iDallas!Today we begin our long journey home. We have an overnight layover in Bangkok and then a full day of flying. This scene makes it a lot easier to leave…
It’s rained two full days out of the 4 we’ve been here and it’s raining again today.
We’re now in Ko Samui, a very popular beach destination in Thailand. From some descriptions we had read we were worried it would be totally overrun with tourists, but so far it’s not been bad at all. We’ve only had one day here so far and it was raining most of the day, though. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.
This phase of the trip is sort of the ‘cool down’ like when you walk for awhile after running, and there will probably be more time to reflect on the trip. So, in that spirit… Thoughts on Chiang Mai.
After our three nights in Bangkok, we flew up north to Chiang Mai. A few people we had talked to were glad we were taking some time to see parts of Thailand other than the ever-popular beaches so I was pretty excited to experience it. We stayed at a pretty swanky hotel called D2Hotel with all modern decor and style. Chiang Mai has apparently been developing its tourism market very quickly over the past several years and newer hotels like D2 have come out of that. It’s pretty reasonably priced for how nice it is, too… a definite change from Bangkok. It’s also very centrally located right near the popular night market.
The Chiang Mai night market is centered around a large warehouse-like building with three levels of vendor booths selling all kinds of merchandise from cheap tourist junk to pretty nice cloth items to high-end antiques (though it’s very definitely slanted towards the former end). Additional smaller booths line the sidewalks for several blocks as well as some parking lot areas, too. It is a great place to pick up souvenirs, but most of the fun is just experiencing the energy of it all. It’s even more amazing when you think about the fact that they do it every single night. One morning we went walking down the sidewalk and noticed how much more open and wide the street felt without all the vendor carts… and then it made us start wondering what they do with all the carts at the end of night. It must take a lot of space to store them all!
On our first day in Chiang Mai Vida and Elise learned how to cook some classic Thai dishes with the Thai Farm Cooking School. Sage, Riley, and I came along to hang out and eat the food, too. It was the best Thai food we’ve had since we’ve been here!
The next day we went to an elephant training camp for a quick elephant ride, and to see them paint a few pictures.
Cruising around in a longtail boat in the reservoir, the surrounding views are pretty awesome.
Very quick update… After Bangkok we spent a couple of nights in Chiang Mai where we rode some elephants. It was tourist craziness but still fun.
After Chiang Mai we headed to the beach of Phuket and then Ko Phi Phi. We’re now rejuvenated for our trek to the jungle of Khao Sok.
This is now our fourth full day in Thailand and Vida and I have taken over 500 photos already. We’ve had easy access to Internet but not much time to use it. The heat here is pretty draining on us so we mostly use our free time to rest. Gallant adventurers we are not… yet.
We spent our first three nights at the historic Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, and it definitely met expectations. The service was very friendly and warm and the food was good, too. Somehow we got upgraded for free to deluxe river-view rooms which was certainly enjoyed. The Chao Phraya river that runs through Bangkok is pretty amazing and is a unique aspect of the city. There’s a steady stream all day long of ferries, river cruise boats, shuttle boats, tug boats pulling huge loads of who knows what, and the noisy water taxis. They crisscross paths frequently and it’s fun to watch them narrowly avoid collision time after time. At night, the river cruise boats are lit with colorful light scenes and decorations. The King’s 80th birthday is being celebrated and most of them seem to have something to do with that at the moment. On our first evening we went out on a river cruise dinner, and it was neat to seem them passing by. Many of Bangkok’s historic attractions along the river are nicely lit at night as well.
The roads of Bangkok are packed bumper to bumper with cars, tuk tuks, and scooters basically all the time so the frequent river ferries are a very nice way to get around, as well. The locals keep the boats pretty full and tourists squeeze to fill in the remaining gaps. Bangkok is definitely a city of hustle and bustle, and an amazing mix of old and new, side by side. The Skytrain public transit system is quite modern, clean, and efficient, for instance. We used it to we got around on our first day and it was downright pleasant compared to the next day’s combination of ferries and taxis.
Bangkok’s air pollution is very noticeable, especially when stuck in traffic on the roads. It’s not quite as bad as my memories of Mumbai, but it is still a major problem for the city. It’s less noticeable up on the Skytrain, which is heavily used by everyone. I can only imagine what the traffic and air would be like without it.
While in Bangkok we visited the Jim Thompson house (this Jim Thompson guy was entirely unknown to me before coming here, but he’s all over the place…), the Grand palace with it’s Wot Phraw Kaew, Wot Arun across the river, and the Vimanmek Teak Mansion.
We’ll be posting some thoughts soon, but for now here is a picture (which links to a few more pictures on Flickr).
I played around with the Rhapsody music service on my TiVo tonight, and it’s actually kinda cool. It can’t hold a candle to my Sonos, but it still seems like a pretty nice way to get Rhapsody music straight onto your TV and home stereo. Once you login you can browse your through existing library of music, browse the entire Rhapsody library or search for artists, albums or songs. One nifty feature is a screen saver that comes up after you’ve been listening for awhile that cycles through the cover art of albums you have in your Rhapsody library. It’s not as cool as the Apple TV screensaver, but it’s still a whole lot better than a black screen!
In my experience, TiVo’s applications like this one that add functionality on top of the DVR are a bit of a mixed bag. While most of them do seem to work crashes and glitches are common. The Rhapsody application crashed once on me in the half an hour or so I played with it. That’s not any indication that it would be unstable with regular use, of course.
Here’s one annoying thing I noticed… If you leave the Rhapsody music paused for more than something like 5 minutes it automatically boots you back out to watching TV. When you come back into the Rhapsody application you start out with an empty music queue again so you have to start over from scratch. I think that’s due to a limitation in how TiVo applications work, but it could be pretty annoying in regular use.
Whenever DreamHost has a massive screw-up of some sort, the thing I most notice about the customer response is the high level of animosity and aggression in the comments. People obviously have a right to respond to any situation in their own way, but still I can’t help but feel that some of them would benefit from taking a moment to step back, take a look at their actions, and consider if those actions are really the most effective path towards a positive solution for themselves.
Websites can be very personal in nature and it can be emotional to have something like that not functioning properly. Technical people in particular can become very frustrated when a technical issue is out of their control. They can feel powerless and in a situation like that anger is certainly an understandable emotion to feel. Still, it seems like an odd logic leap to me to go from feeling some anger inside to taking that anger and using it to fuel more anger and animosity. Ultimately, the goal in any problem scenario is to get to the solution as quickly and painlessly as possible. Obviously emotions can interfere with that but still most people can stay focused on the resolution anyway. The form that particular resolution or solution takes is obviously an individual choice.
What I see an unusual amount of online is people deciding that the best resolution for an unpleasant situation is to get revenge, no matter how much effort it takes. People decide that it’s worth hours and hours of their own time to start up ‘anti’ websites or to post message after message of spite and bile to message boards or blog comments. I get angry myself at times, but I just can’t comprehend expending so much emotional energy over something so ultimately minor. There’s just not enough time in the day.
What’s most unusual about this is that I feel like I don’t see this sort of animosity in my day to day life. When the burrito place up the street gives you a steak burrito instead of the veggie burrito you ordered, do you scream at and wish death upon the guy behind the counter? When the auto repair shop takes 3 days longer than they said it would take to fix your car, do you make picket signs and walk around outside of their business yelling at people walking past? I’m hoping not! What is it about the Internet that makes people exhibit such odd behaviors? Where does all the animosity come from?
I went to a Suicidal Tendencies show at Slim’s in San Francisco last week. The place only holds maybe 400 people so it’s a pretty tiny place for a band as well-known as them. They haven’t released an album for several years and have been out of the bit of spotlight they did have as a result. They’re by no means a huge band but there’s a good chance anyone who’s ever been into metal, hardcore punk, or other loud, fast music has listened to them at some point.
Suicidal Tendencies’ 1990 album, “Lights, Camera, Revolution”, is on my “Top 10 Metal Albums of All Time” list (which I have not yet actually published) and I hold them in very high regard overall. I also knew that the crowd would be pretty insane in a place that small and it should be a fun show all around. We made our way up to the very front left of the stage between the first band and the second band, Municipal Waste, and planted ourselves there for the rest of the evening. Municipal Waste was previously unknown to me and was a pretty good show. They reminded me a bit of M.O.D. and Exodus at different moments and I noticed some Slayer influence at times as well.
After Municipal Waste was finished our beers were empty but there was no way we were going to give up our spots so we had to go thirsty. Sad, I know. Suicidal Tendencies first came on without Mike Muir and began to make a lot of guitar sounds for a few minutes until he came out and the crowd went wild. The guitar sounds eventually turned into an epic version of “You Can’t Bring Me Down” and it took me all the way back to those early highschool years when that song was one of my anthems. It’s a song based firmly in the themes of teen angst, like most Metal songs, but it also has a very strong sense of empowerment. It’s not a song about aggression, but instead about standing up for yourself and your beliefs. That may sound a bit trite now, but when I was 15 it did a lot for me.
Overall, it was a great show and the crowd energy level rarely dropped below a dull roar. I frequently found myself shouting along with the crowd to classic songs like “War Inside My Head”, “Send Me Your Money”, and “How Can I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can’t Even Smile Today”. Goooood times.
I’ve heard some rumors that S.T. is coming out with a new album next year and I don’t know for sure if they played any songs from it or not. I don’t know every single song of theirs but I did recognize almost all of them. It’s hard to say if a band with as much history as Suicial Tendencies will actually produce a must-hear new album, but their live shows are still an experience anyone with any inclination shouldn’t pass up.
Something got me thinking about Compute! magazine the other day and the role it played in my early computing life.
In the late 1980s my family had an Atari 800 XL home computer which had a slot for game cartridges but also had a full keyboard and was similar in ability to the famed Commodore 64. We mostly just played games on it, but it was a personal computer and not a game console. It was later replaced with the awesome (for the time) Amiga 500 but we were an Atari family for a long time before then.
Issues of Compute! had source code (usually Basic, I think) for games and other small programs that would work on all of the most popular home computers of the era, including our Atari, and my family would spend time entering them in line by line into the Atari. The source code was mostly just gibberish to us at the time so it was usually a two person job… one person reading the code out loud and the other person typing it in. It would usually take my parents and I several days to a week or more to do one of them. The programs usually ran and worked at the end but sometimes had small glitches due to typos on our part. When they didn’t run at all it was pretty heart breaking. The games were never awesome, but it was still very gratifying to see the result of our efforts and it was painful to end up staring at useless text. Towards the end of that era of my computing life I started trying to change random bits of our working code to see what would happen, too. I didn’t know then what role computer software would play in my future life, of course.
The cover of the issue here mentions a hands-on look at the Amiga 500 so it seemed like an especially fitting one to go along with this little trot down memory lane.