so cute

Just look at how cute this kid is.

It has been brought to my attention that I had not posted ridiculous quantities of pictures of Jack on the ol’ blog, and so here I start to remedy that. He’s 26 days old today.

Mum and Dad arrive in Chiang Mai tomorrow around lunch time, so we’re all looking forward to that. Also Rob W’s birthday - hope my present gets there on time.

My visa is officially expired now, and I am admitted until the 12-November. On the 11-Nov, I plan to cross a border and get a 30-day tourist entry stamp, which will see me through till 11-Dec, which is the day I leave Thailand to come home for Christmas. I suppose I could aim to spend one night in Myanmar to bring my expiry date to 12-Dec, which will give me a day’s breathing room, but I’m not sure yet: do I want to spend a night in Myanmar? Another option is to just fly to Singapore and then turn around and fly back. I think Singapore Airlines has flights from Chiang Mai to Singapore direct.

food porn: Joe’s Famous Burger at The Duke’s

Just look at this.

It’s Joe’s Famous Burger at my favourite restaurant in Chiang Mai - The Duke’s. It is described as such:

Blue cheese and bacon, grilled onions, lettuce, tomato and spicy horseradish mayonnaise, served on a soft bun with a choice of fresh cut fries, hand battered onion rings, green salad or coleslaw

The best technique I have found is to get it with french fries, and a side of coleslaw. You then eat the burger, then the pickle, then tip the coleslaw into the blue cheese drippings from the burger on the plate, apply tomato sauce to the fries, and eat the coleslaw and fries together to finish up.

Sometimes I also enjoy the apple pie, but this time couldn’t manage it.

And how about the bill?

Joe’s Famous … 195 baht
Coleslaw … 35 baht
Service … 23 baht
Tax … 16 baht
Total … 269 baht

There are two Duke’s now - one at the Night Bazaar and one just a couple of blocks away over the Iron Bridge. I usually go to the Night Bazaar location - which Blacky and I found completely by accident - I think the Iron bridge location is slightly cheaper, but the Night Bazaar location has less mosquitos and better aircon in a “newer” style layout.

stupid shockmarket

I should blog, as it’s been a while since I have.

The US-led economic meltdown is sucking hard. Shares are down of course, but so is the dollar. For the software business, any American customers who actually pay their bills is great, but for me personally living OS, the baht dropping from 33 to 22 baht/dollar effectively increases my cost of living by 33% unless my maths is wrong. Also, the hardware business is suffering with prices shifting between the time orders are placed and the time they’re invoiced. We’re having to contact some customers and tell them we’re unable to fill their order at the price they ordered at. Bleak stuff.

Rob’s long-awaited suit postage is finally updated status-wise on the Thailand Post website: dispatched from Sydney on Friday. Also some books I mailed to Andrew a week later seem to have been dispatched from Sydney on Friday as well. Ah surface mail. Next time I will know better.

I’ve been watching a show called Mad Men, concerning a Manhattan Advertising Agency in the 1960s. It’s really quite interesting, and very period: there’s a lot of smoking, a lot of drinking, and the women are treated pretty badly by the men in charge. I think it’s on in Australia on the ABC before or after The Hollowmen. Also, The Hollowmen is great. Hilarious show, with many characters you can recognize in real life.

The Amazing Race

I’ve been watching The Amazing Race, and man, I’ll tell ya - the American women competing on this show are really really narky and the guys are really really emo sensitive losers. It’s hilarious.

What else is new? This weekend Mint’s mum and younger sister visited - Mint’s mum ADORED Jack. Interestingly, Mint said that (prior to the visit) her Mum didn’t think we would be able to take care of Jack by ourselves. Usually in their culture, the grandparents pretty much raise the children and the parents go and work to earn the money, so I guess that tradition distilled into the philosophy that only old people can raise babies? Interesting anyway.

On Monday, we drove to Chiang Dao in a hired car. I had requested a baby seat for a 1 week old, but the baby seat we got was more like a 1 year old’s seat, so was useless. The car was a king-cab ute (ie, had 4 doors, two bucket seats in the front, one bench seat in the back) but Mint’s mum and Fern insisted on riding in the tray - that’s the most common way for them to be a passenger. Also, riding inside the car makes mum feel sick - I wonder if that’s just because she’s not used to it?

So imagine my stress-levels, dear reader, driving 50km on roads of various degrees of quality, up to 100km/h, with a 1 week old in his mother’s arms, no baby capsule, and an old woman and a 6 year old sitting in the back tray - both activities that we have had drilled into us since young as being very unsafe.

When we got to Chiang Dao, Mint’s mum took charge of Jack, Mint went to do paperwork, and I found an internet cafe and worked. When I’d finished work, I went back to the government building to see them, and had something to eat for lunch, and then waited another hour or two before Mint, exhausted, finally finished. Mint was wrecked - so much so that we apologized and paid for her mother’s Songtaew to her place rather than drive them ourself. We came straight home, Mint sleeping in the car, waking every few kilometers to adjust Jack in her arms, also asleep.

The next day, yesterday, Jack was a bit fractious which we were warned about after the car trip. He was a bit cranky this morning too, until Mint ordered me awake and to go pace around with him for a while. That set him right off to sleep, so 7am I popped him back into bed with Mint.

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.