Archive for August, 2008

I can start this entry in the same way as I started a previous offering.

A frustrating day. A day of high winds where I should have been bouncing off waves with a jellyfish attached to my head at a jaunty angle.

And indeed I had spotted the wind and had just changed into a rather fetching pair of light blue beach shorts with pink stripes (don’t blame me, she who must be obeyed chooses all my clothes). About to head out for the beach and the phone rings. It is Nik, my recent travelling companion, fellow condo owner and camera enthusiast. “I’ve just spent 102,000 baht on a Mac Pro and I am heading back to the condo” was his message. Sod the wind, I had to see this.

Nik has been struggling with computers for a long time. Like me, he uses Lightroom for managing and processing his thousands of photos. Unlike me, he tries to do it on a Windoze machine; and so everything………. happens………..very………. slowly. I kept calling him up saying “get a Mac”; and so after much consideration, he went out and bought a brand new desktop running Vista. Everything happened even slower. I mocked.

Since then, he has been struggling with assorted crashes, slowdowns and general disasters. Then, yesterday, things came to a head. He had had a little friend to visit for the evening (he was unable to recall her name), and had taken some photos of her. They were very large files (about 60MB each), and his machine just stuttered to a halt. It was at this point that he grabbed his credit card, marched down to iStudio and demanded a Mac Pro.

Back at the condo and we unpacked the beast. Two CPUs, eight cores and constructed like a tank, albeit like a very elegant aluminium tank which has picked up an award or two from the tank design institute.

Plugged everything in, installed Lightroom and loaded up the photos of last night’s friend. At this point I did offer to eject myself over his balcony rail if it was slower. But it wasn’t, it was close to instantaneous, whereas before it was close to “I can go and make a cup of tea and bake a cake while this finishes.”

Impressive, but it got even better a few hours later when he called me and asked if I wanted to watch two porn movies running on separate screens at the same time. Frankly, I didn’t, but he had gone out and bought a second monitor and had both working with Lightroom at the same time and it was stunningly quick and very, very cool.

So yes, it was a frustrating day, because my projected “saved up enough money for a Mac Pro” date is early next year, but now I want one now. And Nik keeps calling me and telling me to “get a Mac Pro.” Bastard.

The news is running with blood. A man decapitated on a bus in Canada. A girl chopped up and put into a suitcase in Brazil. Honeymooners attacked in Antigua. Mass murder and accusations of ethnic cleansing in Pattaya.

Police were called today to a condo in Pattaya to witness the scene of the killing. In the kitchen sink they found traces of multiple bodies. A representative of the affected commune, Khun Adam Ant, told police what had happened.

Apparently the owner of the condo, legally known as Spike, but referred to by his wife as Haveyoudoneityet, was in the habit of eating a breakfast of cereal, banana and yoghurt. He then placed the empty bowl in the kitchen sink and deliberately left it there for several hours while he disappeared into a back room to “write my stupid blog.” The bowl, encrusted with breakfast residue, was inevitably visited by large numbers of the commune who could not resist the flavours on offer.

Without warning, Spike would return to the kitchen, utter a war cry which sounded something like “furkinants!”, and would then immerse the bowl in hot soapy water, thus murdering the commune members. Khun Adam explained that this ritual slaying had been going on for years, but this morning things had taken a sickening and perverted turn for the worse when Spike had photographed his innocent victims before butchering them in cold blood (or rather, in hot soap).

Khun Adam Ant was adamant (Ed: sorry) that these acts were ethnic cleansing of the most evil kind. However, Pattaya police representatives, after accepting a donation for the police widows and liquor fund from Spike, declared this to be a clear case of suicide.

Asked for a comment by local reporters, Spike replied “100mm macro lens, ring flash, 1/300 second at F16, ISO 200. Furkinants.”