Cleaning up my hard-drive a little these days, I found some old screenshots that I took during my time in Riga, Latvia. It's just some funny stuff from inside the agency, click to see:

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Found this recently on a project manager's table: Color specifications printed out... in black and white. Nothing wrong with that, hey, it's about the color codes - still it made me laugh.

Those who know me personally sure had to go through it already: I'm getting really pissed off when I'm at a place where an announced wireless Internet doesn't work properly. And this happens more often than I had imagined. For me, wireless Internet is a commodity just like water, electricity, or gas supplies at a house - a fundamental, basic human need that needs to be taken care of and that needs to be satisfied by a widely available simple infrastructure. No compromises, this is the year 2007 after all, and for example in Estonia my expectations have already been matched by 2002 (when most of the self-proclaimed advanced countries still had little clue that Internet could come without wires, and many barely knew that there was an Internet without that little noise box that used to be called modem).

There's only one thing I hate more than places where the wifi doesn't work or doesn't work properly, and that's when the place is an airport. No doubt about it, no compromises, international airports ought to have wireless Internet (most domestic ones as well, actually). I'm still really annoyed that Almaty has nothing of that kind, and it's unfortunately an airport I visit very frequently. I'm shocked that Tashkent doesn't have it, even though there are lots of free wifi spots all over the city. And now I'm sitting at Istanbul airport, and every page I try to open takes five to ten tries, then it doesn't load fully, and my mails sometimes are sent, and sometimes not. Despite the "excellent" signal quality and an established connection.

I admit: A wifi that exists but doesn't work properly is much worse than not having one at all. Istanbul airport just lost a big number of points.

We have a new client with my office in Almaty. They are truly great, interesting, enthusiastic, and I more than deeply respect them for the way they do business. Now they invited us to see their production plant, which is located in Southern Kazakhstan, not far from the border with Uzbekistan. Therefore it was easier to fly in through Tashkent, instead of taking an endless train ride from Almaty south.
The thing was: We got across the border in a rather limitedly legal way. Call it "speeding up procedures". In any case, the mood was great: It was evening, thick fog, light from the strong lamps around the border post, very cold, lots of people in dark clothes moving around the place waiting for a relative, a friend, or a chance to get something across the border that they're not supposed to get across. Perfect mood for an illegal border crossing.
Particularly since we were not really informed on how we'll cross the border. We guessed something wouldn't be quite regular when the driver walked off with our passports, and we were asked to wait in the car. Then the driver came back and told us to wear hats; and not to look into anyone's eyes when walking across the border ("just walk behind me, don't look into people's eyes"). We did. It worked.
The next morning, it was more sunny then, unfortunately. I had to go back alone, because the rest of our team stood for a while, but I had to go back to Baku this day. Not much o a choice but to cross the border in the same way again, particularly because I didn't get my passport stamped for leaving Uzbekistan and for entering Kazakhstan the last day...
When I got back, we had to wait quite a while because some person wasn't there who seems to be very helpful to us. So we had to wait, and I had the time to take a few photos of this desperate little border checkpoint at least:

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