Closed mind?

I remember in school very often people would form their groups, usually based on social class, life philosophy and race/nationality.

I look at the development community and am somewhat reminded of high school. Every time people find out that i am an American working for a European organization they are usually surprised and working in a European organization i very rarely run into Americans. Now i never hear (perhaps because i am American but i don't think so) oh i don't hang out with Americans or hear Americans say they don't' hang out with Europeans and indeed i can think of many exceptions but in general, i seem to see Europeans at parties, restaurants, etc hanging out with each other and the same for Americans... disturbing. 

In job hunting i have discovered that many of the "beltway bandit" organizations pay better than average European (and American for that matter) organizations but the disturbing part to me is that i see this separation even more in people who work for these organizations.

OpenOffice.Org demos ribbon-style UI prototype

I just read a bit "OpenOffice.Org demos ribbon-style UI prototype". I am totally not a fan of the "ribbon style" in MSO or (apparently) the up and coming open office. While i admit that my compu-kungfu isn't what it used to be I am still not bad with figuring out and getting used to new programs but this new ribbon style gui is beyond me. I actually installed MSO 2007 specifically so i could make myself get accustomed to it but after a year i still find myself hunting around trying to figure out how to do this or that function that was just a drop down menu aways in MSO 2003.

A Turning Point For Afghan War, And For Obama : NPR

I was reading an article on the NPR site (A Turning Point For Afghan War, And For Obama : NPR) and one line struck me: "While some U.S. officials say that Obama is considering a plan to pull back from daily battles with the Taliban to focus more strictly on counterterrorism options, Republicans are pressing him to approve McChrystal's recommendations." 

Why isn't this situation a bit of a win for him? That is, if Republicans are pushing him to accept the generals recommendations but are pounding him on healthcare then why not say "ok, you want more troops, let my healthcare plan go through" so at least the dems will get thier healthcare (even if they want out of Afghanistan) and the reps will get their war... of course all this begs the question, where will the money come from and more importantly how will we pay it back.

The death of Google's "Do no evil" mantra

I recently came across an article "Google's not fighting Gmail subpoenas" that tells about how google is just handing over the information of some of its users. I remember reading about an instance where google denied (but eventually had to cave) the DoJ (or was it FBI?) access to IP addresses or emails or something, either way it seemed like they tried to do the right thing; but now, this seems to be part of a downward spiral for google, hopefully privacy groups will successfully take google to task for this.

Fantasies of a computer hobbyist

Asides from the obvious (lewd) ones which I will not go into I am dreaming of an i7 Core with USB v3.0. Yup, those are the two biggies for me. Of course gratuitous amounts of memory (4+ gigabytes, which means i would need a 64bit OS which again means i would need a realtively powerful [or at least new] computer), a really fast hard drive etc but right now I need a fast processor and speedy external storage.

I am working on three huge tasks which require CPUs of the workhorse variety.

Task #1 Graphics: I have about 35,000 photos that I am sifting through and organizing. This involves everything from image stitching to geotagging to retouching to IPTC keyword tagging etc and in large batches.

Task #2 Audio: I have about 28,000 songs to sift through, the sifting is apparently the most laborious part as I have whole albums that I only one 2-3 songs out of but there is other stuff such as adding acoustical fingerprints, MusicBrainz IDs, finding duplicates, etc.

Task 3# Video: I have video from the internet, and tons of video from the past 8 years of digital camera ownership. I want to start chopping, cropping, combining, and editing this stuff into something watchable (to just string all the stuff together would be insanely boring to watch).

Geekness (techno geek, not the chicken head eating geek): This isn't a task but is a point dealing with techno-lust. I  love linux, i don't use it nearly as much as i would like primarily because the majority of applications i need are  windows  only (though the things i use the most , like Opera, are also available in linux). There is a way to run two operating systems at once (wrap your head around that!) with virtualization but that requires heaps of memory and a hefty CPU doesn't hurt. As I alluded to previously a 32bit operating system  has a 2 gigabyte memory limit, that is i don't think it can use more than 2gb of memory no matter how much memory you actually have installed so to run dual operating systems (running windows 7 inside of linux) would require alot of memory and in order to use all the physical memory installed you need a 64bit OS)... got it? Not to mention that alot of video/audio/graphic editing (especially batch editing) requires insane amounts of memory.

All of the above requires semi-to-very serious processing power (which the i7 will handily be able to provide) and serious storage (not to mention read/write speeds). A geek reading this might say “what about eSATA?!” but if you look at the USB v3.0 speeds (4gbit/sec) compared to eSATA II (3Gbit/sec) there is no comparison. Of course the biggest problems now are that 

#1 Due to my globetrotting line of work I need something semi-portable (which means a mobile Core i7 [Clarksfield] which won’t be out for another month or two and won’t come down to a price that mere mortals can afford until after the new year) 
#2 USB v3.0 isn’t expected to be out en masse until mid 2010, Windows 7 doesn’t even have drivers for it yet.

As painful as it will certainly be I am thinking I need to hold off until the second quarter of 2010 at least before I get something. By then hopefully USB v3 will be out, prices will have come down, software support will be out (with major bugs fixed)… but damn that’s a long time to wait.

İsanın doğum günü münasibətilə!!!

Isanin dogum günü münasib?til?!!!
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

Ok, that was supposed to be “Merry Christmas” in Azeri but it actually (literally) means “With the birth of Christ” which is strange anyway since Azerbaijan is an Islamic country… but I guess the Soviets instilled a sense of yuletide cheer in Azerbaijan too (Celebrate, Be Happy, or off to Siberia you go!!!). My staff was telling me that actually Azeris use Christmas trees as part of the New Year celebration and for that one would say “Yeni il” (Happy New Year I think).

Anyway, I saw this Christmas tree (or New Years tree as it were) while I was walking through town, I had seen an Azeri Santa Claus (Ded Moroz in Russian) and most amusingly an Azeri Snegurochka (Amusing because Russians are a “bit” prejudice and certainly have their own concept of the Russian ubermensch, which is almost always blonde, not a big deal except if you are familiar with Russian pride/tradition/culture) while walking around town so the Christmas tree was not so much of a surprise, I guess its just that in an Islamic country one doesn’t normally expect to find celebrations of a Christian holiday around (though if you as an Azeri they say that it is not a celebration of a Christian holiday at all, its for new years!)

Nixon dug deep for dirt on Ted Kennedy - Yahoo! News

I just came across this article today "Nixon dug deep for dirt on Ted Kennedy". I guess it is not a surprise to some but the dispicable levels that Nixon sank to, levels that you thought "na, even Nixon wouldn't do that" are amazing. These phone conversations are quite an eye opener, I just hope that the same information has been collected about Cheney and that they are published before he dies.

Offensive Thriftiness

Yesterday one of my staff asked if I would mind meeting two European inters who were doing some sort of evaluation of cheese production in Azerbaijan. I will post another time about my thoughts on trying to push European cheeses and cheese making practices on cultures that are perfectly happy with their local products. This post is about how these two were operating, they were carrying backpacks, they came by marshutka (like a van/taxi/bus service found in many CIS countries, and is quite cheap [albeit very uncomfortable]), and they don’t seem to want to pay for anything. They came and had some questions for me etc but seemed to be wanting more assistance which I ignored at first but then caved and offered the organization’s vehicle/driver to take them around a bit. One of my staff put these intern in her house for the night (I was not willing to go that far since I already have to host consultants and regional staff sometimes) and my staff also found a student who would do translation for me (seemingly for free) and these two girls don’t seem (hopefully they will prove me wrong) to have any inclination to reimburse the organization or this student translator. While not reimbursing an organization is acceptable having someone help you for free, not treating them to a lunch or transport back home just seems irresponsible and rude and no, not thrifty, it is downright cheap.

I have seen some pretty obnoxious expats, and some locals that are hell bent on ripping off expats but thankfully most expats seem pretty willing to compensate locals for time/services in some fashion. Those expats who mooch off of locals who are much less fortunate (financially) than they are… are just loathsome.

The impersonal nature of the extra personal networking sites

I accept that networking can be pretty impersonal, and the masters are those who can network and make every networkee feel like there is a personal connection; I am not one of those people. Now comes all these social services, like FaceBook (which is a bit more personal since there tends to be a less business like air about it) and LinkedIn which is a bit less personal due to its business angle... but the gaps between the two are narrowing.

I just received another invite through LinkedIn from a person I know of but hardly know personally, which is a step up from those i have never even heard of, and it was simply a "X wants to connect with you". I got another invite via Facebook which was almost the exact same thing, which is a bit more insulting to me in Facebook because both of these are generic invites but facebook is supposed to be more personal and in facebook i *thought* the purpose was to make friends not contacts. Anyway, I have inboxes in facebook and linkedin full of unaccepted invites. I have made it a point that anyone I invite (very few so far) I include a personal message to, to at the very least not give the appearance of totally superficiality be it for facebook or linkedin... I thought these two services were supposed to promote socialization but they seem to have done the opposite with people taking the attitude of who-ever-dies-with-the-most-online-friends/contacts-wins... sigh.

Mud Volcanos?

Well Mud Volcano would be a bit of an overstatement but it is the first thing that came to mind. Anyway, i am almost hesitant to upload this considering some of the fairly critical comments i have gotten for other uploads (such as driving along in Afghanistan, sorry no bombs or anything) but hey.

Ok, this is an area near the capital city of Azerbaijan (Baku). There are no signs to it or anything so if you dont have an Azeri with you (or dont speak the language) then you are SOL trying to find it. Some of the mounds were not bubbling constantly (I timed one to be about every 7 minutes) so i didn't feel like waiting around for the "perfect shot" especially after i got this one. I had thought (for some reason) the mud would be hot but not even, it was actually cold. I was told that many Azeris come there to put the mud on thier skin (kind of like an open air spa... without the spa). That is about it, for those of you looking for dancing cats or bombs etc you might not want to wait for this video to load and keep browsing.

Google should take geocities

I recently heard on the futuretense podcast that Yahoo would be closing geocities sometime in the near future. The covered how some organization "Archive Team" is trying to copy as much of geocities as they can. The first thing that came to my mind was "isn't archive.org doing this?" (apparenlty they stopped archiving geocities in 2002) but today i was studying up on using regular expressions (regex) in the Vim editor and found a webpage... on geocities (I guess Yahoo hasn't taken it down yet). After i noticed this it popped into my head, hey, google should buy geocities! Google now has its own webpages for its users and i would think that Geocities would be a steal now (plus google has already taken another icon from the pre-internet bubble age "De Ja News" and managed to monetize it why not geocities?

Anyway, hopefully someone will take geocities, as the "Archive Team" mentioned, there are alot of pages on geocities (including one of my own which i haven't accessed in years) which ind of give one a peek into the days-of-internet-yore; it would be a shame to loose that.

Drunk Squirrel

Apologies to all for the lack of postings, its kind of hard to post when you just don't feel like it (and i haven't). Anywho, I came across this video on youtube, kind of typical but there is a bit of irony that you might only get if you are Russian. In Russian culture squirrel (белочка) can be a reference to being drunk (I think it is something like "you are so drunk you imagine squirrels") so that made this particular video quite amusing. Just thought I'd share that little tidbit.

An unrelated side note: I use the opera browser the most and one of my gripes (more with the website than the browser since opera is w3 compliant) is that it didn't work with blogger... now it does! I can just click on the add link button instead of having to manually edit the HTML or use a different browser. Horay!!!

Getting harder to be anonymous

I have a facebook account but prefer not to advertise myself too much but now i am finding that other people who have pictures of me (like group shots) are now tagging me in those photos. As much as i do online i prefer to keep things private like where i live, phone, and photos etc
but that gets a bit difficult when people start posting photos of me (so far group photos) online... grrrr.

I have been accused of wearing my emotions on my sleeve but people on facebook take it to a whole new level. Another observation is that i seem to be almost totally friend-less since i have under 20 "friends" and many facebookers seem to literally have hundreds! I think i have invited maybe 2 people to "be my friends" but all the others have contacted me and even of all those who contact me i don't accept. I don't think i am being a snob but i kind of think, did i ever talk to
these people when i was around them (or did they ever talk to me), does this person have anything in common with me (for the few random friend invitations i have gotten from total strangers), and can I stand being associated with these people? (the epitome of snobbery but hey, there are some folks out there who i view as repulsive, slimy, hopelessly annoying etc and i think it would be rather insincere to accept them as "friends" when i view them in such lights).

Anyway, this whole social networking internet thing is a bit much for me, i perhaps i "just don't get it" though i do see its utility so its probably more accurate to say its a combination of
online-anti-social-ness and not "getting it". oh well.

Nadof is corrupt its America's fault but...

So many people countries are blaming the "corrupt USA", but how many people would invest in Russia or China etc? Only a very *brave* few, why? because those places are risky

The latest scandal with Nadof is a great example of carelessness, everyone assumed those "greedy Americans" would not be corrupt so businesses/people/countries invested ****blindly***** you can find many examples of professional investors that didn't fall for the Nadof hype and looked at the numbers and said "something is off". The same for the sub-prime market, packaged debt where no one knew what was in the package... but invested anyway... wildly... and now everyone is crying that there is corrupt business in the US (duh, care to compare the US to some other countries?).

*Of*Course* I am not even attempting to justify any of the corruption here, one of the reasons i might have considered voting for McCain is his semi-tough (shall we say tougher than the average politician which is perhaps not saying much) stance on corruption, but this reminds me of the saying "lotteries are taxes on people that are bad at math" well perhaps this whole financial debacle is a tax on irrational investors (though of course the repercussions are much further reaching than just the jobs of those irrational investors).

Microsoft and refusal to comply

I have a pretty slow internet connection so I really like blogger's option to email my blog entries and have them automatically posted (instead of having to go to a website, wait for each page to load, and then deal with how blogger *doesn't* play well with my browser of choice Opera). The problem i have is that my main email program is Outlook mainly for its PIM features and my HTC TyTN II plays best with outlook compared to other PIMs. Outlook adds in tons of HTML and "MS HTML" (ie non-W3C approved html code) to its emails, normally this is not a problem for regular emailing but blogger apparently doesn't like it so my blog posts come out all funky looking, quite irritating. This is a something that MS does quite often, that is, taking a standard and modifying it (ostensibly "improving it") in a way that makes other standard-compliant applications have problems. They somehow (my guess is through lobbying) got the their XML based document standard approved over OpenOffice's xml document format which was totally open thus flubbing the process.

Man Manicure & Massage

Ok, so it wasn't a manicure (though i have heard of straight guys getting manicures i am not one of them) it was a shave which to me is perhaps the male equivalent of a manicure. I think i have written about something like this before but i am too lazy to sift through my blog entries. I am working in a not-so-large town in south-central Azerbaijan so make no mistake, there are no amenities here that Azeri's would consider "extravagant" but there seems to be a convenient convergence of two cultural customs here barber shop shaves and therapeutic massages.

I have had a b*tch of a time finding places that do shaves in the US which is ironic to me for two reasons 1) I have heard stories about how back in the 50s (?) men just went to the barber shop in the morning to get a shave and 2) In this day of gyms/spas/manicures etc i would think a nice hot/close shave would be in the mix somewhere... apparently not. Its not just the US though, in places where stubble is en vogue (Italy, a place where my German friend commented, even the national news reporters can have a 5'oclock shadow and be in fashion) or where spindly beards are frowned upon (Thailand) or a place where almost all guys are very well shaved and a haircut costs a pittance (Moldova), its hard to get a shave in all those countries. The exceptions thus far are Afghanistan and now Azerbaijan.

I was a bit surprised at how many places you could get a fairly good shave in Afghanistan but it later started making sense as some ("modern leaning") Afghans think that facial hair is a bit uncouth or just a rural thing and then there are those that want to look like "good Muslims" there but also want to "look good" so a good shave/beard-trim becomes important. I went to a dirty little place near my office that had a very sharply dressed young barber there (and he used disposable razors) I am thinking (this is only "Davidson theory" i am not an anthropologist) that a combination of elements like the one that causes Moldovans to be so clean cut and that causes Afhgan's to consider getting a shave at a barber shop which converged here in Azerbaijan resulting in barbershops that give shaves, good ones too (though i fear it is dying here just as it has in the US, what a pity). The barber i go to has a small little place, i mean really small, about the size of a large walk in closet but he has a steady hand (important!), uses disposable razors (insanely important), uses the good ole brush n lather foam, and finishes up with aftershave and some baby powder type stuff... one comes out feel'n like a million bucks.

I have a friend who is a masseur, charges a kings ransom($50 *minimum*), and last time i checked she was having a hard time of it (and my guess is she is having a harder time now with the economy such as it is). Being a masseur you must charge alot especially if you have one or less clients a day but that pretty much makes it prohibitively expensive for po' folk such as myself... unless you live/work in developing countries! In many of the developing countries massages are a maximum of $20 (that was at a expat place in Cambodia), it was $10 at a Chinese place in Cambodia (which was more for locals and IMHO was at least as good as the expat massage place), in Thailand the little old lady gumby massages were like $4 (I usually tipped an extra $1) and in Moldova it was about $7. Here in Azerbaijan it is 6AZN (1AZN ~1EUR) for 40minutes... not bad at all, even on my pathetic salary.

I don't think the massage thing is a cultural convergence thing really, I have noticed that most Russian trained doctors are trained in how to give therapeutic massages and there are also trained masseurs as well. Azerbaijan is a former Soviet republic and it is not hard to see how that has influenced many aspects of society here but not totally, they are still pretty socially conservative (specially regarding interactions between men and women, i had a hell of a time finding a Russian teacher because most of the teachers [or their husbands] didn't think it would be appropriate to teach a guy...grrrrr). Well i found out in Moldova that even the village doctors gave massages and so i thought i would check out here, and yup, they got em. It was a bit awkward at first because the girl (well 20s) didn't speak English and i only speak mediocre Russian so she put me in a room and i guess told me to undress but i wasn't sure how far was acceptable (the Russian tutor finding thing now makes me nervous about offending locals) so i stripped down to pants/t-shirt and when she came in she gave me what sounded like a "I'm supposed to give you a massage like that?!" spiel, i got it and went to my boxers no problem and got a pretty good massage. There are different nuances every place i go, in Cambodia i don't remember anything in particular but in Thailand the little old ladies would freak out if you took off any more than your shoes (this was at *real* massage places, not the brothels, people don't usually take you seriously if you are a guy and say "I want a massage", they just assume you are referring to its euphemism). The Thai massages usually consisted of an unnaturally strong little old woman (trust me, not brothel material) who would do things like put her foot in your arm pit and pull your arm, pushing the limits of ones ligaments (not to mention physics) and you would come out feeling like gumby reincarnate... didn't really help so much if you had knots in your back but i image would be excellent after a exercise workout.

U.K.'s prudent savers feel punished... its not just the UK

I was listening to American Public Media's "Market Place" and they had a piece about how some prudent savers in the Uk are feeling punished and ya know what, its not just them! Times like this when people and businesses are getting bailed out because they were frivolous, not cautious enough, greedy, or just plain stupid makes me feel like all my frugality has been for naught. It is a freerider delima of sorts, i talked with a Spanish colleague regarding the Spanish social system and job hunting also came up, she wasn't worried about it because after she finishes a job she just collects unemployment salary from the government for a few months (something like 80% of what her previous salary was) then looks for a job later... she also confessed that her brother, who owns his own business pays very high taxes (higher than she does) and how he effectively pays for her to sit around (I am wording it more harshly than she did). I have had a harder-time-than-most with job hunting so this blasé attitude is just insanely frustrating. While i was working in DC i lived in an "up and coming neighborhood", which is a euphemism for a ghetto place that has potential, sometime when i would take off early I would see guys just mulling around in the middle of the day and wonder "well maybe they have night jobs", well that was naive, they just collect unemployment (much less than what one would get in most western European countries) and enjoy mulling around... no shame.

Society's inability to hold *all* these people and businesses accountable is... frustrating.

Getting closer to "Media Jukebox" Nirvana

By non-geek/media-phile standards i have alot of... media. In some ways i am a bit of a junkie (i constantly max out my measly little internet connection trying to download podcasts [fuh-get-bout video podcasts]) with lots of music videos, movies, music, and misc videos. The advent of MP3s and DivX was a blessing and media related improvements such as FLAC and x264 along with things like 1.5terabyte hard drives its all quite mind boggling (my *first* foray into this kinda of stuff was a groundbreaking attempt [well for me, hey this was 1995] to record a white zombie song to my hard drive which resulted in a 40mb wav file that took up more than half of my 60mb hard drive).

In some cases i find myself behind the tech curve (i still don't get things like face book) but in other respects i find myself ahead of the tech curve (well ahead of the masses, there are still plenty of media gurus light years ahead of me), a "Media Jukebox" is one of those things I consider myself to be ahead of the masses on but a bit behind the tech-crowd. In my "old" age i have become less interested in tinkering (which is a bit depressing) and just want the stuff to work, my way; a media jukebox is a good example. I am not interested in recording from the TV onto my computer (ah la TiVo) i will rely on bittorrent for that i just want something that i can browse through my collection, or let others browse through my collection easily, i mean really easily. While (IMHO) there is no substitute for winamp for music it is not something that you can operate easily without a mouse not to mention sitting on your couch while looking at the TV. For me the all-most-there solution is a media jukebox that i can control with a RF (ie WiFi) tablet pc like remote. Yes yes there are tablet pc like remotes out there but these setups usually cost thousands of dollars and are totally proprietary, not what i am looking for.

I had been looking over many many different "media jukebox" (commonly called "media center" but i like "media jukebox" better) software packages starting with the one that comes with windows (which will certainly help popularize the concept). Unfortunately most of the reviews etc that i have found focus on PVR/DVR features and not on compatibility etc (i find that usability of most of them is pretty straight forward, but after using in depth features of programs like winamp i guess i would). I have recently re-tried Media Portal, i had tried this once before but for some reason (which i don't remember) it didn't hook me (my guess is stability or too much tinkering since it is still in RC phase). Then there was Xbox Media Center (XBMC) which *looked* great but at the time it was only for, xboxes (and i have to admit that it is an ingenious way to use an old xbox albeit takes more tinkering than i want to bother with plus i am not a game console kinda guy so i don't have an old xbox lying around to hack). Now Media Portal seems more stable and XBMC has been ported to windows (and Linux!). Some of the nice features of these programs is that they can read the album art and ID3 info from the music files (you can embed pictures in music files, called album art) and they can parse file names (like from movies and music videos) and automatically download information about the videos by web scraping places like IMDB and Mtv; all very nice features when you have hundreds (or thousands) of files!

Another note, Opera v10 (alpha) just came house (yeah!!!!!!) and it now has a feature that firefox along with some other programs have had, auto-update, and i don't mean just checking to see if there is a update downloading that file and then making you install-update it, i mean something that just downloads the little updated bits and then updates the program and then lets you keep going (maybe with a program restart in there somewhere). Something like this is really missed in media portal which isn't totally stable yet. Something like an auto-update feature and super efficient (ie can run on minimal hardware) would be about what i need for my folks (hi Mom hi Dad), to be able to put all their music/movies/etc in an easy to use interface that they could control with nothing more than a remote while looking at their TV would be... ideal.

Stocks Are Less of Your Net Worth Than You Think... if you will be getting SS...

I just finished reading an article in the WSJ that i thought would make me feel better about my portfolio unfortunately that didn't happen since it's optimism is based on social security, something that i still have limited faith i will see when i get to SS-collection age.

I know that even taking into account all the financial catastrophes the US has had (ever, even with "bumps" like the great depression) the stock market survives and ultimately you end up making money but listening to the doom and gloom on the news doesn't help.

It does make me wonder how all these financial pundits get to be where they are, i remember during the internet boom everyone talking about the "new economy" and then it crashed spectacularly (or for me it did) then this housing bubble which was only a surprise in how big it busted (I remember hearing speculation about the housing bubble years ago).

The trick it to keep reminding ones self that time and diciplne should prevail... but its a hard thing to keep in mind.

Multi-post what i am doing

I have noticed that lots and lots of apps (applications and websites) have options to add little blurbs about what you are doing/thinking/etc, and then there is twitter which is a tell everyone whatever you want all the time (potentially annoying if you ask me but hey). I am waaaay too lazy to change these things as something pops into my head but if there was a way (a website service?) that can update all the places at once, that is I could say "trying to find a translator to hire" (which was what i was doing all last week, actually my staff was doing the searching i was doing the interviewing) and it would show up in facebook, linkedin, skype, and twitter, or whatever.

I am actually surprised that i haven't been able to find such a thing but thats fine, it just popped into my head.

Back in the CIS

Well I managed to escape from Afghanistan after some (typically) painful job hunting to Azerbaijan, from an uber-islamic society to a semi-secular-Islamic society (actually, as the French husband of the person I am replacing said, “well, actually they drink vodka more than they go to the mosque” [that said they still don’t drink much]).

 

It is kind of amusing, I haven’t really worked in a CIS country since Moldova and I am finding *many* similarities with a few things I recognize from Afghanistan (the common thread in the later two being Islam).

 

I was hired as Head of Country for an organization here but unlike most of the (few) development organizations here my office and most of my staff are based outside of Baku which is kind of strange. I am kind of glad I am not in Baku as it is a booming oil town and I don’t make nearly enough to keep up with the people there (the expats and even some of the Azeris) plus after Afghanistan it will be nice to have something a bit quieter not to mention safer.

 

Anywho, more as I have time.

 

Using the Internet as an information source for help as opposed to a source for copying.

I am presently teaching a business communications ESL course at American University in Kabul and am learning more about teaching every day.

When I was in school (even in 2005) there wasn’t nearly as much information online as there is now (and there certainly wasn’t as much back during undergrad in the 90s). Without a doubt this information boom has been a blessing, no two ways about it, but the misuse or abuse of this information has become more and more disturbing to me. In the US I have heard about problems related to plagiarism etc but for those who are caught there are very stiff penalties (a friend of mine was expelled from school for a year and all she did was copy someone’s homework). In the developing world it is a different story. There are almost no laws about not claiming someone else’s intellectual work as your own and even if there are laws they are routinely ignored. I admit that I am perhaps a bit flexible about “fair use” but profiting off of someone else’s work or claiming someone else’s work as your own really really bothers me. In the class I am teaching I routinely catch students blatantly copying from the internet and not citing the copied work (or worse claiming it as your own); even worse many of the international students from developing countries in my grad school program routinely copied the work of others (and didn’t get caught nearly as often as they should have). I have heard worse stories from friends who are/were professional teachers having papers submitted with the URLs still in the header with students swearing it was their own work.

This is one of those “I can identify the problem, but don’t know the solution” things, if I was to treat my students as my friend in undergrad was treated I would have a class that was 1/3^rd its original size. I have had to stress repeatedly that un-cited work will not be counted (they are presently working on final projects) all this and I am not even requiring the work be cited according to any particular standard (I had to use APA), just tell me how I can find the information if I wanted to refer back to it… and many of them still are not getting it.

God bless comic book movies

I was never one for comic books, for some reason I could never get into them. I suppose I should have grown up by now in terms of taste but it (arguably) hasn’t happened. Enter computer animation of the last 10 years, creativity, and the epiphany that Marvel Comics had that there is serious money to be made here. Yes, of course we have had movies based on comic books for years but I think (sorry, no actual research) that the number of comic book based films has started to increase in frequency. Due to the “fantastic” nature of comic book characters I’d say that producing these types of films with all the needed special effects was a Star Wars sized proposition (which was cool as hell in its day but almost passé nowadays). With a move in the “incredible effects” direction (using cgi) with the debut of Terminator 2 and later the Matrix special effect has grown to jaw dropping capability.

 

For various reasons my taste in movies has become pretty shallow in that great special effects, reasonable acting, and an ok storyline is usually enough to get me to watch something (of course gratuitous violence and sex always helps J). I’d say that these comic stories (which are ripe for storylines and cool scifi concepts) along with Hollywood today makes for really entertaining viewing.

Under Attack!!

How's that for an alarmist title? Well it's misleading to say the least but it still seemed appropriate. Last night (3am) I kept hearing all these noises, sometimes it sounded (in my groggy state) like very brief thunder other times straight up gunfire. I found out this morning that it was actually a shootout between some terrorist and the Afghan Police/Army. It took place less than a mile from where I am which I guess should be unsettling but for some reason its not. I guess some of the reasons it is not particularly unsettling is that I have heard about violence in Kabul for awhile (though I haven't actually heard the violence itself), rumor has it these guys are linked to the attack on Karzi and the police found them and cornered them, they weren't after me, and there was almost no chance I would be caught up in it. Still its kind of surreal. For me the most difficult part of working in Kabul is having to take security into consideration all the time which means I (as I keep saying) don't get out much. Ironically the projects I manage are in a very safe area of Afghanistan (Central, called Hazarajat) where one can, and I have, walk anywhere one wants without fear.

I was walking in Bamyan, a province smack in the middle of Hazarajat, a few months ago and as often happens an Afghan (student) who wanted to practice their English came along and started talking to me. We came to a creek that we had to cross so I hopped across and he just left his bicycle in the grass along the edge of the creek (plenty of people around). I asked him if "that wouldn't be a problem?" and he said "what wouldn't be a problem?" apparently he was not worried in the least about someone stealing the bicycle even thought it probably cost 2-3 weeks salary for many people in the area. Yeah,
I'm hoping to get a job there next (assuming my next job is in Afghanistan).


If you want to see via satellite the approximate area where the fire fight took place (in Kabul) go here (Google maps). The fairly barren area to the right with a faint line going across it is a very well known mountain and the line is a very old wall built by a king way back when (not sure how way back though). I live about a mile west of this point. The houses at the base of the mountain are where Kabul's poor (not poorest) live. I have been around here and can attest that this particular area is not the nicest of mountain "settlements".

Burqa Emporium

Burqa Emporium
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

Well I am not sure if this shop would count as a “emporium” but the only thing they sold was burqas. I should have gotten a photo but they had burqas for children (bought my cousins one, should be interesting to see their reaction) and even a burqa for dolls! I know westerners who have tried wearing a burqa and found it to be intolerable, not being able to see, hard to breath, etc; and in reality (or in Kabul, not sure about other areas) women here sometimes wear buraqs but flip the front up so they can see (and exposing their faces but they don’t seem to care).

I have been told different things by different people about why the buraqs are worn the main reason is so men can’t see how women look and many times women only wear them because their husbands make them do so. But there are many conservative women in Afghanistan, the cook for my organization (who is ethnic Tajik, not typically as conservative as some other ethnic groups here) wears a burqa outdoors but her husband died a few years ago so it is obviously of her own will (she also never comes out of the kitchen either but doesn’t seem to care too much if I come in and see her). Another odd (to me) example is an Afghan friend of mine (who is a *really* nice guy and ethnic Pashto, who tend to be more conservative), his wife wears a burqa and not because he make her (she requires it). He actually has a funny story; his family lives in Pakistan where women also wear something that is similar to a burqa but you can see their eyes (in Afghanistan you can’t see any part of their face) and his wife was getting stares for wearing an afghan burqa but she refused to “expose” herself by wearing a Pakistani style dress so he had to buy sunglasses for her at which point she finally yielded and wore the Pakistani style clothes. Different cultures.