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Road Trip

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I am back from my most recent roadtrip. I loaded up the Tesla and started letting the hands-off Full Self Drive (FSD) supervised take me to points North. First stopping in a campground in Tennesee and up to Pittsburgh for the CIDM Convex Conference (which was the best conference in years). There was a celebration of the 20 years of DITA XML. I was an earlier adopter. My presentation went well and I semi-stealth launched wisdomino. I demo'd some extra cool software we developed and will be selling in weeks to come. It's truely game changing. Of course, there will be much more than that to come. After that it was on to Franklin, PA. to meet with some colleagues in the mining division and onto the farm stopping in Olean NY for the night. I am pretty sure it was the first time I had driven across the entire Allegany National Forest. I ended up driving through the very dark forest expanse during a night time thunderstorm. Although I normally trust the Tesla FSD on the Interstat...
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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 was arrested when we landed. We don't know the details, but it was noteworthy and a minor inconvenience. After we landed, the pilot came on the PA and admonished the cabin crew "Do your Jobs". He left the airplane shortly afterwards while were requested to stay in our seats. Eventually, We are allowed to deplane and the police showed up to deal with the person. Subsequent segments took us to...
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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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