Pok Pok, the Thai restaurant in Portland, Oregon that I’ve mentioned before, was featured on the Travel Channel program “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.”
The segment is embedded below, and you can find it on YouTube here.
(Via Oregonian and Thai food expert Austin Bush, who points out that the show was filmed during characteristically rainy weather.)
Here are some disparate items that have caught my eye of late:
Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper? Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium?
Thousands of civil servants had to move from Rangoon to Naypyidaw when General Than Shwe announced the transfer of the capital in 2005. Almost four years later, this soulless city still lacks the amenities that one would expect to find in a capital. And this is unlikely to change soon
Why the Top Pros of Tennis Give the Region a Miss
Gawker Media is unveiling an innovative and unruly twist on traditional reader forums this morning. The new feature, part of an otherwise modest redesign across the company’s nine blogs, could transform tag pages, typically little more than archives of old posts, into commenter free-for-alls and transparent tip lines.
Just what is it about adding blades that makes a razor better? Thomas Jones speaks to the scientists and technicians behind the latest five-bladed device and asks what next for the serious business of shaving
Checking in with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, our current emissary to Saturn, some 1.5 billion kilometers (932 million miles) distant from Earth, we find it recently gathering images of the Saturnian system at equinox. During the equinox, the sunlight casts long shadows across Saturn’s rings, highlighting previously known phenomena and revealing a few never-before seen images.
They look like huge abandoned volleyball nets facing west towards the Pacific Ocean on one of the many hillsides in the Peruvian capital, Lima.
They started as an experiment two years ago and now they are giving a lifeline to some of Lima’s poorest residents.
The Peruvian capital gets an average of just over 40mm (1.5 inches) of rainfall a year but what it does not get in showers, it makes up for in fog.
“Kludge – An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole.”
-Jackson Granholm
Datamation Magazine February 1962There are as many sources for the word Kludge as there are jury-rigged mailboxes in the mobile home parks of America. Whether the source of the word is Gaelic, German, or Naval Acronym, we know them when we see them, and on this web site, we celebrate these iconic images of mankind’s eternal struggle to hammer square pegs into round holes (with duct tape.)
You may recall my recent post about attending David Thompson’s Thai cooking demonstration here in Bangkok. I was there for CNNGo, a recently launched travel and lifestyle site that focuses on six Asian cities. ((In addition to the Thai capital, the site covers Hong Kong, Mumbai, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo.))
I put together an audio slide show about the David Thompson event that you can find on the site here. And I’m embedding it below. Thompson talks about authenticity in cooking, what he finds appealing about Thai cuisine, and more.
If you have a look around CNNGo, you’ll also find a couple of my earlier contributions in the Bangkok section.
In one piece, I describe the best burgers in Bangkok. ((Newley.com readers will recall that I’ve written about this before.))
And another item is called “The Siam Sunray: Chasing down Thailand’s ‘signature’ cocktail.” ((Again, this item may be familiar to Newley.com readers.))
Foodies with wanderlust, take note: Matt Gross, the Frugal Traveler for the New York Times, is featured on the Oct. 10 episode of the Splendid Table, a podcast about cooking and eating. ((Related posts: My favorite podcasts (June, 2007) and My favorite podcasts: updated (Nov., 2008).)) You can find the episode here, where you can listen to the entire show or scroll down to hear Matt’s segment.
Matt, whose work I’ve praised before, tells host Lynne Rossetto Kasper about his tactics for finding tasty food while on the road. I especially enjoyed hearing about how he discovered the best dishes in Ho Chi Minh City.
(Thanks to A for the tip.)
This event listing in yesterday’s Bangkok Post is, well, remarkable:
Here’s an open invitation to a new talk show-turned-seminar series called “Head + Heart Walking Together!” The first event, on the topic of “Crisis of Thailand and Beyond from a Quantum Physics Perspective”, will be held from 1 to 5.30pm, on Sunday, October 18 in the LT Room, Faculty of Law, Thammasat University, Tha Phra Chan campus. The speakers will be Sivinee Sawatdiaree, a physicist from the National Institute of Metrology; Attakrit Chatputi, founder of Vcharkarn.com and the Thai translator of Fabric Cosmos; and Pramual Pengchan, philosopher and writer of Walk to Freedom. Thammasat law academic Kittisak Prokati will deliver a closing speech under the theme of “Scientific Worldview in Social Science”. Admission is free. For more details, call 02-613-2125 or visit http://headheart.wordpress.com.
Note: The URL in the listing is Thai-language only.
Those of you who would like to attend the event can brush up on your quantum physics here.
(Bangkok Post item via Physics and Physicists via TheThaiReport.)
New doubts have been raised about a seemingly promising AIDS vaccine trial that was conducted here in Thailand by Thai and U.S. Army researchers. The results were announced — and widely reported — in late Sept.
From the New York Times:
When AIDS researchers released results last month from a six-year trial in Thailand of a new AIDS vaccine, they said it showed some promise for new avenues of research, though they freely admitted their data was weak.
Now two published accounts citing anonymous AIDS researchers who were given confidential briefings about the trial results have reported that the data, released on Sept. 24, may be even weaker than the authors admitted — essentially, instead of being 31 percent better than nothing, the vaccine might be only 26 percent better.
And here’s the Wall Street Journal:
Researchers from the U.S. Army and Thailand announced last month they had found the first vaccine that provided some protection against HIV. But a second analysis of the $105 million study, not disclosed publicly, suggests the results may have been a fluke, according to AIDS scientists who have seen it.
The second analysis, which is considered a vital component of any vaccine study, shows the results weren’t statistically significant, these scientists said. In other words, it indicates that the results could have been due to chance and that the vaccine may not be effective.
(Emphasis mine.)
Netbook nerds only:
My friend H recently asked a few pals for some tips on netbooks, the increasingly popular ((Asus is the netbook pioneer, but Dell and several other companies also produce these gadgets. And Nokia recently announced that they’re getting into the subnotebook game, as well.)) subnotebook computers that are cheap, lightweight, and great for travel. ((For at-home use, netbooks make for excellent dedicated Skype videophone terminals, as well.))
I recommended the Asus Eee PC, which I raved about ((One glitch that I’ve encountered recently with my Eee Pc, however: When I try to connect to a wireless access point, I get an error message that says, “There was an error setting up inter-process communications for KDE…Could not open network socket. Please check that the “dcopserver” program is running!” Does anyone know how to fix this? UPDATE: Oct. 26, 2009. I fixed this by resetting my Eee PC to its original factory settings. It’s simple — just reboot while pressing the F9 key. But make sure you’ve saved your personal data elsewhere first. Instructions are here. )) in April, 2008. And my brother M, also a netbook enthusiast ((M recently completed a Los Angeles to Buenos Aires motorbike trip, blogging and Skyping from his trusty ASUS Eee PC 901
I have an ASUS Eee PC 901
. It’s a pretty sweet deal at $375.
It’s basically the same guts as the 901 but a bigger screen and keyboard, which is probably good. Honestly, I would only go with something smaller (like the 901) if you were travelling with it a lot. The 1005 is bigger but not by much — it’s still a very small laptop.
Sick battery life, too — not 10.5 hours, like they say, but a long time. So long that you don’t need to bring your charger with you. There are some cheaper options that are the same computer but with a smaller battery pack but longer battery life is infinitely better.
And yes, it runs Windows, but I have mine optimized to run pretty fast. Here’s how you can do the same:
- First off, you would want to switch out the RAM stick to a 2GB rather than the 1GB it ships with — around $30 and makes a difference. Like this one
.
- And any windows computer can be a lot snappier if you slim down the installed programs and use alternatives to bad programs. Before you even start to use a new computer (or even if you have used it for a while) download and run Ccleaner to easily remove all the stupid software that comes pre-installed, that you don’t want or need, as well as removing ALL programs that run at startup.
- Google Chrome for a browser — IE is no good, and Chrome is much faster than even my beloved Firefox.
- Run Avast free home edition for antivirus (the price is right, and it doesn’t bog your computer down).
- Run Open Office for word and stuff (but be careful when you install it because it will want to install some other stuff too) — but only if you don’t have or can’t get a copy of real office. And if you can get a copy of office only install the parts you need.
- Get the K-lite codec pack with windows media player classic for videos (instead of windows media player which never has the right codecs and is a resource hog). This will play any video ever.
- If you have music on your computer run mediamonkey — it will even sync your ipod.
- And if you’re going to download torrents use utorrent – very easy and light.
- Those programs plus Skype and Picasa are all I have installed.
Thanks, M, for the tips. Have we missed anything? Let us know in the comments.
Yesterday I was fortunate enough to attend a lunchtime cooking demonstration by acclaimed Thai food expert David Thompson. Thompson wrote the well-known English-language cookbook Thai Food
In the image above, which was snapped by Bangkok’s own foodie photog Austin Bush, I was helping Thompson prepare — and enthusiastically sampling — a chili paste to use in a khanom jeen noodle dish.
You can find more images, the recipe, and a thorough description of the event at this post on Austin’s site. ((By the way, Austin’s attending all of the WGF events and is food-blogging up a storm. Don’t miss this post, about last night’s dinner, which was prepared by Graham Elliot Bowles. Sadly, I didn’t attend that session.))
Today is the 33rd anniversary of the Oct. 6, 1976 massacre, in which military and police fired on student protesters at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, killing nearly 50 people.
More info is at 2Bangkok. Here’s a 2006 piece from the Nation, and here’s an article in an academic journal from 1997. And finally, here’s an AP/NYT story about former Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej’s revisionist remarks in 2008 about the massacre.
TheThaiReport.com, a new Thailand news aggregation site, aims to be a sort of Drudge Report ((So far the site hasn’t been updated since yesterday, so today’s news about the train derailment in Hua Hin is absent.)) for the Kingdom. ((TTR is modeled on Drudge’s famously bare bones design. So far no sign of the dreaded Drudge siren, however…))
(Via Bangkok Pundit.)