2007

The following is from a Financial Times story about the recent investment ratings drop for Kazakh banks. Banks in Kazakhstan have gorged themselves on foreign borrowing for expansion in recent years, and the credit crisis is starting to affect them.

No problem, says the president:

Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, has pledged to prevent any collapse of the country's banking sector and accused international ratings agencies of being "non-objective" after Standard & Poor's lowered its outlook on eight local banks.

"Ratings companies should realise that Kazakhstan stands firmly on its feet and will not allow a single bank to fall," Mr Nazarbayev said.

This statement is not so much interesting for itself but as it is representative of a curious mindset I've noticed over the years. It's this complete unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to accept the idea that there is any validity to information that comes from an independent-- meaning in this case, non-governmental-- source.

So the entertainment conveyor belt finally brought this past summer's hit The Bourne Ultimatum into view, and I have to say I enjoyed it. I think my favorite of the three films is probably the second; the first has to spend a lot of time setting up the character and the situation, and so seems a bit slow-paced at times. The third is "non-stop action" in that way that studios seem to think is good but that any self-respecting person who isn't a dramamine addict thinks is actually bad. Also, it never met a camera move it didn't like enough to chop up into several quick cuts and throw at the viewer in quick succession.

Bourne gets referred to a lot as a "thinking Man's Bond" which is a pretty fair assessment. Still, for a person with a reasonable amount of technical knowledge and aptitude there are a lot of places that severely strain your ability to maintain suspension of disbelief.

Warning: There are spoilers for the Bourne movies in this article!

I've finally got around to doing another one of the every-couple-of-years updates to the FAQ section.

This is what Xchat Aqua looks like.

Because it's all about the countries. Although it seems I'm overlooking a continent or two.

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Shamelessly borrowed from heptarch... but I'll go one step further momentarily...

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

Here we are riding up the cable car to the summit of Kok Tubye, the hill in Almaty where the TV tower sits, visible almost anywhere in the city.

Probably this isn't an accurate reading, as the thermometer was in direct sunlight, but the last few days have been pretty warm.

It makes perfect sense that a hilltop tourist attraction in a land-locked country has every right to use animated mermaids for promotional purposes.

My Xbox is a liar. I've been playing the Halo 3 Beta and Half-Life 2. Since Halo 3 is a beta and HL2 is a backwards-compatible title, neither show up.