That’s the subject of my first Globorati post. Go and check it out.
Categories
Category: Misc.
Categories
Welcome Back, Don Muang!
Bangkok’s old airport, Don Muang, was set to reopen Sunday to help ease congestion at the city’s troubled new international airport as its taxiways and main terminal undergo repairs, officials said.
They said Don Muang will handle some Thai Airways domestic flights and all routes for domestic budget carriers Nok Air and One-Two-Go.
“During the initial period of service resumption, Don Muang will handle about 140 flights daily,” said Kulya Pakakrong, acting president of Airports of Thailand, which runs both airports.
Bangkok’s new US$3.8 billion (€2.9 billion) Suvarnabhumi Airport was intended to be Southeast Asia’s leading air transportation hub. But it has been plagued by a host of widely publicized problems, including cracks in taxiways, a shortage of toilets, dozens of design flaws and a long list of corruption allegations.
(Thanks for the link, Khun B.)
Categories
A Long Weekend in Udon Thani
A and I recently spent a long weekend near the town of Udon Thani, in northeast Thailand. Here’re some pics.
The countryside.
The house and pool.
A with the friendly ladies who cooked our meals. Cuisine from Isan — this region of Thailand — is particularly flavorful and spicy, so every meal was an absolute delight.
Whole fried fish and som tam.
A with lunch — krapow.
Khao pad — fried rice.
Stir-fried morning glory.
Larb.
One afternoon we took a small motorbike — a 100-cc, four-stroke Honda — out for a spin. A filmed this three-minute video, and I polished it up and added a soundtrack.
Click on the image above or go watch it on YouTube.
For additional pics, check out the whole photoset.
Categories
Asia’s Top Five Craziest Buildings
![The Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, N. Korea [not my image]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/152/428776769_1c6bf808ec_m.jpg)
Hi, all. I’m back.
I have a story at Tripmaster Monkey today about Asia’s craziest buildings. Enjoy (and leave a comment at the bottom of the article, if you like).
Categories
“50 States in a Week’s Vacation”
Barry Stiefel visited all 50 U.S. states in a week’s vacation. Wow.
(Via.)
Categories
Overland from Laos to Vienam — By Vespa
![Vespa [Not My Image]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/153/414608710_cd96eeb024_m.jpg)
Great story — and images — from New Mandala (which, by the way, is an excellent blog about Southeast Asia):
The Vientiane Scooter Club recently conducted its annual rally from Laos to Vietnam, a journey which saw many of its members rediscover their origins. A group of urban middle class Lao nationals of Vietnamese and Chinese descent, the club members are driven by a desire to find their own authentic place in Lao society.
The club is one of a few new social groups to have emerged in recent years along with greater economic and cultural liberalization in Laos. On their rallies through the countryside they spread a road safety message and donate equipment to rural schools on a painstakingly restored fleet of forty-year-old Italian Piaggio Vespa motor scooters.
(Emphasis mine.)
(Related: the Vespa rickshaw.)
Categories
Carpe Manana
The BBC News’s Kathryn Westcott:
At noon on the dot, punctuality will make its debut in Peru. Lateness will be a thing of the past, or so its government hopes.
Sirens will blare and church bells will ring to remind 27 million Peruvians to synchronise their clocks with time set by the Peruvian Navy.
Fed up with the nation’s reputation for poor time-keeping, the government is promoting the benefits of being on time in a campaign called “la hora sin demora”, or “time without delay”.
Businesses, government institutions and schools will be urged to stop tolerating “hora peruana” – which usually means about an hour late.
President Alan Garcia is renowned for his good timekeeping, and he believes that the laissez-faire attitude of his countrymen harms national productivity and deters foreign investors.
The concept of “manana,” literally “tomorrow” in Spanish but usually meaning some indefinite time in the future, is common to Latin America.
Its nations often score badly in global surveys on punctuality. Time is seen in a much less rigid way than in for example North America and more industrialised countries.
Enter what you’re reading or your whole library—it’s an easy, library-quality catalog. LibraryThing also connects you with people who read the same things.
Looks really, really cool. I especially like the simple design. It’s like a del.icio.us for books.
(Via.)
Tom Fuller had a great story in this weekend’s IHT. It’s about Bangkok’s successful campaign to curb air pollution:
Black smoke billowing from tailpipes into the humid, tropical air was once a Bangkok trademark. But a decade and a half after Thailand began a battle for better air quality, this erstwhile icon of smog has emerged as a role model for Asia’s pollution-choked capitals, boasting considerably cleaner air than Beijing, Jakarta, New Delhi and Shanghai.
Some buses here still belch toxic vapor. And Thailand’s political future is hard to plot as the country seeks to extricate itself from the tangled legacy of the military-led coup last September. Yet the skies in Bangkok on most days are blue, thanks to the work of a small, dedicated group of bureaucrats who pressed the case for cleaner air despite a history of weak, short-lived governments.
“There’s a huge difference when you walk around the streets,” said Jitendra Shah, a coordinator at the World Bank for environment and social issues in Southeast Asia who has worked in Bangkok since the 1990s. “Breathing is definitely easier.”
Thailand’s battle against air pollution provides a virtual how-to manual of environmental cleanup, say Shah and other air quality experts in Asia. Thai officials cajoled oil companies to produce cleaner fuel, used higher taxes to phase out the once-ubiquitous two- stroke motorcycles and converted all taxis to run on clean-burning liquefied petroleum gas. They overcame lobbying campaigns from the large, mostly Japanese-owned car industry and imposed progressively stricter emissions controls based on European norms (Thailand had no emissions standards before 1992).
[NB: don’t miss the photos that accompany the story; many of them were taken in Lumphini Park, which is a few hundred meters from my house.]
Categories
A Few Technical Notes
A few notes on personal technology, for all three of you out there who care about this stuff:
1. Though I’ve been a vocal proponent of Bloglines (the Web-based RSS feed reader) in the past, I switched to Google Reader a few months back. In short: Google Reader is to Bloglines as Gmail is to Yahoo Mail/Hotmail/AOL.
2. I really like the FireFox add-on called Download Statusbar.
3. CheckBook is an excellent personal finance management application. (Sorry, PC users — it’s Mac-only.) It’s not as robust as applications like Quicken, but that’s okay with me.
4. I’ve mentioned On the Job before, but let me just say it again: It’s an incredibly useful time tracking/invoicing application. (Again, this one’s only available to Mac geeks.)
5. I recently purchased an external hard drive so that I can start doing full-system backups in case my computer’s internal drive fails. (I’ve always done backups of my most critical files, but I want a full-system backup in case the unthinkable happens.)
Unfortunately, I didn’t know that SuperDuper, the (similarly Mac-only) backup program that folks in the know really like, only works with Firewire. My external hard drive only connects via USB. Nevertheless, I found Deja Vu, which seems pretty good so far.
6. Mac For Beginners offers a number of helpful, plain-English tutorials for folks who’re just getting used to OSX.
7. And finally, here’s an amusing rant for those of you who are sick of my Mac fixation. Charlie Brooker in The Guardian: “I hate Macs”:
I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.
PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, “I hate Macs”, and then I think, “Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?” Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.
If there’s one indictment of Macs that resounds with me, it’s that Dr. Who would certainly be a WinTel man…
(Image via.)