Blogs

Had a great weekend. Don't know what more to say than that.

See Spiderman, it was good (and comprehensible even dubbed over in Russian).

Added one more short movie, this one of Lena, to the movies page.

A busy few weeks culminated this past Saturday night when my employer, the #2 telecom company in Kazakhstan, launched its new brand name,'Ducat'. The name will be used to market services provided by the members of the Kazintel group (Arna and Ratel) that were previously advertised separately.

For the launch party violin soloist Vladimir Spivakov was invited from Moscow along with the group he conducts, the Moscow Virtuosi.

Nothing coherent to write last couple of days, just too darn busy.

Equipment needs for projects in Atyrau are still not completely clear.

Made a really good spaghetti dinner last night. The company was appreciative. And no, I don't mean my employer.

Daniel will be in DC this weekend to start selling MobileContacts (which I hope to get Kazintel and Arna to start using). There are at least 4 Palm users in the company now-- me, Mark S., Alexey Z (using my old Visor) and our new marketing guy, Sergey Y.

We're building a business case now for a kind of "rescue and recovery" team to deal with businesses undergoing computer-related problems because of virus attacks, hackers, or just a general lack of technical support. Looks like it should be good business.

Then I need to get a pair of really nice shoes.

Had a busy day of meetings yesterday-- one with our marketing department about the design and structure of our corporate websites, and one with KazCommerceBank about e-commerce.

Our own company will have at least three separate sites at the beginning: our main site, the web studio site, and the activation/statistics site for our pre-paid dialup internet cards.

Later we'll probably do a portal site for Kazakhstan as well as other sites.

Had a great day yesterday-- just relaxed home during most of the day, except for a small flurry of activity looking for song lyrics in Gaelic for a friend who needs to sing some at an upcoming performance.

Then went to see "Amelie" with Lena, and had dinner and coffee afterwards.

And then it *snowed again* believe it or not. Not much accumulation as I look out the window this morning, but it's still pretty late for snow here, especially since we've had days over 75 already.

We had a party in the office last night to celebrate the opening of our customer service center-- we now have a centralized call center for people to use when they have technical problems.

Most of the internet services customers, especially those who have purchased dialup cards, are now using the line. Our old service bureau is still handling other calls (as well as those that filter down through sales and marketing) but hopefully it'll all be tied together after the launch of the new trademark.

Fantastic lightning storm here last night around 10 p.m. or so... took some video, maybe I'll edit it and put some up if it turned out well enough.

I know, I know... silly to be videotaping natural phenomena that are global while I'm on the other side of the world. I promise I'll take the camera out into the city for some more interesting footage very soon.

After registering this morning, I discovered all the sessions were in Russian, so I let two of the technical staff go in my place; just as well since the meeting at Kazakhtelecom took longer than I thought, and I had more work to do in the office anyway.

Still managed to see Lena for a late lunch, which made the day that much more pleasant. Thought I might stop by the Ankara for the Cisco Expo dinner, but instead decided to go through with my regularly scheduled Russian lesson-- this time, nouns only, so it'll be less confusing.