08.26.08
Posted in Life and the happenings there of at 1:38 am by Kaihaku
The Prey Veng office’s satellite connection went down a week and a half ago. About a month before that, it had been down for about a week, so we were all feeling a higher level of frustration that we might have normally. So, I called Chamshin, Carol called Chamshin, Miles called Chamshin, Scott called Chamshin…
Chamshin, a bit late I suppose, is our internet provider based in the capital. They had us turn off the modem and then turn it back on five minutes later. After the sixth round of this we started to get annoyed. Scott eventually visited the Chamshin office in Phnom Penh and really got the ball rolling. Unfortunately, the timing was off and the Chamshin technicians arrived in Prey Veng to check out the internet connection while everyone save Dara, our translator, was in Phnom Penh for a team meeting. We were a little upset and said a few things we probably shouldn’t have when we came back to find the internet still not working and learned that the technicians had simply turned on the modem, which we’d turned off because well it wasn’t working.
Feeling a bit bitter, Scott gave Chamshin another round of calls and at one point handed the phone off to me. It wasn’t my best moment. After an argument over whether the internet worked or not, the technicians promised to come today and take another look. This morning, to my chagrin, the internet magically worked for about an hour. Fortunately, it swiftly went back to not working so we didn’t look like morons but that did leave me at least feeling like a bit of a jerk. The internet had just worked when the technician flipped the modem last Friday. It hadn’t worked the entire week before, but at that precise moment it decided to work. Life is like that sometimes. So, the technicians arrived and saw that the internet was, indeed, down. After some tinkering, they determined that the receiver on the satellite must be going and swiftly replaced it. Feeling a bit guilty, especially in the face of their three hours transit and their friendliness after a somewhat rude phone call the day before, I took them out to lunch afterwards. I’ll have to remember som lar koh kor, its a good soup. The head technician talked at length about his time in Russia after the Pol Pot era and how he was an experienced world traveler. It was kind of a strange experience. As he lamented that all that Russian language study was wasted now, I mentally wondered about that, given recent events it would seem that Russia is making a comeback in a big way.
Anyway, the internet is, finally, working again. Happy days.
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08.17.08
Posted in Life and the happenings there of at 7:09 pm by Kaihaku
So, the office internet went out on friday not so pleasantly. Supposedly a repairman is looking into it tomorrow but my hopes aren’t so high. It took a month and a half for the same repairman to install the internet, a month and a half when he told us it would be installed that week. So, we’ll see. I’m going into the capital on thursday so I should have more access then.
I’ve left Shining Force Central, an internet community I’ve been part of since Daria’s went down seven years ago. There was too much going on, too much negative energy and not enough of anything uplifting. I need something uplifting in this time in my life…or maybe I just need not to be uplifting others for once. I didn’t handle my exit so well but then who does. In six months or so I might visit again, but for now I’m done. It’s sad and I feel a sense of loss, but I’m energized in a way I haven’t been in a long time.
The owner of my favorite coconut stand has had his first child. This would be good news save that it means that his cousin is now running the stand and she’s flirting with me in an obnoxious way. Well, flirting might be understatement, “I want to live in barang”, “could you love someone with dark skin”, and “take me to barang with you” are more forthright. I think I’m going to have to find a new supplier of coconuts until the old owner returns. I guess, at the least, it’s a pushy middle age khmer woman and not a young metro-khmer boy this time.
In Laos, the Mekong river has reached it’s highest point in 100 years and the capital is threatened with flooding. Experts are warning that this will cause serious flooding in Cambodia but, of course, who needs facts when you have opinions? The Cambodian Government has issued a statement that all that excess water upstream will not affect Cambodia at all. I guess we’ll see in a couple of weeks if it’s true that water flows downstream or not.
There’s been a lot of progress with the Angkearhdei school. So much that it deserves a post of it’s own! I just thought I’d toss in something positive.
This weekend, with the internet down, I read a ton of Marvel comics. I was very impressed by the Civil War series and the way Marvel seriously altered their universe to address the changing times. I also read House of M and the Onslaught storyarcs. Well done, Marvel. I think I’m shifting more and more from a DC fan to a Marvel fan. Though, the more I read the more I can’t stand those Spiderman and X-men movies. X-men had good actors for the most part but whoever wrote the script… *shutter*
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08.08.08
Posted in Life and the happenings there of at 2:07 am by Kaihaku
So, last night I suffered the sting of a scorpion for the first and hopefully last time. As I was preparing for bed I did note the tiny little scorpion off in a corner of the bathroom but being in a strange state of mind I was distracted by a roach set upside down and struggling to right itself. By the time I ended my observation by flipping the roach over, the scorpion had completely left my mind.
Later that night I went to use the bathroom and a piercing pain shot through my left foot. Looking down I saw the culprit, that little scorpion, and I reacted promptly by crushing the critter into six pieces with the bottom of a bottle of cleaner.
The sting didn’t throb like that of a wasp or bee, it stuck to the sharpest pain and did not deviate. It did not swell and it did not relent for three hours. I hobbled back to my room and swiftly looked to the internet for answers.
Under normal circumstances, I probably would have found this amusing but as it was I was not amused.
While not very helpful, though I did consider assaulting a mango tree, this was at least regional.
I thought this was worthless.
Okay. Finally, I found something like treatment, wrong continent, but how different can scorpions really be? Don’t answer that.
Well, the pain remained constant for three hours. Nothing I did from elevating the foot to putting ice on it helped. It’s not an experience that I relished but I survived it even if it ruined what was shaping up to be my first decent night of sleep this week.
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08.06.08
Posted in Current Events, Spero Cras at 4:42 am by Kaihaku
The hegemony is beginning to crumble! IBM is shipping computers with Linux. This is the best news I’ve heard in a long time. Happy days.
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Posted in Current Events, Rants at 4:27 am by Kaihaku
So, many people that I’ve talked to about the dangers threatening privacy as we enter the information age have displayed an apathetic ‘so what’. Fair enough. A lot of people don’t seem to care if it’s common knowledge what websites they visit, if they pirate music, what their tastes are, what books they checked out at the library, who they call on the weekend…or even what they say in that call. I don’t personally agree but I can see where they are coming from. I think its short sighted and complacent but it is understandable.
But now, what if everyone in the United States was given a health rating by insurance companies to determine if they deserved coverage or not? Kind of like a credit rating. Do you deserve to have medical coverage? Are you healthy enough to be allowed access to what has become practically an essential service in the United States? Well, it turns out that insurance companies aren’t making enough money off of Americans yet so now they are starting just such a service to gather all that information about the population’s prescriptions that until now was just sitting there not really earning any money. See the Washington Post article.
Just think, in a few years my aversion to medication is going to help me get jobs, not to mention good insurance rates, while other saps get turned down. I guess that’s sweet. Who knew that me not having been on a prescription since I was ten was going to be of such benefit.
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Posted in Current Events at 3:44 am by Kaihaku
Arnold Schwarzenegger has run into a problem. Last week, he ordered a pay cut for 200,000 state workers in California, decreasing their earnings down to minimum wage. That’s $6.55/hr. Very kind of you, Arnold. Well, here’s the problem, the state’s payroll systems are so ancient that no one on staff knows how to lower the wages and the process is estimated to take six months. The payroll system is written in COBOL. That’s an ancient programming language for those of you don’t know that dates back to 1959. Where have all the COBOL programmers gone? Well, they are a dying breed but if there were any left on the state pay roll, Schwarzenegger probably fired them last week too. The fire first and ask questions later approach that served him so well in action movies doesn’t work quite so well in government.
Between this and that mess in San Francisco, California seems like the state for information technology problems.
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Posted in Life and the happenings there of at 3:38 am by Kaihaku
Following election day, I did as much processing of what had happened as was healthy, maybe a little bit more than was healthy. I talked to some people and I thought about it a lot. Then, probably fortunately, I got really busy with work. I haven’t had much time to put effort into a update here and there are a few big ones I need to write. Namely election results, the threatening war with Thailand, some good news about the Angkearhdei school, a timely rant about copyright laws, and such. On top of all of that, we unexpectedly lost internet out here in Prey Veng for five days so that didn’t help much. It took a total of thirteen phone calls to get it up and running again.
Crystal has been preparing to leave for Europe and she’s just landed in Holland. It sounds like she’s in a beautiful place and I can’t help but be a bit envious. It’s an exciting and strange time for her, I’d imagine a bit strained too with having to say farewell to family and friends for a long time.
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