“We heard them yell, shout and scream. But, who ever pays attention when they take that deep breath before they shout it out? Nobody does except for me.”
Month: June 2013
Random Temple in Hua Hin
From our work trip that I brought the fam along on. Damn those power lines.
Deep Brain Stimulation for Early Onset Parkinson’s disease
This is the coolest medical video I’ve seen in a long time. Sometimes technology really works, I guess.
Babyblade CBR fun
My friend Ben just bought a used 2011 Honda CBR250R w/ABS in Pattaya and brought it back to Sarakham. I helped him out a little with the details of the transaction and choice of bike, so of course, I got to try it out. Perhaps today wasn’t the best day since it was drizzling and quite windy out on the highway, but that did not deter us.
The bike was lighter and more refined than I expected – I would say it’s more tame than beast. The single-cylinder engine is very smooth and steady, and the bike is very quiet with the stock exhaust (even if it is wrapped with a faux carbon fiber sticker – which according to the internet, grants about 3 extra hp). In my mind, the CBR 150 is more fun at lower speeds, but the 250 is great for cruising on the highway (and probably even more fun when the wind isn’t kicking grit into your face at high speed).
Until this point, I had been riding the CBR around town and Ben was following on my scooter. When we stopped, Ben said he wanted he wanted to ride bitch to “see how girls felt,” so he got on the back and I pretended to be a twenty-something French guy on a glorious circuit around the Maha Sarakham bypass. Getting into the role of a racer-playboy, I recommended embedding a switch-activated vibrator in the rear seat cushion for increased high-speed thrills. For his part as a scared young Thai girl, Ben kept saying, “slow down, Ajarn, slow down!” (I was actually riding very slowly since I’m no longer invincibly young).
It was a lot of fun.
confused princess
I can’t remember if Max or Mina drew this when we stayed at the Dusit Princess in Korat on the way to Rayong last month. But it looks like a Sponge Bob nightmare, for sure.
Testing the WordPress Publicize Function
Since Twitter got hacked a while back, the apps using its API have been refused permission intermittently. Until now, I used a site called twitterfeed to daisy chain my blog posts from my dedicated blog to Twitter to Facebook, but that all fell apart when Twitter security got oversensitive.
So now, I’m going to see how the WP Publicize function works out. Guess I’ll try to post a photo and embed a YouTube video:
Random video from my YouTube “music” playlist:
Basket of mangoes
Nam’s classmate from primary school gave us a basket of awesomely delicious mangoes from his farm. Too good.
Sony hates you.
“Last Friday, Sony Music sent Gummy Soul a cease and desist order for Amerigo Gazaway’s “Bizarre Tribe: A Quest To The Pharcyde”.”
Sony just doesn’t get it:
They don’t know how to make good products anymore.
They don’t understand “fair use.”
They don’t know how to get back all the loyal customers they chased away over the years…
It seems they only want to make a last few bucks before Samsung and Apple and all the other companies who do get it (a little better, at least) collectively piss on their grave.
Die, Sony, die.
By the way, the album mentioned above is simply sublime.
Comments are back!
Comments were hosed for a while; now they are back.
New phrase: “I shoot/shot them with my sword”
I’ve used this on Facebook referring to people who claim to blog or have a blog because they use Facebook. Of course, since Facebook is invisible and merely repackages and resells anything I post to it, I decided to coin it on the internet as well:
“I will shoot them with my sword.”
“I shoot them with my sword.”
“I shot them with my sword.”
There, I feel much better.
Line seems to be the best option for Burma telecommunications
Like it says in the title, Line.
My wife is in Myanmar/Burma for a week. I looked up the best options for calling to/from that country before she went, but the telecom market is in a state of constant flux and it seems they the government controls the sales of SIM cards. What sad state of affairs: Third world telecom service with first world bureaucracy!
As it turns out, most of the airports and hotels she’s been to have had barely decent wifi, which has left us experimenting with voice/video chat services. Here are the results for using chat apps on Android to/from Yangon, Mandalay, and maybe other places in Burma:
1st place: (Naver) Line
Excellent voice quality even on weak connections. If there was a major disaster, this is the app I would rely on (oh yeah, that’s why it was made in the first place).
2nd Place: Google Hangouts
Fairly stable, but laggy with both voice and video calls. Consistently laggy, though (about 1/2 second), so usable if you want to speak slowly and wait for responses.
3rd place: Skype
Skype changed my world, then abandoned it. I still have most of the money I put into Skype credit 7 or 8 years ago. TOTALLY UNUSABLE FOR ANYTHING UNLESS YOU LIVE IN KANSAS CITY AND GET FORCE-FED INTARWEBS FROM GOOGLE. Seriously, I’m going to uninstall Skype from all my devices. So fucking sad.
First day of School
Today marks the first day of the regular term. Max and Mina both went to summer school, but it was more casual and the days were shorter. Today is the real deal. Nam left on a trip to Burma (what an ideal example of poor rebranding – what’s the adjective for “Myanmar,” anyways? What language do they speak there?) yesterday, so the kids are totally on their best behavior because they are with Bad Cop. No crying, no pleading, no nonsense: “Are you guys ready to go to school?”
FUCK YEAH, DADDY!