Kiteboarding
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

This is why i have been neglecting the journal and the flickr account and absolutely everything else!

I think I can officially call myself a kiteboarder now. i’ve spent pretty well every day for the last several weeks at the beach either on the water or waiting for the wind. I can ride upwind with ease and I kicked a two meter jump today which I landed perfectly.

Arjan, a dutch kiteboarder who is leaving the island tomorrow, waded into the water and risked his camera to take this. He was in ‘take a bunch of pictures in a row’ mode to take this so the resolution is particularly low. Still, I think it’s a killer pic.

Some friends lent us a copy of “eragon” (subtitle: The First Chapter of the Inheritance Trilogy), which we were bored enough to watch tonight. We probably wouldn’t have even bothered, but the pirate dvd packaging made it sound just too good to miss. The quote on the back:

The things that Eragon has going for it don’t count — once again, the difference between a good film and a bad one is almost always the script. And the book is just too derivative to take seriously. – David Bezanson

It was indeed one of those “so bad it’s funny” movies, ala Battlefield Earth or The Mummy. We spent the entire time calling the characters by their Star Wars alternates, because in every case there was one. Betcha it turns out Luke (I mean Aragorn.. err, Eragon)’s boistrous princess love interest is a blood relative. The culture, sets, races, costumes, etc, are all ripped from LoTR.. except for the dragon which would be straight out of the Pern books if you added an “-eth” to her name. Terrible directing and just shit-poor dialogue; even Jeremy Irons as Obi-wan and John Malkovich as Emperor Palpatine couldn’t do a thing for it.

The only good thing about this movie is that for once the rest of the world saw what was obvious to me & Colin. It scored a whopping 15% on Rotten Tomatoes and just about every critic panned it. Yay! Kids deserve better than such terribly written recycled crap. Warn your little cousins and neices and nephews: Eragon SUX!

Aww, I just read the author was only fifteen when he started the first book. Well, I guess it’s hard to blame him then; everybody writes dumb derivative junk when they’re fifteen. But how did it get published?? Oh, his parents own a publishing company! I guess the movie producer was some college buddy of his dad’s, and his richass uncle shelled out a few mil for marketing. For shame people! Hopefully the author’s writing improves in time (or he gives up; yes they put out a movie and he’s not even done writing the third book). It seems he’s destined for success with or without any real talent.

Seafood
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Yesterday I had my first go at *squeaks* topless tanning!. Well yeah, we’ve seen ladies going it ‘european style’ on just about every beach, but to the Thais this is unimaginably rude (and illegal) behavior; misewell go take a shit at a shrine.

So we found a nice secluded beach near Thongsala to go swimming. It’s one of the few undeveloped beaches left on this half of the island, and the land is for sale, or rent or something. (Sure it’s way out of our price range, but its hard not to at least think about it.) We swam and played around the gorgeous big boulders there, and I’m now the proud owner of some borderline-sunburned titties!

Colin’s out kiteboarding again after a few days of no wind, and I’m back to the Beebles. The game is coming along steady but there is still so much to do; I’m worried I might run out of dev time before I get it to a showable state. At Colin’s suggestion I’m switching to a 100% Flash interface (admin tools are still in JSP). Flash Remoting’s kind of a dream to use; you can call Java functions and synch up ActionScript objects with your Java ones. I even found an open source connector (OpenAMF) to use instead of Macromedia’s pricy solutions.

Colin said the other day that he envies my ability to rewrite things. Usually I that’d be like saying I’m good at fucking up, but this game is such a learning excerise that it doesn’t feel like time wasted. Plus, jumping in without spending a month planning (which would have been the right move, obviously) means the project couldn’t get caught in the planning stage like so many things I do. ;)

Oh yeah and we added seafood to our cooking finally. The lady in this picture is picking out some prawns for us, that I foolishly left until the next morning to clean. Still turned out okay but I won’t make the same mistake next time. Today for lunch I made rice-cooker-curry; just threw it all in there together and let’er rip. Could have used some raisins but I don’t think Colin will agree.

Hey hey.

This is a map of the internet in Thailand: http://iir.ngi.nectec.or.th/internet/map/current.html

See all those blue circles (there are 20 blue circles with a bunch of lines comming in and out of them for those too lazy to click on the link) those are proxies where ISPs are legaly required to route all Thai traffic in and out of in order to censor (mildly) the intertubes.

See wikipedia uses your proxy ip to enforce bans. Consider this fact and the fact that everyone in Thailand is split among 20 proxy servers and guess how long my IP stays un-banned at a stretch. Shitty.

On the bright side the talk page for my IP is pretty amusing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:203.147.0.48

Also, quickly: I haven’t updated the flickr page in a while. This isn’t because I haven’t been taking pictures. It is because I have been taking shitty pictures.

note: this is not a blog

I am now the proud owner of one very large kite (actually two).

After spending some time thinking about the possibilities for the future I bought a rig. Among the key considerations: kiteboarding beaches in Tokyo are accessible via public transit, there are large and active communities in Van and Vic, February is the best month for kitesurfing on Koh Phangan, and whenever the wind is up my heart starts to beat out of my chest until I strap a kite to it.

So Woot Woot. I spent all day hangin under my kite. Well, I spent more time walking up the beach because I still suck at kiteboarding and can’t go upwind yet. But after a solid 4 or 5 hours today I have improved an order of magnatude. I predict in the next few days I will be riding upwind and that will be awesome.

Although I find being bad at something is often as fun as being good at it. Especially when that thing is really hard. It’s kind of nice having that clear goal ahead and knowing you just have to put your head down and try and try and try until it starts to work.

In fact I have a theory about why sucking at something is so much fun: because the best part of games, sports, whatever is learning them and getting better. And when you’re really bad at something you’re usually learning at a tremendous rate.

So yay for sucking at things because every time you fail you get to have the fun of guessing why.