World's largest parking lot

I went to see the Traces of Siamese Smile art show at the Bangkok Art and Cultural Center^H^Hre in downtown Bangkok. Took me a while to find the website since they used a British spelling for the name.

The exhibition officially started at 7 PM yesterday. I had to walk to the exhibition center since traffic was at a complete standstill. When I arrived at the center I found out that the roads were closed because a member of the Royal Family was there to officially open the exhibition to the public.

Most of the art work was way over my head, but there's one that really stood out for me. It's an imaginary map of how the transportation system of Bangkok should have been, if everything had happened as the government had promised.

ITINC (If There Is No Corruption) by Wit Pimkanchanapong
(Click to see larger image)


And this is how the current BTS (elevated train) and MRTA (subway) map looks like. (Not to scale of the ITINC map above.)


Don't let the image fool you. The Suvarnabhumi Airport Rail Link (red line a.k.a. SARL) and the Sukhumvit (dark green) line extention to Bearing won't be completed in another few years. The last two stations on the Silom (light green) line have been completed since 2004 or so but has not yet been opened for use. They're just sitting there gathering rust.

Oh wait, if you thought the BTS and MRTA are ridiculous, wait until you read about the stillborn BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) system.

More decibels, please

I was so busy working the past few weeks (plus being so depressed over not being able to buy any NSLU2's and having my AdSense account disabled) that I didn't even notice that Metallica, my all-time favorite band, has released a new album: Death Magnetic.

This is one of those few times that I found out something by reading the newspaper instead of reading it online. Even the local newspapers have articles about the new album.

So I went online to read some reviews, only to find fans enraged over the sound being clipped on the CD, but not so in Guitar Hero 3. There's even a petition for the studio to re-release the album.

Today also happens to be International Talk Like A Pirate Day, I know what I'm gonna do while waiting for the album to be released to the stores locally. Arrr!

Evolved camera

The EOS 5D Mark II is released, and immediately, all the popular web forums are flooded with messages of how lame the new camera is and what Canon should have done.

To me though, the single most important thing in a digital camera, SLR or not, is the sensor. In the olden days of film cameras, you had to buy different film to get different ISO levels or to achieve different looks (such as black and white or fluorescent light films), but with a digital camera, you can just turn the ISO dial and adjust the white balance. So to get a different "look" or to get higher ISO levels means buying a whole new camera body instead of just changing the film.

Both the 5D Mark II and the previously announced 50D have improved sensors with higher sensitivity and more megapixels (however, more megapixels is not always better). The other improvements in the body such as better looking LCD, somewhat improved interface, automatic sensor cleaning, or even HD video, are just bonuses that are nice to have but have no effect on the image quality.

I'm very happy with my 30D right now, but the 50D had me drooling all over it just because of the new sensor. I'm also drooling all over the new EF 24/1.4L II lens.

Google AdSense Account Disabled

What I was afraid of earlier came true. I was out meeting a client and when I got home, I got this in the mail:

Hello FRiC,

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we've decided to disable your account.

Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions about your account or the actions we've taken, please do not reply to this email. You can find more information by visiting
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153&hl=en_US.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Although the mail was incredibly vague, I immediately went to the URL in the mail and filled in the appeal form. A few minutes later I received a mail completely written in Thai saying that Google will be closed until September 24. (?!) So instead of seeing the ads there will just be blanks where the ads used to be.

Was it due to people clicking on all those Scientology ads?

Lonely slugs

Since my NSLU2 + CUPS experiment earlier turned out to be so successful. I decided to get a whole bunch of NSLU2's to be used as print servers and for playing around with. One of my HP JetDirect cards happened to fail while I was experimenting CUPS so it was all good timing.

Unfortunately, when I went back to my network shop, they told me that they only had two NSLU2's. I had bought one earlier, and they had the last one and there will be no more, ever. They even claimed that the two they had were leftover stocks from years ago.

Of course I knew they were lying, since I had been trying to buy the NSLU2 locally for years and was never able to find them. In fact, when the Linksys NAS200 was released locally it was sold as Linksys' first network storage device. (I also have the NAS200, but it was disappointing, both in performance and functionality. I'll talk about the NAS200 another time.)

No more slugs for me...

One of my NSLU2's with a 2 GB Kingston DataTraveler Mini Slim sticking out the back.

Pad Thai

Watching the PAD protests on the streets of Bangkok is like watching the world's largest soap opera, except it's all happening in real life.

Two years ago, mass protests against the then prime minister Thaksin started because he sold shares of his company to Temasek tax free. Hello? Buying and selling stocks has always been tax free in Thailand. Thaksin is the owner of the company, so he has the right to do whatever he wants with his company. This year, mass protests against the current prime minister Samak started, uh, because the demonstrators didn't get who they wanted as the prime minister the last time around. How to get the prime minister to step down? Blame him for hosting a cooking show!

PAD apparently stands for People's Alliance for Democracy, I tried searching for PAD on the net but couldn't find anything useful. There are supposedly official websites and forums, but they're filled with pop-up ads and iframe viruses, which makes their official status somewhat questionable. I did get a lot of hits for Pad Thai though.