Author: shun

Thailand and Its Wonders

Coming back from his short trip to Thailand, Cheehoi shared some of his experiences with us. He concluded that Thai Buddhist architecture is probably the most spectacular of all religious architectures in the world. It’s hard to find reasons to disagree with him.

Coming back from his short trip to Thailand, Cheehoi shared some of his experiences with us. He concluded that Thai Buddhist architecture is probably the most spectacular of all religious architectures in the world. It’s hard to find reasons to disagree with him.

I bought an interesting book when I went back in 2002 — Thai Ways by Denis Segaller (ISBN 974-202-006-X). It provides a lot of insights to this wonderful culture and its graceful people. I wish I knew about this book when I was still living in Thailand. I liked this book so much that I even wrote a review on Amazon.com!

Even though most political analysts say that the King of Thailand has no direct power and serves only as a symbol of culture and religious figure, I’d say just the opposite is true. During the 1992 bloodless coup (gotta give it to the Thais to have a series of “bloodless coups), the country was in such a disarray that it took the words of the King to bring peace to the land. Even the macho coup leaders had to bow in front of His Excellency and submit to his power. I doubt George Bush Jr., supposedly the most powerful leader in the world, can command that kind of respect from its people with gun barrows.

On a similar note, there was a big controversy in 2002 when an American opened a restaurant using a poster of the King on its advertising campaigns in local papers. The poster depicted the King as a hip-hop punk with highlighted hair bands. Americans see it as something funny and a sign of freedom of speech. But in the eyes of the Thais, who are serious about their King, they see it as an insult. It’s as serious as if someone says to your face, “Your mother is a dirty whore. I had a good time with her.”

Boonsom Watanapanee, deputy counsul general of the Royal Thai Consulate in New York, puts it best, “… I know you can make jokes with the president, with Queen Elizabeth, but not with my king.”

This international incident developed to a point where the government of Thailand threatened to break all diplomatic relations with the United States unless the poster was never used again and that the owner apologized to His Excellency the King. Being culturally insensitive, the expected result was, of course, the owner’s refusal. She still thought that was just a harmless joke and planned to run the ad again! It only took an insensitive American to get on the local radio show to mock the King some more. Even I, a non-Thai national, got very offended about the King of Thailand being mocked as such.

Yeah, freedom of speech is sacred. But so is respect and a little sensitivity.

Cats Know What’s Going On

Grace and I are convinced cats are definitely much more self-concious than many anti-cat people project them to be. They KNOW what’s going on.

Grace and I are convinced cats are definitely much more self-concious than many anti-cat people project them to be. They KNOW what’s going on.

Our cats are good examples, particularly Baobao.

Babao understands quite a lot of vocabularies from Grace and I. She knows when Grace asks her to get her cat salad every morning; and she understands to meow and sit before I’d let her outside (and she knows it when I become annoyed at her repeated begging at 2AM sometimes). These could be viewed as training through habbits. But we think it’s more than just that.

Both Baobao and Wawa know their names very well. Wawa always turns her head and looks into your eyes when you call on her. Baobao comes to you when you call her name (after a few times). And the funny thing is, sometimes Baobao pretends she doesn’t hear you when she sleeps. But you know it’s a dead give-away when her tail wags as soon as her name is called. If you keep calling, she’d open her eyes, roll and go back to sleep. What a bum.

We think Baobao has a better grasp of human technologies than Wawa. She understands that when it’s cold, cuddling inside blankets keeps her warm — and two layers are better than one. During the winter, if you can’t find Baobao anywhere else in the house, try under the blanket. Baobao is also a fan of, well, fan. Not equipped with a central air, our new apartment gets pretty warm in the summer. Baobao has discovered that, if she sleeps at Grace’s spot on our bed, she gets the maximum coverage to the wind from the fan. Grace even observed Baobao experimenting with walking around different spots of the bed to make sure that her spot was the coolest. What the hell!

Wawa is not quite as alert as Baobao at times, however. But she did demonstrate her loyalty to Grace in an incident.

As mentioned earlier, our house gets a lot of cat visitors. One of the cats usually comes by once a day to check out our cats. But one time she was unpleasantly surprised by Grace’s sudden appearance in the kitchen when the alley cat obviously wanted to be alone with Wawa. Aggregated, she hissed at Grace. Surprisingly, Wawa immediately hissed back at the alley cat to show her loyalty with Grace. The message got through; the alley cat quietly accepted the challenge and she never hissed at Grace again.

Some hard core Christians once told me that only humans have souls. The rest of the animal kingdom is simply accessories to men. Other animals have no souls or feelings. This is what really ticked me off about certain clans of the Christian religion. How can they be so self-righteous and proclaim to be above all else in nature? How can they reject signs of intelligence exhibited by species other than humans? This kind of stupidity is what will put an end to men’s misery when we destroy ourselves with pollution and irreversable destruction of the Earth.

MythTV — Part III — It Must Be the Hardware

I give up. It’s got to be the hardware. So long, PVR-150.

After my last two posts (here and here), I decided maybe my Linux skills are still too rough. Perhaps I should stick to something I know more about: MS Windows 2000.

Just to make sure that Linux was not the problem, I put Windows 2000 back on to my PC box. After getting all the updates and installing the drivers for PVR-150, still nothing! Now this got me thinking. Maybe it’s the hardware! The hardware must’ve been screwed up.

So off it went in UPS return box (paid for by Buy.com’s online auto-RMA and UPS shipping label generation software). I will get a new card in a week or so. And we’ll see.

OS X 10.4 Tiger Boots from External Hard Drive

It’s so easy to install Apple’s OS X 10.4 Tiger on to an external Firewire drive that you can use as an emergency drive to boot from.

OSX Tiger installation image Finally I got around to upgrade Grace’s Mac to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger today.

But before I started with the upgrade, I wanted to make sure Tiger could run smoothly on the aging PowerMac (AGP) running at a meager 450Mhz, about half the speed of my Titanium PowerBook G4 (DVI).

Test install on the second 60GB hard drive went well. Speed was acceptable — no noticeable slow down or hiccups compared to Panther.

Then just out of couriosity, having read that booting OS X from external Firewire drives was possible, I installed Tiger on my spare 6GB Firewire/USB drive just to KNOW it’s possible. Not surprisingly, it booted like it should (a bit slow though).

If I am not mistaken, I don’t believe this can be done on a Windows OS since hardware information is inserted into OS’s registry, thus making a boot on a different machine impossible. In fact, just booting FROM an external drive can prove to be difficult without thorough knowledge about PC hardware and Microsoft Windows OS.

I also found a few articles (1, 2, 3) on installing an external boot drive using Linux. But even with Linux’s flexibility, it still requires some fiddling with MBR (master boot record). No plug & play there. One article, written by an IBM engineer, suggested booting from a USB 2.0 drive arguing USB 2.0’s popularity on standard PC hardware.

In any case, the upgrade was a success. Everything was mrigrated without major issues, though StuffIt Delux had some issues, that went away after patching a 9.0.2 updater.

I can’t imagine doing anything Windows now that I’ve had it so easy and simple on the Macs.

Taboo — Warning for Closing Multi-tabs in Safari

Simple warning system before user closes Safari windows with multiple tabs in them. I know I can’t use Safari without it.

Taboo is a very useful “hack” for Safari that provides a warning before a user quits or closes a winow in Safar with more than one tab open. This is extremly helpful because Apple built the damn Previous Page button so close to “Close Window” button. I can’t tell you how many times I have accidentally closed a window full of active links I was still using in Safari. Kudos to Adam Cohen for developing this great hack.

Taboo warning screenshot
Image courtesy to Adam Cohen’s Obsessive Compulsive Development, maker of Taboo.

MythTV — Part II — Giving KnoppMyth A Try

My battle continues with MythTV installation and configuration.

There’s no question in my mind as to why MythTV is MythTV. I just can’t get the stupid thing to run right.

Just earlier I wrote about my troubles with MythTV under Fedora Core 3. So I said I’d give KnoppMyth a shot. I couldn’t wait for a couple of days, so I forged on with the saga.

10PM, sitting there thinking this KnoppMyth should work. It’s an auto-install wonder.

Think again. Stupid KnoppMyth got stuck with trouble writing to the disks a few times. I had to use Fedora’s partition/format utility from the boot disc to reformat the disks before KnoppMyth would even run properly. So that took me about an hour to resolve.

To be fair, KnoppMyth installed and auto-dected a good majority of everything right away. And the install went relatively smoothly — everything from the OS, MySQL database, MythTV and almost everything else. ALMOST: PVR 150, audio card and ethernet cards got left out.

So before I invest more time on KnoppMyth, I decided I’ll try it on Kyung’s old Optiplex GX110. Maybe I’ll have better luck on his machine. If all else fails, I will go back to Fedora and deal with problems I already am familiar with.

Those guys at Systm definitely oversimplified KnoppMyth’s ability to solve everyday-man’s problems. But then again, I do have a pretty old system to boot (Dell Precision 410; circa 1999).

Better luck next time.