Just so you don't think I'm making fun of the Kazakhs... we do the same stupid crap here in America. Here's the label from a tent footprint I recently purchased from Mountain Hardware (an American company):

This thing is going to be awfully hard to pack, what with it having a couple meters of polyurethane on each surface... should be waterproof though.

One of my favorite things about travel to Kazakhstan is the English menus at some restaurants. I have a standing policy to order the most humorous-sounding menu item whenever I go out to eat in Kazakhstan. So from this recent trip, here are the award winners:

2nd place goes to "French friend potato lobules with spicery." I loves me some spicery.

Also interesting on that shot is the curiously brittle porridge... I'm not sure how that works; I didn't order it. The overall winner for this trip was, hands-down, the "Bonk in rack."

And what, exactly, is a Bonk in rack, you ask?

Turns out its a pork chop. Very tasty.

Honorable mention goes to the M&M's I got at the grocery store. Other than the name itself, there's only one thing in the Latin alphabet on the packaging:

Yeah! ROCK ON!

Greetings from Amsterdam. Peter and I have a 10 hour layover here. Luckily, we were able to talk our way into the Crown Room lounge without having to pay anything. That means free food and drinks, reasonable chairs, wifi, and power outlets for the duration of our stay here. The flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam was by far the most comfortable trans-atlantic flight I've ever taken. They had personal video systems in the back of the headrests of all seats, even in coach. Each one was capable of showing its own video on demand, and their selection of movies and TV content was impressive. I watched No Country for Old Men, Juno, I Am Legend, and Michael Clayton. And boom, the flight was over. Got no sleep... but that's OK. If only all flights were this comfortable. As an interesting side note, they had a problem with the video system right at the beginning and had to reboot the system. When they did this, a standard Red Hat Linux startup scroll went by. Could see some details about their onboard filesystem, the processor being used in the headrest displays, etc. Interestingly, each headrest has its own embedded Linux box in it (with a puny 266 MHz processor) and the video data is grabbed from a central fileserver that is mounted over the network.

One other humorous side not: DOE did not put the Netherlands on our country clearance cable, meaning that we are not allowed to leave the international departure area (i.e. we can't go into town during our 10 hours here). However, because the layover was so long, the airline was not able to check our luggage through. As a result, we had to leave the international departure area to claim the luggage and recheck it. LAWBREAKERS!!! Peter and I are total criminals now. Delta made us do it.

Also, notice the weird alliteration itinerary: Albuquerque - Atlanta - Amsterdam - Almaty - Aqtau. <dramatic chord>

The Red Army Choir + Finnish rock band = wierdness levels approaching that of Japanese popular culture.

(apologies for linking to a right-wing crackpot website)

So I bought this new computer mostly to geek out on Warcraft. I had some Bluetooth issues which I eventually gave up on and just purchased a USB headset. My only remaining gripe was the network latency when playing Warcraft. When I was playing on my XP laptop, I had ping times of around 100ms to the game servers. When I was playing on my new Vista machine, they would oscillate wildly from about 500 to over 4000ms. Obviously, when playing a realtime online game like Warcraft, having the game freeze for four seconds (especially during combat) was a huge problem.

I assumed the problem was Warcraft itself, because I didn't notice network weirdness anywhere else, and because traceroutes to the game server showed perfectly acceptable ping times. But after a complete reinstall of the game and removal of all of my interface mods, the problem still persisted. Then, in a fit of desperation, I turned off wireless and ran a wire across my house to the computer. Problem disappears. Using the wired network, latencies below 300ms always, even during heavy network usage. Using the wireless network, latencies around 800ms with spikes up to several seconds multiple times a minute.

Now it's not my wireless network, because it works fine on wireless with the laptop. So it's either the wireless card hardware/firmware that came with the computer from Dell, or Vista's drivers for the wireless card. Is this a known issue?

Is the wireless networking in Vista, by default, doing something like searching for other networks or channel scanning for the best signal path or something that might interfere with my realtime gaming? I get fine bandwidth through the wireless... just weird latency spikes. Any ideas?

In the meantime, I've had to move the computer to a different room, one that has a network jack in it.

I tried to do this periodic table quiz and in 15 minutes I was only able to name 54/118 elements. I should have gotten 2 more, but I couldn't seem to spell Bohrium or Lanthanum correctly. Well, I really should have gotten about 30 more. Still, according to the statistics of people who have taken the test, I'm well off the bell curve on the "good side," but I still think I should have done better.

I got all of the alkalis, all of the noble gasses with the exception of mega-exotic and -unstable "Ununoctium", and a healthy dose of the transuranics. I got a lot of ones that most people miss because we use some exotic stuff where I work. Not a lot of people got Neodymium, for instance. Though the fact that I missed Cadmium is pretty inexcusable; I work with that stuff everyday.

Having looked at the table for a couple minutes (just at the abbreviations, and for it to count on the quiz you have to spell out the whole name), I took the test again and got 78/118. At least I got over half that time... Humorously, I missed Titanium, Thorium, and Fermium the second time around but got them the first time.

OK, Dad, I'm guessing that you can get them all. The real question is... how long does it take you? My money is on 9 minutes.