for now, having returned from the in-laws, where we had a meal to celebrate Ira’s Dad’s birthday, where we saw Babushka, Aunty Sasha and a friend that Ira’s mum hasn’t met for years.
Jun 23 2008
50,000 Target Met
Jun 11 2008
Missing Posts
OK, so I definitely need to clear some time in the next week or two, and try to catch up with a lot of posts (and photo editing) on this blog. Although my memory of my holiday last September may be a little hazy by now, I’m hoping the pictures will either refresh said memory, or paint a good enough picture to give you, the reader, enough of an idea. After that, we have our trip to Britain over Christmas and New Year, with Mum’s wedding in between. After that we have finally meeting up with Tom the pilot, contact being made with an American Jazz singer hopefully coming to Astana to play some sets locally. Finally, we have the birthday trip to Amsterdam (I may need to link to upcoming forum posts for the Coffeeshop specific info) and Britain again this April and May. I’m hoping that by posting this summary now, it will remind me what is missing, and force me into actually taking the time out to write a few words and crop a few piccies. To friends and family still waiting for those posts, thanks for your patience so far.
Jun 04 2008
PC No Longer In Pieces :-)
As I mentioned previously, our main PC had a major failure with the hard drive that had Windows and all the apps on it. It is most probably just a coincidence, but this occurred directly after I updated my on board audio drivers. Upon rebooting, I was presented with an error message stating that HAL.DLL was corrupted. Not a problem, I’ll drop into Safe Mode and find which CAB the file is compressed within on the XP Install CD, expand it and drop it into place. Another reboot bought up multiple file corruptions, including BOOT.INI . As the hard drive was only 40Gb, and was already second hand, I decided now would be a good time to finally insert the 500Gb drive I got for Christmas from Mum. Having fitted the drive in (not as easy as before, as there were still another three internal drives attached), and installed XP, I discovered that the install process had decided to make the boot drive L: ! This caused issues with some driver installation programs, and I discovered that the Windows Disk Management util could only reassign letters to non-OS install drives. So, using a few different utils, I recovered the faulty hard drive to the point that it could be read again, and rescued every directory I could. In the end, I only lost my Firefox bookmarks, in terms of important non-backed up data, so all that was left was another OS install, hardware and their respective drivers to be added on at a time, and now that I have 500Gb to play with for just programs, all the programs I could lay my hands on to install.
Anyway, things are now settled down enough for me to return to my normal routine on this PC, so thanks to those people that were patient enough to wait for me to respond to e-mails and comments.
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May 23 2008
White Lines
No, not a reference to the seminal track by Melle Mel and The Furious Five (not Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel, as often quoted – this was a marketing ploy by the record label, who listed ‘Grandmaster’ as a track artist), nor Duran Duran’s version of said song. No, I’m happy to report that Astana has had it’s road markings reapplied. Drivers still don’t seem to exactly stick to their lane (or even stick to the principle of three marked lanes should equal a maximum of three real life lanes of traffic), but it does seem to have a small effect.
The reason for this being done now is probably the birthday celebrations Astana will be holding soon – many construction projects and visible improvements are being rushed through to completion in order to make sure all looks well in time. Sadly, they took down the rainbow road ornaments; DaveG had a point that they didn’t really fit in with the image of a modern capital city, but at a personal level, they looked pretty. Also, with the (necessary) ice scraping done all winter long on the roads, not only do the lane markings disappear, also the pedestrian (zebra) crossings have no visible clue left to their whereabouts. Now you could just cross where you know they are supposed to be, but the rainbow structures over the roads hopefully used to give some motorists a reminder that the pedestrians were supposed to try and cross there, and should therefore be avoided a little more often.
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Apr 23 2008
Prince Philip Insults People
Not the most shocking of post titles, I have to admit, but this occurred near where Mum lives (in fact right where they used to live), so it caught my attention.
The Queen and Prince Philip were attending Swansea’s leisure centre, to re-open it following extensive improvements, and dropped in on St Thomas’s Community Primary School to, well, probably just say “Hello, and what do you do?”. Anyway, Philip unwisely opened his mouth, and surprisingly enough, insulted a lot of women who live in the East, by proclaiming he thought “Eastern women just sit around smoking pipes and eating sweets all day”, when shown a display of some locals belly dancing.
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Apr 14 2008
424320 Seconds To Go!
Well it is now just 118 hours until Irina and I leave for Amsterdam 🙂
I still have quite a lot to do work to do before we leave, not least is working out what to take with us for both the Netherlands and our subsequent trip to Britain. In terms of lightweight equipment, I am trying to minimize on the gadgets and accompanying power supplies etc., and also working out the minimum amount of clothes we can take, considering we’re not likely to be using a laundry in Holland. So what am I taking? Well my HTC TyTn II is definitely coming along, as it serves as my phone, a PDA (for gaming in between flights, internet browsing whenever I can find a WiFi signal) and it also has a built in GPS device, so there’ll be no excuse for getting lost whilst stumbling from one coffeeshop tourist destination to the next.
(Yes, I know 118 hours does not equal 424320 seconds, but by the time I wrote out this post, a few more minutes had past 🙂 )
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Mar 11 2008
Family All OK
Realising that the likelihood of anyone commenting on the post re. Britain’s weather any time soon was slim, I decided to check in with Mum & John, Dad and Nick. All were OK, though John did get a bit blown around by the wind. Probably because he went down with another photographer friend to the Swansea coast to see what pictures jumped out at them.
OK, so that isn’t actually Swansea, its in North Wales, but I couldn’t find any decent shots right now; John’s will probably be published on his blog sometime soon. Anyway, really glad our family seem fine, hopefully friends are OK as well.
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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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Jan 19 2008
Happy Birthday Gramps…
Today is my Mum’s Dad’s (we call him Gramps) birthday, so this is just a short post to congratulate him on this special day, and to wish him as comfortable a time as possible as he recuperates following a hospital visit. Irina and I managed to see him when we visited Britain over New Year, and while I think of it, another big hello to everyone back in the UK, both those we did manage to see, and those who we unfortunately did not meet with. We also have another three birthdays coming up next week with friends both in Britain and also here in Kazakhstan, but more details on that later…
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