Month: March 2011

YouTube iframe embedding

It seems that the new way of embedding YouTube videos is really slow to render when you have multiple videos on a single page. Offhand, I can’t remember tweaking anything else that would cause this blog to be loading in segments like this. The thing is, I don’t really have time to test it now, so I guess I’ll just refrain from posting so many vids for a while and let the ones below fall off the front page.

Hunting Parts for a Kujira Crown

After owning a 1971 MS60 for a few years now, I can tell you one thing: It’s been pretty damn near impossible to find spare parts for it. After spending countless hours trying to find parts overseas on the internet (because there were almost none advertised in Thailand even last year) that I could afford to have shipped here, we lucked out. Parts sellers started advertising in Thai forums.

So to start with, I’ve ended up with a shipment sold as a set:

My car is not missing any of these parts, but these are in better condition(the guy who sold me the car aptly described it as “faded glory”). Some of them, like the taillight lenses, will be dissected and combined with my existing ones to make better parts.

Most important to function of the car is the full set of weather seals for the door. I’d heard rumors that new rubber was still being made in Thailand for virtually every Japanese car ever produced. Now I have proof. Perhaps even more important than the parts themselves were the labels on the bags containing parts numbers and bar codes, with which I was able to trace the manufacturer. Do you need rubber seals for an old/rare JDM car? I can probably get them now (as opposed to all of the Toyota dealers and parts specialists I talked to, who most decidedly cannot).

So what’s my purpose here? Why am I searching out parts for my old Crown, of the only generation of this make that was a complete and utter market failure (while being the first Toyota Crown – earlier models were Toyopet)? Let’s just say I’m trying to restore some glory…

UPDATE: This is what my MS-60 Kujira Crown looks like now: http://cosmicbuddha.com/2012/03/the-toyota-kujira-crown-reborn/

Specifying a starting point in YouTube’s Flash 5 Player

In my previous post, I set an embedded video to start from a determined point partway through. The video was embedded with the new iframe tags (specifying HTML 5 instead of a Flash player, which is usable by a broader range of devices, but hasn’t been fully accepted by big developers like WordPress and ebay due to inherent security concerns).

This is the new parameter, which is to be appended to the end of the video link in the embed code:
#t=5m55s

(above, m equals minutes and s equals seconds)

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So in my previous post, the embed video code looks like this:
<iframe title=”YouTube video player” width=”560″ height=”349″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/VLuHMB438gc#t=6m17s” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen ></iframe>

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Google states that the actual starting point may vary by up to a couple seconds, so you should take this into account.

Why the newspaper died

Clipping from the Bangkok Post, early 2011

At first I thought this was an early April Fools thing, but it wasn’t. The Bangkok Post was/is the widest circulated English language paper in Thailand (possibly initially funded by the OSS/State Department!), and printed a half-page article on how to properly shovel snow. In Thailand. Apparently, somebody sent a complaint to the editor that was printed in a subsequent issue. This was addressed by claiming that this article was pulled from a partner news source, which is just a ridiculous defense… They really should have claimed it was an early April Fools thing.

Food Dreams (CUTTLE FISH THE WATER)

Quite often, Max awakes from a deep sleep craving certain foods – strawberries seem to appear in his dreams quite often, as do hot dogs and toast with jam. Just now, I carried him from one room to another after he fell asleep, and he woke up kicking and screaming saying, “NO! I want to eat it! I want to eat it!” It was quite hilarious, except that he woke up Mina, or to be more specific, my laughing woke her up. Nam glared at me for a while, so I dove onto the bed next to Mina until she went to sleep again.

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The photo above was taken in the seafood section of Big C, however, Max has never woken up asking for CUTTLE FISH THE WATER or any other cephalopods.

Thailand’s Got Talent

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A few years ago, I had a conversation that went like this:

LostSoul: I accidentally slept with a guy, I thought he was a girl.

JY: Yeah, I hear stories about that all the time.

LostSoul: The thing is, I can’t get her our of my mind. I want to see her again. Does that mean I’m gay?

JY: It doesn’t mean you’re gay. It just means you like fucking guys.

Jammin’ solo

Max was so jazzed about playing his toy guitar, we broke down and ordered a real one off the internet. It’s called a Plum Blossom, if I remember correctly. I arranged for one of my second year students to come give him lessons once a week, but it’s just too soon. He won’t play when we want him to, and often just ignores people he doesn’t know.

Ah well, at least I got some photos, and the guitar is being kept safe for if he shows an interest again.

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I’m posting a bunch of phonecam photos in the coming days, so please forgive the craptastic quality.

No Holiday in Cambodia

We had been planning to go to Cambodia with Nam’s faculty for a couple days from the day after tomorrow. Max’s chickenpox had cleared up almost completely this week and he was going to go with mommy and daddy. Mina was to stay at home with relatives and the nanny, and we had done a test run with these arrangements. We assumed she would come down with chickenpox weeks ago, but it never happened (truth be told, we wanted it out of the way quickly and knew she was strong enough to get through it – Max and Mina played together all day every day,I even had them drinking from the same cup). Everything was going fine.

Then it all came unraveled.

Our nanny suddenly stopped coming last Sunday because of a serious personal issue. Even that was OK, because Nam’s little brother’s girlfriend, who works with kids, was going to watch Mina at our in-laws house.

Then two nights ago, Mina came down with a fever. Yesterday red bumps started appearing here and there. Today they have turned to pustules and she is itchy cranky baby.

Shit.

No holiday in Cambodia (which we already paid for).

What did we need a holiday from? Chickenpox. What prevented us from going? Chickenpox.

DAMN YOU CHICKENPOX!!

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– Here’s to another couple weeks before we can bear to look at Mina’s face again without feeling terrible.

Looking for Yoichi Enomoto, Sachiko Enomoto

We are looking for my grandmother’s cousins, Yoichi Enomoto and Sachiko Enomoto. They live here, about seven kilometers from the coast of Sendai, one of the hardest hit areas. Their eldest son, Yoshi, lives in Tokyo. We do not know where any of them are.

This is a photo of Yoichi and Sachiko, they are both in their nineties:

The only webcam feed in their area still up as of yesterday is down today: Izumi-ku Sendai webcam
That’s about a mile from their neighborhood.

Their Romanized address is:
Miyagi-ken Sendai-shi Taihaku-ku Yagiyama Yayoi-cho
Postal code: 982-0833

Japan Updates

NHK in Japanese has the best live coverage (the other JP news channels have been unstable today):
High speed 1
High speed 2
Low speed link

In English, NHK International is useless and US news channels are a FUCKING JOKE, especially CNN (presenters reading Twitter updates apparently based on what people are seeing on other channels). Try the streaming Al Jazeera page.

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I’ve gotten in touch with some relatives, but the Yoshida clan is spread far and wide, and there are 6.0 (on the Japanese scale the max is 7) aftershocks happening as I type this.

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UPDATE: Google Crisis Response page