Natalya (as in Ms. Kim, rather than the Dr. Natalya that gets mentioned more often on this site) should be arriving later today (Friday). We’ve not seen her in a while, so it will be good to catch up. She used to live with us in Cheltenham a long time ago, before returning to Kazakhstan. Dave is also supposed to be popping over for a drink or two, as well as some haute cuisine created by yours truly. (OK, it will probably be some processed & battered meat product deep fried with chips & beans, but he didn’t complain last time )
Finally, before I forget, Happy Birthday to the friend who doesn’t want their name or photo on this site. We hope you enjoyed your day, and we look forward to meeting again soon.

As I previously mentioned, this city is starting its celebrations for the president’s birthday, and the anniversary of it becoming the capital city. There was a large push for all civic construction to be completed in time, and the roads recently had some lanes painted again. This might not sound like much, but when you consider you can easily have 7 or 8 lanes of speeding traffic on the road, expecting motorists to voluntarily stick to their side of the road is like trying to find a diet pill that works as well as the promises made on the bottle!

According to this report, a school in Lund, Sweden, has informed a boy that if he hands out his birthday party invites on their property, he must invite all pupils, rather than those he is actually friends with. I would have not raised an eyebrow had they simply been telling him not to bully others, or make fun of someone due to their weight/skin or hair colour, but to tell a child that his birthday party attendees will be controlled by the authorities really does seem totally OTT. Whether general opinion backs the teacher who confiscated all the invitations, or this was a politically correct little authoritarian, I was unable to discover, but the story caught my eye, so I thought I’d pass the link along…

MAKING? LMAO
See this BBC article for a rather large typo, or very misinformed journalist. Although the BBC World television report did not contain this inaccuracy, the fact that the online version wasn’t checked properly is quite astounding. The idea that the Dutch are banning people from rolling their spliffs with tobacco is laughable. In case you haven’t yet heard, the Netherlands are following most of Europe by banning smoking cigarettes (and in their case alone, joints with tobacco in) in enclosed public places. I still want to know whether they expect all smokers who prefer hash to weed to use pipes, but I guess I’ll have to wait a while before returning to Amsterdam to further my research. It is a tough job writing this blog

Irina’s parents managed to finish the decorating being done in their house just in time to welcome some family members who had travelled over for her dad’s 60th birthday. I’ll try and post more details on the celebrations at a later date. Anyway, once the paint had dried, I reconnected their PC, and the audio/video equipment in the lounge. They ended up not buying a plasma tv mount, deciding to just keep it on the floor stand.

I read a report that back over in Swansea, they recently held a film premiere for “The Edge Of Love”. The movie was partially funded by the Welsh Assembly (via their Wales Creative IP Fund), who invested £700,000 in the Dylan Thomas biographical film. You can find a video interview with two of the stars (Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley) here.
Sadly, Wales is also in the headlines for topping the list of underage drinkers in the Western world, at least according to the WHO. Check the BBC article here. The sample size was 250,000 (I’m assuming that is in total, not just in Wales) 11,12 and 15 year olds. 15 year old girls in Wales were the most likely to have experimented with weed. As long term readers will know, I have no issue with schmoking personally, but the fact that so many young girls have tried it is a little surprising.

Last night (well, a couple of hours ago) was the first night of celebrations. The reason? This city’s (Astana) birthday as being the capital of Kazakhstan. Also, the president has his birthday around this time, so it is a joint celebration. Anyway there was huge firework display with some lasers. The sights and sounds all the way from our flat window was pretty spectacular. They will apparently be repeating the spectacle each night by the river, though whether it will be to the same scale remains to be seen. Hopefully Ira and I will manage to get a little closer sometime, and I’ll try and figure out which settings will work best on the camera. Probably not tomorrow, as Dave is coming over to get drunk catch up and listen to some of his new tunes discuss deep intellectual matters.
Oh, and the car alarms? In the car park near us, despite being a good 10/15 minute walk away, all the car alarms were set off by the bassy booms from the fireworks!

You may remember I recently wrote about SocialSpark (OK, just double checked, and it is the post below this one ). I’m glad to say the temporary hiccough they encountered with their data centre seems settled now. Having had some more time to play around with the interface, I’m happy to report that most aspects seem to have been improved or had their aspects expanded since the last PPP redesign.

The premise is relatively simple - if you run a blog, and enjoy writing posts about things your visitors might be interested in, you can start earning money very quickly. As friends and family will know, this is one of the income sources I’ve been relying on since moving to this city, and to date it has gone reasonably well. One major difference between this and other, longer established schemes, is that everything is completely upfront. Every post you write that is inspired by a SocialSpark will be clearly labelled as such, bloggers are only ever expected to give their honest opinions, and the links are all NoFollow. This means (theoretically at least), that the search engine companies will be happier with such content, as you are no longer giving link juice to the company’s website whom you are linking to. The idea with Izea’s newer scheme is to bring visitor’s attention to product and sites, rather than improve their SEO necessarily. You will also find suggestions on what to write the next time you suffer from writers block, and with a community of like minded bloggers, you will often find your own site’s traffic will improve.
So, visit the site (I’d post an affiliate link, but can’t seem to find such a scheme just yet), sign up, and if you feel so inclined, as me as a SocialSpark friend - you can find me under the name of SilentlyScreaming

[EDIT 3]
The site is now up, my thanks to Emily for the heads up. Luckily the opp I took last night and posted on was still available. The requested link had only changed by one word, so I didn’t need to change much in the post at all. Anyway, see below for the original version of this post…

I attempted to enter the details for my last sponsored post through Izea’s PayPerPost scheme, to find that the site was not responding. As I have had problems with my internet recently, so the first thing to do was check if a few other sites were working. Google, a few favourite forums and friends’ sites were all working. So, I opened up NetFront on my phone, waited for the Edge connection to be established, and confirmed that the Izea sites were not accessible via KCell’s servers either.
At this point, I thought I’d try and check Izea’s blog to see if they had posted anything about planned downtime/maintenance issues. D’oh! The blog is based on the same servers, so this didn’t help. I did a quick search, and checked the Google cache of the Izea blog. Sadly, this was five days old, and held no helpful news. Eventually, I checked on Google’s Blog Search, and lo and behold, there are unexpected problems right now, posted on the Izea blog. I could only see a three line intro to the post, as the blog itself is still down, but I at least know it isn’t just me.
I hope they fix the problems soon, it is 4am, and I only have an hour or two to enter the post’s details before I lose my reservation on the opp. That and I need sleep soon

[edit]
OK, so head on over to here for Izea’s post on the situation.
[edit2]
See the comments below for a quick hello Izea’s Karen. As tempting as it may be to throw my toys around, obviously I understand this is effecting more than just me and my $15 opp

PLEASE do head on over to the Izea blog post I’ve linked to, BUT just in case there is another hiccup with Amazon’s server this time, I’ll include a copy of that post below…

We’re not quite sure what’s happened just yet, but our data center seems to have gone down. We can’t get voice calls into them to ask why either.

We have people travelling there right now (with large sticks) to see what’s going on, but for the time being at least PayPerPost and SocialSpark are both down.

We will of course be working hard with the data center to restore normal service ASAP.

Update 1 17:06: Just found out that the connectivity between the data center and their main Internet carrier has gone down. This is still not good news in so far as the sites are still down, but for us at least it means less work when they fix it. The machines are actually all up and running just fine, they just have absolutely no-one using them.

Update 2 21:36: Well, the data center has not been so helpful so far. It seems the problem was not the carrier at all, but someone or something in the center itself. The ‘engineer’s (see the quote marks there) haven’t had a clue what’s wrong, haven’t offered us any decent updates and generally just suck. However, they are, at long last, making progress and apparently we should see some servers come online shortly. In the meantime, we’ve deployed static elements of izea.com to an Amazon EC2 server and pointed some of our domains at it. We’ll be posting up a message on those sites soon for those visitors that don’t know about the blog. Hopefully we’ll have gone to a lot of effort to do that though and won’t need because our servers will be visible on the Internet once again.

What a crazy nightmare.