Blogs

Well, since I've already played just about every level of Halo half a dozen times, including playing the complete game through at least once on Easy, Normal, and Legendary difficulty settings, I've been using a few spare moments (usually just before bed) to look at some of the other Xbox games.

Starfighter wasn't very pretty or playable-- the controls seemed completely counter-intuitive, and it wasn't possible for me to get into playing.

Cisco Systems had a reception to celebrate the opening of their new representative office in Kazakhstan last night at the Ankara hotel; great food, lots of good contacts, even though it was a small group and everyone already knew everybody else, for the most part.

Cisco Systems is opening up an office in Almaty, and tonight they are having a reception at the Ankara Hotel, with technical seminars to be presented tomorrow. (Which is kind of a pain in the ass, since I have a meeting with Kazakhtelecom at 10 tomorrow, which means I have to register for the seminar, go to Kazakhtelecom, and then come back later.

Diana Brett, exec. director of AmCham, will also be going. Hopefully I'll catch up with Lena later on.

I need to play more tennis.

Actually, I need a vacation.

Synfibers.com now runs using the same site software used here at narcogen.com, at blackstarproductions.net, and at rampancy.net.

In addition, there are sites for other potential clients in development that use this software, as well as test sites for clients of Arna (Kazintel) in Kazakhstan, including amcham.synfibers.com.

Lena's host father from the US, Bart, flew back to Iowa via Istanbul, Paris, and Cincinatti early this morning. Today she'll take her GRE in preparation for going to university in Germany starting this summer.

The old photo gallery script I wrote is going to be retired.

This new site system doesn't have such a facility; instead, I'll be using a program that came with my digital camera to create gallery pages, and then paste them into this system.

This costs me a little bit of flexibility-- there will no longer be a possibility to search for individual photos according to various criteria in the database; but it should allow me to put photos on the site much more quickly than the old one at a time method.

Went to see "Birthday Girl" (in Russian) yesterday with Lena. Interesting to notice they dubbed over Nicole Kidman's Russian performance with another voice actress also speaking in Russian. In one scene, an actor speaking in Russian was dubbed over in Russian, then another character translated that from Russian into English, which was also dubbed over again in Russian.

After that we met Galina and Bart (Lena's host father in Iowa) for dinner at Venezia, then played pool at Metro (Galina and Lena beat us handily all 3 games).

Most of the old creative works, prose and poetry, have been put into the new system.

Only one of the visual items has been, and none of the photo galleries have been done yet.