First, they moved the site to a new server, and forgot to tell me, which meant that nothing worked for half a day until I checked the site and wondered why it didn’t work

And, yesterday, they experienced some intermittent power supply problems.

Hopefully all fixed now, but I’ll be keeping an eye on things, and considering whether to move to another host if this continues.

Thanks for the plugin tip, Nathan – I might look at that. Although, touch wood, a combination of Akismet and Spam Karma 2 seems to be doing the job fairly well at the moment. It’s trapping the odd ‘proper’ comment, which I then have to fish out of spam hell, but otherwise, the combination doesn’t seem to have let through a single spam in over a month.

Andy, if the cause of the problem is the same for you, you might want to try this plugin, which I’d actually recommend for all WordPress users.

Ger, Yakutsk was interesting. I didn’t speak a lick of Russian when I went there, so my ability to form my own impressions were somewhat limited. And it was nearly 8 years ago now, so I’m sure much has changed. It had the clearest skies I’ve ever seen though. No pollution haze is to be found.

I actually never lived in Tashkent. I was first in a kolkhoz outside of the capital. It was quiet and very dark at night. Most of the time I was there, I lived in Navoiy, which I think is the most thoroughly nice place in Uzbekistan when it comes to infrastructure. It was a secret city and closed to foreigners until 1996, and you can tell it was built to be a socialist workers’ paradise. It is the headquarters for the region’s mining concern and it still has quite a bit of its own clout in the country. That said, life was pretty much like it is anywhere else — get up, go to work, come home, and repeat.

My pleasure. Maybe the name of your blog was the reason for this. The German Telekom workforce is reported to be pretty old in average, some are relicts of the good old days when T-Com was still state owned and run by “officials” (Beamte). Maybe some of the elderly gentlemen there (with lifetime employment guaranteed)still have some mixed feelings when reading or hearing the word “Siberia”, regardless the context.

I’m at a bit of a loss to explain, though, as the number of visitors seemed to be about average this morning, so it doesn’t seem to have been a widespread problem.

Fred Weir sure gets around.

I used to. Can’t remember the exact reasons for it, but drop Nathan a line and he should do some computery thing to fix it. It’s something to do with the Russian ISPs being interpretted as dodgy porn spam, or something.

Of course I can’t answer this question as I am not in Russia, but maybe Andy would like to know that I received exactly this error message when trying to access ‘Siberian Light’ for quite some time this morning form here (Germany).

I face no difficulties when accessing ‘Registan.net’.

its quite interesting that there’s such regional variation in the food. When you think of Russia and how big it is, I daresay shi is shi all over the country. Plov – a proper Uzbek plov is just lovely. The Uzbeks do amazing things with lamb. Am starting to drool like Homer Simpson! I’m not a huge shashlik fan but I take your word for it.

What was Yakutsk like? When I hear of it i just think of diamonds and imagine it must be reasonably wealthy like Norilsk or Tyumen . And whats daily life like on the ground there in Tashkent?

RM