adrian is rad

I like sandwiches. I pack a sandwich four days a week for lunch back in the US. I make up recipes for sandwiches. I like places that make good sandwiches.

I haven’t had a sandwich in over a month—it’s been a month and a day since I left the states—and I really wanted one for lunch today. I don’t know of many places that have sandwiches here, so I just had to go to Subway, which is the first American food (or maybe any sort of American) chain that I’ve patronized since I’ve got here.

I had such a stupid self-conscious-that-I’m-a-corporate-whore-(sometimes)-and-don’t-really-mind grin on my face when I was ordering my foot long turkey breast sub.

[Also, I’ve misspelled sandwich sandwhich a shameful number of times on this blog.]

While my Chinese skillz are coming along slowly, my gestures and other non-verbal communication skillz are advancing rapidly.

Yesterday, I went to the post office to get some stamps, a relatively simple task if you know the language. I had one letter to mail to the U.S. and wanted to get five more stamps because I’ll have a few more things to send over the next few months. Getting the letter I was sending stamped was no problem, but the other five proved a little more difficult. But as I said, I’m getting good at the gestures and the problem was soon resolved.

I also bought a bike yesterday from a man who didn’t speak any English.

Yeah, you’re going to want me on your charades team.

Brace yourself, lest its sweetness blind you.

Sure it’s rusted, the kickstand won’t stay up when I’m riding, the seat doesn’t go high enough and the seat actually leaves part of itself on my pants when I get off of it, but it’s a pretty smooth ride and cost me a total of about $22.

Driving into Ubud from Kuta when I was in Bali, we saw a lot of floats in the street. We asked the driver and it turns out that there was a parade that day commemorating the day. We got various stories about who it was for, whether it was for anyone at all. It was an annual parade, or it was for the husband of a woman we talked to, or it was for a baby that had died a couple weeks prior. Or it might have been a combination, a planned parade but when the baby or the husband died, they became part of it.

The plan, we learned, was to parade these floats about a kilometer and then burn the floats. As it was tradition, all the men, including my group, all wore sarongs.

Some floats prepared on the road.

Everyone turned out, it seemed.

It took quite a bit of coordination to lift each of the floats.

There was a lot of noise and excitement as the parade started.

On some of the floats, younger boys road up top.

There was a music group from the local school marching along with instruments from the gamelan tradition.

People who didn’t walk along the route with the parade watched as it went past.

At the end of the parade route at the cemetery area, all the floats were lined up around the edge of the area. Every family in town prepared an offering which were then placed in the floats before they were burned.

After a lull in the excitement there was a lot of yelling off to one side. Suddenly I realized that the locals had dug up some (apparently recently buried) bodies. Wrapped in thatched blankets, they were rushed over and placed in the floats amid a flurry of yells.

This man was the man with the matches, one presumes an important person on this day.

One float with offerings lined up around it and in the back.

Everything goes up in flames.

Man Charged With Beheading Hotel’s Duck:

Police said Clark — an auditor in the Office of Inspector General — tore the duck’s head off near the hotel’s atrium pond Saturday and then told witnesses: “I’m hungry. I’m gonna eat it.”

“It sounds like there was quite a bit of alcohol involved,” police Sgt. John Wuorinen said.

I first heard about the mounting protests by monks in Bangkok. Considering Thailand is a neighboring country to Myanmar, I was concerned that it might just be a region news story. I’m glad it’s not.

I am concerned about the fact that monks are being beaten. The countries Minister of Religion (or something like that) even said “If the monks go against the rules and regulations in the authority of Buddhist teachings, we will take action under existing laws.” Wow.

The images of so many monks marching is pretty powerful:

Alright, don’t have much time here, so I’ll just mention a couple things.

All Watted out I’ve seen about 15 temples (Wats) in the last two days. I’ll all Wat-ted out. There were some very impressive ones.

How fucked up is this? A lot of the temples were in Ayuthaya. It’s the old capital about 60km north of Bangkok. I was taking the train to get there (I should note: 15 Baht, about 50 cents). (Also, the seats were wooden. And no A/C.) Not very far out of Bangkok the train stops. And stays stopped for about an hour. I thought it was an engine problem.

Eventually I got out and looked. The train had run over someone. Curiosity really did kill the cat this time as I didn’t feel very good after seeing the body under the train (and again after they’d cleared it to the side and we went past).

He got all Thai-ed up in the ropes I went to see some Thai boxing (Muay Thai). It was pretty cool. They punch, kick, knee, headlock and all sorts of stuff. Possibly more interesting was the very intricate and complicated set of hand signals people used up in the peanut gallery to denote how much and who they wanted to bet on. I saw a lot of money change hands. In a place where you can stay a night for 200 Baht (about $6.65) and eat lunch for 40 Baht (about $1.35), people were placing 1000 to 8K or 9K on single fights and there were 9 in the night. Pretty absurd.

You may or may not know that high school joke, but the answer is Bangkok, which is where I am for the (long) weekend. It’s kind of crazy.

I just had some outrageous chicken masaman and chicken metaba and rotti. Outrageous. It made my day better.

I’m staying in a place for under 7 dollars a night. It has a clean sheet and pillow case and I have a private room. And the people who run the place are super helpful. Like draw you maps of exactly where you need to go helpful. I like them. It doesn’t have a ton else going for it, but it’s good enough.

I went to a market today that quite possibly had 1000 stalls. It was very extensive. I got lost a few times. Good thing I had a map of the market.

Tomorrow I’m hitting some serious ruins (Ayuthaya–I would wikipedia link it for you but it’s too slow here) tomorrow. I’m not sure how I’m getting there and back yet. Maybe bus. Or train. I’m hoping the front desk/ guest house-running people will be super helpful again on that one.

This isn’t a giant city, but it has a lot of traffic. That limits what’s reasonable to do. I’m not going to be a particularly good recommender of things to do here, I think, because I’ll have seen relatively little.

Also, my foot hurts, ranging from a little to a lot. I might get a foot massage. It probably won’t help, but my other foot will probably feel relaxed afterwards.

I didn’t find how to do this online so I thought I’d put up instructions once I figured out how.

I had a friend who has a Mac that he wanted to use as a file server on his local network, which has multiple macs and Windows computer. The server Mac has multiple hard drives. Drag-and-drop and saving directly to any of those hard drives was important.

He’s got a (powerpc) Mac running OS X, 10.4.6 with 3 or 4 hard drives in it. Let’s say they are named MainDrive, Backup_001, Backup_002 and Backup_003 and the username that he logs into the server with is ServerUser.

So to map the main disk from windows, it’s not a problem. Steps as follows:
1) On the Mac: share stuff (windows sharing) in control panel->sharing. Note the IP address it gives you here (or find it elsewhere). In this case it
was 192.168.0.3 (use the one that shows up on your machine)
2) On windows: go to windows->explorer->map network drive
3) drive name: (whatever you want)
location:

\\192.168.0.3\ServerUser

(the admin user for the “server” mac is ServerUser, change this as necessary)

4) click “log in as different user”
user:ServerUser
pass: [whatever]

The other disks, you need to do something tricky and make links from the main drive to your separate drives. These are called symbolic links or symlinks.
A) open Terminal (applications->utilities->Terminal)
B) type ‘ls’ and enter. make sure you’re in your home directory
(should look like the same folders when you click on your home directory in Finder)
C) type the following line

ln -s ../../Volumes/[drive name]/ [drive name]

for instance

ln -s ../../Volumes/Backup_001/ Backup_001

D) repeat C for each remaining drive on the Mac (Backup_002 and Backup_003 in this case)

[Note, if you’ve done the above, 1-4 and A-D you should now be able to click on the networked drive on the PC and see the secondary drives within that. If this is good enough, stop here. My friend wanted to map each drive separately, which requires a little bit more.]

Then go to the windows machine and repeat steps 1-4 above except for step 3 type for the location:

\\192.168.0.3\[username]\[drivename]

for instance:

\\192.168.0.3\ServerUser\Backup_001

Repeat as necessary for all of your backup drives.

Now each drive will be mapped to the windows machine separately and drag-and-drop and saving directly to those drives should be possible.

When one or the other machine is rebooted, the windows machine might show a red ‘X’ by that network drive. Once both are on again, you should be able to simply double-click the drive and opening it should reconnect the drive.

So your Elsafe hotel safe doesn’t want to lock. It keeps saying that it’s “open” when it’s closed? The batteries probably need to be replaced.

Here is the instruction manual if you want to read more. Replacing the batteries is pretty simple.

Update: I am not associated with Elsafe. Please direct questions to them or read the instruction manual linked above.

In the foreground is obviously a 7-11. If you click and enlarge you’ll see more orange and green in the distance. This is yet another 7-11 across the street and less than a block away. That’s how many 7-11s there are here.

Jakarta Airport (CGK Soekarno-Hatta Jakarta International Airport). On the far right is a green “Nothing to Declare” customs line. Here people are lining up and having all their luggage x-rayed by customs. On the far left is a green “Nothing to Declare” customs line. Here people are walking freely through with no customs officials. There is nothing to determine if there is a difference or if people should or can use one or the other. I used the line without officials.

Bay Area bargain restaurants. I’ll have to check it out when I get back.

Very funny anti-movie piracy spoof: