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.

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:

Snow cancelled plenty of days when I was young (though 2 hour delays were the best because you didn’t have to make those yo) but natural conditions haven’t canceled much more feel in the last 8 years. MIT just wouldn’t cancel classes…except for that one record-breaking snow fall. Otherwise, you’re already in hell, what’s walking a mile in 8 inches of freezing slush?

Well that’s all changing for me because tomorrow’s TYPHOON DAY. No school, no work across the region.

Last week I got to see the Legong of Mahabrata @ the Ubud Palace, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. The group performing was Sekaa Gong Jaya Swara Ubud. It was balinese dance accompanied by gamelan. Gamelan is an Indonesian (Balinese and Javanese) music with tuned percussion instruments, instruments like (but not exactly) xylophones (metallophones), tuned gongs, cymbals, barrel drums (kendhang). Sometimes, like in the gamelan I saw, they also have fipple flutes and a two-stringed spike fiddle called a rebab. (It should be noted: gamelan is a set of instruments, not the players/ history. The Berlin Philharmonic is the people, not the particular instruments they play.)

The venue, the Ubud Palace, is a courtyard of a 16th century palace. Not to be flippant, but it’s sort of like making the Great American Music Hall a lot more historic and even more beautiful.

The group came in, some dancers and the gamelan players shaking these tuned bamboo rattles called anklung in addition to the barrel drums mentioned above. The players went to their seats and there was a pause before the music began.

Gamelan itself means hammer. That’s because most of the main instruments are struck with hammers of various sorts. The music often starts fairly simple and slow. One line on the metallophones and one on the cradled gongs. More lines come in. People with hammers are hitting the instruments with one hand and selectively damping them with the other. All this while amazing and tremendously precise dance was going on in in the middle of the U made by the instruments.

I was completely enthralled from beginning to end. I have to say, I’ve been to some great shows this year, some that I might even call “better” but quite possibly none that kept my attention as singularly as this one.

Gamelan “Gender” Wayang - Krepetan (mp3)

(I searched for a while I’m really not sure where you can get this CD other than in Bali. Amazon has other Balinese gamelan CDs, though.)

Gamelan Gong Kebjar - Hudjan mas (mp3) (buy)

My other music experience while on Bali was marching ensembles in a Balinese death parade and ceremony (amazing for many reasons, but I’ll just stick to the one here.)

They played similar instruments to the gamelan: tuned gongs, hanging gones, cymbals and barrel drums, but they also used whistles and their voices, even breaking into the ketjak rhythm for a moment. Here I was able to get right up up next to them and be almost surrounded by the sound. The tuned gongs were doing a slower rhythm while the cymbals were being hit together at a very fast pace, only to suddenly stop and all by thrust into the air. It was great.

It appears Dylan’s blogging again. This is good.

It’s probably not going to be as wildly popular or widely read as Tenderbutton but I expect it to be pretty good.

Taiwan’s possible bid for a UN seat is kind of a big deal here.

I’ve seen this banner on a number of buildings:

And yesterday, the world’s tallest building had a message on the side:

zoomed in:

Why didn’t anyone tell me that a young Red Sox pitcher pitched a no-hitter in his second major league game. Pretty cool.

The Time 100 (influential people list) is pretty interesting. I spent a lot more time with the Alt Time 100, a list compiled by a panel of “Xzibit, rapper and host of MTV’s Pimp My Ride; Bridget Marquardt, 1/3 of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend and star of E!’s Girls Next Door; Eddie Sanchez, UFC fighter; Tommy the Clown, krump dancer; Dr. Boogie, hairstylist and contestant on Bravo’s Shear Genius; Jimmy Jimmy Coco, spray tanner; Glenda Borden, party planner”. Here are some excerpts:

10. Hugh Hefner, editor
Everyone thought Hef should make the list. Then I explained that Bridget was one-third going out with him which made the panel very excited. If Bridget was two-thirds going out with Hef, I don’t think the panel could have taken it.

27. Mike Lazrdis, Blackberry founder
Tommy The Clown called him “a real life saver.” You can’t afford to be out of touch for a moment when you’re a krump dancer. That stuff breaks out anywhere, anytime.

45. Bono, singer
All that Africa stuff.

54. Monique, comedian
More good body image stuff. While not at all fat, the panel loves fat people. Though not enough to date them.

56. George Clooney, actor
The panel felt strongly about Darfur. The panel also felt strongly that the most important player in the Darfur crisis is George Clooney. The panel does not equate feeling strongly about something with reading about that something.

60. Magic Johnson, businessman
Xzibit thought that Magic has some secret cure for AIDS he wasn’t sharing and should be left off the list until he divulges his secret. Xzibit has strange thoughts about both medicine and the power of this list.

79. Howie Mandel, TV host
Without him, you’d just be looking at models holding suitcases. You need the Howie visuals to make you long for the suitcase models. It’s the yin-yang concept.

I’m a tree! Bischofia javanica. We’ll forgive the namer for forgetting an ‘f’. From now on you can call me Bishop Wood or Autumn Maple.

The Weekly World News is done and some respectable publications are doing favorable obits.

Just today I went to a place that I swore was Chinatown!

On the bus, seen on a young woman presumably going to work:

WHAT DOES “FUCK” MEAN?
F = FOREVER I LOVE YOU
U = UNHAPPY WITHOUT YOU
C = CARE ABOUT YOU
K = KISS YOU WITH A HUG
I GIVE YOU BIGGEST F.U.C.K.

Oh, Taipei, how you amuse me.

I could easily spend 3 months being amused by the signs here. Here are just a few I’ve seen.

[Some of the signs are hard to read in this size. Click for larger versions.]

Taiwan

There are signs everywhere, many of them lighted. They can easily fill your view.

Beef and beer, how can you go wrong?

Lobster and beer, is the only improvement, I guess.

On some signs, the iconography is unusual:

On some signs the language is–how should I say this–awkward. (Note, the screen they’re referring to has never been on that I’ve noticed).

Yes, they go fast, I get it! 39 m/ min fast!

Announced Tuesday along with the iPod Touch and the other things is the best designed cake in the world. It can hold 8 billion songs. 8…billion…songs…

Is the skin eating food or is the skin the food? I’m confused.

There is something about chicken restaurants. Thumbs up! You’re about to eat me!

“The best saporous fried chicken in Taiwan”. Where’s my dictionary? Is that a word?

“Super chicken” is the newest superhero…you can eat.

I know where I’ll go next time I need some mockery.

Hello! Damper Baby!

“Deep flied pork cutlet”. I’m not putting words in anyone’s mouth.

Some bring out the giggly high schooler in me.

Summer BEER Rock Festival

Beer
SUMMER
Rock
Festival
ACTIVE
->Activity Girl With Dream
Active girl has inside herself to be confident, fulfilled, happy and healthy. Active girl Power! is the power to speak your mind, to stand up for yourself, and to know what’s right for you. We want every girl to know: you are unique, you are valuable, and with your Girl Power! you can succeed. The future is yours.

Indonesia

No “tipping” <wink><wink> Ah yes, I see.

The only I saw can be disturbed aviation safety was me taking the photo of the sign.

Car maintenance shop, but in Indonesian!

Sort of like a Walmart but in Indonesia.

From street vendors you can get a thing where it’s a rice sausage (rice in sausage casing) cut open with a regular (meat) sausage placed inside, cut open and spices and things put inside. It is cheap and good.

Hey Song Sarsparilla soda is pretty good. Sort of like root beer but a bit more tea-like.

They have strange flavors of chips.

They also had Short Rib Doritos, initiating a test like those done for previous weird Doritos flavors. Full experiment after the jump (at the bottom of the post)

In Fugi and I think other fishing villages you can pick live seafood from buckets and they’ll cook it 10 feet away and serve it to you. We picked out some mantis shrimp, a fish, some mussels, oysters and some small fish. It ended up being way too much food, of course, but it was great. The mussels were among the best I’ve had.

Doritos “Short Ribs” flavor experiment after the jump.

(more…)

It’s a bit late, but here’s the August mixtape. My excuses include moving to a new continent. Also, I did offer up a short mix earlier.

You can download the zip file with the following:
1. mp3s of the songs
2. liner notes (pdf)
3. playlist files (iTunes txt file and an m3u file)

(for the iTunes file, simply import all the songs to your library and then go to file->import and then select the song list (the txt file). you should now have the 2007august playlist in your iTunes with all the songs in the correct order).

If you want to read the liner notes before downloading the whole thing, they’re here. This one includes a lot of great indie pop/ rock and some oldies, including a lot of new finds (of new and old bands), CDs I’ve had forever and new purchases. Bands include Oh No! Oh My!, Bottom of the Hudson, Ted Leo, and Superchunk.

Adrian’s August 2007 mix tape (rapidshare link [1] with zip file, alternate link)
(I’m trying this because hosting the zip was a significant bandwidth drain. Let me know your thoughts on it.)

As always this’ll be up for a limited time (~1 week), so grab it now.

If you like the artists or songs, I suggest supporting them by buying their music, going to a show, buying merchandise from them or at least telling other people about them.

[1] If you’re having trouble with the rapidshare link, here’s what you do, step-by-step. 1) Click on the link. 2) scroll down and click “FREE” 3) chose a mirror (or you can leave it) 4) input the number/ letters they show in the graphic into the box 5) click on “download via…”

First photo album is online.

Yesterday I went to (what is officially still but not really) the world’s tallest building, Taipei 101. I like the architecture; it’s nicer than many of the very tall buildings. Cooler yet is that it has the fastest elevator at 16.83 m/s. It goes up to the top in 37 seconds. Awesome. Also it has the world’s largest tuned mass damper. They call it “damper baby”. It weighs 650 tons and can swing 1.5m in really bad winds or an earthquake. Good job, damper baby!

In other geek news, I saw a sign at the MRT that said something like “Beware. This escalator runs fast, as 37 m/ minute.” Yeah, they stated the actual speed (even though the unit is silly.)

Speaking of MRT, I “figured it out” last night and today. It’s a fast and efficient system, from the looks of it. Quiet, cheap. It’s also packed but given the other qualities, I’ll take it. Oh, and the tokens you get have RFID or some sort of other RF tags. You just swipe them to enter. It’s pretty cool.

There are 7-11s everywhere. I have been places where I am standing at one and could walk to two others each in a minute. It’s tremendous. It’s like Dunkin Donuts in Boston or Starbucks in Seattle. There are both of those here too, but not as prevalent. Mister Donut has a one-up on Dunkin Donut here it seems.

The National Palace Museum’s collection is amazing. Pieces from just about every era of China. I was amazed by some of the craftsmanship. Elsewhere I was amazed by the detail on some of the 3000+ year old pieces.

Went to Danshui for the evening and had my first night market food. Just cheap food from street vendors. You get small amounts from a few and that’s dinner. Little taiwanese tacitos, squid grilled before my eyes on a stick and “stinky tofu”. It tasted pretty good and I’m not vomiting yet.

This city is very bright and busy. I’m not sure if that’ll get old.

A common sink/ toilet maker here is Toto. Every time I see one of their products I can’t help but think: “I bless the rains down in Africa”.

(bottle reads “BIO Technology Fiber Drink”)

(I’m not the one enforcing stereotypes.)