It was really refreshing to read a reader's submission to Stickman's Website. I wish I had written it as it captures my opinion of bar girls to a tee. Definitely worth reading:
That's it for my New Years Day post from the village :-) Heading back to the Big mango on January 4th .. enough of this camping shit .. give me good music, a couple of beautiful bar girls, and an expat friend or two and I am a happy guy.
However, do understand, I love my wife and she is a wonderful person with not one mean bone in her body .. definitely a keeper ..
Well here I am in Thavorn's Thai village for the second time on a New Year's Eve. I have never been a fan of New Years and the older I get the less I need to be reminded of the March of Time. The road carnage continues during the end of year celebrations and last night a nine year old girl was run over by a car backing up during her school's end of year pageant. Not a way to remember New Years for the school or her parents.
Most of the local Thai males get pissed on rot gut cheap Thai whisky and will end up sleeping tomorrow away after they pass out in a few hours. I would rather spend my time in the Big Mango's many nightlife bars entertaining friends and the ever present ladies with lively discourse and reminiscing of the year past.
I understand that not everyone is as fond of working girls as I am but I find them way more interesting than regular women folk, especially of the western hemisphere type. A smile goes a very long way :-)
We treated the family to KFC for supper and bout a couple of jackets ($15 each) for Thavorn's older children and even bought 2 training bras for her 13 year old. In Thailand, that could be male or female.
I lost it last night and behaved like the crazy farang that appears to fascinate Thais. Thais are allowed to be crazy and get angry and hit people for some slim reason, especially when being drunk gives them a ticket to ride.
Thavorn's brother is someone I do not like for a variety of reason. He is too stupid to know he is stupid. At 27 he has still to find meaningful work especially when his mouth gets him into trouble. He has cost me about 60,000 baht over the years. First off I had to pay for the hospital bill when his gf's father shot him for knocking up his daughter. The family did not have 30,000 baht. Then in a weaker moment I bought him a smart phone for 8,000 baht so he could take pictures of his kid. Then he wanted to borrow 20,000 to buy a 12 year old Honda Accord in great condition. I told Thavorn that was not a good decision because it would die shortly after he bought it and in a Thai's mind, why would he pay for something he had no use of. Needless to say he never paid back a baht.
Last night he left the house while I was putting Jaidan to sleep and stole about 15 of Jaidan's toys. I decided to inform the mother how much a piece of shit her son was in English and she got the message despite not understanding any English. I told Thavorn to call the bastard and tell him to bring the toys back immediately or I was going to beat the crap out of her son. I punctuated that by putting my fist through the back door. Sometimes you can lose it in Thailand as Thais do not think the way we do.
I received some sympathy form Thavorn's sisters bf because he also calls the sister asking for loans and starts swearing at her and calling her bad names and she starts to cry. He does this to Thavorn about every two months.
The piece of shit just rode up on his motorbike and sat down to eat as if nothing happened last night. I can't understand everybody's acceptance of such a jerk. But then again, he was drunk, which in Thailand is a great excuse for not being responsible for your actions.
As you can probably tell I am still upset :-) nit noi.
The devil has arrived .. opinionated as always
The New Years School Pageant where the girl died .. sad
Staying in the village is very similar to a camping experience back home in Canada. We have even taken to camping in my man cave because it beats sleeping under a mosquito net and I am more confident that it is scorpion proof.
Safe sleep inside
As usual, the village house is quite dirty and cleanliness is not a priority to the village folks I have come to know. A funny aside .. as we drove down the deadly highways some enterprising Thais were selling flower amulets to protect the vehicle on its drive. I casually mentioned that the Thai highways are the second most deadly in the world so the amulets do not seem to work well. That logic was lost on them .. all the more reason to buy some good fortune. Have I mentioned that they are lottery addicts?
Thavorn and family preparing another Thai feast
There is a wedding in the village tomorrow night as well as another young male going into monkshood for a while. This period is often as short as one month but whatever it takes to get out of military service. Seems like a big deal for one month.
Tonight, starting at 8 pm is the local schools New Year's performance which occurs on the 30th instead of the 31st as they want a sober audience and definitely not hungover.
I have yet to go for a run or exercise, although I am watching what I eat and have yet to have a drink despite being encourage by the Thai males present to imbibe some rot gut Thai whisky. You have to be pretty hard up to drink that shit, albeit, it is very inexpensive.
I have been engaged in programming a basketball score clock to keep my mind engaged and I have enjoyed it as I have done very little Canvas graphics programming so there is lots to learn.
So I can easily see myself enjoying (nit noi) my short stay in the village over this new year.
Bell, Rogers, Telus, and Shaw should be ashamed of themselves as well as our Governments, present and past .. I am enjoying a 100 MBS download and 30 MBS upload, with no caps (Fibre) for the small sum of 800 Baht a month ($30). If a developing country can do this ... WTF .. I also get 30 MBS down and 10 MBS upon my phone for 2,000 baht or about $70 and month. There is a cap of 75 gigs a month but the equivalent plan in Canada is about $400 a month. Thailand is also rolling out 5G early in the new year so things are going to get even better and also cheaper. Competition is great and Canada has allowed its telecom giants a monopoly for much too long!!!
Meanwhile back in Bangkok
You can buy a winter jackt of sorts in Bangkok
My night out Harvey (on the right) and American, British, and Australian friend
Even the BTS trains get decked out
BTW, if I don't get a post in tomorrow, HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Today's song is: Leaving on a Jet Plane .. Mam Cass and John
What Goes Around Come Around .. 1972 vs Now :-)
We got serious about our 6 month trip to Canada today and started packing to take the majority of our 'stuff'' to the village. Tomorrow night, Thavorn's sister and her husband arrive with their pickup truck to drive us and our belongings to the village where they will be stored until we arrive back on or about September 1st 2019. Included in our packing is my 34 inch curved monitor, vacuum cleaner, surplus electronics, pots, pans, dishes, cooking plate, etc.
What we hope to be left with is one large suitcase for each of us, and a carry on. I have mentioned before about how I feel about stuff and my lack of need for it. I can comfortably go through life with 2 pairs of quality (Oakley) shorts, 2 pairs of quality jeans (Guess), 3 t-shirts, 2 golf shirts, 1 quality pair of sneakers (Asics) one pair of real shoes, and one pair of quality sandals. Underwear is optional in a hot climate. What else do you need. Oh yes, hair drier, dental floss, and an electric tooth brush (Colgate).
Perhaps that is why I get such a kick out of backpackers with a huge backpack on their travels.
We will spend about 17 days in the village, but Thavorn and jaidan may stay longer as Thavorn will not see her other two children and Mother for the next 6 months. We leave for Canada on February 17th. I have to come back to Bangkok for basketball and a 90 day reporting on January 8th.
Tonight I hope to meet my English buddy Harvey for a few beers and a walk on the dark-side. I have been spending a huge amount of time coding and need a break from the tedium. The big Mango beckons, calling my name :-)
I miss my 34 inch curved monitor but my 30 inch LG monitor comes close.
MTBF is an acronym for Mean Time Between Failures. Whenever you buy something like a computer or a car, or buy into something like a marriage, there is an average (mean) time when the product or the relationship goes south.
In my case, my 3 year old Dell AlienWare laptop went south 2 days ago with very little warning except for a slowing down which I attributed to Windows bloat. I have always said electronic equipment seems to have a MTBF of about 3 years. My Samsung 34 inch monitor crapped out at 2 years, 10 months while my AlienWare laptop was almost 3 years to the day as it was purchased on December 15th 2015.
Now I program on my laptop and when it died, my immediate concern was how much time is this going to cost me, what have I lost, and what is my latest backup and where did I store it? I have backups on the same device, on portable ssd drives, and in the cloud on our servers.
After much searching I found the most valuable backups of my various vmWare images on one of my portable SSD drives and it was current. My current work, still in development was on two different servers in the AWS cloud so I was good to go.
My Documents were another story as I am not as good at backing up my person stuff. After much trying I was able to open a CMD prompt and go spelunking on the laptop's SSD drive. I quickly found out that some directories and files had disappeared but I was able to copy over some needed documents a bit oat a time because the computer would crap out and reboot 3 times if tried to much. I suspect that some memory had gone bad.
I managed to get my backup laptop up and running with my latest apps and vmWare images after a day of hard work installing the latest of everything as that laptop, a Lenova ThinkPad is 6 years old. Turns out my older laptop was running better than than the 3 year old AlienWare. ThinkPads are great, especially with their spill proof keyboards that I have had experience to test.
I will be buying a new ThinkPad and staying away from Dell in the future as this is the second Dell laptop I have had with issues.
One item I always avoid is Bilingual keyboards whether they be French (bad) or Thai (worse). The replacement laptop is highly recommended on the internet by just about all reviewers, except Mac pundits.
It gives credence to the phrase, 'I am here for a good time, not a long time'.
Seriously, who wants to live past their prime. However, the older I get, the longer my prime gets. However, when I can no longer run or walk normally, when the mind begins to dim, and most importantly of all, when I become a burden to someone else, it is time to hit the check out button :-)
Gout sucks, apparently 1 in 2 people start to experience it after 50 years of age. It is a pain in the toe. Also a pain in the ass if you like to walk long like I do. Also, drinking too much (who me?) also tends to start up a gout episode .. bummer! After a week of ice I headed off to the local pharmacy and obtained the usual drugs that I would have to go see a doctor in Canada. Lo and behold after a day of said drugs, the pain is starting to abate. Uric acid begone I say!
On a lighter note, I am looking forward to a break from coding and having a beer with a couple of good friends, over the Christmas season in downtown Bangkok. After all, it is the season to be jolly!
By now my buddy John will be in the Great White North with his Thai wife. I look forward to hear from him and watching her Facebook with Thavorn.
Today's song is: Mind Police .. Edward Bear .. Great Canadian Rock Group
There seems to me a growing trend that you are guilty of something if you think it, but do not act on it. This seems to take politically correctness to a whole different level. I guess it is best to keep your thoughts to yourself. Makes a blog a dangerous thing. Oh well, I was never that PC in the first place.
Christmas has arrived in Bangkok in a big way. All the malls are decked out. Strange though, it is not a public holiday and New Years is more of a big deal, but Thais love displays. Some pics:
My English buddy Harvey arrives from the Mother country on Dec 25 and we are planning to meet up in Pat Pong for a walk on the dark side. Pat Pong is the original bad boy area and I have not been there for some time. As usual, Harvey will be here for about 2 months and should be leaving about the time we leave for Canada.
It is time for a celebration a couple of times over. Basketball is done for 2018 (games, not practices), Christmas is drawing nigh, and the vast majority of my software rewrite is done. My buddy John asked me to stop by his office if I had time and when I did, he gifted me with a bottle of red wine for Christmas and here I sit, sipping away, unable to wait for Christmas as Mouton cadet is my favorite wine. This particular bottle is of 2014 vintage, a very fine year :-)
It has been quite the grind of 10 hour days to get the software rewrite done. The app is comparable to Expedia's app in complexity and there is only just little old me as a coder whereas I am sure Expedia has about 50 code-smiths working on their app. I don't think many people realize how efficient I am at coding as I have been doing it since 1979 in many languages. A polyglot I am for sure.
Now it is up to my business partner Brent to test the software and send the bugs/fixes to me in a timely manor. That should keep him busy for about 20 hours. It took me about 250 hours for the rewrite with about 150 hours over the past 2 weeks. Throw in basketball practices and some games and I am ready for a walk on the dark side (in search of some honky tonk Thai women) as soon as my English buddy Harvey arrives on December 25th.
BTW, the software rewrite was a Workshop registration and tracking system deployed with a very large school board in Ontario. It has been in production for about 10 years with about 13,000 users and over 150,000 workshop registrations for 8,700 workshops. It is a major app.
We host our servers on the AWS cloud and store our data in a mySQL database.
Besides being the only coder, I am the server guy, the database DB guy, the cloud expert, and the software architect.
So the plan is a few nights on the dark-side around the 25-27, travel to the village on the 28th to join Thavorn and Jaidan, and then back to Bangkok in early January. We then have a month to prepare for our 6 month trip to Canada, leaving on February the 17th. What an adventure that will be! :-)
Today's song is: Nickleback .. If Everyone Cared ..
Well, I have been coding 10 hours a day for about 2 weeks now and I am getting mentally fatigued, but I will be finished soon. Google successfully killed off Flash and I have had to recode a major application in HTML5 and Javascript. The upside of all this is when you recode, you get to do a better job especially when it comes to code maintenance. The program I am rewriting is 10 years old and needed a recode as it grew haphazardly through users' requests for additions and changes.
Unfortunately I don't think my partner realizes he will need about 50 hours of testing to completely make sure everything was ported over successfully :-) The look and feel has also changed due to the new coding paradigm.
Thavorn and Jaidan have been very understanding as I code away for hours.
February is rapidly approaching and the 3 of us are getting excited about going to Canada.
Basketball is going well as we won our last game against NIST, a much larger school, 42-32. We won have won bigger but we have trouble putting the ball in the hoop at times.
I have not been out at night downtown for about a month and it will soon be time for another walk on the wild side. We are headed to the village about December 22 and will be there for about 10 days.
I am pretty busy these days recoding a major piece of software and coaching the varsity boys basketball team. Now and again, I feel guilt pangs for not posting on my blog, but not too often.
A major event in our life is coming up as we prepare to travel to Canada for 6 months early in the new year. We are all getting excited. I have not seen snow in at least 5 years and Jaidan and Thavorn have never experienced the Great White north and want to try everything form skating, skiing, tobogganing, and creating snowmen and snow angels.
Bangkok is gearing up for the Christmas season ..
We lost to ISB but that school's population is over 2,500 compared to our 625
This is their old gym with 2 huge LCD panels for a score clock and videos.
These corrugated shacks are everywhere in Bangkok, often just next to million dollar condos.
Jaidan and his 2 older cousins .. Jaidan is still off the CDN growth charts.
