TimsBlog

I wasn’t going to cut it so short, but I said fuck it. I was going to leave the top about an inch tall or so. I got lazy and didn’t feel like taking that much time with it.

BTW I was trying to make a scary face in that pic. I look rather scary as is with a shaved head.

EDIT
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I forgot about the rake scar.

I uploaded a few pictures of the house. I didn’t take much time taking them. I also didn’t get shots of most of the bedrooms. Mainly because mines a mess since I’m still not settled in yet. The others are for storage. Well that and its a big maze of a house.

Sort of has two kitchens. Both are next to each other and have counters, cabinets, and sinks. One has the ice box and the other has the stove. They are separated by a glass partition and glass door. My bedrooms on the 3rd floor. The stairs are a bit of a pain in my ass.

I was setting up my PC speakers this morning and fucked them all up. I lugged them along and they took up so much space in my luggage and cost me an extra $50 for being over weight. I plugged them in and I had forgot they were the only piece of gear that was not able to handle the electrical current here. So I’m pretty sure they are shot. $100 down the drain. More like $150 including the overage I paid to the airline. I’ll see what a good set will cost me here. Probably close to the same price as I paid in the states.

I got to Bangkok A Ok. I’ll write mroe when I’m settled

They have a monorail train inside the terminal. Not bellow it or outside, but inside the terminal. Kind of cool looking. Terminal s not the longest I’ve ever seen, but I guess it does beat walking.

I will be without internet in about an hour. I’ll be leaving for bangkok tomorrow morning. I might be online in the day tomorrow since I have a 6 hour layover in Detroit before leaving for Tokyo. I looked it up its $8 for an all day wifi pass in Detroit.

Pownce is such a geeky site. Its made for the cell phone bloggers and geeks. its still beta but at some point it will be like sms to post and all that. There is a nice friends structure involed that I like. You can sub clasify friends and send out messages and share stuff with all or some of them. Meaning the public only sees some of the posts. I have a few invites if someone wants them. Just ask me. You will have to be on my friends list (get an invite) to see my song posts. I’ll be using it to post links and songs mainly.

My Pownce page http://pownce.com/tim7423/

I love stumbling across songs like this.Its the band The Teenagers single”Homecoming” Song reminds me a bit of Sonic Youth. Might be the duet factor. Anyways great little song. Love the lyrics and video.

The bands page http://theteenagers.blogspot.com/

Their myspacepage (shudder)

The bands Flickr page http://www.flickr.com/photos/7293684@N05

Heres the Video

BTW I hate good looking French people.

The lyrics

Homecoming
by The Teenagers

[Male]
Last week, I flew to San Diego to see my auntie
On day one, I met her hot step-daughter
She’s a cheerleader, she’s a virgin, and she’s really tan
As she stepped out of her massive car
I could only notice she was more than fuckable
I think she was coming back from the game or something
Because she was holding those silly pom-poms

On day two, I fucked her, and it was wild
She’s such a slut

[Male]
I fucked my American cunt
[Female]
I love my English romance

[Male]
It was dirty, a dream came true
Just like I like it, she’s got nice tits
[Female]
It was perfect, a dream came true
Just like a song I’ve been wanting to

[Female]
OK, listen girls:
I met the hottest guy ever
Basically, as I was stepping out of my SUV
I came face to face with my step-cousin or whatever, who cares?
Anyway, he was wearing skinny jeans, had funky hair
And the cutest British accent ever
Straight away, I could tell he was rocker
From his sexy attitutde and the way he looked at me
Mmmmmm, he is totally awesome

Oh my god
I think I’m in love

[Male]
I fucked my American cunt
[Female]
I love my English romance

[Male]
It was dirty, a dream came true
Just like I like it, she’s got nice tits
[Female]
It was perfect, a dream came true
Just like a song I’ve been wanting to

[Male]
I fucked my American cunt
[Female]
I love my English romance

[Male]
It was so nice to meet you

[Female]
The pleasure was all mine
I do like you
Come to Cancun for spring break

[Male]
I’ll think about it
It could be great

[Female]
And don’t forget to send me a friend request

[Male]
As if…

I was reading this article this morning.

Tourists beaten by 30-man gang

Police arrested a Thai soldier for participating in an attack by 30 men on three British tourists as they ate at a food stall north of the Thai capital, police said Thursday (July 19th).

Thomas Donald Patrick suffered a cracked skull after he and two friends were attacked in Nakorn Sawan province, about 210 kilometers (130 miles) north of Bangkok, said police Col. Pranom Manmuang.

A group of about 30 Thai men, including a soldier, began kicking and punching the three Britons as they dined at a roadside food stall Sunday (July 15th) morning, Pranom said.

An arrested attacker confessed that he was in the group that attacked the British tourists including Patrick – a staff coach of the London-based Tottenam Hotspur youth team.

He said his group did not intend to hurt Patrick but the fighting erupted after a conflict between his group and Patrick’s Thai friends.

Responding to questions about the attack, Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont said the incident must be thoroughly investigated by police and the army.

“I believe it will not affect the image of the Thai army as it was more of an isolated incident that involved individuals. The Thai army does not encourage their men to act like hooligans,” Surayud said.

Patrick and two other men _ William Paul Stone and Francis Benjamin Peter _ were taken to a hospital. But the same group of attackers stormed the hospital room and continued to beat them until police arrived, Pranom said.

Pranom said Patrick’s condition was stable, adding the two other Britons were slightly injured.

On Thursday police arrested and charged Sgt Chinaphong Prakobketkorn and another Thai man, Nattapan Jirapong, with assault. The suspects face a maximum seven years in jail if found guilty.

I have told people before that you jsut don’t start or finish fights in Thailand. You avoid them at all costs. Its jsut as safe in Bangkok as in the states in most cases. The main difference is if your in a fight with a Thai person expect other Thai’s to join in and they will not stop till your finished. This is explained perfectly with the line from the article saying that they followed the tourist to the hospital and beat him some more till the cops came.

I’m sure this was not random. The tourists had to have said something to piss of these guys. There are ways to avoid these situations. Shut your loud mouth and walk away everytime. Don’t raise your voice. Remember if you end up fighting it will not stop and every Thai on the street will join in to make sure you get beat and it will not stop.

I can’t say why this happens in Thai culture. I can only speculate that its form big loud obnoxious foreigners in their country all the time. If someone twice your size was treating you you’d get a bunch of people to stomp the guy too. Its all smiles all the time till you push them to far.

More proof that learning the basics in a foreign language are key. Thank You, Please, and I’m sorry go a long way.

I switched to using trackball over mice early on. Reason being is stress. I was noticing my wrist was hurting a lot and I was getting a callus on my wrist as well. The repetitive movement of just three fingers is much easier on the joints and bones than the whole wrist. There is also the rare joy of seeming someone try and use my trackball. You love or hate them. The market shows this as more of a hate than a love. I can only find a handful of them out there. Most of them being the type with the ball to the left for use with the thumb. I can’t use it with my thumb so my options are limited to an even smaller selection of trackballs

I settled on this Logitech model a few years ago

Only problem is the left click button wears out in about 6 months for me. Its a long elliptical button with the switch dead center behind the button. Since I tend to click it toward the front and not the middle I wear out the switch inside.
It becomes worn at an angle to the front making the contact less responsive if it even responds at all.

Now I have this Kensington model coming today

I think this might be one of the most popular models. It has a really old school trackball look and feel. The inner wheel is the scroll. The 4 buttons are configurable and it also has software to program the buttons to work with hotkeys and button combinations. There is a 5 year warranty on this model. I’m hoping if and when if wears out they will replace it. I have been spending $50 on the logitech model. This ones $100. I’m hoping in the long run to save a some money.

On a side note my elbows been hurting me the last 3 months. I’m sure its related to it dangling while using a trackball or typing.Or perhaps its just my shit poor posture when at the computer.

On flickr by:andyi

Well I had the Realistic Version, but it was exactly the same thing. Yes I had too much Radio Shack branded stuff. Man this brings back images of a many nights I spent playing with this thing. I got it when I was young in the early eighties. I had no idea the were so sought after or famous. I just remember it had a lot of functionality for the size and price. it was hard to get a keyboard that was affordable at that time. Especially if your 7. Man the small fortune my parents must have paid on batteries for this thing. At some point I will buy one of these off ebay.

I also remember being able to create your own sounds by entering different number combinations. You could get some really creepy and/or gut wrenching sounds out of it. With no great success I remember having it mic’d to record on my GPX combo stereo. The same GPX I used to play DJ with. No not the techno DJ but the on air Johnny Fever DJ. I had a turntable hooked into the auxiliary input and two mic’s in the mic inputs for left and right along with headphones. I’d have to switch the input selector to swap turntables, no fader. So I’d have two turntables and a tape deck for recording it all. I could que up records and talk over them while recording. Thankfully those tapes disintegrated a long time ago. Talk about a kid yearning for the digital age. Might not have been as fun as going into Radio Shack for cables and adaptors to make it all work.

Ok I said I’d show off my black desktop and here it is. I used ishowu to capture the screen to video and visualhub to transcode it a smaller size. Then I upladed the video to viddler.

Before I get into the black desktop I’d like to say viddler is my video favorite video site. Its not chucked full of the clips you find on youtube, but its more practical for content you own yourself as far as sharing and hosting video online. Its got a get interface and the quality is great.

I started using solid black wallpaper when I first got my 24″ Dell LCD. Out of the box the thing blinded me so bad I saw spots for a day. Lets just say its bright. Now thats a good thing, but takes some adjustments. I was reading Merlin Manns site 43 Folders when he talked aobut using an all black desktop with the help of a few programs. I was already using quicksilver a little app that does so much and is rather hard to explain. I mainly use it for switching applications and controlling certain apps functions. I hit CMD+space and then type short abbreviations to launch apps. I also use it to control itunes with shortcuts like for play/pause and skip. Its nice not to have to bring itunes to the front to just pause a song. I set my dock to auto hide and installed menufela to hide the menu bar at the top.

This leaves me with a solid black desktop. No distractions and no bright ass pixels straining my eyes. I also made it a habit to leave all files off my desktop. It helps with performance and also is nice and tidy. I pace files on my desktop for temporary use only hen trash them or move them to a better more organized place. I have been using apples expose a lot also to navigate thru open windows and bring hem to the front as well.

I “was” so happy to be running parallels on my mac. It allows me to use windows (inside a window or fullscreen) without having to reboot into windows via apples boot camp. As nice as it is to be able to hold the alt/options key down at boot and be able to choose which OS I will use its still a pain when I only need on program on windows for work. So rebooting takes time basically. Even if its a few minutes its enough to side track you from what your doing. Now with parallels I was able to just boot windows inside of OSX do my work.

Then parallels had an update to the software and broke the connection with my boot camp. This was just one of the many problems people suffered when upgrading. I think it even cost money. I’m not sure since I didn’t pay for it. It left me with having to reboot to get into windows. I even tried to downgrade to a previous version and it still didn’t work.

So in comes VMware. Its basically the same program only its still in beta till Aug. I have not run into stability issues yet. Feels like the same program to me. Slight differences between the two, but nothing that I notice. I knew there was two options for running windows inside of OSX, I just forgot about VMware. So glad I remembered. Makes work a lot easier. Most importantly the less time I spend in windows the less time I have to think about how many years I spent using the XP.

I used to think I enjoyed all the problem solving I had to do in windows. I also used to think I enjoyed the variety of software available to me on the windows side. I mean there are like 20 choices for any given type of software. I was jsut fooling myself. Since I’ve been looking for and installing mac software I’ve come to one conclusion. Mac software works out of the box and does everything you want it do the simplest way possible 90% of the time. It really only took me a week to get used to OSX.

This is not a sceencap of my desktop. I went all black. I mean all black desktop no menu bar, dock and I use quicksilver to launch all my apps. I’ll explain that in another post.

Ok look at your computer tower. Is it on the left or right hand side? I’d say its most likely on the right. I happened to notice that I always set mine on the left. Even now with my notebook I have it on the left and my monitor on the right. I’d say it has something to do with being right handed or right eye dominant or something, but I’m right handed and it doesn’t fit that explanation.

I only do a few things left handed. I play hockey left handed. Not by instinct, but they first time I played I was stuck using a left handed stick. Now I can play both handed, but left handed I have more control. I smoke with my right hand which is somewhat against the right handed person way. A lot of right handers use their left to smoke to free up their dominant hand for other things. I eat left handed, but thats by choice. I hold the knife in my left hand and fork in the right and never switch. When I was young I noticed that people cut with the right and then switch to the fork in the right. I felt that was a wasted step and trained myself to just cut with the left and fork the right.

So I am trying to think why I started putting my PC towers on the left hand side. When they used to sit horizontal they always went under the monitor and in front of the keyboard. I’m guessing the first time I had a vertically sitting box I was suck with having to place it on the left because of the desk configuration or something.

Flickr Search for “Workstation”

Found this one today. Heres you friendly Indian tech support lady named (cough) Linda (wink wink you know if you’ve called tech support)

(in thick Indian accent) Have you tryed turning your PC Off and then On again?

Its kind of silly to be buying Tshirts before I get to a palce that sells them for $3 a each, but I wanted these.

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