Author: Justin

The fever has passed… (Dimetapp flashbacks kick ass)

But I felt strangely drawn to reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez as strongly as I usually feel like watching TV after popping heavy duty cold medicine. I realized that reading 100 Years of Solitude in Spanish is quite manageable after having read it in English before (at university), even not having spoken more than a couple lines of Spanish since high school. But maybe I was just fever-hallucinating, who knows?
A kind of trippy thing happened though. After the fever passed this afternoon I went shopping and bought ingredients for chicken soup, including a whole chicken. I bought it at the supermarket so it was cleaned and gutted, but when I tore off the package wrap and took it out of its styrofoam coffin I saw that the head was still attached and tucked under the body. It was Pinky, come to visit Daddy from the grave!
Believe me, it was quite hard to cut off the neck from the body and then the head from the neck with a pair of kitchen scissors. I kept expecting a Pet Sematary scene with dead eyes suddenly popping open and pale beak pecking at my hand… It was soon all done, however, and the soup is delicious.

RIP Pinky

I was away on a scouting trip for our upcoming International Camp all today and seem to have come down with something nasty, hopefully not the piggy flu.
The worst news today, though, is that a stray dog came into our yard, snapped Pinky’s neck, and carried him off. Nam saw the carrying off part and knows which dog it is. Vengeance will be mine…

The second baby kicks harder

I’m not even sure if I ever really felt Max kick or not when holding my hand up to Nam’s belly. I thought I did, but I can’t be sure. No such thing with the next baby, though – she’s in there jumping up and down every day and night. It seems as though specific poses or actions set her off; when Nam lays on one side, the baby gets really active for some reason. Even Max has felt her kick now, which brings me to my second point: It seems that Max now thinks that all even slightly plump women are PREGNANT. This has turned into something of an inside joke, usually ending when the girl asks, “why are you kissing my belly, Max?”
Well, he thinks there’s a baby in there!

Ping Test

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Give it a try here: http://www.pingtest.net
This is especially useful for people in Thailand trying to stream data or play multi-player games on servers overseas. Try testing your latency to Bangkok, then to a foreign destination. The traffic bottlenecks at the undersea data cables after being squeezed through government filters and ISP proxies, which explains the pitiful latency. It’s not quite as bad as DSL being beat by carrier pigeon, but it does explain why Skype and internet radio reception can be so crappy a lot of the time.

Dark Stalking

This is really interesting: Dark Stalking on Facebook

“But by far the most interesting part of all of this have been dark users. Like dark matter, these users are not directly observable, usually because they’ve completely disabled API access. In fact, some of these users are completely dark unless you’re a friend. They don’t show up in search results. They don’t show up on friends’ lists. You can’t send them messages. If you try to navigate to their user page (assuming you know it exists), you get redirected back to your homepage. These users have their privacy settings turned up real high, and are supposed to be hard to find.
However like dark matter, dark users are observable due to their effects on the rest of the universe. If a dark user comments on a stream entry, I can see that comment. More importantly, I can see their user-ID, and I can generate a URL to a page that will contain their name. I can then watch for their activities elsewhere. Granted, I can’t directly search for their activity, but I can observe their effects on my friends.”

So, even if you think you’re cloaked safely in the thermocline like a lurking nuclear sub (by using “safe” Facebook practices), the very act of trying to be invisible can give you away. You cannot be detected directly, but you invariably leave clues just by being there. I keep wondering what form the Great Facebook Meltdown will take, but it’s definitely building up to that definitive moment.