Ok, it’s really not that hard to grock.

business week printed a pretty accurate description of life in mysore, complete with quote from my friend russell

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_05/b4019088.htm

magazine stands in bangkok are generally full of fashion and gossip magazines … maybe a news magazine or two thrown in, but mostly just fashion and gossip. the first twenty or so pages of each magazine is generally dedicated to society-type pics, basically pics of people at different galas, benefits, exhibits, things like that. of course, the first thing we all do when the magazines come out is look through the society pics for people we know …

this picture of pank and i was taken back in november, but just came out in the latest volume. click on the full page pic to see a bigger version of the full page if you want …

sometimes people are a bit surprised when i tell them that i like to spend most of my nights home reading a book, watching a dvd, studying thai, things like that. bangkok apparently has this amazing nightlife, but aside from when i have friends in from out of town, i am rarely up past eleven or twelve on a weekend. part of what keeps me in are the crowds and smoking, in california you can go out to a bar and hang out with your friends and your clothes don’t reek of cigarettes when you come home. i think what really keeps me home is that i already spent way too many hours in bars and clubs and as a settle into my dotage, i just enjoy going to bed early, getting up early, being in places without loud music. i’m sure that my ashtanga practice is a big influence on this too, it’s hard to get up and practice yoga for two hours six days a week if you’re not taking care of your body properly.

there have been two periods in my life tho where i was very much into going out, the first lasted from about age 16-19 and for those first few years i pretty much spent all my energy either going out, saving money to go out, or fighting with my parents about not letting me go out. i grew up in a small town in upstate ny and while there was no real night-life around there, it was the early 90s and there was this booming rave culture happening in lots of places a few hours from nyc. when i was back at mom’s for christmas i found hundreds of old rave flyers stored in a box, i scanned in a bunch … either from parties i went to, thought i may of went to or just thought were pretty. i don’t think i went to all of the parties that i scanned in flyers for, but i my memories from those years are a bit shaky (for a variety of reasons), so who knows what i went to and didn’t.

i have a big box of pictures from those years too, i’m not sure i’m ready to put them online yet tho. i wore some really scary outfits.

rave flyers are linked above as rave museum.

i feel a bit like rip van winkle … i stopped writing software two years ago, and just new started doing some work again. it really amazes me how much has changed since then. part of the changes come from the fact that i worked on a windows-based machine before and now i’m using a mac running osx … it’s kinda like falling asleep in a rusted-out el camino with no wheels and waking up in a brand-new bmw. first of all things just work on the mac, i don’t have to spend hours tweaking things or wondering which applications are conflicting with others. what really makes the mac shine tho is that when they switched to osx they pretty much threw away all their old operating system code and build a new operating system on top of unix. the windows operating system is carrying around baggage it got when it was poorly designed decades ago.

it’s also really interesting to see all the technologies and tools that were new and immature two years ago, and how they have matured over that time. i remember back when i was first writing java code almost eleven years ago and how pretty much nothing worked iike it was supposed to, things changed all the time, and documentation was sparse at best. it’s not just that the java language has progressed and matured tho, the whole internet infrastructure and open-source development community has matured and progressed. this means that even when a new technology is introduced, the support structure needed to help it mature is already in place.

this last software project i did was just about 10 hours, writing a small tool to merge a bunch of databases. it looks like there will be some bigger projects happening soon too … nothing that will take up more than 10-15 hours a week of time, but still enough to keep this part of my brain going.

so my friend art who is also a student here at absolute yoga in bangkok is in mysore for his first time, he is keeping a blog here

well you’d think that flying home to bkk and finding out that nine bombs were going off would be reason enough for a blog posting or two, but a really nasty case of strep throat and having friends in town sort of upstaged any creative musings from me.

i woke up on the 1st thinking i was just really hungover and jet lagged together (a lousy combination), by the time it got to be the 2nd i realized that i was dealing with much more than a hangover and jet lag. truth be told, it was a combination of strep, too much vodka on new years eve and jet lag but i think that the strep beat me up the most. finally at 7am on the third, i dragged my butt to the hospital up the street, filled out some paperwork and waited for the doctor. she took my temp (101.4F), looked down my throat and sent me into the next room to get an injection of antibiotics in my butt. the hospital also sent me home with 7 days of antibiotics, some sleeping pills and throat lozenges. in case you’re wondering, the total bill for emergency room services and all medicines ran 1300B or about $30USD. the whole process took about an hour. while the price structure doesn’t really compare with what i would of been charged in the usa, i’m sure people will be interested to know that when i went for some food at the hospital after, there was a thai restaurant and of course a mcdonalds. i love that the usa is exporting wonderful ideas of what sick people should eat when they want to get sicker.

after i got home, i literally laid down on the floor, covered myself with a blanket and woke up two hours later covered in sweat and feeling worlds better. i spent most of that day just resting around the house, basically just sweating, drinking water, peeing, napping, things like that. finally by the 4th i was feeling more human and was able to show jason and dave around some. it’s a good thing that they came to visit me in a pair and could go out on their own tho as i spent about 1/2 of their time here in bed.

my practice last week stalled for about four days when i was sick and then i kinda eased back into things. since sunday i have been on my normal schedule of going to bed early, getting up early to practice for about two hours, eating, teaching, things like that. i haven’t been studying thai since i get back as i have a few other projects happening. i’m working on getting 500 pashmina scarves sent to my brother so that he can sell them in hawai’i and i’m actually doing some software work again. it’s been about two years since i’ve written any code, but i’m amazed at how quickly it is coming back to me. i’ve been using this new dev environment called eclipse which is amazing. i wish i’d had it back when i was writing software full time. so there’s no chance that i would go back to this software thing full-time, but it’s nice to do 10-15 hours a week for a bit.

ohh and somehow on my trip across usa, i lost my camera battery so no pics of jason and dave’s visit to post. i think they took some tho, so i’ll post them whenever they send to me.