Aug 31 2009

Backwards Is The New Forwards?

Category: Anna's Photos,Anna's Videos,Dasha&Kittens — ChrisM @ 6:04 pm

hmmmm, another post where WordPress decides that I didn’t really want to use the built in gallery function, and leaves the images orphaned without a post assigned to them. Well anyway, these photos were taken on the 31st of August, and we have now finally reached the end of the backlog. Here you can see Anna starting to learn how to use objects to assist in standing up (hands near her for the inevitable wobbly moments, obviously). Although she can now roll with gay abandon, and crawl backwards, Anna still doesn’t seem to want/be able to coordinate moving forwards. However, given that forwards it same really as horizontally rotating 180 degrees, then moving backwards, she still seems able to get where she wants. Namely off the safe, clean playing area we lay down here or at the inlaws, and onto the much more interesting carpet.
To round off this post, we have a shot of Kara using Anna’s nappy changing mat as a stalking area to pounce on Muska the next time she enters the living room.

Anna Selecting The Next Toy To Play With

Anna Selecting The Next Toy To Play With

Kara Waits To Ambush Muska

Kara Waits To Ambush Muska

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Jul 28 2009

SearchTerms Tagging 2

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 6:25 pm

Just wanted to write a quick post about a (WordPress) plugin I’ve started using recently. It is called SearchTerms Tagging 2 (I’m guessing I missed version 1?), and the idea behind it is quite simple.
As you may know from my posts about the WP GotLucky plugin, I find it interesting to see what people were searching for when they found my blog. Obviously a lot tends to be based around Astana or Kazakhstan in general, but sometimes people are looking for quite specific information about a software configuration issue they have, or for other people’s thought on a holiday destination. With the GotLucky plugin, I have an RSS feed and e-mails sent each time this site is found via a google search, but without running the search myself, I can’t tell specifically which post they ended up at. With SearchTerms Tagging 2, each post has a list of the search terms used to find the post (if this has occurred since the plugin was installed), and on the config page, I also have a list of which terms (and associated post) were found most regularly.
So, head on over to the page linked above if this sort of plugin sounds of interest you. If you have any queries/feature suggestions, check out the comments, where you’ll see the author is pretty quick and helpful in his responses/upgrades 🙂

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Jul 14 2009

Riverside Walk And Astana Park Hotel Cafe

Category: Anna's Photos,Eating Out,Kazakhstan,Personal,Pictures — ChrisM @ 11:38 pm

So, restarting the catching up for the Anna’s Photos category, we have some shots from the 14th of July again.
OK the WordPress gallery function once more appears to be convinced I don’t want the order I’m asking for with these photos. Beyond manually clicking and dragging the fifteen photos into the desired order, below is as close as I can get. Just imagine the first one is last, instead.

Anyway, Irina, Anna and I decided to investigate what was around if you took a left upon reaching the river Ishim near us, as despite living here for more than three years, we hadn’t yet made it to that part of the (very nearby) city. After walking down as far as the end of the concreted path, we sat on a bench and took a few shots on the camera. Anna seemed happy enough taking in the view by the water, so we continued our walk back across to more familiar territory, crossed under Turan (the name of the road our flat is on, since they moved Sary Arka), and continued walking next to the river. Irina spotted that a hotel (Astana Park Hotel) had a summer cafe advertised, so we decided to pop in and take a look. There are lots of gazebos, a pond with some fish swimming around, and a general summery feel to it.

Whilst the menu wasn’t cheap, the selection was pretty good, the service (that day at least) top notch, and the food tasty. Anyway, see below for a few photos of the place.

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Jul 11 2009

Russian Rhymes

Category: Anna's Photos,Personal — ChrisM @ 5:55 am

Yes, another post where WordPress decided the built in gallery function really wasn’t required here, thank you very much. Anyway, 11th July saw us at the in-laws’, and by looking at the photo with Anna’s Babushka (Ira’s Mum) some Russian nursery rhymes or fairy tales being read to her.

Chris, Anna And Ira

Chris, Anna And Ira

Babushka With Anna On Her Lap In Back Garden

Babushka With Anna On Her Lap In Back Garden

Irina And Anna Near The In-Laws' Back Door

Irina And Anna Near The In-Laws' Back Door

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Jul 02 2009

Anna Bottle Feeding Again

Category: Anna's Photos,Anna's Videos,Personal — ChrisM @ 1:56 am

The day after (2nd July) the tightrope walking in the park, we decided to try bottle feeding again with Anna. Back in Britain she had taken to the bottle brilliantly when we had tried, but we forgot to change the teat when we next tried over here in Kazakhstan. This meant the flow was too slow, and she got very frustrated with it. Wanting to ensure that I could feed Anna if her café mummy wasn’t around to do the honours, we decided to try once more. The following video and picture were shot at the time.

Yum Yum Yum

Yum Yum Yum

No More Thank You

No More Thank You

(I’ve given up using the fancy gallery built into WordPress again – it seems somewhat random, as to how well it behaves recently.) Click the pictures to see a larger version, and as normal, you can use the links to navigate through them. Click once again to return to this post.

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Jun 26 2009

One Week Before Astana Day…

Category: Anna's Photos,Kazakhstan,Personal,Pictures — ChrisM @ 3:27 pm

Well, eight days I think, but anyway, as this was the 26th June again, you can see the camera batteries took a bit of a battering. We took Anna out for her (almost) daily walk, and decided to check out how the preparations for Astana Day (and the International Religious Tolerance Forum) were coming along. If you have ever seen pictures of Yurts, and wondered how they were made, and the process that creates them, you’ll hopefully get a slightly better idea soon. If you’re reading this on the front page, you’ll need to click the link under the first photo to see the rest – there are a lot, and so to keep the front page readable, I’ve hidden them away.

Anna At Entrance To Astana Park, With Yurts In The Background

Anna At Entrance To Astana Park, With Yurts In The Background

Continue reading “One Week Before Astana Day…”

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Jun 24 2009

From J. Lo To Play Dough

Category: In The Media,Kazakhstan — ChrisM @ 5:15 pm

OK, so his name is obviously Placido Domingo (well Plácido Domingo to be precise, but I don’t yet know how WordPress will handle accented characters. Cyrillics are still an issue), but if I titled the post from J. Lo to Pla. Do, I thought it quite likely people would read it without making it rhyme. Which would obviously ruin my day 😉

Anyway, the connection between the two singers? Astana, Kazakhstan, obviously.

What, you say you still don’t follow? Fair enough… We will soon be celebrating Astana Day, and last year there were rumours that Jennifer Lopez would be performing at a concert. See NewEurasia.net’s article here.
OK, I was working from memory, and upon reading that article properly, it sounds more like it was for a celebration of the president’s birthday, not Astana day. I’ll need to look into that. I hope NewEurasia implement some mod_rewrite rules soon – all their internal links to old articles are still broken.
Jennifer Lopez

However, this time there does seem to be official confirmation, (three English Language sources that I could find at least – United Press International, PR Newswire, merinews (site is utterly unrelated to me, though I should have thought of the domain name before it was grabbed by them.)), that he will be appearing (and presumably singing) on July 5th at the Palace of Independence. This all assumes that it isn’t some sort of power play by akimat, in terms of getting a contract signed.

Anyway, I expect tickets will be for big-wigs, their children, extended familys and any politicians in the area that haven’t recently been denounced for corruption, so I’ll have to keep an eye out in the local press and media for reports on it.
Placido Domingo

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Jun 12 2009

Plugin Problem Traced – WP Security Scan

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 4:48 am

See my earlier (possibly related?) post on an inability to upgrade to WordPress 2.8.

It looked as though my laziness in tracing the upgrade initialization problems had caught up with me earlier, as I found I was unable to edit existing posts or pages, with a blank white page being presented, and no changes committed since using 2.8. Deciding this wasn’t something with I’d just ignore for now, I went through the plugins, individually disabling them, trying to edit an existing page§. If the page updated correctly, with no blank response, I re-enabled the plugin, and disabled the next in the list. Of course, I didn’t find the misbehaving plugin until the second to last one – WP Security Scan. I’ve left a thread informing the author on his forum, and just left the plugin disabled for now.

§ – In case you’re interested, I noticed that either the newer version of the DandyID plugin, or a change in WP2.8 had caused the list of places you can find me online to be presented on seperate lines, with accompanying text, rather than the space saving row of icons I had previously. This information has now been moved to the About / Contact Me page.

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Jun 12 2009

WordPress 2.8 Upgrade Problems

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 3:19 am

OK, problem sorted. I don’t know which of this site’s plugins caused this blog to be unable to automatically upgrade to WordPress 2.8, but after deactivating all of them, the process completed at the first attempt. Just in case this helps other blogs, if you currently have any of the following activated, you may want to disable them all, upgrade, and then obviously re-enable them. Akismet, All in One Adsense and YPN, All in One SEO Pack, Auto Thickbox, Broken Link Checker, Comment Referrers, DandyID Services, Different Posts Per Page, Easy IP2Country, Executable PHP widget, FeedBurner FeedSmith, Fuzzy Recent Comments, Google XML Sitemaps, MiniMeta Widget, MyBlogLog: Just for you, MyBlogLog Recent Readers Widget, No Frames, Revision Control, runPHP, ShareThis, Subscribe To Comments, Twitter Tools, WordPress Automatic Upgrade, WordPress Related Posts, WP-Blackcheck, wp-GotLucky, wp-headlineanimator, WP-o-Matic, WP Calais Archive Tagger, WP Calais Auto Tagger, WP Security Scan and finally Zap_NewWindow 🙂
You can now see why I didn’t follow the correct protocol (disable one by one) to discover which plugin was the naughty one 🙂 If I had to lay money on it, I’m guessing the No Frames plugin caused problems (I had already tried disabling the external WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin), but I have no proof whatsoever.

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Jun 12 2009

This Blog Will Change

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 2:55 am

… its appearance for a few minutes whilst I try to track down the root cause for the site’s inability to automatically upgrade to WordPress 2.8. I’ll be temporarily disabling all the plugins, so don’t worry if the site looks a little odd for a short while. Back soon…

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