Winding down...

[alexpgp]

By the time the day's shift was over, Galina had already left for Colorado. Under the best of conditions - which are not in place right now - it is possible to do the trip in one, long, mind-boggling session, but stopping somewhere along the way makes for less stress. However you slice the onion, it's still going to take around 18-20 hours to cover the distance.

As, perhaps, a measure of my depression, I allowed myself a rented video this evening. Prior to this evening, it had been several months since I'd rented anything. The good part about not renting videos for a while is that first, you end up not spending a lot of money on so-so videos, and second, a backlog of want-to-see movies gets built up, so that the money you do spend is spent on (theoretically) better movies.

That theory was shot to hell by my having rented X Men tonight. Nice special effects (if you care for people liquefying in front of your eyes), but the plot is so corny that you could fatten cattle with it. I know I probably sound like a broken record, but even the comic books (as I remember them from oh, so long ago) were better.

Or maybe I'm just feeling grinchy because Galina's gone.

Segue. I've run across some interesting sites in my recent surfing, particularly in Russia.

I am probably the first kid on my block to have registered with a site in Russia that offers both free Web hosting and a free e-mail account. They ask surprisingly few questions as a condition of registering, so I suspect the site is not long for this world...unless they have an angle I'm missing.

Another site, www.rambler.ru, offers e-mail using a more conventional, but not overly onerous registration procedure, and once inside their system, it's actually pretty neat...particularly the calendar feature, which allows you to send e-mails and trigger reminders associated with various events on your schedule.

In both cases, a reasonable reading knowledge of Russian is a big, BIG plus. Rambler, by the way, is a very useful all-purpose site, though you have to take the news clips with a slight grain of salt ('bout the size of the Rock of Gibraltar).

Maps have always fascinated me, especially subway maps (go figure). One site in Russia, www.nakarte.ru, offers a Moscow Metro map that's keyed to a pretty detailed map of the city (down to the level of major buildings). Response was good, and the system was so easy to use that I was able to find the building in which my sister-in-law lives out near the Perovo station in no time flat.

Online mass storage offerors are starting to integrate with folks offering downloads. Today, I downloaded a shareware app directly from cnet to my Xdrive, which was pretty convenient, considering the fact that my personal computer could not be connected to an Internet connection when I did so. Of course, I still have to download the app conventionally, but I can do that at my leisure in the evening.

Finally, fellow fans of Jean Shepherd can go scratch their itch at www.flicklives.com for some recordings and a bunch of interesting information.

Segue.

Tomorrow is supposed to be a repeat of today, but a little quieter. Things on the station will begin to pick up again toward the end of the week with the launch of the next Shuttle flight (whose ISS designation is 5A.1), which will be bringing up a new crew to replace the three guys who've been up there since November. I'll not be working this flight, since I really need to get back to Colorado and help kick the store back into high gear. There is still plenty to do around here, though.

Monday and Tuesday, I'm scheduled to work with some Russian media folks who are in town to do a feature on NASA, and I'm sure I'll do a stint at Execute Package again before I leave town, which right now is scheduled for the 13th.

Gotta go get some quality shuteye.

Cheers...

Comments

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

As in so many other areas, Moscow will jump from having no phone directory, to having one distributed on CD, bypassing the good old thin-paper-books stage.

Actually, Moscow pretty much always has had directories...just not widely distributed is all.

:^)

Cheers...

Re:

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

I always thought the old Soviet idea was if you needed to know a number you did, otherwise it wasn't any of your business ;)

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Not really. The truth was closer to there only being a limited number of directories in circulation, and those were distributed to telephone offices. You could call for information, but had to know an awful lot about the person whose phone you were looking for (first name, patronymic, last name, exact address).

Cheers...