Hey, it just turned 2020 here in Thailand. So HNY to all and to all a good night! 🎉 🎆

My last year at Oberlin (1966-67) the college sponsored a “drug conference” before the drug culture took hold. It featured Timothy Leary, Richard Metzger, Allen Ginsberg & Richard Alpert. We had no idea where Alpert’s life would lead him.

I’ve unearthed another old Apple device, this time at a computer repair shop here in Northern Thailand. The hardware looks brand new and it booted quickly with the graphics looking bright and sharp after booting.

iMax 20 inch Mid 2007.
Processor 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. Memory 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2. Graphics ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT 126 MB. 1 TB HDD.

OS X El Capitan version 10.11.3.

I asked whether the OS could be upgraded and the answer was No.

Has Apple succeeded in making this machine totally obsolete? Any advice about any ways it could be useful?

This seems to be the time every year when I find myself doing long term planning. New year’s resolutions never seemed to work very well for me. But one year, I tried this idea by Chris Brogan and it worked pretty well for me. The next year, not so much. But it came to mind for me again today, so I decided to try it again for 2020. So here are my three words for 2020.

Organize Publish Radio

My wife and I are near the end of our 80 day stay in Thailand, the longest of my seven trips to her native land. It has been a good time to have some distance from my native US. In my first trips to Thailand, I traveled all over the country with Paula as she drove about her large territory, doing her job for the company that bottles & distributes Coca-Cola products all over Thailand. She did all the driving and I had the good fortune of learning about her amazing country as a lucky guy doing a ride along.

We were mostly going to places she had been to many times in her work, staying at hotels she had used many times, eating at restaurants she had visited frequently. She never once had to refer to a map of the country, even though we had driven in more than half of the 76 provinces in the countries. I knew I was a very fortunate visitor to a distant land which spoke a difficult tonal language which I didn’t know how to use at all. My only saving grace was that I fulfilled my promise to help Paula to become more fluent in English.

But during this trip to Thailand, we ventured off her beaten path in the country several times. We had used Google driving directions several times in the US, with me driving and her using her Android phone to follow the Google directions. It impressed me that their directions were accurate in our small Midwestern town. But it had never even occurred to me to try the service in Thailand. Surely Google would not have gotten around to mapping a small country in Southeast Asia, roughly 8,000 miles from Silicon Valley.

Amazingly, it turns out Google has in fact gotten around to mapping Thailand. I first discovered this during this trip when we drove to Kanchanaburi, one of my favorite destinations in Thailand, but a very long drive from my wife’s family home, so the sun was setting as we approached the outskirts of the town. To make matters worse, our usual hotel was fully booked, so we had a reservation at a hotel we had never visited, and we were now going to need to find it with our headlights and the light from a full moon. Paula had entered the hotel’s location in her Samsung tablet, which we soon discovered had a very unstable Internet connection. After zeroing in on the hotel, over and over the connection would be lost and the tablet would reboot itself. We wandered around in circles in the vicinity of the new hotel. After stumbling along in the dark for well over half an hour, we finally called the hotel and they kindly drove to get us and lead us to the hotel. The next day, we discovered that the hotel was on a street with no name. It was a pretty rough start with Google directions, but Google was right. The hotel was right where Google told us it was located!

When we got back to her home town, Paula went to the mall and paid for an upgrade to her phone service to get a much more reliable Internet connection on her tablet. Then she tethered her Android phone to the Samsung tablet. The tablet sat in the front seat and provided a nice stable Internet connection to the phone, which provided the Google driving directions to us, even when it was quite dark outside. I was super impressed when we drove to Chiang Mai, found a hotel we had never used and then drove across town at night to a restaurant we had never visited before. We took one bad turn on the way to the restaurant, but it was easily corrected.

In the years I have been active on micro.blog, my admiration of the technology provided by Google has been gradually eroding, to the point where I was considering following the lead from others in finding alternate services for those that Google provides. Stumbling around in the dark late at night in a foreign land has brought some humility to my technology expectations. There are some on micro.blog who have the technical expertise to put driving directions on my cell phone, but I am not one of them. Maybe, just maybe, I should not be so quick to criticize the way Google goes about doing things. I’m back to appreciating the good things that Google does for me.

One of my favorite Thai angels, at the government run Elephant Training Center just north of Lampang on the mountain road to Chiang Mai.

We’re watching the Royal Barge Procession on live TV right now for the coronation of Rama X. Amazing boats being rowed down the river in unison, smoothly gliding down the river. 🇹🇭

Over the last 15 years, the Thai baht has been the strongest currency against the US dollar, while inflation has averaged only 2.2% per year. The Economist. Just one reason of many that smart tax accountants really love Thailand.

For folks who still use Google Maps, you can now delete your location data from their servers after a fixed period of time.

The awesome woman who built the very first ever Tesla pickup truck went to the release event to see Elon Musk’s version of a Tesla pickup. I watched her original video about making her pickup and this is a super follow-up video. Hers is way better.

I highly recommend folks should read this article. It’s about one of the US presidential candidates and it’s also about the writer, who wrote a great piece. It’s also about a terrible condition that makes a lot of people suffer, especially young kids. Your feedback?

Perfect weather this morning in Kanchanaburi. The birds agree. A huge variety of bird calls coming from all directions, sounds you don’t hear in the US, ‘cause we don’t have these birds back home. So much to see, but so much to hear too!!

Today we got up early and drove ten hours to Kanchanaburi, then another hour+ wandering around the city looking for our hotel. We ended up in a traffic jam of people arriving in town for a big festival centered around the famous bridge over the River Kwai, my third time here.

Today I got the best haircut of my long life at the new Destiny Barber shop in Lampang,Thailand. The barber was super expert & did a fantastic job! Not a single hair got down my neck to make me itch. So good that I paid double his fee, a huge bargain even at that price!

A pastime is an activity that you do to pass the time. When I was a kid, baseball was clearly the national pastime in the US. Now I’d say it has become looking at a smart phone, at least for younger people. In Thailand, without question, the national pastime is eating. 🇹🇭

Learning About Thailand

A Guiding Principle for Myself

If I begin to feel superior to these so-called “simple, happy people” … Stop! Look! Realize these people speak fluent Thai, even read that special script, and I don’t!!

Don’t ever forget or minimize that.

🇹🇭

In August, Doc Searls posted a message that archives of the Linux Journal were gonna be preserved. Now Dave Winer has posted a link that says the journal’s website is down for good. Internet Archive has preserved it?

Being in Thailand

Guiding Principle

If you begin to feel superior to these simple, happy people, stop and look around you. Realize all these people speak fluent Thai, even read that strange script, and you don’t!

Don’t ever forget that.

🇹🇭

Warriors lead pretty much all the way & beat Portland by nine points. They had a harder time with them last year in the playoffs! This year none of the Warrior players from the playoffs last year played in the game. None, nada! Double double for Eric Paschall. Go Steve Kerr!

Google has figured out where we are. I asked it. “What time is it in California?” and it told me, 1:12 AM, Tuesday November 5, 2562 BE (PST) time in California USA.

It supplied the BE date completely on its own.

What a fun afternoon & early evening we had in Lampang, Thailand. We started at the modern Central Plaza, where Paula & her sister did a bunch of banking, while my brother and I both had two scoops of delicious Swenson’s ice cream. Then we shopped for some groceries at Tops Market.

We headed back to the car for a short drive to downtown Lampang for the weekly Saturday night street market. We’ve been there many times, but I was always focused on what the vendors were selling. This time, before we got there Paula had pointed out that many of the buildings down the street where the market is held are a gorgeous Portuguese style of wooden buildings. So when we got there I actually looked at the buildings for a change & then started taking a LOT of pictures. Of course, she was right. See some of the pictures at the link I provided above.

We walked all the way to the Rachada Bridge, then part way out on the bridge to watch the swallows flying about during the sunset. During the walk back we stopped to look at some amazing carved water buffalo horns that my brother had spotted before we reached the bridge. This was amazing detailed art work that had been produced by an 80 year old man, near the end of his life. When my brother first told us about it, I joked that maybe it cost 100 baht. My brother said surely not, as it had certainly been produced over dozens of hours of detailed etching. So then I guessed it might be 2,000 baht. Once I saw it, I asked the nice lady what the selling price was. It was 1,500 baht (about 50 USD). That was for two large decorated horns, plus two small horns that had been carved into the shape of realistic looking birds. I would have bought them immediately, except my wife didn’t love them. And on reflection, I wasn’t sure it would be to legal to take them out of Thailand. The seller was very gracious and let me take a picture of them and we proceeded along the way, excited about having witnessed such beautiful artwork.

Backing up a bit, I will mention that it was very hard finding parking, because so many people had come for the market. We were lucky to finally grab a parking spot just past the corner where perhaps the favorite restaurant of the locals is located. So as we nearly got back to our car, we instead went across the street and entered Aroy One Baht Restaurant for dinner. I had eaten there myself at least twice and I really wanted my brother to experience this amazing place!

The restaurant is in a lovely wood building, which is nearly always full of people eating. We were immediately pointed to the dining area upstairs and after we climbed the flight of stairs, we were quickly directed to an empty table in the corner by an open window. The table actually consisted of three sewing machine tables lined up together, each one still having its iron treadle attached at the bottom. We looked over the large menu (over ten pages) with color pictures of each dish. My brother and I looked over the English edition of the menu and my wife and her sister looked over the Thai version. Most of the entrees were 40 or 50 baht each, and some around 25 baht, that is, all under $1 to a bit over $1. This is a good time to mention that Aroy in the name of the place means “yummy” and the One Baht in the name refers to the price for an order of rice. Of course this pricing encourages people to order a variety of dishes, as they are so affordable.

We ordered 8-10 entrees for the four of us and the bill for the dinner came to $12, no tip required, or even expected. It would have been $10, but I couldn’t resist ordering a Chang Beer, the only beer I’ve ever really liked. It turned out to be one of their large bottles, so I didn’t even try to drink it all. The $12 tab reminded me of the first time I took the family to this place. I had no idea about the reputation for affordable pricing, so I was quite shocked when the bill for that meal arrived. It almost made me feel guilty for taking advantage of these people. Almost.

Maybe you’re wondering whether I bought anything at the street market. I did indeed. An older man was selling one variety of plant, which folks were calling a butterfly plant. It’s leaves look exactly like a butterfly. He had a simple written sign that said they were 30 baht each. Each one was planted in a tiny black plastic pot of dirt, with a single thin stalk going up a foot or two to a bunch of these amazing butterfly leaves. I spotted an unusually nice one and bought it immediately. Our plant has nine of the butterfly leaves on it. The next morning I discovered its true identity on the Internet, Christia obcordata, Butterfly plant or Swallowtail, native to Southeast Asia and Brazil, an ornamental, herbaceous and perennial plant.

What an exciting night it was!

On Friday Dave Winer posted some well considered thoughts about Facebook and civility. I think Dave has gotten more flexible in his thinking and I like that.

All about Google buying Fitbit from The Verge.

Woke up this morn & then my brother & I watched the Niners win their 8th game of the season on Amazon Prime. It’s the first time in six trips that I’ve been able to watch an NFL game live from Thailand. Really cool that it was the Niners. Okay wi-fi here, so it was all good vid.

Halloween is not a holiday here in Thailand, having never been ruled by a western culture. Had they known that ghosts are involved, it might have been a popular idea among the people. So I’m not expecting to see a pumpkin & Paula says no kids will be coming to our door. 🎃