KZBlog

An American expat living in Astana, Kazakhstan

Category archive for ‘Resources’ rss

  • Books for Kazakh Students

    A Peace Corps volunteer in Kyzylorda is raising money for books for his students at the Kyzylzhar Secondary School. Check out his fundraising page for details and screenshots of the current textbooks they are trying to replace.

  • Is the Saks as Good?

    I am still searching for a good product and service review site like Yelp.com or Urbanspoon or Angie’s List (good and bad) about services and products here?.I did mention pomidor.kz in an earlier post but I missed that that site is mainly intended to collect bad reviews of services in Kazakhstan. It’d be nice to [...]

  • Rehashing the Contador-Astana Feud

    In researching my last post, I reread a bunch of articles on why Contador left Astana. Although there were issues when Armstrong was riding with them regarding pay and of course, the team almost lost its license at one point, it looks like mens sports equipment was the big issue or the straw that broke [...]

  • GULAGs in Kazakhstan

    In the vein of yesterday’s post, here’s at least a hasty link to an article about a new book, The Gulag’s Foundation In Kazakhstan Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society by Steven A. Barnes of George Mason University (where, perhaps coincidentally, it seems like an awfully large number of Bolashak [...]

  • From Kazakhstan Into Space

    From Kazakhstan Into Space

    From Kazakhstan into Space 50 Years Ago is a great account of Gagarin’s trip and has links to more great resources. I like the idea of celebrating Yuri’s Night

  • First Orbit

    First Orbit is a documentary on Yuri Gagarin’s flight by Christopher Riley. I haven’t had a chance to watch the whole thing, but from the first bit it looks really good. It includes family photos of Gagarin and audio of his flight as well as modern space imagery. It is an hour and a half [...]

  • A Transparent PM

    Prime Minister Karim Masimov announced the other day that he is setting up a new section on his blog to rate the effectiveness of government workers. It isn’t clear exactly what role the blog will play in this or what he will put up, but as of yet the transparency section, as Masimov is calling [...]

  • Kazakhstan Search Engine

    I’ve been playing with Kazakhstan’s search engine. It’s pretty clear that it covers mainly .kz domains, but also a few .ru sites. English language searches are therefore limited-but you can find sites in English. Overall it has a preference for formal resources. Searching for крем (cream) brings up resources about the Kremlin way before you [...]

  • GPS in Kazakhstan

    I was playing around with my iPod the other day (I have a humble little iPod touch instead of the $1000 iPhones and iPads. I will wait til I move back to the US to buy something fancier) and decided to search the App store for “Kazakhstan”. There’s not a lot of apps out there [...]

  • Facebook U

    Technically this isn’t news about Kazakhstan, but it’s making big noise here where a Western education can land you a very good job and a high salary. Apparently the London School of Business and Finance is offering free MBAs online via Facebook. OK, not really. They are, however, putting up materials online including readings and [...]