'Blanchard: In Las Vegas I was working for a local TV channel which was quite bureaucratic and after a while I needed a change. I decide to take two years and teach English abroad...'
An American teaching English?
What's the world coming to.
Welcome once again to The eXpat files, our Vulture Weekend feature in which readers who've well and truly left the nest explain what it's like to ply their technological trade in another land. This week – we're going weekly by popular demand – meet D. Hayes Blanchard, who made the move from the US to Armenia, and then Dubai. …
"Inventor of the Marmite Laser"
!????
As names go that one boggles the mind.
One wonders what a Marmite laser would be. Lets see...
"Laser: a device that produces a nearly parallel, nearly monochromatic, and coherent beam of light by exciting atoms to a higher energy level and causing them to radiate their energy in phase."
I can barely imagine what a monochromatic coherent beam of marmite would be like, but it sounds highly destructive. Perhaps one of those Marmite squeezy jars can produce something like a Marmite laser beam if put under enough pressure. It does suggest the existence of a whole pantheon of marmite based fundamental particles of nature. Presumably they can be exicted in some way so that they can radiate their marmite in phase?
Does the Grand Theory of Everything possit the existence of the Marmiton, the particle heavier even than the Higgs? If not, I think it should. This could be the missing piece that the particle physicists have been looking for all this time. It's been right there, on their morning toast, all this time.
Here's an important question. What percentage of Nobel Physics Prize winners like(d) marmite? I think we should be told.
...about actually using water cooling for server racks, kind of like they used to do when mainframes were vacuum tube and about the size and heat output of railway locomotives.
But what I want to know now is how a guy from Kentucky/Vegas got turned on to barbecue from the right side of The Old North State, where we use a vinegar based sauce and save the tomatoes for salads or sandwiches.
I wonder if he's also a beach music fan.
Mine's the one with the bag of hush puppy mix in the pocket.
I will agree that Armenians are slow to adopt western standards but I'll disagree that they refuse/resist change, in fact you can always wave to them a fancy European degree, tell them that's how it's done in the west and you can pretty much have them running with a power cord between their buttocks! but I think I can pin point the problem for Blanchard, he was with peace corps, which means he speaks fluent or near fluent Armenian, big, BIG mistake, if you want them to take you seriously don't learn Armenian!!, no kidding, the moment you learn enough to hold a conversation they'll just stop taking you seriously, stick to English at all times during work!
> And a general contractor didn’t understand why he couldn’t run a water pipe through the cabinet containing a rack of media servers (the pipe wasn’t on the blueprints).
I worked in a small 2 story office where the toilets were between the ground and first floor. The servers were jammed in a storage room under the stairs with the sewer pipes ran across top of the room.
The other interesting thing was the toilets had louvre windows and it did occasionally snow.