One thing I love to do when I go to Bangkok is go to the movies. Bangkok cinemas are properly sized temples within which one may worship the Gods and Goddesses of the Silver Screen. Some even have reclining chairs and a select few offer waiter service. Yes, you’re expected to stand at the beginning of each movie to salute the King. A small price to pay compared to the unpleasant shoe boxes that pass for “movie houses” in our little town.

So it was with high expectations that I opened today’s newspaper, looking to see what movies from my want list would be playing. No Country For Old Men? (yes, have seen it but on a big screen it would be even better) Nope. There Will Be Blood? fuggedabouddit. Charlie Wilson’s War? Not so much.

Instead it would appear that the entire city is having a Film Festival now, the theme being “The Worst Reviewed Western Films of the Year.” The choices are:

National Treasure 2
Aliens Vs Predators 2
Alvin & the Chipmunks
Elizabeth 2

The few that are of borderline interest to me are:

I Am Legend
Across the Universe
Bee Movie

But none enough to make me conform to a schedule, take a train, wait in line, etc.

Opening on January 10th is Mr Woodcock, a movie so bad that I couldn’t make it all the way through the DVD rip I’d downloaded off the internet.

Pirate DVDs here cost about 100 Thai baht (at least if you’re white). That’s about three times the price of the same thing in Shenzhen and even more expensive than if you buy from the fake deaf guy who circles the bars in Wanchai at night.

Apparently, drinking makes you gay. Via new sf blog io9 (and why an sf blog is linking to this is a mystery to me), scientists at Penn State have tested animal sexual behavior under the influence of alcohol.

…. male fruit flies, which typically court females, also actively court males when they are given a daily dose of ethanol. ….A second discovery is that repeated exposure to ethanol causes male flies to engage in more inter-male courtship …

Please do not look to this blog to make some politically incorrect but probably funny jokes about drunk gay FRUIT flies.

==============================

Meant to mention, yesterday flew on one of Cathay’s newly outfitted Boeing 777s. The seats in business class are all facing at an angle, rather than straight ahead, enforcing privacy even if you don’t want it.

Back in steerage economy, the new seats have backs which do not recline. Instead when you push the button, your seat slides forward. So the guy in front of you can’t destroy your laptop when he decides to go into nap mode after a meal. Not entirely comfortable though. The foot rest is a band of strong cloth rather than what you may be used to, extremely uncomfortable to me. The seats are a bit wider (9 seats across rather than 10) but this is partially negated by the fact that each seat belt now has this huge padded airbag attached to it. If the plane slams into the side of a mountain or goes into a screaming dive from 35,000 feet, not sure what good an airbag will be. Book/magazine storage is now under the seat instead of in front of you – and when you slide your seat forward you can’t get at it.

Also, they couldn’t get the video system working properly during the flight. For lack of anything better to watch, I watched the boot-up messages each time they rebooted. Their system is using Linux, and I saw all these error messages not only related to non-existent files and directories but also related to programming errors. What kind of tests does their IT department do before moving stuff into production? From looking at this it would seem the answer is “none.”

Oops, time to go to the dentist!

First, check lyrics to David Bowie “Panic in Detroit,” do they fit this situation?

He looked a lot like Che Guevara,
drove a diesel van
Kept his gun in quiet seclusion,
such a humble man
The only survivor of the National People’s Gang
Panic in Detroit, I asked for an autograph
He wanted to stay home, I wish someone would phone

Um, nope.

Be Bop Deluxe “Panic in the World”? Lyrics not online.

Anyway, next section is geek stuff. If that bores you, please skip to a couple of questions at the end of this post.

Managed to beautifully fuck up my laptop last night. I have this virtual CD ROM program called Magic Disc which works well within certain limitations, but I always have to remember to disable it before shutdown or reboot because something in it screws up the booting process on the laptop (works fine on my desktop PC). I keep it because it allows me to have one of my many addictions (a ten-plus year old computer version of the board game Risk) while traveling.

So installed it but it would not complete the installation. Portions of the laptop were frozen. Couldn’t access Magic Disc to disable or uninstall it. Tried killing various processes in Task Manager, no luck. Finally, when all else fails, reboot. And that’s when all hell broke loose, at least in a limited manner.

I simply couldn’t log in to my PC. The fingerprint scanner software wasn’t coming up and I hadn’t logged in with a password in so long I couldn’t remember what my password was. No matter, because each time I tried a traditional login, the PC informed me that only an administrator could login that way.

I spent the night, well part of it anyway, wondering what I was going to do if I couldn’t get this going. I’m not 100% on vacation while here. I do have to get some corporate work done. And will probably have a new BC column due one of these days. And just general web-surfing, planning the next segment of my trip and so on. Email at least still accessible via both Blackberry and iPhone.

As you might have guessed, after sending a panicked email to the help desk, last night I drank semi-heavily to temporarily not think about this.

I’m not even traveling with the DVD-ROM drive for the laptop. The best plan I could come up with, after about 8 glasses of Johnny Walker and soda, was to take the PC to the local computer center, buy a pirate copy of Windows to tide me over, and find some shop with a USB DVD ROM drive to do the install for me. At least this way I’d have internet and access to my files until getting home, even though I’d probably lose the ability for a VPN connection back to corporate servers. A viable plan? Luckily, I won’t need to find out.

This morning, the phone went off early, my friend at the help desk getting back to me first thing. He supplied the admin login for my laptop. And it still didn’t work! I wasn’t able to change the login domain from something corporate to just the local PC.

Finally I had a flash of inspiration. I used the admin login in safe mode. Yippee! I was in. I could then uninstall the offending program. Several minor hiccups along this path but finally successful, on the next reboot everything came back normally. (Hence my ability to post to the blog.)

This does now mean two weeks of not playing Risk – each game takes at least 30 minutes, a most excellent brainless time killer. Solitaire and Hearts not the same.

So, no more heart attack, things are calm and happy.

Questions:

1 – Anyone know of a good, reliable (and hopefully free) virtual CD drive program for the PC?

2 – Any recommendations on where to buy knock-off watches in Bangkok that are better than the crap they sell in the night markets, equivalent to the “AA” quality (or whatever they are called) one finds in certain shops in Shenzhen or other places in China?

3 – Any of my readers ever go to Ko Samet or Ko Chang? Any thoughts on that or other Thailand beach/island reached by taxi/ferry (rather than airplane)? I do not want to go to Pattaya or Hua Hin. My copy of Lonely Planet “Thailand’s Islands and Beaches” is from 2004 and I assume is somewhat outdated.