โฮเวอร์คราฟท์ของผมเต็มไปด้วยปลาไหล
Today’s photoset is a handful of shots from my balcony where I tried to capture the awesome gradients in the sky as the sun went down (which happens very quickly this close to the equator). I don’t think I did particularly well, but I like the above shot…
[edit: Jim has introduced me to level-adjustment in Photoshop. And I’d been wondering what I was going to do with my little remaining free time…]
I bought 50 unbranded DVD-Rs last week, and found that not one of them would work in my PPC Mac Mini’s Superdrive. So I bought some branded Sonys, identical to discs I’d used before without a hitch. They didn’t work either. The Mac just spat them out after a whole lot of whirring, every time.
The drive can read and write CDs perfectly. I put a pre-recorded DVD in, and got the same issue – whirring, then auto-eject. I read some forums and saw a few people had suggested fixing similar issues by resetting the NVRAM (Cmd+Apple+P+R at reboot). I did this, and things have improved a bit.
Now I can burn a DVD, but I might need to insert and re-insert the blank up to ten times before the Mac will accept it.
I’m guessing the drive’s on the way out – anyone have any other ideas, and more to the point how simple is it to attempt replacing it myself? Do I need to buy the exact same drive? Help!
[Edit: The latest version of this plugin can be found here.]
Well, that took slightly longer than I’d intended. Version 0.001 (a simple JavaScript wrapper) was posted almost four months ago. I’ve had some adventures on the way – neither Snoopy nor curl() could cope with the HTTP 301 codes they received from Ma.gnolia’s servers, and PHP’s DOM XML client requires PHP5, which just isn’t an option for most people not running their own servers, who are stuck with PHP4.
I tried hacking Snoopy, I tried reporting the bugs to Wordpress and Snoopy forums, and for a while I thought Gary White’s RSSReader library was my saviour. But it couldn’t cope with the HTTP/1.1 301 either, and Gary didn’t respond to my email. Finally, I found LastRSS. It works.
So here it is. The syntax remains the same as the previous version. The default number of links to show is 10, and the maximum is 20 (as this is all that ma.gnolia will supply).
<?php magnolia(USERNAME[, NUMBER_OF_LINKS); ?>
eg. to show my 10 latest links, I simply use:
<?php magnolia('barryprice'); ?>
To show my 3 latest links, I’d use this instead:
<?php magnolia('barryprice', 3); ?>
Dead simple.
I’ll start by saying no, I’m not getting married, and have not ordered a Thai bride. The title is merely what I saw written on a sign in a shop window. Obviously in this case, “alien” refers to foreign nationals. But living here in Bangkok, I find myself feeling like a bona fide alien more often than not.
A motorcycle passes. The driver’s a man. Behind him sits his wife, arms clasped around his waist. Behind her perches their son, holding onto the bar behind the seat for dear life. Oh, and the daughter’s sat in her father’s lap up front. A family of four, on a regular motorbike. They stop and ask a policeman for directions. He points them on their way. I pass them by in the other direction, sat on the back of another bike. This one’s a taxi – the driver is taking me to the skytrain (overground “subway”) stop at the end of Thong Lo – a three mile journey – in return for ฿20. That’s UK £0.30, or US $0.50. None of us are wearing helmets. Nobody cares.
I jump off at the BTS station, smoke a cigarette (฿46 for a 20-pack – say £0.70 or $1.20 – I’m approximating here) and head up the escalator to catch the skytrain into the heart of Sukhumvit – tourist ghetto. I could get a taxi, but it’s the middle of the afternoon – the traffic will still be gridlocked for hours. Three years ago, the underground subway system didn’t exist. Ten years ago, the skytrain didn’t even exist. Even today the mass transit system covers only a fraction of Bangkok.
The Thai language is a tonal one, which whilst entertaining, can be more than a little frustrating:
Words are pronounced with a tone that is either low, mid, high, rising, or falling, allowing many similar words to have different meanings. Thus the sentence, “The new wood was not burnt, silk burnt,” is translated in Thai as, “Mai mai mai mai mai mai.” Correctly pronounced, this sentence would sound like this, “Mai (with high tone), mai (with low tone), mai (with falling tone), mai (with falling tone), mai (with rising tone), mai (with falling tone).” #
It’s easy to criticise or judge Thailand with an understanding of the language – it can seem incredibly primitive to us. People seem to do so with alarming regularity. The Thai phrase for “train” (as in locomotive) is “rot fi” – literally “car with fire”. The skytrain is “rot fi fa” – “car with fire in the sky”, and the subway system similarly translates as “car with fire under ground”. Yes, it sounds primitive. But the culture and background of this country is so incredibly different to ours that perhaps we will never truly understand it enough to judge.
In short, primitive or otherwise, I’ve been here for ten weeks now and am having the best time of my life.
The above view was far more spectacular than I’ve managed to capture – I have no idea where I was (somewhere between Bangkok and Ban Laem), but would love to take a closer look at those hills/mountains/cliffs/things.
I’ve been offline for a few days – I had been paying an Indian gentleman the princely sum of ฿1,000 per month for access to his wireless network, and through that, the internet. The network went down just as I was going out on Tuesday evening, an inconvenience I’d grown accustomed to, and I decided to leave it until I got home. When I did, in the early hours, it was still down. Not good. In the morning, I went to knock on the guy’s door to discover that he’d moved out. Cheers mate.
A Thai friend had this to say:
Thai people not like India man. If we have to kill an India man or a snake, we save the snake.
It’s strange how a country which can be so progressive, welcoming and inclusive can also be so endemically racist – and it’s even stranger remembering that as a white man I’m an ethnic minority myself here.
It’s taken me three days to make alternative arrangements, but I’m fairly happy with that – to be honest I was expecting it to take at least three weeks. I remember my friend Martin’s experience trying to get ADSL in his last house here – one week they would tell him it was impossible, the next they would tell him it would be done the following day. Then they would pretend they didn’t know who he was. I think he spent months chasing them before it was finally resolved.
The Thai way is all about saving face – if a Thai can’t answer your question, s/he would often rather lie than suffer the embarassment of admitting it. The truth comes a poor second to appearances, which can sometimes be amusing but sometimes incredibly frustrating.
Yesterday I took a river taxi to Pantip Plaza to buy a wireless router (฿2,500) – much faster than a taxi or motorcycle, and incredibly cheap (฿12). I headed back to the pier afterwards to make the journey home, and saw a boat already waiting. “Which way is it going?”, I asked a farang couple who were already on board.
“It doesn’t matter, just get on!”, said the female.
It mattered to me – I needed to go east, not west. I clambered on board and asked for a ticket to Thong Lo, which the driver happily sold me. And then off we went – in the opposite direction. Thanks guys.
Still, I know how the river taxi works now. And I know that the driver would rather take my money and let me figure out what to do than to point out that “farang on wrong boat”…
Anyway, aside from my time offline, I’ve been writing furiously for other sites recently, as well as working on technical aspects of a number of websites. My hosting website is up and running over at foobar hosting, with more to come. Perhaps once things settle down I’ll have time to write here more than once a week!
