What does the shade smell like over there?

Here it smells damp. Not soggy-dog damp, but kinda cold damp. It's as though the small change in ambient temerature between the sunny bits and the shady bits is enough to literally squeeze molecules of water out of the air and up your nose.

I noticed this for the first time a couple of days ago when I was riding along on my motorcycle. The highway I was travelling along splits into a double decker section for a while, and I just happened to be on the lower level. Anyway, that's when I noticed it.

Just thought I'd mention this. Use it, don't use it. Whatever.

Phi Phi

SO here I am on Phi Phi, trying to look like I know what I'm doing. There is a lot of info to absorb. Already I have done 2 courses - rescue and emergency response. Damn, there's a lot to get into my head.

Yesterday I ate chicken feet for the first time...not bad. Don't ask how that happened. They were actually quite good. Check out TransportCaff for a recipe of sorts.

Anotehr thing. This keyboard has Thai writing on it, which makes me long for the Das Keyboard.

A-41 (collected)

Episode 2 of the Visa saga saw me returning to the Royal Thai Consulate to collect my passport, which now contained the royal chop. That only took 2 minutes.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

What I do want to yammer on about is the amount of space the visas end up taking in one's passport. You can get 10 or so chops on a page under normal circumstances, but a visa requires an entire leaf unto itself. What a waste. I'd like my microchip now please. Just embed the thing in pip and let me get on with it.

Das Fingentypenconfusen

The mind boggles. Here's a keyboard that doesn't have any letter on it. The inventors claim that it turns you into a superduper fast typist because you don't have to think about the letters.

Check out the Das website here.

Number A-41

If you ever want to remind yourself of your place in the universe, all you have to is wait in one of those diabolical queueing systems for your number to come up.

There were 20 people in front of me at the Royal Thai Consulate this morning, and I waited over 2 hours before I could hand ion my Visa application. When my turn finally came, my request was processed in under 3 minutes. Sign. Pay. Hand over photograph. Receipt. Chop. Thank you. Which makes me wonder what the people who seem to be engaged in discussion for half an hour at a time are up to. Endless discussions, rifling through papers, dropping things, rooting in bags, pressing of ears against the bullet proof glass to hear properly.

In certain circles we talk about those who are constitutionally incapable. I give you the Visa queue as proof.

And speaking of embassies and consulates; it's inetresting that you can literally walk into the grounds of most of the sovereign buildings - say hello to the guard, state your business and proceed. Not so the American Consulate. At leat 2 layers of fencing, dogs, armed guards, armoured cars. Whatever happened to "bring me your weak, your downtrodden, etc?" Not sure who's foot the down trodding boot is on these days.

There's a lizard living in my motorcycle

I kid you not. This morning as I was thundering along, I espeyed a small lizard clinging to the fairing of my bike. At first I thought a piece of grass had become lodged there, but on closer inpection it was indeed a lizard.

The poor bugger was clinging on for dear life in the 80km/h headwinds. As I stopped at a traffic light, he found better footing below the rim of the fairing, and then managed to creep into the gap betwen the dials and the front of the fairing. I slowed down by then to give him a more comfortable ride.

I hope he's still there. One more reason not to wash the machine.

Open sauce

Frankly I couldn't give 2 shits about the browser wars. Back in the day I used Netscape 3 - simply becasue IE 3 was dodgy. But from IE 4 onwards, Bill's browser was better. What I dug most about the good ol' days was that there were a zillion little useless apps that you could plug in.

Firefox has returned us to those heady days. My browser now sports the ability to have coloured tabs, close buttons on each tab, an image and text zoom function, an IP address capturer, a colour picker, FTP client (not just file view like IE), an RSS reader...infact endless numbers of really groovy meaningless functionality.

Now all I need is a broadband service provider with an actual working line and a willingness to respond to problems in les than 6 weeks.

Sony Baloney

Well, it seems that music distributor SonyBMG has included malware on several CDs that installs itself into the root of your computer for the express purposes of disallowing the copying of aforementioned CDs.

Naughty, naughty, naughty. Already the state of Texas has brung themselves a lawsuit on Sony. And it seems that lawyers elsewhere in the US of A are considering whether the case has enought merit to merit a class action suit.

Me, I hope the backlash causes more than juts a little embarrassment. This blog has featured various posts dealing quite superficially with the idea of copyright and intellectual property.

For thos interested enough to see a list of the 50 CDs that actually contain the malware, it can be found here.

On scrutiny, however, there's very little I'd listen to anyway.

Blogwatch

A new and pernicious form of blogger is emerging in the blogospere; a spam tout who couches his / her evil message in complimentary tones, but who is quite clearly on the hunt for extra click throughs to his / her site.

Again, I invite the hackers of the world to unite and bring down these miserable bastards with large Denial Of Service apps.

See the comment on the post below to see what I'm on about.

Singapore

I can't think what else to title this post other than "Singapore."

Every time a visit Singapore, I tell myself that that's where I want to end up; for a while anyway. It feels so familiar. All the things that I really like, but can't find here in Malaysia are to be had in Singapore in buckets - right down to the finest Pizza I've had in years.

Even the airport is something else. With about 45 minutes to spare before the flight took off, I discovered that the waiting area has an outside area, complete with sunflowers (all kept at regulation height by gangs of gardeners), and even a small cinema. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

So here it is, for the record, and just so the message travels into the universe and becomes true. I am going to work in Singapore.

As I was writing this post I came across the following article in the Mail & Guardian website.

Click here for the article

Asterix and the great Firewall of China

And the plane landed safely.

The first thing I saw this morning when I turned on the TV during my morning ritual of espresso was the image of an aeroplane bouncing around my screen under the high magnification of a telephoto lens. "This aughta be good," I thought, "obviously some fundamentalist group of exploding-shoe wearing maniacs have threatened to do a Kruschev."

Sadly this wasn't the case. Turns out the Airbus A320 merely had a skew nose wheel.

CNN obviously shared my bloodlust however, because to hear them tell it, it was a disaster of humanity-threatening proportions. They had rounded up the usual crew of experts from fire chiefs to ageing stewardesses who survived the Hindenburg disaster. None of them was playing ball, however. Whenever Larry King would refer to the disasterously dangerous attitude of the undercarriage, the panel pilot would correct him - "It's a little cockeyed, Larry."

Anyway, despite the media's attempt to will the thing to a fiery end, the plane landed as smoothely as if all systems were go. No mess, no fuss.

Still, it made the morning coffee more interesting than usual.

Free at last (well, almost)

It is with a not undue sense of relief that I write this report today.

This a.m. I sat for the written part of my motorcycle license here in Malaysia. It's been almost 3 months since I paid my money and joined the seemingly interminable bureacratic queue. The real issue, of course, was that my residential address and my business address differed. How silly of me.

I thought that I would have to resort to the official method of getting things done hereabouts, which is ask the question, "who do we have to pay, and how much?"

8 weeks of to-and-froing with the transport department, and a pile of paperwork larger than a mighty redwood, and the I can finally move on to episode 2 of this saga. I'll keep the universe posted as things develop.

My blog has been spammed

I'm not sure how to feel about what just happened. Someone called meghanhc59jfdenton has posted a spam comment on my blog. Of course, this miserable fuck's name leads nowhere, so I can't even reply in kind.

If there are any hackers reading this, please find the organisation in question and mailbomb it.

This wasn't in the brochure

For the 4th day in a row now KL is blanketed under a layer of smoke so thick I can barely see across the road. Visibility is down to under 100m in some places. Schools have closed. The fish are going belly-up in the fish farms for lack of oxygen. Hell, the air even smells like a good old fashioned highveld grassfire.

In typical fashion the authorities are telling us as little as possible. What we do know is that the API (air pollutant index) has reached "dangerously unhealthy levels." We also know that the smoke is the result of open burning which the Malaysian government routinely blames on Indonesia.

The hysteria is reaching a fever pitch; there are calls for the government to seed the clouds in the hope of creating rain to wash the sky. The only solution is for all of us to look west and blow as hard as we can.

And speaking of stealing ideas...

Here's one of this year's Cannes winners from Jupiter Drawing Room in South Africa.



And here's an ad I came across from Lurzer' Archive, Vol.3-2002. Hmmmmmmmm...

Sum of yesterday

Some stuff lasts and some doesn't. I've been going through the annuals trying to find an idea to steal and something struck me. No matter how technology infulences this profession, a good idea is timeless. It doesn't fade. It doesn't crack. It doesn't go out of fashion. It's never the wrong colour for the season. Not even Greenpeace can find something wrong with a good idea. It's never superceded by a new model. etc...

And why am I musing thus? Well, I came across an ad for an airline, in which the lastest turboprop engine was being hailed as the latest greatest thing since...well, flight. And it seemed intresting that while the turboprop engine has been overtaken by technology, the idea expressed in the ad remains worthy of a look.

Nuff said.

TIME Magazine logo now in the public domain?

When I first saw the cover of the Time magazine shown here, I was amused by ironic symbolism of the Chairman sporting the Louis Vuitton logo. For me it neatly summed up my rather naive understanding of China Today. However I think that I viewed it somewhat differently to how it was meant; Time Magazine, I'm sure, wanted to draw attention to the bourgeoning spending power of the rising borgeouise class in China; I saw it as yet another example of the Asian abilility to embrace everybody else's valuable symbols as their own. There was, however, a third point of view that I had not anticipated.

Gems

I've long been a fan of Zapiro's political cartoons in the Mail And Guardian newspaper. Every now and then, though, there's one that is just so insightful and African, that it deserves a shouting gallery.

Here is one such.

The China Syndrome

I'm sitting at a recording studio somewhere in the Far East thinking about China's latest attack on freedom. They're clamping down on ISPs, requiring anybody who has anything to do with the Internet to register with the state. Companies running blog sites (such as MSN's "Spaces") are now required to filter out words such as "freedom" and "democracy." Those not willing to play ball will have to host their offerings outside of China's borders; anyone inside China will no longer be able to access these sites.

The fifth estate is under attack.

This reminds me of the bad old days in South Africa when the government under PW Botha became so paranoid about the fourth estate (the press) that they established a commission of enquiry to investigate, and ultimately stamp out, press freedom.

Thank god they lost thaht battle.

More on this later.