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Embrace everything positive.

--Charles Dowdell

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Central Asia

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We are back from our most recent crazy trip. This time it was Central Asia and the "five stans" - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. We made all of our objectives. And we have now been to 104 countries. Angie has 95 and I have 94 countries. Together it is 104. These five countries were packed into 12 days, 7 flights, 2 high speed trains, 1 cable car ride, 1 horse ride, and lots of hours in car trips. They are all Muslim countries, but they are better characterized as former Soviet countries. Russian langauge is a strong second language in all of these countries. There isn't much English spoken in any of them. Angie being fluent in Russian made all the difference and did intrepreting for me as well as a couple of British backpackers we met in Turkmenistan. Tajikistan is the Country with the distinct langauage being a derivitive of Persian with the others being Turkic. Ethnically, Southern Uzbecs are Tajik. Interesting, the spelling of many...
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I lived thru a Sunday. I spent a lot of time in the library. We watched the debut of "Emperors of the Ice" last night as part the science lecture. The producers/lecturers gave a talk as well. The documentary will be seen this coming year in the US. It is a National Geographic Special. It is pretty interesting to see a film like this one. It is all staged around McMurdo. To my eyes it isn't that exotic anymore. Don't get me wrong. I find it exciting and all that. However, it is like seeing a documentary about your family Thanksgiving day dinner. It is familiar. I have a very busy day today. I actually got quadruple booked today with work and training. That has to get worked out this morning. Here's me in the ham shack. I have a bit of work to do for the shack but we are going to be using 14.243 MHz USB. I will be using the station callsign KC4USV. Schedules are forthcoming.
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Blogging Blogging is really a largely overlooked way to transfer information effectively and easily. My system is set up so my browser effectively works as a two-way browser. When I want to say something I hit a button and type away. There is a lot going on at work. I feel overwhelmed somedays and largely underwhelmed others. Politics at its finest. It is interesting to note that politics has a negative connotation. Should it? I mean politics is what drives dialog and societal progress. I think my personal values at workk are straight forward. I want to to feel effective. Others are are not driven by these values. It may be prestige, honor, money, power and other second-order values. There is little anyone can do to change someone else's values. It is alarming when someone attempts to chnage mine. What are they thinking? How does that reflect on them? An individuals values must not be changed, only identified and aligned with organizational goals. This example is clearly le...
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An article came out just after my blog in regards to the Antarctica card being played in the Global warming campaign. http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/02/25/antarctica.icecreatures.reut/index.html The paragraph "Since 1974 5213 square miles of ice shelf have disintegrated...", sets the tone. It makes you go wow that's a lot of area. Antarctica is a big place. It is 98% ice. The peninsula is probably undergoing some serious change just like other parts of the world such as the northern Mediterranean coast. Climates change. I am not ready to say that my wood fire is causing the "disintegration" of Antarctica's ice shelves.
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Columbia, Guyana, and Suriname

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We are back-- again. This time from Northern South America. As we planned, we spent midnight Christmas eve in a new and interesting place. We were at 35000 ft above the Eastern Venezuela jungle. We had a flight leaving Bogota at 11:00 PM arriving in Georgetown Guyana at 3:00 AM. We have noticed at lot of what you might call "odd hour" flights outside the US. It makes sense, the Western world (West Europe, US, etc.) connects with these flights. It makes sense to schedule flights as "connecting". On our initial flight from Atlanta to Miami one of the passengers seemed to have been arrested when we landed. We don't know the details, but it was noteworthy and a minor inconvenience. Subsequent segments took us to Bogota, Georgetown, and Paramaribo. We decided to go back to Georgetown from Paramaribo overland. looking at the maps and globes over the years it always seemed like an interesting place to experience. There is exactly one road East-West across these two...
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