Postcard from Bishkek

The kids quite often have to produce reports for school, (called a Doklad or Referat).  I well remember having to do these when I was at school, but they seem to have things a lot easier these days, (or is that just “old age” talking?). When we set the task of writing a report on topics like […]

On February 4th, 2004, a new social networking site was launched  that connects people, to keep up with friends, upload photos, share links and videos: Facebook. Happy Birthday Facebook!  

Love it or hate it … “Wikipedia has drastically affected how we access and share information on the internet” … so says Justin Franco in his brief History of Wikipedia (in two and a half minutes”) on youtube. Wikipedia was launched on 15th January , 2001, although it was based on a concept and technology of […]

As usual, when I started considering a topic for today’s postcard, my first action was to check the diary and I discovered that were several things which might provide me with a theme: I knew, of course that November 30th is St. Andrew’s Day, and although my name, Ian, is originally Scottish I wasn’t sure […]

During the week I had an interesting lesson in the power of the internet.  One of my friends on Facebook posted the following status on their wall: It’s international book week. The rules: Grab the closest book to you, turn to page 52, post the 5th sentence as your status. Don’t mention the title. Copy the rules as part of […]

This week’s Travel Talk on Twitter, (#ttot) was about Adventure Travel. The idea is quite a simple one … once a week, on Tuedays … well, twice a week actually, because it takes place at half past nine GMT, that is at 9:30 am and 09:30 pm,  in order to allow people around the world […]

Some time ago I came across some fascinating images of famous places – and some not so famous, (for example, on Flickr, in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph and also here), created by photographers who were making 3D Spherical panoramas, like Victor Rehemeyer’s which I’ve featured here and on our website www.see.kg.  They […]

This year is Alan Turing Year, named after Alan Mathison Turing who was born a hundred years ago, on 23rd June, 1912.  Turing was a mathematician, who played an important role in the development of computing,  He is famous for a number of things, most notably his role in the code breaking operations at Bletchley […]

Most of our lives consist of mundane, day-to-day, drudgery but sometimes, just sometimes, we experience something which acts like a watershed which changes our way of looking at the world; our own version of the “Damascus Road”.  It might be a religious conversion like St. Paul’s but it might be somewhat more prosaic than the […]

According to the Flagcounter statistics, we have just passed 5000 visitors from 132 different countries to the site since the counter was installed last September … with 11420 individual page views. I know that’s not a lot by  some standards … there are many sites that get far more ‘hits’, but it is still a milestone […]