Nothing special

The Australian contingent

Last week or so was reasonably uninteresting. As far as work is concerned, FIFTA, my secondary project, is going reasonably well. The guy I'm working with knows database design and Visual Basic. I am teaching him object oriented database design and VBscript. Both aren't that hard when you understand the basics.

Capital Bank is a slightly different story. Although it seemed that their primary needs were an updated Internet and intranet website, it turns out that their most important problems are related to their network setup. Today I brought Henry in to talk about helping them out.

Last Tuesday, at the Hash, I acted as GM, which was quite a bit of fun. On Friday, my phone suddenly stopped working: 'Your prepaid account has expired.' It turns out you not only buy units in this country, but also days. I still had some 65 units (65 minutes or 650 SMSs) but no more days.

On Saturday, we celebrated Paula's birthday. For some reason, there's a whole contingent of young Australian girls volunteering in UB. Paula is one of them and some 6 girls, together with Henry and myself we celebrated with a good round of bowling and some mediocre food at 'Winners'. Yes, there is a bowling alley in this city.

How did the great bear originate?

I picked this book up at the tourist store of the Palace Museum of the Bogd Khan. It was printed in 1988 and the price of the book has increased a cool 1000-fold since then.

The book contains all sorts of folk stories from Mongolia. Most particularly, the first group of stories, legends, are very interesting. These are the kind of stories that explain how the great bear did originate. One part of the book, that deals with magic, gets boring quite quickly. These group of stories seem to lack insight and don't appear to be inventive.

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However, a lovely book to read with some outright fantastic shorts.