happy birthday miss R

happy birthday today to my favourite person living in england. I think … I’m yet to meet all of them.

I have a cold

Hello all. I have a new love … and I’m not talking about Jack as you may have expected, who is an old love compared to my new love … Tiffy FU cold tablets. Each tablet contains 500mg Paracetamol, 2mg of Chlorpheniramine Maleate, and 30mg Pseudoephedrine. I bought a box of 25x 4 tablet sachets for 250 baht, which makes the value per sachet about AU$0.35. Take that spam filters!

I have to admit that Mint and I both wondered what the mother approximately two houses away was doing so inneffectually with her new baby when the crying dramatically started in the wee hours. The answer, I now know, is changing his/her nappy. Babies apparently aren’t big fans, which suprised me … I’d prefer to be out of crappy drawers asap myself. Also not big fans of the bath, and not being fed immediately upon noticing they are hungry.

Jack in pictures

Jack Macquarie

Jack Macquarie was born this morning 10:49am GMT+7, weighing 3800 grams. He and Mint are both doing great, but Thailand being Thailand, she couldn’t hold the baby until 8pm (I had to leave at 7pm, so I don’t know if she’s got him yet) and I couldn’t take a picture in the nursery for some reason.

happy Woo-day to birth!

Woo’s birthday today, and for the record, so far he is not sharing it with a little person in Thailand. Well, none that I know of, anyway.

Hired a car for 3 days on Saturday, so Saturday morning we went shopping, picking up stuff for Mint’s mum, and stuff for Jack noi. It was wierd to drive again, and even though Thai traffic is moderately terrifying, it’s a lot easier than it looks.

Sunday morning we headed off to Mint’s mum’s place. First false start was me not bringing my passport, so we diverted home to grab that, just in case. Second false start was Mint forgetting her ID, so we diverted home to grab that, too. Then we were off!

Several toilet stops later, we were there! I was actually pretty impressed by the house, and it wasn’t too alien to my sensibilities. I already knew about there being no hot water, but was touched at bath time to discover Mint’s mum had boiled a bucket of water in the front fire for me to use in the shower. They also had just had power connected that very day, so it was nice to have a fan to sleep with.

an email to a recently addicted skyrates junky:

JL, a friend of mine and reader of this blog, has recently confessed his addiction to Skyrates after reading about it on my blog. I decided to jot down some of my skyrates history for posterity:

I had a Mastiff, then a Cyclops, and then a Lancaster, which I loved. I then tried a Cetacea, then a Mantis. I then went back to a Nomad I think, that was virtually impossible to combat with, just one rear arc. It had a trading kit and a performance kit iirc, which brought it’s CKPH (which is Cargo Kilograms per Hour) to a quite respectable number - the highest configuration possible in a T2 plane I think.

Then I had an ill-fated experience with a triple-kitted Lancaster, which wasn’t as awesome as I remember when it was the original non-kitted version, but in reality it was almost certainly better than the non-triple kitted version
I had my best experience yet with a Vengeance, perf kit and combat kit, mad props, a large ammo feed and wings B. Actually it was even better when I had the wings A and the armor piercing rounds instead of the wings b and large ammo feed, but I kept running out of ammo. It was ultimately the ammo that made me decide to get a Bolo. And it’s top speed.

So I got my “Perfect Bolo” configuration completed:
http://lobachevsky.net/mechanic/compare.php?p=25&u=10,17,40,43,42,12&s_c=5&s_r=5
but 50 cargo wasn’t enough to run the missions I wanted so I was looking for something else.

I happened to be at Uurwerk when unobtainium dropped, so quickly sold the Bolo, bought a Leviathan, and filled it with Unobtainium. What a capitalist. The week that followed was the most boring skyrates I’ve ever played - it took 17+ hours to get anywhere, and I could only sell 20x crates at a time (with a cargo hold of 675 crates) before the price dropped too hard to be worth it.

So I finally got so sick of it, I went back to the Bolo. Unfortunately in the process, I lost so much money that I couldn’t afford the 2-kit version I had tweaked myself into. And with the 50 cargo not being enough, I now believe happiness looks like this:
http://lobachevsky.net/mechanic/compare.php?p=25&u=36,17,10,21,40,12&s_c=5&s_r=5
which is what I’m working towards, but that may change at any moment.

I had a Seahawk with my alt, “Squeek”. The only problem with it is the no engine slots, but they’ve all got a problem, that’s what makes the game so interesting - it’s a billion tradeoffs working against each other.  At the time I started Squeek I was running very boring long-haul trades in the nomad, just getting a bankroll together to get something else. That’s why I started Squeek and made him have a more intense experience - more combat, combat planes, combat skills etc. As I shifted my main character towards the more immersive combat play, I moved squeek more into a trading role, just gathering a bankroll to buy a monster plane.

Also Leyton plays a bit too, but for him a Leviathan would be a good choice because of how much trading he does, and how little time he’s got. That’s another interesting angle.

made it to Chiang Mai

ok, to quickly summarize, we have now made it to Chiang Mai and partially unpacked. We were booked in a sleeper carraige on the train, but with the latest civil unrest the trains were all cancelled so we had to catch a bus which was far less … pleasant.

Anyway, we’re here.