Geeking in Laos

This week has been a little geekier than normal. It's the last week of the term break so I've been madly trying to get all the computers working as well as they can.

Since most of them haven't been well maintained for ages and have been in the lab for at least 4 years or more, this has meant formatting all of the old computers. I've got 14 of 19 done now so I should be able to wrap it up tomorrow. Along side formatting everything I've also been "upgrading" everything to Windows ME. The machines are really too old to run XP so it's the only feasible option.

The big pain has been that there's so many little extras that I have to do to get the computers really setup nicely. First, I make sure to do a custom install of ME to make sure that some of the garbage that's put on by default isn't there. Then of course, I have to install some drivers for devices that ME doesn't have drivers for (Video, Sound, Modem and LAN) then restart. Then I have to configure the network (IP addresses, add file and printer sharing) and another restart. Then I set up the shared drive and install AVG, another restart. Then install the updates for AVG that I've downloaded and do a full scan (there's been a lot of viruses on the PCs in the past so I like to make sure they're clean and it's quickest to do it at this point before more stuff gets loaded on).

Then it's time to install Office which is another custom install. Then I have to go into Word to set the default units to centimeters and the default paper size to A4 (why it can't do this automatically when I told Windows I'm in a metric country is beyond me) plus I need to switch macro security to medium because the install for Lao language support needs me to open a file with macros. Then I install Lao language support. That's the "barebones" setup. I'm to the point where I can get 3 machines going at once in some process of this setup. After this I'll still need to go back and install some extra software but it's not as much of a priority.

Earthquake

For those worrying about me who haven't heard from me recently, I was not affected by the earthquake. Laos is landlocked and far enough from the epicentre so I didn't feel anything here.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have visited Phuket just over 3 weeks ago and not now. I can't also help but wonder about all the incredibly nice and friendly people I met living there. Most of them I never knew their names so I will likely never know who survived and who didn't.

Random Thought

Okay I have no real news to post so I thought I'd post a random thought.

The other day it occured to me why is sliced bread considered the pinnacle of human achievement? All other (recent) achievements are compared to it. Think about it, how often do people say that something is the greatest thing since sliced bread?

Granted, sliced bread can be kind of good but seriously, was it really such an achievement? I took a fair number of history classes in University and I can't say I remember sliced bread as being mentioned as bringing forth the renaisance, enlightenment, industrial revolution, or the modern era let alone any other major epoch in human civilization.

Was Guttenburg inspired to create movable type (note, not the printing press which had already been invented by the Chinese)? We know Newton thought of the theory of gravity because an apple fell on his head but maybe he had enough time to sit under and apple tree because he wasn't wasting all his time slicing bread.

As far as I can tell sliced bread's contribution to society has mainly been saving us a minute or two and helped reduce the risk of kitchen injuries. A decent minor contribution but hardly the foundations of a modern civilization. Perhaps though this is really a reflection of the modern world. Maybe most modern achievements are really pretty minor and can, at best, only be compared to sliced bread.

That's it for now, hopefully more interesting news will follow shortly.

My Brief Career As A Burglar

Somehow, yesterday I managed to be locked out of my house not once but twice. The first time was pretty straight-forward, we only had 1 key for the house and Hamid had it but I got home before he did so I was locked out. Fortunately, the landlady was home and after briefly examining the possibility of breaking in, I went to her house and got a key for myself. We were given 2 keys for the house when we moved in but one of them was a bad copy so that's why we had a problem.

The second time was a lot stranger. Now possessing my keys everything should have been okay. What happened though was some people came over so we had the front door open. I went out with one of the people to get something from their car and then came back through the front door so my shoes were by the front door. After the people left, I decided to go out for supper. Since my shoes were by the front door I went out that way. The front door has a lock where you push in the button on the handle inside before you close the door to lock it. I did this and went outside. I then realised that I had forgotten my jacket and it was getting cold out so I wanted to get it. I also realised that I had forgotten to check if the kitchen door was locked. So, I went back to the kitchen door. That door was locked so I unlocked it. However, it turns out that someone had also bolted the door from the inside, so I couldn't open the door even though it was unlocked. To make matters worse, we didn't have a key for the front door so I was stuck outside. This time the landlady wasn't home so I spent about an hour trying to evaluate my options for breaking in. After working on both doors for awhile I ruled out those options. I made then made a brief attempt to break in through a window. The windows all swing out and Hamid hadn't locked his so that was a good start. However, there is then a set of bars to get past before the screen. Sometimes these are very badly installed but our house has pretty secure bars. After giving up on that attempt I was starting to evaluate the feasibility of getting onto the roof and attempting to get in through the kitchen's skylight when the landlady finally came by and was able to go to her house and get the key to the front door (which I now have). It turns out that when she came over to visit she had bolted the kitchen door.

New Digs

This last week has been completely crazy. I got back from Phuket on Sunday. Then went back to work on Monday. On Tuesday I found out that our rent contract was up this month and the landlord wanted to raise the rent to $300 US a month and that he didn't want to rent it for just 3 months but wanted at least a 6 month commitment. I get the feeling that this has been prompted by some other problems between CUSO and the landlord but I really don't know the situation and getting info has been really tough. On Wednesday it was confirmed that we had to move and our rent was only paid up until the weekend so we had to be out of the house by Sunday.

Thursday and Friday were the CUSO Lao AGM which was held in Vang Vien which is about 160km outside of town (which means it can take anywhere from 3-7hrs to get there). Vang Vien was really nice and we stayed at a really cool hotel/resort outside of town near some of the caves in the mountains. I got to go cave swimming one day which was a definite highlight. It was also really cool to finally meet most of the other cooperants working in Lao. I plan to try to visit Michael in Xagnabouly and Anita and Joe in Salavan although the transportation time is a bit of an issue.

I got back to Vientiane on Saturday around 2pm and instantly got thrown into the middle of preparing for the move. Fortunately a lot of the CUSO people helped out and that made a big difference with dealing with a lot of the stuff from the house. Bounlanh (the cooperant placement assistant) helped us a lot because she knew of a house that she had cooperants from VSO stay at when she worked there. The house isn't as fancy as the house we had but it feels a lot cosier and I like the neighbourhood better. The one downside is we don't have a TV but we're going to talk to the landlord and see if we can work something out.

We moved Saturday night so it was pretty hectic. Today I've been looking around the new neighbourhood a bit and it is nice, there's a huge market really close to us and I think I'm a bit closer to work too which is really nice. Plus the landlord is really nice and is still working on fixing up the house more for us.

Phuket Was Phuking Awesome!

Okay, that’s not the way you actually pronounce Phuket. The h is silent the same as in Thailand. I don’t know why both Thai and Lao use all these h’s that you never pronounce but they both do it all the time.

Phuket was a really good time. I only got to spend 3 nights there because of being sick at the beginning of the holiday but I still managed to hit a few beaches, go SCUBA diving, go parasailing, get a suit made, and eat tons of Thai seafood. I stayed in a nice small town called Kamala on the west coast of Phuket Island.

SCUBA diving was definitely the highlight of the trip. I went on a 2 dive intro trip. I went to a nearby island called Ko Weo. It was just the instructor and myself besides the 2 Thai people working the boat which was really good. The first dive was okay but the 2nd dive was a lot better. First of all, I had a lot better sense of how to control my buoyancy so I didn’t need as much help. The other thing was that we went to the other side of the island and I think there were more things to see on that side. I saw so many cool fish. I saw a lot of clown fish (like from Finding Nemo) and a huge school of yellow snapper that just looked like a cloud of yellow from a distance but once you got closer you could see hundreds of fish and swim with them.

The suit was also a bit of an experience. At first I felt a bit bad about being sort of conned into going into one of the tailor shops and buying a suit. However, I did manage to get a good price (about $130 CAD for a 2 piece suit, silk shirt and 2 silk ties) and the quality is good and it fits me perfectly. Somehow the tailors are able to make a complete suit for you in a day, I went in at lunchtime on Thursday and they had my suit finished on Friday around 6pm.

So all in all it was a really fun trip. My main complaint is that I didn’t have enough time in Phuket because it was so nice. I am definitely planning to go back for a longer trip.

The Dissentery Diet

You want to lose weight in a hurry? Forget Atkins, diet shakes, counting points, hell even exercise, go for dissentery all the way. "I lost 10-15lbs in 1 day and I owe it all to dissentery."

Okay, there's 2 things wrong with that last paragraph. First of all, I don't know that I actually had dissentery. I definitely had some kind of intestinal infection though. Second, I don't know exactly how much weight I dropped in the 1 night from when it kicked in and I went to the doctor. I know that before I came to Lao I weighed around 175-180lbs and when they weighed me at the clinic I was down to 165lbs. I probably dropped I bit of weight since I came but I know I didn't drop over 10lbs.

4 days in the hospital on IV fluids later and I'm feeling a lot better. I'm still not quite 100% but I'm pretty much there now that I can eat a full meal on a regular basis.

Needless to say, this has put a bit of a cramp on the travel plans. I still think I'll head to Thailand for a bit though because Vientiane is pretty much shut down from the summit.

2 months in

Well I've hit the 2 month mark here in Laos and things are going pretty good. I'm starting to settle into a routine of working and teaching (I teach 3 classes a week at work). I still need to work more on preparing for my classes but other than that things are pretty good.

Marian has gone back to Canada which means that for the first time in 2 months I'm sleeping in a proper bed (I was just using a matress on the floor and a sleeping sheet). On top of that, the en-suite bathroom in my new room has a working water heater so I've also had my first hot shower in 2 months which was a big treat.

Still working on the travel plans to Thailand. I think I'll spend a few days in Bangkok before heading to the coast. Then spend a bit of time there before going to Chiang Mai in the Northwest and then fly from there to Luang Prebang in Laos before coming back to Vientiane. I have to leave a bit later because I'm finishing my Lao language lessons this weekend. But, on the plus side, the 1st and the 3rd are probably going to be holidays too so I get a full 2 weeks off now.

Even more nights in Bangkok?

No, I haven't re-injured my knee and ended up back in the hospital again! At the end of the month, Vientiane is hosting the annual ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) summit. Because of security concerns, the road my office is on is going to be closed each day (incidentally, this is also why the road my office is on is currently being re-paved). Because of this, I have a holiday from Nov 22 to Nov 30. Actually, Nov 22 is a Monday so really my last day of work is the 19th.

Because the city is going to be crawling with diplomats and officials, there's not going to be a lot to do since a lot of stuff will be closed off for security. So, I figure it's a really good time to not be in Vientiane. So, I'm now making plans to head to Thailand (probably to hit some of the beaches on the coast, do some snorkelling and maybe take S.C.U.B.A. lessons). Since I already have my multiple-entry visa it's no problem to head off for that time. More updates to follow.

No news is good news

Okay, I've definitely been a bit slack lately in keeping the blog up to date. Mostly this is just because getting internet access is a bit tough since I don't have any access at work or at home. Hasn't been a whole lot going on. I got a bicycle from work that I'm riding pretty much every day. It's an old japanese bike that's pretty beat up and only has 1 speed. But, it's pretty sturdy and I don't have to worry about anyone stealing it so that's good. It's a lot better than most of the local bikes (usually chinese) which aren't really made to carry a foreigner's weight.

Other than that, not much to report. It's the end of Budist Lent which includes a big boat racing festival which has made the downtown pretty busy each night. I went to a co-worker's house on Saturday to watch some of the races but it wasn't too exciting. I think this weekend is the more serious races though.

The city is also really working to prepare for the ASEAN summit at the end of November. The latest news from work is that the roads around my ofice will be closed because it's on the route the officials will take to the meetings so we're going to have a holiday from November 22 to November 30. December 2 is Lao National day so that's a holiday too so it means I have 1 week off and then the next week I only have to work Dec 1 and Dec 3. The downside is that we have to have classes for another week in December. I wouldn't get time off during the term break but I wanted to go to Salavan for a week to visit the CUSO office there and I might not be able to now.

Kip Rules Everything Around Me, K.R.E.A.M.

It's kind of hard to not feel like a total gangsta living in Vientiane. The biggest bill you can get in Lao Kip is 20,000 Kip and that's worth about $2.50 canadian. The 20,000 bill has been a pretty recent addition so it's still a bit harder to come by. I changed money this week and decided to change 2000 Thai Baht (which is roughly $70 canadian). That gave me 528,000 Kip and the biggest bill they had was a 5,000 so I got a huge stack of 5,000 Kip bills (a bundle of 100 bills and then some loose ones).

A bag of pop (yes, they keep the bottle so they can get the deposit back) costs 2,000 kip, a Tuk-Tuk ride to just about anywhere in the city will maybe cost 10,000-20,000 depending on the driver and how well you negotiate (although some try to rip off foreigners and charge 30,000 to go anywhere). A good meal at an "expensive" restaurant is around 30,000 kip (unless you go to a really upscale foreign place). Cheaper local places are a lot less. I had an amazing Phat Thai yesterday for 10,000 kip.

My stipend from cuso is pretty low (maybe $500 canadian a month) but is a lot more than most local Lao salaries so it's really easy to live well. The really nice 3 bedroom house that I'm sharing has air conditioning, 2 bathrooms and satellite TV and costs $250 US a month (which is paid for by CUSO seperately from my stipend).

Another night in Bangkok

I wasn’t even in the country a week before being medically evacuated to Bangkok. Last Tuesday I slipped and fell and hurt my left knee. I didn’t think it was anything serious at first because I could walk fine. Later in the day though, it started to hurt to bend it and it got very swollen, to the point that I couldn’t bend my leg at all. By the end of the day, I couldn’t put any weight on my left leg at all. I thought it was just because of the swelling and iced my knee. The next morning I still couldn’t walk on it so I went to the Australian Clinic. Dr. Ben told me I’d ruptured the ligament (my ACL) in my knee and the swelling was due to blood collecting inside my knee. He drained about 90ml of blood from my knee and put a temporary splint on my leg but that was all he could do. So then he booked me a flight to Bangkok to be checked out further. It all happened pretty quickly. Dr. Ben made it seem like it was some kind of big emergency to get me to Bangkok as soon as possible but all they did in Bangkok was X-ray my knee and put a better splint on it. I spent the night in the hospital and then flew back to Vientiane the next afternoon. On the down side, my career as a professional athlete is over and my nice official 2 month visa has been used up (because it was only a single-entry visa) and now I’m on a 15-day tourist visa. On the plus side, I managed to score a sponge bath from 2 Thai nurses.

One night in Bangkok

Arrived at last. Took me 5 days in total to get to Vientiane (left Monday evening and got to Vientiane Friday afternoon).

The heat is really going to take awhile to get used to. It almost feels like a wall when you walk outside and the air is thick from all the humidity.

Bangkok is unbelievably intense. Just walking down the street there are so many more things to see, hear, and smell. It’s very crowded too and sometimes can feel a little bit claustrophobic.

After spending the night in Bangkok Hamid and I left on the overnight train to Nong Khai (on the Thai-Lao border) where Khamla from the CUSO Lao office met us and drove us to Vientiane.

Other than that, I’ve mostly just been trying to get over the jet lag and get used to the heat.

Subject to change

I've been getting pretty used to things being subject to change with my CUSO position. I know the job description is pretty much just a guideline of what I might end up doing. My departure date has pretty much been a moving target as well.

I thought it was finalised when they said I'd be leaving on the 14th but as of yesterday, I'm leaving on the 13th instead. There were some problems with booking my flight I guess and they had to have me leave a day earlier. I now am supposed to fly Halifax to Ottawa, spend the night in Ottawa, Ottawa to Chicago early in the morning (7:45, ugh), Chicago to Tokyo, Tokyo to Bangkok. This means I'll be leaving on the evening of the 13th and I don't arrive in Bangkok until the evening of the 15th (local time). I'm going to be pretty wrecked I think.

The good thing is that I'm pretty much ready to go so losing the day wasn't as big a deal as it could have been. My volunteer work will suffer a bit but that was going to be a problem anyways because some of the people I need to work with are on vacation this week. I've managed to pretty much finish the documentation though and I will be able to wrap that up before I leave so that's good.

New site is live!

Looking back through my blog I started working on the re-design for my site on April 15, 2003. Now almost a year and a half later it's finally to a point where I could take it from my "development" box at home and load it onto my domain.

The fact it took over a year isn't as much a reflection of how much work was involved but more a reflection to how much I procrastinated on working on the site at times. Having a definite deadline of wanting to get this done before I leave for Laos really helped push me to get this done.

There's still some more work I'd like to complete such as fleshing out the image search and updating some of the pages but it's to the point where i can do all of that work "live". I felt it made more sense to get everything up on my domain well before the deadline so I'd have the time to fix any problems. Overall, everything went really smoothly though. I had a few small problems with some files that had absolute paths set but they were fixed pretty quickly. The only other issue I ran into was getting my new database loaded on but a little work with my hosting's support has that fixed up and now I have a better way for managing the database as well. So overall I'm really happy with how this has played out.

Tying up loose ends

Well I'm due to leave in less than 2 weeks now which is really freaky. Still seems like there's a lot to get done before then.

I'm really pleased to say that the re-design of my site is more or less completed. There's still some small things left to clean up but overall it all works now so it's not as big of a deal. Last night I managed to get the image searching fully working which was a major task that I'd been putting off for ages. Right now it only searches by country or by roll but I can add in extra search functionality very easily. Plus, getting the country searches was the biggest one I wanted to get done so my links to pictures of various countries on the photo page would work. The only thing I have left to do is split the search results over more than 1 page so you're not forced to download hundreds of images at once. I'm pretty sure I've figured out how to do it though which is the big thing.

Due to disk space concerns I've decided to do away with the 1200x800 versions of my photos. Removing them should really cut down on my storage use. My hosting has finally started holding me to the 100mb of disk space and charges me for any extra disk usage so I had to get the site back under 100mb.

The bigger loose end in terms of my site would be updating all of the content. At first I thought this would really be a mammoth task but I've realised it's not as bad as I thought. Most of the pages are pretty static (like the articles in the photo and tech sections). The main area that needs updating is the personal area and that's only a few pages.

The other thing I'd like to do with the site is put up some of my Photoshop work. I'm debating if I want to create a whole seperate "Art" section for this or if I want to just put it under photo. Not really a big deal either way but it's something I need to think about.

Site work aside, there's lots of other stuff I still need to get done too. I still have a couple items left to pick up and I finish my shots next week. I'm almost done with my fund raising which is good but I'm still behind in finishing up my volunteer work. I got really into working on my site and it sort of took away from my enthusiasm for working on my volunteer work. Hopefully now that the site is pretty much up to date I'll be able to get back into the volunteer work and finish it off.

New navigation is done

Well it was a major pain but I've finally got my new hierarchical navigation menu working. What annoyed me the most was that very early on I found a page that had example code that seemed to do exactly what I wanted to but was ridiculously complicated and poorly documented in some respects. Because of that, I gave up on it and struck out on my own way of doing it. This failed miserably. Finally, I went back to trying to do it in a similar way as the example code. Doing this started to help me understand the example code better. There was still a lot of stuff I didn't understand in the example code though. It turns out though that none of that code was needed for making the navigation menu the way I wanted it.

Once I got the basics worked out I still had to play around with it to get my links working properly as well as getting it to look right. Overall though, I'm very happy with the way it looks.

Ultimate in geeky

Anyone visiting my site can tell that I'm pretty bad when it comes to keeping my site up to date. One of the things that would most quickly date my site would be if I included my age anywhere on the site. Because of this, I had pretty much given up on including my age on my site anywhere.

However, thanks to the power of PHP, that has all changed! A few years back I'd actually joked about doing something like this but had never bothered. I now have my age proudly displayed on my front page. However, it's not actually my age, I actually have PHP taking the current year and subtracting my birthday from it so now my age will always be accurate!

Site update push

Lately I've really been in the mood to work on my site more which is cool because I want to get it updated before I leave. Ideally, I want to get the re-design completed and everything up on my actual domain, www.tildefrugal.net/ instead of on the dev site. I plan to shut down my Linux box while I'm away so anything that I want to be accessible has to be up on my main site before then.

So far today I've managed to incorporate some of the new features of Blogger such as comments. I also added a "this day in history" link for each date. The HowTo for that covers how to do it using Javascript but I wrote a way to do it in PHP which is cool because it's all browser independent.

The big stuff that still needs to be done is to update all my pages so they reflect the new design and to hammer out a few details with the new design. But once I get all the pages ported over to the new structure I can work on any other changes to the design and they'll be reflected on every page.

At the moment, I'm debating on changing my navigation structure. As I've mentioned before, I've had a lot of issues with figuring out how to structure it well. I'm now thinking I may do a more hierarchical navigation instead of the "menus" at the top of the screen. The big plus is then I can go as deep as I want but it might get a bit unwieldy.

Forced to download bad 80's music

Sometimes when I'm planning a trip a song comes to mind as an appropriate representation of the trip. This is kind of hard to explain what I mean without offering up an example. One I clearly remember was when I was planning on going to Russia the obvious song was Back in the USSR. In that case it wasn't bad at all, I really like The Beatles and it's a good track. The obvious one for my planned travels after my placement is of course Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys. Again, pretty cool. For my placement though, the obvious song (as many people have already pointed out) is One Night in Bangkok which has got to be up there in terms of 80's cheese. Still, it fits so well that it can't not be the song. If anyone knows of any songs about Laos please let me know.