Thursday, March 8, 2007

Internet vs. Laptop

We're in Kostanay now, and I've been dealing with the photo and laptop
issue for 5 days now.

First let me say that Michele and I absolutely love Kostanai and think
it's a very livable city. Many restaurants do take Visa cards now - most
importantly the Gros grocery store, which has everything but oddly not
salt or matches.

First of all in Kostanai there seems to be no DSL available anywhere at
any price, even in hotels. It's all dialup. The speed you get is
frequently only 14.4k (remember 1989 era AOL) and the highest is 46.6
which I get by logging on at 6am before Michele gets up. To use my
laptop in the apartment, we buy a 3,000 or 5,000 Tenge card at the Kaz
Telecomm office across from Tsum on the mall downtown. From 6pm to 11pm
is 2.34t per minute. From 11pm to 8am is 0.74t per minute, and from 8am
to 6pm is 1.74t per minute. A 3,000t card may get you 20 hours and it
might get you much more depending on when you surf. In the room, the
connector is a standard "RJ11" phone connector which fits in your laptop
with no adaptor, but since it's possible you might not get a long enough
cord on your telephone, you might bring an RJ11 extension cord from
Radio Shack it's about $4.

Next, the internet cafe at the Kaz post office, next to the downtown
mall area, is 6t per minute from 9am to 1pm, and 12t per minute for 2pm
to 9pm. They have about 5-6 older Win XP pc's running Cyrillic operating
system, so it's very difficult if you're trying to burn a disc, import
from a flash card, or camera. I would ONLY use these terminals for web
surfing. ON the day I went, I got a virus from their system embedded not
only into my compact flash chip but also into my 2gb jump drive. Argh,
how stupid of me. If it's a bad enough virus it could have copied all my
sensitive adoption related documents and vital info from that Jump drive
which is my lifeline should the papers all get lost.

The best and greatest thing I found so far is to take a couple of days
of photos on compact flash chips, then take them to one of several Kodak
processing shops. There's a self-serve kiosk at which you can extract
all the pictures and save them to a CD-Rom for less than 500 tenge. It's
amazing peace of mind to have my pics on a disc.

This morning I'm using Flickr uploadr to put pics up at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rga and it's very very slow. Plan to only
upload low res images of about 600 pixels across, or they simply will
not go up.

This information is all for Kostanai, and I would presume things might
be more sophisticated in Astana or Almaty.

Robertson

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You are a Mastercard commercial. Cost of airfare xx, cost of driver yy, cost of internet connection in Khaz. zz, FIRST FAMILY PHOTO- priceless.

Sorry it is such a hassle getting online and posting, but we love and appreciate it.

LOve Karen

ps- one day there will be payback for that photo with the sticy on the forehead!

Anonymous said...

Good Morning, Mommy and Daddy!
It's wonderful to read about your continuing adventures. The Flikr pictures answer a lot of questions. Your group picture, the three of you, is priceless. Will you soon be allowed to feed Morgan? Even more fun, will you get to change her? I imagine that's all part of the parent-training program.
Question -- how much is a Tenge worth? :-)
Our attempts to communicate by means of Skype last night were unfortunate. Mostly dead silence is what I heard, though you did say "I can hear you!" several times. Think I'll stick to blog replies and e-mails.
Do you have a snailmail address, and will you be there long enough to receive mail -- would a letter get there from the USA in a week or so?
What's Women's Day -- is that like Mother's Day?
Lee sends his best. Love to all of you,
Mom/Mar