dannyman.toldme.com

The way the mechanic explains it, this little plastic thing that holds the throttle cable in place broke, which is why the car started acting funny. After awhile the transmission eats itself alive, and costs $1,250 to swap in a rebuild.

Ouch.

He says this is a common problem on Fords. He showed me the plastic ring in question, as he always has a few on-hand. What with the recent shuttle tragedy and the economic impact, I was thinking “O-Ring“.

Since the price is a serious chunk of change, at this juncture, I told him that maybe I’d pick the car up and hold on to it until I at least know my unemployment status. I thought about it some more and it really is a wonderful car. Everything else on it works awfully well, and I swear it is worth keeping. What’s more, I need a car around here – heck, my stuff is still in Oakland. I’m thinking on the question tonight, and I think I’ll call them back tomorrow and authorize the work.

Shikata Ga Nai!

Feedback Welcome

Psychic spies from China try to steal your mind’s elation
And little girls from Sweden dream of silver screen quotation
And if you want these kind of dreams its Californication

This was a favorite song of the cover band in Hat Yai. I hadn’t heard it much before my time in Thailand. I thought it was a neat song about California. It’s also a neat song about America, a land of dreams and controversey that occupies the minds of young people around the world: the Italian guy who thinks that he should be able to vote for America’s president, the Argentine gal who feels reluctant to bring up America’s meddling in Latin America, the good-natured Jordanians who love America all the more despite the boiling conflict between our civilizations.

It’s the edge of the world
And all of Western civilization
The sun may rise in the East
It least it’s settled in a fine location
It’s understood that Hollywood
sells Californication

I was flipping channels at Mom’s place, and we stayed a few minutes on a BBC news report from Ivory Coast, where in among the crowds of people who had showed up to rally for whatever cause they thought would do their country right, several were holding American flags, mostly simple paper ones colored by hand. Why are they waving our flags, we wondered? At least they’re not burning them. The French are involved with their former colony, not us!

Everyone in the world has an opinion, an impression they have of America and Americans. The world is watching us. Please, countrymen, try to set a good example: we’re not alone in our own wilderness these days.

Feedback Welcome

Whilst writing up today’s entry, I came up with the idea that maybe I should make a stylistic distinction for different flavours of content. Most notably, the techy talk in this section. Don’t like techy talk? Skim through it quick. Easier to pick bits out.

Since we like to re-use code, and defer to precedence, I told this document to source in an additional style sheet, instead of replacing the site-wide style sheet. This way I can override the bits I want to change for this log document, while also catching whatever style properties change for the site as a whole.

The problem is that in the main style sheet, I had spelled out “monospace” as the “font-family” attribute for several elements, and now I wanted to change this part of several elements by using the DIV tag on a set of elements. For example:

<h3>Car</h3>
<p>Stuff about the car.</p>
 
<div class="techy">
<h3>Techy Stuff</h3>
<p>Blah blah blah</p>
</div>

In this way, I wanted the text within the techy DIV to come out monospace, while everything else was in the nice Helvetica font. The problem is that I had already defined the P, and H3 attributes to use Helvetica, so they never came out in monospace.

The answer came out to be that in the site-wide style sheet, I should stick with monospace as an attribute for the BODY parent tag, and tell the P and H3 elements to inherit:

BODY {
        font-family: monospace;
        color: black;
        background-color: white;
        margin: 1em 2em;
}
P {
        font-family: inherit;
}
H3 {
        font-family: inherit;
        color: maroon;
}

So, in this document, I set the BODY font-family to Helvetica. Now the P elements in this page inherit Helvetica, instead of monospace, and everything comes out Helvetica. Unless, of course, the P is contained in a DIV tag that spells out a different font-family.

Ah, so let’s take this a step further, and change the colors of the H3 elements from maroon to a green color. Again I run in to that same problem that I have already set my H3 elements to be maroon! But since I want black text, I can’t just inherit maroon from the BODY element. What to do!?

After much searching through w3c’s recommendations, and different style sheet guides, I found a reference to an entry in Tantek Çelik’s log that invokes CSS syntax in a way I have never noticed before:

.techy H3 {
        color: #003300;
}

This makes H3 elements within a techy parent class turn dark green. This is different, and vastly more useful to me than specifying H3:techy as I am used to doing. This allows me to take the techy class from my parent DIV, instead of having to specify techy as the class for each element. Yay!

It took a lot of effort on my part to figure this one out, so I had to share here. This is why you see this part of my document in green shades with a monospace font, and all I have to do to apply these styles to this section of the document is to wrap it in a DIV element of the appropriate class!

Feedback Welcome

I have files on my laptop that are important. I’d like to keep a copy of them on another computer. The handiest is the desktop machine I’ve assembled by buying a hard drive at Fry’s, and installing in a machine I’m borrowing from Brian. Today I set up a Windows network between the two, to see how well that works. Large file copies from the laptop, on Brian’s wireless network, to the desktop, tended to bomb out any time a packet dropped in the WIRELESS ETHER. So, I kibbitzed with Lemson on IRC, who sent me to the Knowledge Base article that explains how to turn on “file synchronization” and now when I copy to the server, the file synchronization service handles it.

Windows’ “file synchronization” is designed to locally cache files that are stored on a network server. This allows you to trundle away with your laptop, and work with the files, and settle up the difference when you get back near the server again. This means that it acts as an elaborate FILE CACHE.

What I really want, is to have two copies of the same set of files: one on the laptop, and one on the server, and something to occasionally reconcile the differences between the two. On Unix I would use rsync, which I can also use on Windows, thanks to Cygwin, but since I’m operating on Windows, with a “server” that does not have an Internet-style hostname, it seems more interesting to me to see what Microsoft wants me to do, by fiddling with icons, instead setting up a more Unixy environment and typing crazy commands.

This way I’ll be more in touch with what “normal” people do, which can come in handy when you need to help them out.

1 Comment

Much time today has been spent brushing up on Perl to write the answers to a technical pre-screen for a job writing Perl code. It’s nice to be “working” and even if I don’t get the job, the technical exercise is worthwhile.

Feedback Welcome

After this, I took the car to the mechanic. The estimate to figure out what’s wrong is around $80. Hopefully it is an easy fix and not a doomed transmission, that threatens to eat into that $2,000!

Feedback Welcome

First day back to “working.” Telephone interview from EDD to determine my eligibility. They’re not concerned with Transmeta, they’re focused on the claim they’d have to file with my very last employer, the Pizza Place. Since I was voluntarily separated from that position, I think I may, in fact, be ineligible.

Not to worry greatly, there seem to be more jobs out there, including server positions, and the bank account is currently around $2,000, so I can float at least a month …

Feedback Welcome

The most noteworthy accomplishment of the day is that I got the car back. I did this by buying Jessica some lunch, then guilting her in to a ride down to Angel’s house. You see, Angel picked the car up from Dave and Rebecca when they moved back to the midwest.

When I got there, Angel was out, and his roommate Pat gave me the keys. I took some time to double-check the fluid levels and whatnot, before starting the car. That quiet quiet engine made me wonder if it had died, but no, it was just smooth as ever.

The car was full of trash. Bits of food, melted crayons, one baby shoe, one baby sock, and a couple bags of neatly-packaged garbage. Ahhh, yes, I knew well the mark of Dave from the days when I lived with him. Angel called at this time asking if I found his car-starter gadget thingy that he needs to start his high-tech car, because he was trying to find it and maybe he’d dropped it in my car. I couldn’t tell what he was talking about, so I asked about the garbage, and he said it came that way, and the first thing he had noticed was that the steering wheel was sticky! Oh, and by the way, they stole the license plate.

The rear license plate. The one the cops look for to nail you for expired tags.

I had to count my blessings: the car didn’t smell, there were no critters crawling around inside it. It seemed like it would go. I figured the bagged garbage was Dave’s way of collecting much of the trash that would otherwise have grown nasty on the floor. By Dave standards, this is actually pretty responsible.

I tapped the gas and was suprised by the eager V8 that I’d been away from for so long. Now, on the last day I had it, the transmission suddenly started acting funny: things weren’t shifting right. Dave and Rebecca consequently drove it almost not at all, as it fell into a state where it couldn’t top 35 MPH without making ineffectually eager revving noises. It was at this top speed that I navigated surface streets back to Mountain View.

It was quite the trek. I made two stops. The first to at a 7-11 where I removed the garbage bags from the car, then went inside where the nice South Asian guy behind the counter allowed me to borrow his wash rag, with which I wiped off the steering wheel. Further down the road I found an auto parts store, checked the transmission fluid again, and topped it off. Mike told me that there was this magic sauce that can reconstitute the transmission fluid after it has been screwed up by heat, but I couldn’t find this. The improved fluid level didn’t help; It was worth a shot, though.

Feedback Welcome

Jessica helped me welcome the Chinese New Year today by inviting me to join her family at her brother’s place. We stuffed our belly’s with Taiwanese-style hot-pot. Chiawen had invited me over to his house at the exact same time as well, but Jessica got to me first. Yay for my Taiwanese friends!

Jessica’s friend Lisa has a place in the city, and they have two rooms coming available, one for $500, and another for $600, with free DSL via a wireless network, blocks away from Golden Gate Park, and the ocean! Lisa says I’d love it and Jessica thinks I should move there because then she has an even better place to crash when she gets up there to party. Unfortunately, I can’t make it up there to check it out tomorrow without a working car. Public transport, without weekend Caltrain service, is two hours just to get to the city!

The current game plan is to rent from Brian this month. I want to try and live differently, somehow, and changing my environment is part of that. Brian responded that he kind of likes having the place to himself, but I’m welcome to stay the month. Works for everybody!

Brian woke me up this morning with the news that Columbia had exploded. I couldn’t do anything about the space shuttle, so I just went back to sleep. Seems like a crappy way to start off a lunar new year when the country’s been having a rough go of the economy, and we’re close to war. I hope its not a portent of a bad year ahead.

3 Comments

Not knowing any other Americans in Bangkok, I’d done a Google search for “Thanksgiving Bangkok” and found a website devoted to Asian Nightlife with four public Thanksgiving events. I picked the 500B buffet with “Irish Food and Irish folk band ‘No Fixed Abode'” which sounded to me like the doings of an Irish pub. I rode the SkyTrain out to a gigantic world-class hotel, where I was welcomed by a guy ready to seat me at a table by myself. Perish the thought! I saw an older lady sitting alone at another table, asked if she would like some company, and sat with her instead.

She was Canadian, from Ontario. They celebrate Thanksgiving in September, and she was spending the last of her baht on a Thai meal, instead of the pricey buffet, since she was flying out early in the morning and wanted to eat something light.

She told me that she had a small farm up North, and was a member of an organization called WWOOF: Willing Workers on Organic Farms, where she’d hosted many a Japanese or Korean traveller, exchanging food and shelter for some help on the farm. What a wonderful dinner companion!

I put away three plates of food and a dessert plate — I wanted my 500B worth! After the Canadian lady left, I spent some time talking to a retired couple — he a Texan and she a Thai.

They didn’t have pumpkin pie — Thai pumpkins are different and they don’t make pie out of them. What the hotel did was adapt their monthly Irish Buffet into a Thanksgiving dinner, which is why they had an Irish band playing homage to America. I enjoyed the folk music, and the band tried to favor American composers. I stuck around until they wrapped up at 10.

Back at the SkyTrain station, I noticed that one tall girl was dressed in an unusually fancy black dress. I looked out over the streets and the skyline as I waited for the train. When it arrived, I found myself seated opposite of her, across the SkyTrain’s wide central aisle.

She was quite tall, with long fingers, light skin, and a long face. I overheard her talking with her friend, and her voice sounded unusually deep. She looked too young and pretty to have smoked enough cigarettes to explain this. I followed this hunch and studied her more. Her breasts and hips were modest, but then a lot of Thai women are unreasonably thin. Then I caught her Adam’s Apple. Having captured her secret, I loved her all the more.

I could tell she liked me too. And I wanted to make friends, but how do I go about doing this, especially if I don’t know that she speaks English? And what would she think of my potentially ignoble intentions, for though my admiration was based on the fact that I think very highly of anyone who can struggle so long and hard to to successfully capture their own self-identity, Adam’s Apple or not, she was still a damned fine lady to boot.

When I stepped off the train I looked back through the window, and saw that her head had turned to follow me. For a moment, I was tempted to return, but decided that I would leave it to fate that tonight she and I were bound our seperate ways.

On the way back to the hotel, I worked it out that Bangkok was 13 hours ahead of Chicago. I got back to the hotel at 2300 and Jessica answered the phone. It certainly was 10AM. At 50B/minute, with a 50B connection fee, the nine-minute call ran 500B, but it was worth it to hear mom’s voice on a holiday.

1 Comment

In the morning I packed up and bid adieu to the Atlanta. The new hotel wasn’t too far, though with a large pack on my back, I would be safer in a cab, if I saw one. I spied a metered taxi just a little way down the street, and got in, handing the cabbie a business card for the White Lodge.

“100 baht.”

“Meter,” I pointed at the meter. I’d been in town long enough to understand that 100 baht was an insane fare to charge for the distance involved.

“100 baht.”

I wrapped my arms back through the straps of my bags and got out of the cab with ease. I continued over to the SkyTrain station and made it to the hotel without incident.

I decided on a walking tour through Chinatown, which was only a kilometer or two away, so I walked from the hotel down Bumrungmuang. The sidewalk split off from the road for an overpass, so I followed the sidewalk into a warren of tightly-packed houses and shops. This is where the poor folk lived, the “developing” side of a developing nation, and in my eyes, the more interesting side.

It was enough just to see — ancient houses on top of different shops — stray cats and dogs everywhere — endless textile markets, where the clothing is cheap, so close to where it is made. There were shops full of recycled auto parts, headlight and tail lights hanging from their wires like fish on hooks. Some shops had piles of a particular kind of generator or motor. One shop’s floor was entirely covered in lengths of rusty metal chain layed back and forth like newborn pasta. Unfortunately, my camera was full at this point, so I missed out on a great picture. It had also managed, at long last, to eat the day’s pictures. This irritated me immensely, but what can I do but come back and take some more? I have that kind of time.

[640×400] [800×600] [Full Size] An example of Bangkok’s old-fashioned, wooden housing.	[640×400] [800×600] [Full Size] Thailand’s population tends to be lithe and limber, and Thailand’s thieves tend to be stealthy and nimble. This must be why this building’s security grating goes all the way up.
[640×400] [800×600] [Full Size] Thailand is chugging away into the information age. The gritty infrastructure for Bangkok’s dense population comes together in beautifully complicated telephone poles like this one atop a railside shanty.	[640×400] [800×600] [Full Size] A colorful family of Calico cats nap in a woman’s sewing shop, which open to the street.
[640×400] [800×600] [Full Size] There’s not enough proper housing to go around, but there’s some room for shanties along the narrow-gauge right-of-way. I took this photo from a pedestrian bridge, but you can see that many locals don’t bother to get the view.	[640×400] [800×600] [Full Size] This looks like a step-up: random slabs of colorful contrete blocks along the river.
[640×400] [800×600] [Full Size] Two-story river-front housing is overshadowed by ugly concrete construction, which itself aspires to the glistening wealth of the sky-scraper behind it.	[640×400] [800×600] [Full Size] Need auto parts? Shop here.

At one point, I developed a thirst for a Coke. It wasn’t long before I spied this American logo in one of the narrow alleyways. An old Chinese lady had two refrigerated beverage cases. I pointed out a bottle of Coke, rubbing my finger together and asking “How much?” She grabbed the bottle and opened it, reached for a straw, which I declined, and she bade me to have a seat at one of the little plastic tables sitting in the alleyway next to her refrigerator cases.

Still wondering her price, I handed her a 100B note. She handed me 90B worth of notes in change, then she went for her coins. I asked her to stop, feeling guilty of the slight apprehension that she might have tried to overcharge me. 10B: 25 cents is an unheard of price for a bottle of Coke back home.

I got up to wander around with my bottle but she again encouraged me to have a seat, and then I understood: she keeps the bottles! I was participating in the human economy at a scale where a bottle of coke is best served restaurant style, which explained why she was in no hurry to charge me. Chagrined, I realised that as a strange foreigner I was more likely a threat to naively steal her bottle, than an opportunity to be charged a premium price.

On my way back I stumbled upon a few shops packed full of schoolboys, playing computer games for 20B an hour. They had no terminals available for me to check e-mail. Instead I approached a lady with a cart who was grilling slices of thick white bread with butter and sugar on one side. I asked her how much, and I heard her say 25B, which seemed steep, but worth it for me. She grilled me up a fresh slice, cut it in eight, bite-size pieces, placed them in a baggie and handed it to me with a wooden spear to use as a utensil. I gave her two 20B notes, took my change, and wandered off with my treat. A moment later she chased after me and handed me my second 20B note – the price had in fact been five baht – this delicious treat could be only as sweet as the lady who sold it to me for twelve cents. Her main clientele must have been the schoolboys, and I figured that growing up in Bangkok’s Chinatown couldn’t be that bad if you get to play computer games and eat sugar bread after school.

Feedback Welcome

I had a well-deserved sleep-in, then wandered my way down to the Woodstock to enjoy an excellent cheeseburger topped with fried egg. You can tell they are serious about burgers by the availability of A-1 Steak Sauce. The meat was super tasty. A damned fine experience! Then they turned their big-screen TV to a movie on HBO while I spent some time on the journal. An ex-pat told me to watch out for my backpack, though we both agreed it was pretty safe sitting next to me in the Woodstock. I’d read that some tourists lost their backpacks to criminals who slashed the straps with a razor blade and ran off with the goods. I explained how I carried my backpack more securely, and recounted my experience with the pick-pocket the night before. He said that sometimes you have to ditch being polite and cool and make it absolutely clear that someone’s attention is not welcome. Aye.

Afterwards, I went “hotel shopping” in the Siam Central area, as the Atlanta was booked up for the weekend. Walking through a shopping mall on my way over, I noted several backpacks ripe for the plucking, the worst hanging off the back of a Japanese, the straps coming together and connecting at the top of the bag, and worn so loose that there was an inch of slack between the top of the bag and the man’s back. No, I would be pretty safe from this problem.

I ended up reserving a room at the White Lodge – 400B/night with private bath and A/C – cheapest room on the block, though cheaper could be found over in the backpacker haven of Kao San Road, where I would lose the convenience of the Sky Train. I returned to the Atlanta for a pretty good vegetarian dinner.

Feedback Welcome