Category: Misc.

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Breaking Travel News from The Onion

The Onion: "Southwest Airlines Now Taking Passengers To Destinations By Shuttle Bus"

The Onion: “Southwest Airlines Now Taking Passengers To Destinations By Shuttle Bus”

DALLAS—In what the company is calling a “bold new leap” in comfort, convenience and overall quality of travel, Southwest Airlines announced Monday that it would be replacing its entire fleet of passenger jets and planes with daily shuttle buses.

The shuttle buses, which will depart from airport runways to over 200 destinations nationwide, represent a major breakthrough in commercial aviation.

“The future is now,” announced Southwest CEO Gary Kelly, gesturing to a 30-foot bus painted in the company’s signature red, yellow, and blue. “With these amazing new buses, traveling from New York to Los Angeles takes as little as three days. That’s less than half the time it took passengers to get there on our old planes.”

Equipped with a 70-gallon tank and a four-stroke engine capable of speeds up to 60 miles per hour, the innovative buses will reportedly reduce travel time by 75 percent on average. In addition, cushioned plastic seats and easy-to-hold metal poles will present passengers with a level of comfort never before experienced on Southwest flights.

(Via World Hum.)

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Bangkok By the Numbers: Family Visit 2008, Early Numerical Status Report

My mom and step-dad arrived in Bangkok yesterday for a visit from the US. Here’s how their visit has shaped up, numbers-wise, so far:

Thai Foot Massages

  • Hour-long Thai foot massages enjoyed in the last 24 hours: 2
  • Combined hours of full-body massages planned for them for tomorrow: 4

    Thai Cuisine Consumed

  • Approximate number of individual Thai dishes we have consumed since they arrived: 13

    Kimchi Consumption Requests Made By Me

  • Times I asked my mom to try the particularly pungent kimchi during dinner at a Korean restaurant tonight: 7
  • Number of times she obliged: 0
  • Plates on our table at one point during said dinner: 19

    Bowls of Lot Chong Devoured

  • Bowls of lot chong (green “worms” made of sticky rice flour in coconut milk) scarfed down at lunch today: 1

    Shopping Achievements

  • Mobile phones purchased at MBK: 1
  • SIM cards purchased from same vendor: 1
  • Value, in Baht, of pre-paid phone card minutes purchased: 200
  • Pairs of eye glasses purchased today: 4
  • Items of clothing currently being constructed for my mom and step-dad by my favorite tailor: 13

    Songkran Soakings

  • Number of times I have been soaked to the skin by Songkran revelers since my mom and step-dad arrived: 1
  • Number of times I was soaked to the skin by Songkran revelers before they arrived: 5
  • Number of times my mom and step dad have been soaked to the skin by Songkran revelers since they arrived: 0
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    Misc.

    Asus eee pc: 10 observations

    If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger. — Frank Lloyd Wright

    A gave me a supremely cool gadget for Christmas: The Asus Eee PC. I’ve been using this most compelling toy subnotebook productivity tool for over three months now.

    Here are 10 things you need to know about the Asus Eee PC:

    1. The Eee PC is small. Very small. The display is just seven inches wide.

    2. The machine is extremely lightweight. Mine weighs just two pounds. If I lived in a cool enough climate to wear a jacket, I could put the Eee in my jacket pocket. And take it places. Like to parties. And be a total dork.

    3. Combine these two points with the fact that it has a solid-state, 4 gigabyte flash drive — meaning that it has no moving internal parts — and you’ve got yourself the perfect device for staying connected on the road. I’ve used my Eee throughout Thailand and on the road in Vietnam.

    4. The Eee has some great built-in features:

    — The 4 gig drive is big enough for documents, photos, and some music. With a 1 or 2 GB thumb drive, you’ll have all the space you need.
    — It has a built-in Webcam and comes pre-loaded with Skype, so it makes a great portable videophone.
    — The battery lasts three hours or so, and the charger (pictured below) is slightly larger than a mobile phone charger.
    — It lacks, however, an internal optical drive, but I haven’t missed that.

    1. The Eee PC won’t break the bank: the 4 gig version retails for about $400 in the US, though it costs a bit less here.

  • My Eee is black, but the device also comes in…pink.

  • The machine, which Internerds the world over have been lusting over for quite some time, has got an interesting history and some serious geek cred. The Eee was developed by Asustek, a Taiwanese manufacturer that decided to get into the small, inexpensive laptop game after witnessing the attention lavished upon the One Laptop Per Child project.

  • The Eee is powered by Linux. To keep costs low, Asus developed the Eee to run on the open-source Linux operating system, instead of Windows. (If you think PCs are the true computers of the working man, then the Eee PC must be considered equally utilitarian.)

  • One drawback: the touchpad is a bit finicky, so it really pays to buy a mouse.

  • Oddly, the wireless connection doesn’t connect to a preferred network by default, so you should change it to connect to your home wifi signal on boot. Here’s how to make that tweak.

    • Other sites that contain more Eee-related info include EeeUser.com and EeeSite.net.

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    Misc.

    This American Life: The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar

    Don’t miss This American Life episode 352: The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar, by reporter Tal McThenia. The show aired on March 14. From the show notes:

    In 1912 a four year-old boy named Bobby Dunbar went missing in a swamp in Louisiana. Eight months later, he was found in the hands of a wandering handyman in Mississippi. (The picture [above] was taken just days later.) In 2004, his granddaughter discovered a secret beneath the legend of her grandfather’s kidnapping, a secret whose revelation would divide her own family, bring redemption to another, and become the answer to a third family’s century-old prayer. We devote our entire episode to the story.

    Related: my favorite podcasts.

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    My New Story about Riding a Soviet-Era Motorbike in Vietnam

    I have an article in the April issue of Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia magazine about a recent six-day trip I took through the northeast of Vietnam on a Soviet-era motorbike. The issue isn’t online, but if you’re in the region you can find the magazine on newsstands. If you’re in Bangkok, look for it in bookstores and at BTS stations. The article is called “Riding High” and it starts on page 91. Here’s more info about T+L Southeast Asia.

    The image above is a pic of me and a friend I met during the trip.

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    iPhoto Tweaks: Getting the Most Out of Apple’s Image Editing Application

    I generally like using iPhoto, Apple’s default image management and editing software. But with nearly 8,000 images in my library and limited RAM and hard drive space, opening the application and its accompanying 20 gigabytes of data was taking an eternity, and even basic tasks were becoming unwieldy.

    I’ve now figured out a better way to manage my images using iPhoto. The solution isn’t revolutionary, but it’s working well, and I figured I’d share my new setup in case you’re facing a similar issue.

    First, I bought an external hard drive and moved all of my photos off of my PowerBook. This was a no-brainer, and I should’ve done it a long time ago. Here’s Apple’s official description of the process. It’s pretty simple. (Note that I’ve got iPhoto version 5; I understand the newer version of the app makes this task even easier.)

    Then I used a helpful add-on called iPhoto Library Manager to create a new library that I now store locally on my machine, while the album that holds my thousands of other images lives on my external hard drive. This Macworld article describes, with screen shots, how iPhoto Library Manager works. One thing I like about this application is that it’s very lightweight, and you can launch it and fiddle with your libraries without actually opening the resource-intensive iPhoto itself.

    And finally, I happened upon an excellent little app called Image Capture, which I didn’t even know I had it on my machine. It’s a straightforward app that allows you to review, delete, rotate, and save images from your camera or memory card without opening iPhoto at all. This way, you don’t automatically import huge batches of images and then sift through them in iPhoto. Instead, you can simply delete images directly from the memory card and choose the images you want to keep. Then you decide where to save the good pics and then import them into iPhoto.

    This detailed overview of Image Capture provides instructions for making the application open by default when you insert a memory card, rather than having iPhoto spring to life automatically.

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    John Doe, Worldwide

    Here’s a look at how people around the world refer to John Does, or unknown individuals.

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    Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and…Thailand?

    ecuador_map

    It’s been a tense week in the Andes. On Saturday, Colombian forces launched a surprise raid on a camp inside the Ecuador border and killed a senior FARC member. The result has been an ongoing diplomatic kerfuffle between Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.

    AFP has a run-down of the events: “Regional tensions rise after Colombia raid into Ecuador.”

    And the NY Times‘s Simon Romero narrates a video report about the incident.

    Meanwhile, Bolivia expert Miguel Centellas discusses a Bolivian dimension to the story.

    Reuters has some analysis on the political implications for the region: “Andean crisis shakes hopes for regional unity.”

    And as for Thailand…

    Today we learned that a Russian man alleged to be a notorious arms dealer was arrested here in Thailand yesterday. He is accused of selling arms to al Qaeda and the Taliban, and he was lured to Bangkok by American DEA agents…posing as FARC members looking to buy weapons.

    CNN: “‘Most-wanted’ arms dealer arrested in Thailand.”

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    How People Work

    The Early Bird... [Not My Cartoon]

    Here’s a long list of how people go about doing their jobs. Profiled here are artists, writers, musicians, robotics researchers, actors, cyclists, and more.

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    On Classic Fishing Lures, Art, and Urban Legends

    2016-01-30_lure

    Fishing tackle as objets d’art? Damn straight.

    Field and Stream‘s got an excellent photo gallery of the 50 Greatest Fishing Lures of All Time, many of which are simply beautiful. The Dardevle Spinnie, for example, is awfully pretty. I also love the sleek Rapala, the flamboyant Rooster Tail, the irreverent Hula Popper, and the bulbous Berkley Bat Wing Frog. (Okay, so that last one might not be so easy on the eyes, but you’ve gotta love fishing with something that resembles a miniature frog.)

    My all-time favorite lure, though, is the Mepps Aglia (above), which I would argue is just as attractive as many contemporary women’s brooches I’ve seen. It is nothing less than a work of art.

    Related fishing post: remember when my buddy Chad caught a deer in the Chesapeake Bay last summer? Well, his photos from the event were subsequently forwarded via email — each sender embellishing the tale a bit — to such an extent that some labeled it an urban legend. But it’s not. You can even look it up on Snopes.com.