Moscow: Why is my Blogger now in Russian?

So the first week I was in Moscow, while RG was off looking for a job, I tried to work on my computer. One of the first things I did was try to post a blog. Interestingly enough when I logged into blogger it was all in Russian! There wasn’t even a button to change it to English. Luckily I remembered the format well enough to do what I was going to do. But I still thought this was weird, but I was in Russia. So the next thing I did was go to Google and do a search. Again it was all in Russian with no English button. I was not happy. When I did searches it primarily brought back Russian web sites. I DON’T know Russia. This wasn’t helping me. Then I noticed that the url was www.google.ru! Hmmm. So I typed in www.google.com and was immediately redirected to www.google.ru. After several more attempts Google finally started let me go strait to www.google.com. What a pain.

This happened often. Most large companies have created separate, more local, versions of their products in regional languages. Therefore I was redirected a lot to .ru sites. I am sure that these sites look at the IP address and realize it is coming from a Russian provider and redirect me to the regional site. The problem is I want the American site. Most of the sites I had to click on an English button or a button to be directed back to the .com button but for some I just had to retype the address until the server decided I wasn’t a complete idiot and wanted to go to the US site. By the end of the first day I was always redirected to the US sites, and from then on. This of course also causes problems. The US sites are hosted at least 5000 miles away.

Due to the fact that US sites are hosted so far away there was defiantly a lag time for almost all sites. KB (RG’s sister) had a high speed connection so that wasn’t the problem. I sure the problem was latency. This is the time it takes for an IP packet to be processed by each router, switch, server, and transmission line between you PC and the server. When you are in the US trying to access a US site there are maybe 6 or less hops so latency doesn’t generally cause issues. But when you are overseas you could be 20+ hops away from your target and have hire latency times for each transmission line because of the distance. This means a packet takes 500 milliseconds instead of 155 or less. This doesn’t sound that bad but most IP traffic consists of at least 3 parts, request, send, and acknowledge. So 500 actually means 1500 instead of less than six. Now multiply that by thousands of packets and things get a little slow.

While for checking mail, surfing, and even online shopping this may be ok it normally causes issues for corporate applications. In fact many of the services on my work laptop stopped working altogether and I received emails saying my machine wasn’t being updated. I also had a hard time signing into our corporate portal. So this was pain. Not because I wanted to do work but because I still had some administrative things to do so my expenses would get paid and I would get credit for things I had already completed. I also was working with my staffing people but the email forms they use have a lot of programming involved and did not work well from Russia. So to make a short story long – I was certainly surprised that using the internet would create such a hassle just because I was overseas. I could still do just about everything I needed to do. I just had to be more patient.