Pattaya Days

Bangkok Protests
tulsathit – A Thai journalist for The Nation. Not the greatest of newspapers to work for, but he writes in English and is reporting frequently from Bangkok this weekend. A good way to keep in touch with what is happening.

Formula One:
Occasional posts from the drivers, apart from Karun Chandhok who is like a kid in a toy shop and is posting all manner of fun stuff. Much more from the journalists and broadcasters, with links to web and images.

Drivers
The_Real_JB – Jenson Button
AussieGrit – Mark Webber
karunchandhok

BBC F1 Team and other journalists
jakehumphreyf1
andrewbensonf1
Jamesallenonf1
sarahholtf1
NobleF1
tedkravitz
legardj

Any additional offerings gratefully received.

After months of build up, it is finally here. Tens of thousands of fans (red shirts) will descend on Bahrain (Bangkok) for the first (latest) round of the world championship (ongoing battle against the government). Everyone is hoping that the event will be free of accidents (violence), and it is very unclear who will emerge the winner.

OK, enough of the double talk. Bangkok is going to be inundated with protesters this weekend. It’s not my country and I have no opinion on who is right; especially as it is all politics and politicians worldwide are, almost without exception, scum. I just hope that the country comes out of whatever happens without too much damage. The Thai people deserve a stable future, although I doubt they are going to get it.

Meanwhile, Bahrain is the venue for the first round of the 2010 F1 world championship. Schumacher is back, Alonso is in a Ferrari, Button and Hamilton in McLarens, the return of Lotus; so much to look forward to, but will the actual racing be any more exciting? Formula One fans deserve more than just another boring procession, although I doubt they are going to get it.

With my True TV service discontinued, I plan to watch the races at Nanotrax, where Qon, even though he is American and knows nothing of these strange European based machines, has scheduled the Sunday RC car races to dovetail with the F1 event on TV. Sadly, a photo assignment on Sunday means I will miss this and will have to revert to my backup plan of downloading the BBC coverage and watching the race on Monday morning. Keep the beer cold Qon; next time….

Before I rolled it, I had a 2 litre Honda Civic. It weighed about a tonne and had 150 horsepower, giving reasonable performance.
Of course it would have had significantly better performance (and rolled much further) if it had only weighed half a tonne, and been blessed with twice as much horsepower. Like this:

It’s an Ariel Atom. A 300 bhp Honda engine stuffed into some chassis tubes. 0-60mph in 2.9 seconds and times round a track that match the fastest and most expensive cars in the world. It’s a Lotus 7 with less body and more of everything else and I would dearly like to own one. But at thirty thousand pounds plus in the UK, and something like 5 million baht to import; that is not going to happen.

The lucky owner is Mr. Nong Nuch Tropical Gardens, whose car collection I have previously admired. It ended up near our condo because the gentleman whose job it is to maintain all these wonderful toy obviously needs to take them out for a run to make sure they are OK. Personally I would have driven it to Chang Mai rather than just into Pattaya, to give it a really thorough test; but I can imagine that the bum becomes a little numb after a while.

Jeremy Clarkson liked it, which may or may not serve as a recommendation:

Note to son: Kind of you to offer; but keep saving for the GT40. Thank you.

We have a new police chief (by “we” I mean Pattaya, nor our home which is already more than adequately policed by she who must be obeyed). He is obviously keen to make an impression and has been calling regular press conferences to announce new schemes.

The latest wheeze is to empower the one thousand plus baht bus and motorcycle taxi drivers to help fight crime in the city. To encourage them to look out for and report suspicious behaviour, they are being offered 2,000 baht if the bad guys they finger are successfully prosecuted.

This is a good scheme in principle, if it were not for the public perception that those driving baht buses and motorcycle taxis are the biggest rogues of all. Still, at least the new top cop is trying.

And in other news: A motorcycle taxi driver has been arrested for snatching a necklace worth 55,000 baht. Perhaps he can plead guilty and then claim the 2,000 baht reward….

Obtaining and maintaining a reasonable internet connection in this fine country can be a bit of a challenge. Speeds vary hugely and disconnects are frequent. Calls to the help centre can be painful, and once the problem is identified as being located in the physical phone line, there is always a tendency for the TT&T engineers to assign the blame to the internal wiring of my condo; saves them from getting out of their office chairs and going to check their connections.

Mind you, maybe they have a point. This is the spaghetti at the point at which the phone lines come into our builiding:

There is a lip of a roof partially shielding the wiring, but everything gets damp when the rains come, and the box on the right is in too much of a mess for the door to shut. If a signal manages to get past this lot, then there is a further tangle of wires and connections to negotiate in the maintenance office, before a leisurely trip up to the condo unit floor where two more boxes offer interference possibilities.

My friend Nik has been having problems for weeks, and my internet has refused to achieve full connection speeds for longer than I can remember; so today action was taken. Nik went out and bought a couple of kilometres of wire and the condo technician was tasked with routing a connection from the incoming phone line on the wall, direct to our condos, bypassing the chaos of wires. My job was to stand and watch and look worried. Our condo technicians have a reputation for destroying or stealing condo property, being sacked, and being replaced with someone equally incompetent and dishonest. But the boy did good, and now I have a rock-steady connection; and some faith that my internet will keep on trucking when the rains come.

Can’t be so confident for the rest of the residents.

Asus Aspire One Netbook
One careful owner, never raced or rallied, needs some attention.

Here’s a fact: Netbooks suck.
They don’t do anything well. The displays are awful, battery life is abysmal and if I had to evaluate the amount of pleasure it gave me to use one, I would say “none at all”.

But, in flush of consumerism for which I am prone, I did buy one a couple of years ago. It was 10k baht, which seemed like a bargain at the time, and I had visions of taking it everywhere as my friendly computer. I soon realised that my iPhone makes for a much quicker and more convenient computing companion, so the netbook saw little action and then eventually decided not to work at all.

That was six months ago, and since then it has sat, glowering, on the shelf; giving out “fix me” vibes every time I passed. Today was she who must be obeyed’s day off, which she seemed keen to spend playing Farmville, Fishville, Pornville etc., so I thought I would have a go.

The beast had a power light that came on, but nothing else seemed to happen. If it was a hardware fault, there was not a lot I could do; but maybe I could inject some software life into it.

Some quality time with Mr. Google revealed that many people had suffered from Acer Aspire One death. For some it was terminal, for others there was a hope of resurrection via a BIOS re-install. So I spent about an hour gathering all the necessary files, preparing a USB stick and reading the instructions over and over to ensure I was doing the right thing. Then I held down a couple of keys, turned the thing on and waited for it to spring to life, at which point I intended to shoot “Hallelujah” very loudly, if only to annoy she who must be obeyed who was busy feeding her digital fish. Instead, all I could do was mutter “bastard” very quietly, because nothing happened. I spent two more hours fiddling with options in an attempt to breath life into the dormant machine, but it refused to respond. I pronounced it dead.

In such instances there is nothing to lose in disassembling the machine. There is a 0.00006% chance that you will discover a loose connection, and a 100% chance that the act of deconstruction will render the device beyond hope of future repair. But it is fun to do and sometimes interesting.

Here are some more facts:
Netbooks do not come to pieces as easily as a desktop computer.
A hammer is never a good idea (this applies to almost everything, especially delivering babies).
If you have to prise it open with a screwdriver, there is probably a screw you should have removed first.
If you have to prise it open with a screwdriver and something snaps, there is definitely a screw you should have removed first.
Once you have taken a netbook to pieces, you can’t put it together again.

Or at least, I can’t. But maybe you could! No reasonable offer refused.

I don’t really understand Mexican food. I get confused between the various names. Do I want a Burrillo, an Espilada or a Chinchilla? They all look the same on the menu and when they arrive at the table, they all look and taste the same. There are some beans, some rice and something that could pass as a large bowel movement which is either soft or crispy, or softly crispy, and is stuffed with more beans, a bit of salad and maybe some meat of unknown origin (unless I ordered Chinchilla). But fuck all that, I love Margaritas.

So I could never be described as a connoisseur of Mexican food; but I do enjoy the occasional visit to a Mexican restaurant, knowing that I will roll home feeling pleasantly full of something, and awash in Margaritas.

There was a place called Mike’s in Thappraya road which did the job; but the location was rather bland and noisy and our visits were infrequent. But now Mike’s has moved to a side street off Thappraya and it is now a very pleasant place to eat the obscure and drink Margaritas (or Corona if you must).

Down to Jomtien Marina yesterday morning to take a shot of a friend’s boat. There seemed to be more than the usual number of people and lengths of cable:

And some expensive looking cameras:

Turns out that they were shooting an episode of a Thai soap, possibly the worst television in the world (apart from whichever show it was that brought us that squawking Scottish tank). The star was someone called Jenny who is, according to she who must be obeyed, famous. She is also known for being gorgeous, but, if I can throw in a nautical term at this point, she didn’t float my boat.

She seemed to be getting less preferential treatment than some other performers in the show. She had to find her own piece of shade to keep cool; whereas these two, who presumably had a crucial, albeit non-speaking role, were provided with fans and had bags of snacks close by in case of need:

My camera equipment was mundane compared to the film crew’s collection. I brought along the 1D, because people expect “a real camera”. but also had the GF1 which produced some very acceptable images and were mixed in with the final selection I gave to my friend. The boat is for sale if you are interested in standing in a salty shower fully clothed, throwing up, and tearing up $1,000 baht notes.

Rose are red
Ferraris are too
Apart from this one
Makes me want to puke