RTA

Sukhumvit: 2am

It’s just before 2am in Bangkok. The sidewalks on Sukhumvit are busier now than they were at 2pm, and everyone is concerned with the order of the hour. Beet-nosed expats slough on down a side soi toward their homes. Sweaty tourists with bleary eyes and sweat dribbling down their necks laugh at each other and hit [...]

Down the rabbit hole…

Over the past two weeks I have had the very interesting, and in some ways motivating, experience of dropping into an “Alice in Wonderland” world where things are not as they seem, people agree to battle and then run off at the sight of something scary, and arbitrary shrieks of “Off with his head!” ring out [...]

Protocol?

The outrage from conservative America over Obama’s bows to Asian leaders borders on the ridiculous. First of all, if we felt secure about our role and standing in the world community I’m quite sure that the reaction would be much more muted, after all, it was with President Eisenhower here.

Eisenhower bows to Pope John XXIII

Or [...]

Bad Sushi!

Ok, this is some stinky fish. I wanted to try the my.hamachi.cc website with our Hamachi network, so went to go create an account there. Only I can’t, because I won’t accept the license agreement for a license that is [...]

Inherent Conservatism

I surprised myself recently — FB friends may have seen a note to that effect. What surprised me is that I am significantly more conservative in my investing profile that I thought I was. Ask around and my guess is that the people who know me best (Although not Jan when I asked. After this long, [...]

The PITA Factor

There’s a cost to being a pain in the ass (PITA). Whether we are on the cost generation side or cost bearing side, we all know this. A lot of businesses, however, don’t explicitly work these costs into their business model. By not doing so they implicitly create a system where their good customers (Low PITA [...]

A Good Thing

The spam trollers will hit this, bounce to any one of 3.2 trillion randomly generated pages, and then start downloading an infinite number of completely random e-mail addresses. Once their database of e-mail addresses has been sufficiently polluted, it becomes unusable due to the high number of resources required to successfully send e-mails, and therefore it [...]

XP Update Woes

Something strange happened just before the holidays and XP (Pro) became very unstable. At the same time, our router stopped working completely — no power-on light — and three hard disks developed sector errors, so my guess is that we had a spike that fried the router and crashed/rebooted XP in such a way that things [...]

Three Cheers for Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport

I don’t know when this started, but PHX now has full and free wireless access across the entire airport. I just read this morning that Denver will do the same thing starting this week, but with advertisements that will need to be clicked through in order to get to the web. So be it — nothing [...]

Adventures in VoIP: SPA2002-ER

I’ve been tossing around the idea of setting up an Opdahls-only VoIP network for a while. We live in Tokyo (Although I travel 50+% of the time), my brother and his family are down near Los Angeles, my sister and her family are in the Portland, Oregon area, and my parents split their time between Colorado [...]