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Instincts provide opportunities for personal discovery
If I had titled my own column with utter disregard for our newspaper’s headline style, I would have called it something along the lines of “Relegating logic and sensibility.” As I note in the column itself, this sort of thinking is uncharacteristic for me. But the best time to make stupid decisions, to try outlandish things and fail, is now. And it’s time I started doing a little bit of that.
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The Olympic Torch relay
The Olympic Torch relay kicked off in Almaty on its way to lots of countries before it arrives back in Beijing to kick off the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. The relay slogan is "Light the passion. Share the dream."
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International offices lack both cubicles and formality
Yet another column from the Technique. There is a lot I like about business culture here in Kazakhstan; certainly I like my current job vastly more than I liked my old one. However, a ton of that has to do with the company I work for and the type of people I work with. It seems like it would not be at all impossible to capture a similar feeling elsewhere, including in the U.S.
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Mental bandwidth
About a year ago I made an effort to read a book about the operations of the mind and the relationship between the human brain and the concept of mind. I wasn’t able to force myself to finish the book, however, because the questions the book sought to answer struck me as patently ridiculous. One of the many reasons that I am not a philosopher is that I find debates over things like the mind-body problem ultimately unimportant, and most explorations of them self-indulgent and baseless.
I greatly prefer a more practical approach to thinking about the mind: I don’t really want to contemplate how it works as long as it does. But there is one (in my opinion) common-sensical concept that I do use extensively: that of ‘mental bandwidth,’ generally in the context that I don’t have enough of it available for something.
Essentially, I find that the amount of things I can keep in my mind or consider has a finite limit, and so the things I contemplate on a regular basis are limited to the few things that I prioritize as the most important. The limit obviously decreases significantly when I am overloaded with work or other things (as I often am back home) — things like getting my assigned tasks at work accomplished, or finishing projects for school. But the mental bandwidth does not strictly vary with my free time, as some things might use up a lot of mental bandwidth while using up trivial amounts of physical time.
Since I’ve been here in Almaty I’ve discovered that without the stresses of daily life in Atlanta, I suddenly feel like I have significantly more of this bandwidth available. This leaves me free to contemplate the things that previously were too low on the priority list, like changing bad habits, or indeed relationships.
Relationships, in fact, are perhaps the best example of this mental bandwidth concept, as they require a lot of bandwidth to be viable. Whenever I even considered relationships back in Atlanta my general feeling was one of stress, guilt and frustration brought on by the fact that I knew I wasn’t able to put enough of myself into anything. Here, I’ve unexpectedly found myself with what I might consider a much… healthier range of emotions towards the idea. Ironic, considering getting into a relationship during a six-month stint in Kazakhstan probably makes very little sense. But hey — que sera, sera.
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Pictures, by popular demand
Popular by all of two or three people, but here are a first few pictures. More will come as I continue organizing my photos and uploading the ones I feel up to sharing. And yes, I’ve joined the hordes and decided to use a flickr account. The nice integration with Windows Live Photo Gallery, which is a surprisingly good (if horribly named) program, sealed the deal.
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Biggest cultural shock yet
In Kazakhstan, it is considered slovenly to not frequently launder–and iron–shoelaces. Clearly I have no chance of looking remotely respectable.
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International women deserve more than Hallmark
I never like the headlines to my columns, even when I write them (although this time I did not). This week’s ‘Nique column contains some more detailed thoughts about International Women’s Day.
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Celebrating International Women’s Day
"Congratulations on the holiday, our dear ladies!"
I was going to post photos today, but some technical issues unfortunately prevented me from doing it… so, some time on Tuesday, perhaps. It’ll give me the chance to take some more photos, while I’m at it.
Meanwhile, today we celebrated March 8, International Women’s Day, at work. I actually wrote a column about it for the ‘Nique this week (that I’ll post later), but the above photo is the poster the Magic department made for all the ladies in our office. We also all pitched in to purchase cake, flowers (well, amusing balloon animal-style flowers) and gifts for the entire female staff.
It might seem fairly insignificant, but the entire approach, with all the guys in the office holding a meeting to determine plans, and assigning responsibilities, etc., not to mention everyone contributing a not insignificant amount of money, was just something totally alien to what I would have expected in the U.S. Perhaps part of it comes from working at a much smaller, younger and more closely-knit company, but I can’t help but feel that part of it is based on cultural differences between the U.S. and Kazakhstan.
That’s pretty much been the story, in fact: there hasn’t been anything huge that has just totally caught me off guard about this country; for the most part it has been in line with my expectations. But it’s the little things that jump out at me out of the blue that are adding up to an interesting cultural experience.
So far, I feel that I’m learning a lot, even though I have experienced relatively little here to date. Let’s hope it keeps up.
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Tech college career inspires above-average mediocrity
My weekly column from the Technique (back from a two-week hiatus), this time about my motivations for going to Kazakhstan. I kind of liked it, even though I wrote most of it in a semi-exhausted state at the Frankfurt airport.
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Things I did not miss
Some things, unfortunately, are present everywhere. For the non-Cyrillic readers among you, that’s L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, advertised on the side of a bus stop in Almaty.
As seen on the side of a bus stop in Kazakhstan.
In Brief
My name is Arcadiy, and arcadiy.org is my website. Funny how that works.
I write about life, technology, my random side projects and whatever else strikes my fancy. I make no promises about the utility or entertainment of anything here. However, I would love to hear your thoughts on anything I mention.
In my day job I'm a Program Manager at Microsoft.
You can read (or look at) more by me in my momentstream.
- The fauna (and flora) of the Microsoft campus http://post.ly/pVdv #
- @2neverland That's a great opportunity for you to recommend Bing! :) #
- @skowyong In spite of the breathless media coverage, no details yet. #