December 30, 2003
For the Record
I woke up at 2:45AM today and proceeded immediately to the refrigerator where, in the course of ten minutes, I consumed:
10x Ferrero-Roche Chocolates
2x Granola Bars
1x Roll
4x Generic Kraft 'Singles'
3x 12oz glasses of milk
I think the only way I ate that much in such short time was that my stomach nervous system was still asleep and couldn't register that I had just filled it with a kilogram of garbage.
Needless to say it was painful to sleep on my stomach and I felt hideous this morning.
December 29, 2003
TASK FORCE DAGGER: The Hunt for Bin Laden
Just finished Task Force Dagger: The Hunt for Bin Laden. Have to say it's one of the better military/special-operations books I've read. Its principal focus is on the use of Green Berets to destroy the Taliban in Afghanistan after September 11th, 2001. Why this book is so much better than many other special operations books I've read is that it delivers more details than it promises. A lot of times book blurbs get you drooling, bragging that you'll be let into the bowels of the hitherto unknown top-secret black-ops missions, but by the time you've finished it, you've spent an agonizing three hundred pages choking through endless chapters of all the political and administration hurdles it took to authorize the mission, and whatever juicy details are left you've heard about already, somewhere else. There are a few exceptions, books that offer fresh information and interesting insights, and this, thankfully is one of them.
Probably a lot of the success is attributable to the authors' pedigree. Robin Moore has been writing about the Green Berets since 1964. In December 2001 he went to Afghanistan and was there, observing and talking to these people as history was occuring. Co-author J. K. Idema is a Green Beret who fought with the Northern Alliance for ten months and "had extensive experience with the British SAS in the 1970s and 1980s." The third writer, Chris Thompson hails from a military family and is a journalism graduate.
The book starts out on the right foot, knowledgeable authors, a compelling story (essentially a few hundred Green Berets won the war in Afghanistan), and decently lean prose. Each chapter of the book is allocated to one of the "Tiger Teams" who were dumped into various hellholes of Afghanistan, tasked with orders to link up with local guerilla armies and then defeat the local Taliban. The basic routine was something like, "hellacious infilitration via helicopter in appalling conditions, meet up with bizarre local warlord, win his trust by calling in airstrikes on Taliban positions, roll that trust into a terrible momentum to absolutely maul 'AQ' [Al Quaeda] and Taliban elements in shockingly quick fashion."
The book is unrepentently pro-Green Beret, tolerant of a few others (SAS, Delta Force) and barely-restrained in its criticism of the CIA and worse, FBI. The CIA was still as inept as ever. They refused to deal with people they didn't like, even if those people had incredible intelligence. They had been willing to buy the surrender of Taliban commanders in the early days of the war, but they were unwilling to put "criminals" on their payroll for infomration. ... The Agency was still overly political and inherently untrustworthy, not to mention rife with novice agents who had no experience in war and lacked courage."
There are a (few) criticisms of some Green Beret teams that didn't perform well around the Tora Bora area, "unlike virtually every other SF team on the ground throughout Afghanistan, the team in Tora Bora was alienating the muj counterparts, instead of aligning with them."
The authors definitely have an axe out for a few people, including easy layups like the foolish Geraldo Rivera. But also rear detachment deputy Chief Warrant Officer Rob Way, excoriated for dismissing Green Berets' wives' concerns too easily, and "treati[ing] the wives [of Green Berets] like shit." Perhaps most interesting was the total disdain with which CIA paramilitary office David "Dave" Tyson was regarded for having abandoned his parter, John "Mike" Spann, during the Taliban revolt at Qala-I-Jangi fortress. Although the CIA "lauded [his] bravery", in fact, "Dave wasn't sure what had happened or what to do -- he certianly didn't know what had happened to his partner, who he had abandoned when he cut and ran."
There were lots of interesting little nuggets that gave further color to the action. In an, essentially, appendix at the back of my late printing it talks about how special forces had permeated all areas of Iraq weeks before we officially went to war. Perhaps the most interesting story was about Delta Force's Signal Squadron, who'd "surreptitiously entered seven different communications switching systems" and via satellite piped an enourmous flow of wiretapping back to the NSA. Even though they are extremely proficient at this, "several of the operations were just too sophisticated and complex. SF operators infilitrated two civilian AT&T technicians, and then on to Delta operators, who brought them into their safe house to work on the system."
The book also claims that terrorist Abu Nidal didn't commit suicide and he wasn't killed by Hussein for "failing to redeploy his terror network." Instead, Moore says the Mossad killed Nidal with a bullet into his eye. (**)
Another rarity in these sorts of books is that there were a reasonable number of photographs. None were great. Most were low-resolution. But they definitely remind you how huge and hard-core these guys are.
Don't worry, I've not spilled all the suprises of this book. There are many more anecdotes and technical details to enjoy.
** In searching for some references, I stumbled onto this alternative explanation of Abu Nidal and the Mossad.
More thoughts on RSS Technology
Home-ripped RSS feeds
Yesterday I said that it was a pain that some websites I regularly read do not offer RSS syndication feeds. An obvious countermeasure would be for people to scrape these sites and rip their own RSS feeds. The three sites I named yesterday, CNN, Debka, and Drudgereport all have been around a long time and appear to have pretty stable formats that could be parsed.
So now if I now have a little engine that is ripping bootleg RSS feeds for me, why not share them? Yeah, sure, but how to let people know they're available? Presumably the sites themselves aren't going to be publishing the link for me.
P2P RSS networks
I had another idea -- set up a P2P RSS network where where everyone shares their RSS feeds, whether they're official or home-ripped. So everyone's P2P agent would be sitting around asking each other, "What feeds do you have available? Do you have a feed for BoingBoing that is more recent than mine? What feeds do you need, maybe I have one ?"
Since we're just exchanging modest-size text files, and not MP3s or DVDs the bandwidth burden is pretty low, even for home dialup users. That means there would be lewer defectors who take only and do not share. It also relieves some bandwidth burden from the original publisher's site.
It shouldn't be too hard to design. All you need to know is the RSS's URL, the timestamp from when it was received from the publisher's site, and a hash code of the contents so that you can easily prevent downloading dupes.
GUI-based Spidering
Oh, and back to scraping web sites to produce RSS feeds. I'm sure there is an Oreilly book out there that would describe the best practices for spidering a site and scraping its contents, but hell, do I really want to write and maintain a perl script every time I want to scrape a new site? No. It's a mess picking through all the piles of badly-formatted and baroque .html source.
What would be much cooler is a GUI-based engine that looks something like a browser, loads up a page and displays its structure, allowing you to annotate it with GUI devices, describing the landmarks on the page, what to scrape and what to ignore. It would then take that information and mechanically produce perl script for scraping the site according to those hints.
December 28, 2003
Spiting their faces
- TEHERAN - Iran will accept aid from all foreign countries except Israel following a devastating earthquake that killed some 25,000 people in the southeast of the country, interior ministry spokesman Jahanbakhsh Khanjani said Saturday quoted by the official news agency IRNA.
?The Islamic Republic of Iran accepts all kinds of humanitarian aid from all countries and international organizations with the exception of the Zionist regime? (Israel), Khanjani said.
Observers noted that the United States had not been excluded.
The spokesman said Iran urgently needed sniffer dogs and machines that would detect eventual survivors, along with medicines, blankets, tents and prefabricated houses.
That Israel has perhaps the world's premier disaster search-and-rescue squad in the world, and sends them to nearly ever disaster that occurs (including Turkey) makes no difference apparently.
Of course in the interest of fairness, perhaps Israel wouldn't even have considered sending them to Iran anyway.
Moveable Type Trackback Autodiscovery Problems
This weekend I've been having a terrible time getting trackback autodiscovery to work. I thought the problem was related to Sharp MT, but I was wrong. Turns out MT is subtly broken. It doesn't autodiscover urls unless they are mentioned in the Entry Body of the blog item. If they are in the Extended Entry area, they're ignored.
There is a fix though, from MarkPasc.
In Entry.pm, line 297, change the code to:
my $body = MT->apply_text_filters($entry->text . ($entry->text_more || ''), $entry->text_filters);
I tested it out and it seems to work. The symptom is gone, however I did get an Internal Server Error thrown, the server complaining:
malformed header from script. Bad header=---: /home/karavsh/public_html/scgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi
Now I am not sure if this is caused by this code change, however. I had been hacking around several weeks ago on other projects and saw this same problem intermittently. It throws the error after it finishes pinging the different urls. I thought the problem went away when I installed the security-updated XMLRPC.pm module, but maybe it didn't.
RSS Web Technology Thoughts
I think RSS is the new epoch in web technology. A (very) few people are reading my site via RSS subscriptions and I am reading others' blog almost exclusively using an RSS News Aggregator. It's a better way to regularly read content.
One consequence of preferring RSS feeds to Web Surfing is that I don't surf all the sites I used to, particularly the assholes at Slashdot. They made their site very unfriendly to RSS. Secondly, they're becoming more irrelevant. They're essentially an online news aggregator (with a tedious attitude). Who needs that when I have my own personal aggregator.
I wish other sites I read regularly through the day provided RSS feeds. CNN, DrudgeReport, and DebkaFile, for instance.
Why don't they? Is it that it would increase their bandwidth loading over the edge? I don't think so. These sites would love if they could double their traffic. It would double their ad revenue. Ah! That's the real answer... with RSS Syndication, they are supplying the content, but not getting to show the ads. They can't make nearly as much money in that case. Wired's approach is to just pass out a teaser-blurb for their articles. You have to go to the site to read the article (and be exposed to the ads)
One problem I've found with reading blogs via aggregation is that you lose the comments and trackbacks that enrich a blog item. It would nice for the news reader to incidicate which articles in my list have recently updated comments or trackbacks. Achieving this would require some new fields in the RSS feed (I suppose... I don't know much about the different formats' definitions) as well as support from the blog publishing tools.
Feeling Creatively Charitable Lately
It's the holidays and life is good; I've been feeling charitable.
Specificity is nicer
A week before Christmas someone sent me an article on a deserving-but-under-supported charity in Singapore. The thing was, the charity had a great idea for getting their donations. Instead of just asking for some money for their general account, they had an online site and database that allowed you to directly designate funds to support specific peoples' needs. Really, how can you turn down a row like, "Tang Chor Hui (RT) needs a 1L Vacuum Flask "to make hot drinks for elderly at home and young children." for $19.90." ? I find a specific request like that to be much more compelling than a generic request for money for the ledger.
Now the site wasn't implemented very well (I think it was statically generated offline), but the model was great. By the time I saw the article and visited the site, every single donation request had been fulfulled.
All this got me thinking about creative ways to donate.
Whatever happpened to the Jhai Foundation?
A few months ago I tried to contact the Jhai Foundation, an organization in Laos that is trying to develop a viable internet communications network for rural areas of Laos. The idea sounds really neat, and there was a flurry of publicity about it when it was first announced. Their financial needs were comparatively modest.
So before I went to Laos, I tried to contact them. Maybe I could donate some time on their project. It could be an interesting experience. I received a very cool reply from them that didn't feel very good, though. I followed up with more information, but they never even bothered to reply. I'm not sure what exactly the problem is over there, but it seems troubled. They don't even seem to have any updates of their situation during the last year-plus. Would be nice to hear something positive about this, but right now seems unlikely.
Update: October 6, 2004
The Jhai computer project never worked out -- up till now they've never finished the communications link to bring internet to the village. That's probably why they were not very receptive to me...
Amazon Micro-payments and Lousy MT Templates
Another interesting development is that Amazon has introduced the Amazon Honor System. The idea is that people with websites can receive micro (or macro!) payments from people who appreciate their website or software.
Why is a micro-payment site from Amazon important? Mostly because it's Amazon and not the odious PayPal. So when I give a bit of money to the Sharp NewsReader, Luke actually gets it, it's not held captive by Paypal in their escrow never-never land.
Why is making micro-payments viable important? Because it makes it easy to support small niche software projects and websites that aren't commercially viable, but are useful to the public and satisfying for the author. Sharp NewsReader is an example. It's not like a couple ten dollar donations are going to suddenly make the project commercial, but it pays a month's web server charges, or subsidizes a manual, or even a coffee. It a bit of incremental encouragement to the projects that you appreciate.
In fact, this leads to another idea. I've complained about how the default templates in MoveableType are handled so poorly by IE. Most other MT installations have the same problems. But what to do about it? I have neither the time nor the expertise to write a good robust set of templates and stylesheets for Moveable Type. But hell, we're in the Age of Offshoring -- there is someone sitting around idle who could create it. Of course it would cost. $300USD? $500USD? Probably not more.
Is it worth $500 dollars personally to me? Umm.... well... it would be pretty hard to justify (especially to DragonLady). But plenty of people would appreciate it. One idea would be to pay someone to write the templates/stylesheets, and then share them to the general public. The public benefit is large. I can always stick up an Amazon micropayment banner and maybe get a few bucks back. Plus, imagine all the traffic that some decent MT templates would drive to my site!?
The only reason I haven't done this is that I keep thinking, "well, in two months MoveableType Pro will be out and they'll have better templates." Unfortunately, the release date keeps rolling forward!
Conclusion
All this talk and I wind up with "better templates for Moveable Type?" Back to the drawing board....
December 27, 2003
Mountain Biking at Bukit Kiara
We dragged our Trek Liquid Twenty's to Bukit Kiara today. What a savage, exciting place to mountain bike! The place slaughtered me, but I'll love to come back.
It took us thirty to forty minutes to make it from KLCC to Bukit Kiara. I had a decent map of where we were heading, but the street map was missing roads. We wasted fifteen or twenty minutes looping around and backtracking. Now that we know the route, it takes perhaps 20-25 minutes to get there.
Bukit Kiara is a nice area. If I had to live in Malaysia, it would be a good candidate... high-end housing, nearby cafes and restaurants, and of course Bukit Kiara. I don't know what Bukit Kiara is officially registered as.... a nature reserve? a no man's land? someone's private property? All I can tell is that it is a fairly extensive, forested, hilly area not far from KL and in a prime real estate district. Where there aren't expressways on the perimeter, there are new housing developments nibbling the edges. But stilll inside there are many, many acres of excellent mountain biking.
We got there around noon (overcast, but steaming hot) and set off. I followed the recommended path for first-time visitors. My wife also came along. Poor thing.... she spent most of the time walking the route and being absolutely consumed by mosquitos. I don't know what happened, but within twenty minutes she had, literally, at least two hundred mosquito bites, and I, even two hours later had none. I don't know exactly what rude odor I emit, but it was efficacious in Bukit Kiara. She claims they're not itchy, but I am going to the pharmacy later tonight to get some itch cream, because I am worried that they will become quite tedious after dinner.
The route is fierce! The best way to describe it is to take Bukit Timah mountain bike trail in Singapore, but make it much longer and make every feature a lot more violent. Steeper drop-offs, sharper switchbacks, narrower squeezes, and steeper edges.
We'd done the first leg, "Rumpy Pumpy" which conveniently returns near the trailhead. Ling bailed back to the car (she has hardly any MTB experience, so this was way over her abilities, plus it was in extraordinarily uncomfortable conditions) and I carried on. Since we're in the middle of Greater KL, there is plenty of handphone coverage; no concerns about going missing.
I carried on through the Twin Peaks area and onto Snakes and Ladders. Against all odds, conditions got tougher. I was really winded;I haven't ridden in three weeks. These trails are amazing.... a foot-wide trail cut into the side of a terribly steep slope that would promise a twelve foot tumble before hitting much ground. I didn't see a single soul on the course, although I was following a single tire track from someone who seemed pretty hard -- it seemed to always be plowing along, through mud, up climbs, and down descents.
I wish that had been all I encountered of my predecessors, but sadly, no. Some total, total, total fucking loser had been through earlier. I don't know if was his breadcrumb trail, or he was the point man for a group of seriously lame bikers, or what, but for literally miles, every thirty feet was a square of paper chopped from an insurance policy. It was entirely excessive. Yeah, there are a bunch of trails, but being that we're in the jungle, they are very discrete (not discreet!) and there is no reason to be littering so much of the trail with this debris. If you want to mark turns and things, fine, but this was just stupid.
So after I had completed the long set of switchbacks on "Snakes and Ladders", it was up "Twin Peaks" toward the summit (elevation 260m). Two thirds of the way there (it's a moderate grade on a wide track) I stopped, feeling totally awful. I was so hot and tired and vaguely nauseated that I was sorely tempted to bail there, and go back a kilometer to catch an asphalt road to the car. Decrying myself a faggot and a weakling, I decided to drink some more water, eat something, and carry on. Glad I did, because just a few hundred meters onward I reached the "summit." Something had denuded the area of all timber, replacing it was a huge field of five foot high ferns, and an enormous view of KL's city center.
That was probably the turning point for my enjoyment. From there I decided to turn back east, along Twin Peaks, back toward the trailhead rather than farther north along Janies Additiction. It was just right... another twenty minutes of really exciting downhill back to the trailhead.
These downhills sections are just monstrous. They're so rough and steep, frequently the trail disperses as it comes to the descent and you can see it's purely a "anything goes" to get down the thing fast and in one piece. It doesn't help that it's also used as a horseback trail. There are huge holes and ditches to contend with. But my goodness, on a full-suspension mountain bike it was an absolute dream. There is no question that that bike allows me to go faster and be more aggressive. The only thing I wish I'd changed about it was to have lowered the seat by two inches before I set off. The descents were so steep that I was frequently positioned behind and below the seat level. I had the distinct and persistent fear that I was going to lose it and end up shaving my nuts off with the seat.
The tires on the Liquid Twenty, IRC TrailBear 26x2.25" were just right for the conditions. Like Bukit Timah, everything was quite damp, but the water runs off quickly. There are sections here-and-there of especially slimy clay. I didn't have any traction or clogging problems.
It was a highly entertaining ride and I look forward to some more work there. It's a pretty cheap-and-easy trip to drive up from Singapore, hunker down at the Mandarin Oriental for the weekend, and spend the afternoons riding at Bukit Kiara. I think a full survey will demand at least a solid month of daily riding before I have the endurance to ride it properly.
December 26, 2003
Trying out a new offline blogging tool
Six months ago, as I was preparing for a trip to Australia, I found Zempt as a solution to offline blog publishing. It was okay, but not great. One real bugger is that it didn't support image uploading. This is particularly onerous when you're out in the field, trying to blog a trip you are on.
Since then I had seen references to some other offline blog tools. Tonight I am sitting in my room at the Mandarin Oriental, Kuala Lumpur, playing with my brand-new Toshiba Tecra M1 laptop. Why not check out the latest in offline blog publishing technology? [
*isn't it sweet how on Dec 26th Google is already listing this article (written on the 23rd!) as the top article on "blog offline zempt" !?]
On his recommendation, I downloaded Sharp MT. It's the second application I've used in the last month that has been written using the .NET framework. I guess Microsoft's strategy is finally coming around. (the other app was Sharp NewsReader.... what's with the 'Sharp' prefix???)
So I'm testing it out right now, so no decision yet. It seems pretty straightforward, maybe a bit more polished than Zempt? Now it's time to try the image uploading.
...hmmm I THINK I uploaded the image, although I cannot see where it is going to turn up. There is no reference to it anywhere I look, including the preview template. Also, it didn't seem like a very robust handling of the image... it didn't ask if I wanted to make a thumbnail of it, or make it a pop-up or embedded image. I guess to some degree it is constrained by using the XML-RPC interface, not ftp. I think it would benefit by making ftp an option and providing this advanced image functionality.
-
Q: Why is every image upload based off the Blog URL and why can I only upload images?
A: These two items are related. The upload of the images is part of the MT functionality exposed via the XML-RPC - it is not an FTP upload! Since MT expects the uploaded file to be an image, it treats it like an image. Can other types of files be uploaded? I'm sure it could, but I don't know what it would look like when it got to the server. As to what the directory location is, that is also part of the specification. If you select a local image called image1.jpg and upload it to the server with the "remote name" of _images/screenshot1.jpg it will be found at [blogURL]/_images/screenshot1.jpg - that root location is set by MT; the file name is whatever you tell SharpMT you want it to be.
Ok, that's it. Let's give it a try.
December 23, 2003
Stupid interlude
I've spent the better part of this evening fussing with a new iPod. It involved a reboot here and there. At some point I had to send out some emails to my colleagues in NYC. When I doublechecked, I saw they never had escaped the mail queue, and in fact were being blocked, outlook saying that the server had rejected the message because '203.125.94.90 is listed at list.dsbl.org'
HUH? It's claiming that I am blacklisted as an open-mail relay?
good fucking grief.
So my first call was to Deru Net, my host. Now they have been very good for the last eighteen months I've used them. Find it hard to believe they'd allow my mail system to be configured as an open relay.
The fellow in tech support who picked up "heard" my problem and said that it wasn't deru's fault, it was that someone had submitted an email I had written as a spam to this list, which then banned my domain as an Open Relay.
So I'm thinking, "ok, perhaps someone at my office accidentally did this? (they have a really tedious, authoritarian IT department."
But two things gnawed at me. One was that he couldn't really explain what that ip address (203.125.94.90) had to do with anything. It's not the address of karavshin.org. Secondly, the message from Outlook says that the karavshin mail server is rejecting the message, not the mail recipient's server.
The fellow was nice and tried to be helpful, but I think he only superficially heard what I tried (poorly) to explain.
So after I hung up from him, I dug around some more.
First, what exactly is dsbl.org complaining about?
And secondly, who the hell is 203.125.94.90 ?
Turns out the answer to question two is very important...
- bb-203-125-94-90.singnet.com.sg
What's that? It's a dhcp-allocated address in the huge block of addresses singtel (my dsl provider) owns. Apparently, back in November, someone was using this address, operated an open relay, and got themselves banned on dsbl.org.
The thing is, they they weren't banned, really, just the address. So whenever this address gets allocated to someone else, they're effectively banned. Pretty stupid.
So I just happened to have the bad luck of being given this address when I rebooted. I cured the problem immediately by disconnecting and reconnecting, getting a fresh, non-boycotted address.
I guess I will drop a note to singtel (if it's not too onerous) and tell them about this. So dumb; such a waste of time.
My first round with the iPod
A kind soul gave me a 20gb iPod for Windows today. It comes in a tidy little cube, and when I opened it up, the refinement of the packaging had me drooling in moments. An elegant folding box, revealed all the parts nicely tucked away in static bags that are more fashion statement than necessity. Lift enough flaps and you reveal the iPod itself which was slimmer, smoother, and more sexy than I thought they were.
The Apple packaging and presentation folks' game is tight.
So I figured the same would hold true when I installed the device, which doesn't amount to much more than plugging a dock into a firewire card and launching aan install CD.
Well.... the beauty and elegance seems to have stopped there.
The thing just simply didn't work. The iPod manager couldn't work the device. I could see the iPod was listed as an installed device, but that was it.
After frustrating time spent searching for technical help on the Apple website (truly the windows support site has much better navigation) I figured I had found the problem. It seems that the iPod is extremely finicky about what FireWire card you use. Even if your card works with everything else (as mine does -- a nikon scanner, an epson 2100 printer, sony digital video camera), it doesn't mean your iPod will.
So it seems like my card (Via 1394 OHCI compliant host controller ), which came with my Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra 2 motherboard is not certified as compliant with XP (although it is for Win 2000).
I dug around my boxes of random computer junk and found another firewire card that came w/ my Nikon Coolscan ED 4000 scanner. This one was a Ratoc PSIFW2 firewire card. Installed, it tells XP that it is a "NEC 1394 OHCI compliant host controller," which also is not certified for XP, only Win 2000.
Anyway, I figured it worth a shot and plugged it in too. Well, it worked for some reason. iPod manager could see the device.
So I resumed the installation. Goodness gracious, I felt like I was installing RealAudio player. The CD installed at least three different softwares (the drivers and managers, MusicMatch [with whom I've had a run-in before], and something called Audible.
I think for sure I could have skipped Audible (software for digital books).
MusicMatch is the XP alternative to whatever software Apple uses on their Mac's to manage the playlists on iPods. First things first, I forbade it from associating with any file types whatsoever. It is strictly for managing my playlists. It took a bit of tussling before it would recognize my iPod, but after a turn-on/turn-off it seems to be behaving nicely and regularly.
I'm a bit concerned, though. It seems to be obsessed with metadata tags (titles, artists, genres, and so on).
Well, here's my setup:
I've got 16GB of mp3's in a single directory. I've pulled these things from everywhere from Napster to Gnutella to USENET. Many are rips of BBC Radio One broadcasts. Basically the "metadata" is a total farrago. I sure hope that MusicMatch isn't so fixated on good metadata that it makes using my poorly-notated music (which is 99% of the library) too much a chore.
Does anyone have any advice one what I should do to organize my music? I really have no interest or time to be screwing with it an awful lot.
One other embarassing note... So as I mentioned above, the install didn't go that smoothly. At some point it looked like it was finally working and setting itself up. One of the steps is formatting. I started at the iPod "formatting" for twenty minutes, groaning to myself that something was bad, but trying to be patient. Finally I realized that the blinking "Do not disconnect" is just it saying that it is docked in with the PC and operating normally! So much for a meaningful UI!
December 22, 2003
Where's the Spam?
After getting through my week of PC Torment, I finally have my email up-and-running, including SpamBayes. But I just noticed something--the level of spam I get per day seems to have dropped precipitously since I left for Laos.
I checked all my accounts to make sure the forwarding and collection wasn't screwed up. It just seems like I am getting a lot less spam since I returned.
What's the deal? Now that the al-Tikriti's are out of the picture, did Rumsfeld send Task Force 121 after major domestic spammers ?
December 21, 2003
Did the Secret Service Protect Bush From His Own Soldiers?
So Bush made his Thanksgiving speech to Iraq-based troops. There was lots of noise about the immense degree of secrecy and security concerns in flying Bush there and back. Plus there were feel-good interviews and reports from the troops..
Obviously the Secret Service had gigantic security concerns over threats from Iraqi insurgents. But one thing never mentioned in the press and never obvious in any of the photos or video I saw was how the Secret Service appreciated the threat from the soldiers themselves.
Face it, in the US, the Secret Service is always (justifiably) swarming around Bush during any public function. I have to imagine that they viewed the soldiers suspiciously too. More, less, or the same as the general public, I don't know, but I'd guess at least the same. Hundreds of young, stressed-out guys with weapons? The Secret Service gets alarmed over much less than that.
Presumably the agents were there and presumably they kept a low-profile because certainly, at first glance, to be quite insulting that the Commander-in-Chief requires protection from the same soldiers fighting on his direct behalf.
Close of a tedious week and other things
Computer Bullshit
The trip back from Laos seemed ok. We were home by late afternoon Sunday. First things first, I went in to check my PC. I turned it on, but was getting no signal to the monitor. Some quick tests revealed that it was the PC's problem, not the monitor or the cable. Long story short: turned into five astonishingly agonizing days of of PC-recovery-efforts.
Presently I have a working installation and all my data is safe. What I haven't finished is
But at least I have a working computer again. I guess this process deserves a proper post-mortem, but it really was so frustrating and agonizing and impossibly tortuous recovery that I cannot bear to think about it right now, let alone write an essay about it. (And anyway, there are some more issues to resolve.)
Christmas Week
We're required to be in Kuala Lumpur for a wedding on Christmas day. Trying to make the best of it, I put us up in a Club Suite at the Mandarin Oriental and for a couple days we'll laze around there and go mountain biking at Bukit Kiara.
If things work out, I'll also be bringing along my Christmas gift from Dragon Lady. (I chose the Tecra M1 over the IBM T40 because it seemed more suited to being a Chautauqua/Sabbatical workstation while on vacations to the bush) Ling will have her Christmas present too, but of course there are only three people on earth who know what it is -- I operate under extremely strict gift security rules, to Dragon's intense, vocal dismay.
Reading
Just finishing up a terrific collection of Dashiell Hammet detective short-stories, The Continental Op. Like Elmore Leonard, he has one style of dialogue, plotting, and character, but they make for engaging, quick reads. In fact, I just finished "Tishomingo Blues" the other night while waiting for fdisk to finish it's dirty business.
A few months back I had work in London. For the flight I brought along a bizarre 'Graphic Novel' by Alan Moore called From Hell. I meant to write a review of it back then, but never managed to. In short I was shocked by how scratchy and drafty the pictures were, but the plot was amazing and creative. When you read the appendix which goes into all the historic background of his sources for his strange, invented tangle of Freemasonry, Jack the Ripper, and Victorian England, it makes you appreciate the book even more. Anyway, I wanted to buy another acclaimed book by Moore, Watchmen, but Kinokuniya never has it in stock. Instead I bought another Moore novel, "V is for Vendetta." I've only read the first chapter, so not a whole lot to say about it. I expect it'll be interesting at any rate.
A few weeks ago I was burnt by a really worthless book about Navy Seals since the Vietnam War, "Navy SEALS: A History Part III." The credits say the author was "Kevin Dockery from Interviews by Bud Brutsman." This isn't exactly right. It should say something like, "Uninteresting and rote interviews by Bud Brutsman weakly paraphrased into text and shoddily glued together with a few pages of filler by Kevin Dockery." Truly, the book really sucked. Brutsman isn't a very good interviewer, I guess. It seemed like he asked the same dozen questions of every Seal, and got essentially the same answer from every Seal. There is nothing compelling in this book and nothing you wouldn't have read somewhere else. Skip this turd and pick up Dick Crouch's "The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228" instead, it's enormously better
Anyway, I was smarting from wasting forty dollars on Dockery's book when I saw a new title on Kinokuniya's 'Kommando Korner' bookshelf today, "Task Force Dagger" by Robin Moore (*advanced apologizes for the 8-bt rendition of 'Ballad of the Green Berets' playing in the background as if it is a Geocities website). I've read only twenty-percent of it, but it seems much, much, much better. It chronicles the Green Beret teams that destroyed the Taliban back in 2002. It seems to have a lot of fresh, interesting details, not just recaps of stories I read in the Washington Post or New York Times two years ago.
Also just finished up a truly delightful book on Edward Gorey, "Elephant House Or, the Home of Edward Gorey." The photographer, Kevin McDermott, photographed Gorey's house a week after Gorey's fatal heart attack and did a remarkable job capturing the marvelous artistic essence Gorey infused the home with.
Other stuff in queue? I'll try my hand at a couple Anthony Trollope books. I figured if Gorey liked them so much, there must be something to them. As well, I bought a couple Raymond Chandler anthologies, as I've been enjoying the Hammet novels again.
December 13, 2003
On the way back to Singapore
So Friday was spent on the road... Something like 8.5 hour drive from Luang Prabang back down to Vientiane. Couple of 20-30 minute breaks thrown in for good measure. Now it's Saturday night here in Bangkok. We caught a morning flight (< 1hr) from Vientiane and spent the afternoon walking around town.
Yesterday, to D abord mom week end a ko samui trop bien de chez trop bien. On a passe jours la bas. on etait dans des bingalos 5 etoiles, avec les pieds dans l eau. Le matin on ouvrait la porte et on avait la vue sur la mer. c etait tellement beau, on a fait de la plonge, on est partis en bateau visiter des iles et on s est baignes sous des cascades dans des lagons. J ai jamais vu un truc pareil....
Ensuite la thailande est un pays super agreable, le climat est parfait il doit faire 30 degres. on va se baigner et bronser entre les conferences on a trop la belle vie. Bangkok est une ville super dynamique ou il fait bon vivre. Les tai sont toujours avec le sourire
C est vraiment extra, car enplus c est pas sale comme en chine et ca reste typique. Tu sais on s achete des fringues pour 5 euros et on mange dans des boui boui pour 50 centimes d euros , ca nous fait marrer.
J adore cette ville. On est alles visite le temple du boudha d emerode et c est dingue, tout les batiment sont couvert de feuille d or, d emeraude et de rubis. c est emerveillant.....
En bref je kiffe grave excuse the technical interuption, I accidentally hit CTRL-V and inserted some previous tenant's prose
Anyway, yesterday, to pass the time I pulled up my log book and decided to log everything on the drive from Luang Prabang to Vientiane. I didn't have a GPS, but since there is only one road, Hwy 13, it's good enough to just mark off the odometer.
Consequently I have endless pages of records....
34.1 (km) overtook bus
34.5 50m bridge
35.5 power cable (3 insulated; 1 non)
37.2 overtook bus
39.1 soldier, irregular uniform, SKS 1x
40.3 hamlet (< 30 huts; 1 satellite dish)
...
and on and on and on and on and on and on. The driver, Mr Tong, probably thought I was a lunatic, as he conspicuously never asked me, "Mister, what the hell you doing ?" like any regular person would have.
It started making me loopy after a while. By the time we got to Vang Vieng (2/3rds of the way?) the urbanization was increasing, and I was recording "1 motorcycle 2pax" till it was coming out of my ears. I couldn't bear to do it anymore once we got there. But I figured it was good enough.
Anyway, all the interesting detail is between Luang Prabang and Kasi, which (don't worry) I have recorded in amazingly tedious detail. It's one of those things that will make a web page that, one day, someone will stumble onto courtesy of Google, and remark to himself, "for heaven's sake....äny and every goddamned thing is online nowadays."
So anyhow, I have some followup stuff to write, Í'll get to it Sunday, when we return to Singapore, or later this week. I also have probably a dozen(?) rolls of film to develop. I'm not in that much of a mood for it right now. For the last three days my tongue has felt like I spent most of my vacation giving head to a Komatsu Drilling Auger. Fucking thing is swollen and sore, so I keep accidentally chewing on it, and in an effort to painfully avoid irritating it, I am talking with this weird lisp that sounds like I'm wearing my old retainer from Dr. Longwell. It's really irritating. I am forced to talk to Ling as if I'm Mason Verger, blowing binary puffs of air out my nose to communciate.
December 11, 2003
Search for Ban Longlan
Today we loaded up the 4x4 and headed north, trying to find the remote Hmong village of Ban Longlan. In addition to the universal Lonely Planet Laos* guide I had an older guide 'Footloose in Laos.' It's dated, but it's nice because it's got a lot more color commentary, background, and prose about the areas. Lonely Planet tends to stick to a strict regime of:
foreach $city in $country {
print("How to get there");
print("Where to stay there");
print("What to eat there");
print("A few things to do there");
}
So this Footloose guide listed a Hmong hill village named Ban Longlan up in the mountains northeast of Luang Prabang. The directions were of the form: "drive towards this village, look for a turnoff, drive to this village, look for a turnoff, drive to this village, look for a turnoff, now you're in the mountains, drive two hours up a very small trail. Not many people come to this village so be polite and conservative."
This sounded like an interesting hunt. It is further complicated by:
1) Absolutely dismal maps of Laos have no knowledge of these sub-roads at all
2) Once you're in the country, no one speaks English. We speak neither Lao nor Hmong
So off we went. We did a pretty good job dead reckoning. I didn't have my GPS with me, so all we could do was log the trip using the odometer and taking photos of key junctions and turnoffs. We started out on Hwy 13, barely passable as a state highway, and then off onto a secondary road, following a tributary of the Mekong along a rough aggregate/bitumen type surface, and then onto a tertiary dirt road.
All the while we are passing through smaller and smaller villages and seeing larger and larger eyes staring at us as we pass through. There are barely any motorcycles or bikes that far out, let alone 4x4 pickups, especially driven by westerners.
Anyway, eventually we made it to Ban Natan. Now somewhere in the village, or very nearby there was to be a turnoff, north, into the mountains that would begin an arduous two hour drive into the mountains. We couldn't find the turnoff, there weren't even any good candidates. We kept asking villagers for Ban Longlan and they kept saying (phonetically) "poon" phun? and pointing back from where we came. We surmised they meant further back.
In a bit we found a promising-looking trail. It was headed right toward the mountain range to the northeast of us. I popped it into 4wd and off we climbed.
We shortly came to a fork. I investigated both legs of it. They each ran down into an enormous dry rice paddy (several acres) that forms a plateau before the mountains we were headed to. One leg of the fork ran into a dead cul de sac. The other leg ran right into the paddy. Paddies are constructed with mud berms ponding off different sections of the paddy. The tracks, before petering out, crashed through some of these berms.
Since I couldn't see an obvious objective through all the scrub on the other side of the paddy, I felt it was sort of stupid and rude and ignorant to go thrashing through the farmers' field, especially when I didn't even know if this was exactly right anyway. (The Footloose guide didn't mention this tricky spot at all).
A quarter-mile away I saw an old lady threshing hay with a stick. Ling and I hiked over towards her. I must have looked a sight -- dressed in black clothes and sunglasses popping from the brush into to this great, dry paddy walking toward her. After I gave her the Pioneer Ten Harmless Earthling Wave, she waved back and waited for us to arrive. Once she realized we were looking for Ban Longlan she started talking and pantomiming furiously. Unfortunately we caught none of it but "Poon." I'm sure she was giving us very precise descriptions of the route.
So we walked back to the truck (parked on a steep slope descending onto the plateau) had a light lunch (the sun was poisonously hot) and decided to call off the hunt. Somewhere there is a path that makes it up to those mountains, but it's not clear where, and l just didn't think it proper to go ramming around their agricultural area, even though it did look dead, dry, and out-of-season. This is one of those things I'll do more research on and try to find the next time we come to Laos. Maybe if we weren't there at high noon I would have explored on foot, but it was punishingly hot there.
All in all it was quite a nice drive. Very scenic. There are many teak stands in the hills here, which do seem to turn color, unlike most tropical foliage. There were parts of the trip where it looked like Upstate New York in autumn. That wouldn't last long, though, because you'd turn a bend and be staring at three water buffalo, or another enormous green rice plantation.
Got a small bit of 4x4'ing in. Took 4L to climb back up the hill from the rice plateau. It was quite dry, so not too bad. If it was muddy I'd have bee concerned because the tires don't have that much tread.
The Ford Ranger seems to have a good gearbox. I've had no problem finding gears (the Land Cruiser always was a pain to find reverse). As well, I came in and out of 4H/4L/2H without any problems (one of our Landcruisers eventually got stuck in 4H)
Also had a thought that a nice GPS feature would be a way to voice-annotate waypoints. Something like, "I'm driving down a road, busy with that, but I want to mark a waypoint." Normally it takes 20 seconds of total concentration to set a waypoint and give it a "meaningful" name (as meaningful as a 12 character string can be anyway...). This means you have to pull over and do it, or just set it and hope you can remember what "008" waypoint was ten hours later and relabel it. Instead I'd like to click "take a waypoint here" and then speak into a the GPS 10 words that record what the waypoint was, "turnoff before the Ban Seuang River" or "Left hand turn down onto the plateau" etc. etc.
* You don't appreciate what a strong franchise Lonely Planet has until you go to some of these remote travel destinations, and see anyone walking down the street or sitting at a cafe holding a copy.
December 10, 2003
Online in Luang Prabang
- Date: 12/9/2003 08:19:29 -0800
From: Matthew Eldridge
To: "Nils Blutig"
Subject: Re: feh
hahahaha I find it quite odd/entertaining to have you in regular
contact from a country that I would have assumed is a terribly poor
backwater
It is a terribly poor backwater.
Even in Luang Prabang (second? biggest city in Laos) lots of houses are just thatched huts. The 'thatch' wall isn't nearly as crude as you'd think, though. I inspected some today. The ribbons are extremely uniform and pulled so taut that I could believe they are glued together.
Traffic density is very low. Last night, out of boredom, I sat on the cool veranda of our guest house doing statistical samples of street traffic. I don't have the figures with me, but overwhelmingly foot traffic dominated, followed by the tiny 125cc motorcycles that are prevalent throughout SE Asia. Cars, trucks, and even the public-taxi 'tuk-tuk's and minivans are far less common.
You don't drive out of town five minutes before you're back in total rural existence. I wouldn't call it subsistence agriculture, because that has the implication of misery, and dismay, and desperation, and that is definitely not the feeling you get from seeing these hamlets. I think there is plenty of industries keeping people employed (brick making, paper making, textiles, coffee, rice, etc etc)
There are scores and scores of children outside running around playing and looking terribly happy. The kids aren't skinny, but they are small. Ling and I, coming back from a morning drive to the Krang(?) river, passed a trio of kids playing on the side of the road. One, running like a dervish, didn't seem to be much larger than a 2l bottle of coke.
I'm not sure how to explain the IT presence. But it is true, you can be in total rural, backward Laos no different from 40 years ago, walk a mile and then be logged into the Internet, or watching HBO (or worse, Cinemax -- shockingly bad). There is a total dearth of newspapers here -- neither local nor international. I guess everything would be, at best, published in Vientiane, and it is a vaguely onerous drive here. I will say, though, that after electricity and sewage, having an IT plug is the best utility for helping upgrade a town. For me, it would make it 100x easier to live here for an extended time.
Spent time this morning going to a few different high-end art galleries. We helped paint some of the papers used in our lamp from Ban Khilly. Then we went over to OngPopTok (sp?) which is an exciting gallery of fine silk textile weaving. This city reminds me much of Kochi in Kerala, India. It's really nice and has a lot of promise.
December 09, 2003
Luang Prabang Backroads
Lightweight day... Got up at 6am to photograph the scores of monks walking single-file around Luang Prabang collecting their morning alms of glutinous rice. Finally realized why they look more shocking than most buddhist monks. It's not their saturated orange robes, nor their shaved heads. It's that their eyebrows are shaved off. They all look like Billy Corgin.
Spent a chunk of the morning at Ban Khilly, a gallery nearby that popularized decorative paper production. They use a local tree, saa, to make this very pulpy paper that has incredible texture and they treat it in a variety of creative ways... batik wax process, oil-emulsions, and embedding leaves and flowers into the paper itself. The turn it into really cool lamps and lights.
Anyway, the best thing about the place is the owner, Oliver Bandesmann. Extremely funny, opinated, multi-lingual (lao, german, english, and all the romance languages), he had me in stitches most of the time. His setup is quite cool -- an airy old french colonial house surrounded by beautiful temples and lush tropical gardens -- inside he's got all sort of art work, couches, and a second story veranda.
Tomorrow we're going in to oversee the preperation of several sheets of paper we're using in some lamps we bought.
This afternoon we drove out into the country to see some Lao weaving works, then deeper into the country to see the tomb of the first westerner to see Angkor Wat (in Cambodia) [this was just an excuse to take a drive in the countryside], relax by a wide, slow, cold river, and then drove on deeper until we got to a village that had the traditional "do not enter" sign symbol on their gate.
I haven't driven it enough, but at first impressions of the Ford Ranger:
1. Engine seems to have less torque than the Toyota Landcruisers we were driving in Australia. Perhaps the gearing is different, and I am not torturing the engine enough?
2. This thing has been fitted with, against-all-odds, tires even cheaper than those in Australia. These "Hankook" tires (China or Korean manufacture for sure) squeal around even the slightest turn. They probably could use higher pressure. When I was driving this morning, we were on road surface very similar to the razor-stretch north of Dalhousie that ate a thousand dollars worth of tires inside of 200m. I kept it 30% slower, and figured we were 30% lighter-loaded, so we were ok.
Anyway, this room is getting increasingly hot, and now the clerk-cum-IT-helpdesk is asking me to do ridiculous things to my PC figuring it will help others' PC. I don't want to jeapordize 20 minutes' writing over this rubbish.
Until then
December 08, 2003
Luang Prabang
So we drove the rest of the way to Luang Prabang. I guess it was about five hours of driving. The bulk of the trip was spent tediously threading our way up and over a huge karst limestone mountain range.
In some ways the drive reminded me of our long drive from Osh to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Continual grueling serpentine up hill surrounded by mountains. Except this time they were jungle-covered limestone instead of 100-degree granite, and there were many more chickens, children, and 'tractors' (*) on the road than then the endless stream of soviet heavy trucks in Kyrgyzstan.
From almost the moment we passed 'Kashi' ( a town 40miles north of Vang Vieng) we saw so-called soldiers guarding the road, presumably against Hmong rebels. They were a haphazard crew -- everyone wearing a unique ensemble, everything from GI Joe hand-me-downs to ARVN-style floppy hats and old dress shoes. The weapons were an even motlier collection. I saw an M-16, an AK-47 with an enormous, comical Rambo-style banana clip, and then countless other automatic rifles. I suppose they are Chinese SKS's, but since I am not a Jane's Small Arms of the World enthusiast, I can't say for sure. Generally the soldiers were doing everything BUT soldiering -- shaving in a stream, chopping wood, squatting on the side of the road. The foot patrols didn't exactly look like a British Square.
Of course, I'm sure they're not all that way. We took a break at a town high in the mountains, and a truck full of 'irregulars' pulled in to fill up their tub of glutinous rice (this is basically all they eat). They looked older and more random than most of the other soldiers (some of those had looked shockingly young) but they were ethnic Hmong tribesmen and had the 'master tracker' aura around them.
At any rate, the drive from Vientiane to Luang Prabang is a piece of cake. There is no obvious security problem, the absolute distance isn't far, the road safety is reasonable (largely because there is so little traffic), and there is basically no way to get lost. That being said, in the future we'll probably just fly directly to Luang Prabang from Bangkok next time. This is surely the nicest city to visit and the drive from Vientiane is a bit of a chore.
We got in around 4pm, found a nice guesthouse, and basically bummed around the rest of the night. Tomorrow we'll tour Luang Prabang some more. It's entirely possible we'll stay in this general area for the balance of the week. Spending all day, every day driving is not that much fun. Our Australia trip definitely demonstrated that hanging-out-and-fucking-around days are vital.
* 'tractor' is not the 36" Cub Cadet you're thinking of. Instead, imagine the biggest 'Troy-Bilt' brand roto-tiller made. Now make it about 30% bigger and make the handles ten to fifteen feet long and remove the the tiller/chopper arms. So really all it's good for is pulling a plow through a rice paddy. Now since it's not rice planting season, they use these as cars. The built a 20 foot long cart that attaches to the tiller. The driver sits on the cart part and steers with the long handles. If you have to make a really sharp turn, you have to jump off and run wide of the cart. These are very common. The loads on them are amazing -- I'm always impressed that the pivot-joint holds.
December 07, 2003
Biding time in Vang Vieng
This is the first and will be the last time I take a night's layover in Vang Vieng, a third of the the way along highway 13 from Vientiane to Luang Prabang. It turns out to be nothing but a backpacker slum. There are some caves and other natural attractions in the general vicinity, but we're skipping them to get out of Hooverville tomorrow morning.
The first hotel we tried to find was Les Jardine des Vang Vieng. We searched high and low for it, and even accounting for the lousy Lonely Planet maps, our dead reckoning failed us. Eventually our driver found out from some locals that the hotel was closed eighteen months ago. It seems that the owner was heroin trafficker who fell out of favour with the government.
Since we are driving a 4x4 Ford Ranger (the Toyota Hilux was unavailable, which is unfortunate, because it has more style), we could have pressed on and made the journey in a day, but we were in no particular hurry. The road is very simple two lane affair without signs or lines, but the traffic is quite sedate and minimal. No hell-bent drivers like in backwater Malaysia, and there isn't enough commerce to put too many five-ton murder-trucks on the road. I did see a fair share of ancient Soviet GAZ trucks and lots of FAW military trucks. Our driver was quite safe and in-bounds. If 31die and I had been driving, we would have been making substantially faster time. That will come soon enough -- when the driving gets more interesting, I'll take the wheel.
Anyway, we reached Vang Vieng in late afternoon and found a hotel for $5USD. Like I said earlier, this place is basically a toilet. There are a succession of restaurants selling 'western' food (Pizza is a big one here..) to the layover tourists. Apparently some Vietnamese syndicates run opium dens in town, but nothing overt. That's just about all there is here. (Plus a few Chinese selling lots of stereotypical Chinese junk -- transistor radios, cheap locks, and dice)
Tomorrow we'll fuck off out of here reasonably early and get to Luang Prabang which should be considerably nicer, more cultured, and more interesting. We're not sure of our schedule beyond that, however.
*Did see a very interesting salt-rendering 'plant' -- hopefully at least some of the photos turn out acceptably. The setup was about fifty? (why didn't I count?! I do such bad a job documenting...) tubs filled with a slurry of saltwater being evaporated by heavy fires using sawdust fuel. The saltwater appears to come out of an ?artesian? well. This mine was on the edge of the beginning of a large karst limestone mountain range. The salt sells 140 kip per kilo. 10,450kip approximately equals one USD. {Don't worry.. the largest kip notes we've got are 5,000 -- consequently Ling's bag looks like a scene out of 'Blow', with 6" stacks of dirty money rubber-banded together}
December 05, 2003
Off to Laos
Leaving for Laos in an hour. Back in ten days. If I'm lucky, will be online from Luang Prabang or Vientiane next week.
Am glad I'm leaving now, otherwise I'd waste a lot of time writing a scathing blog item on how Bush's "Return to the Moon" program is utter rubbish. Not a single more dollar should be spent on NASA. NASA is a decrepit bureaucracy that hasn't managed to escape the 1970's. Throwing money at them is to throw it away. Private industry is our only hope of meaningful space science.
Any comments telling me how spending on NASA results in marvelous scientific benefits for all will be swiftly deleted.
December 02, 2003
Medical Systems
When I temporarily moved back to the USA in 2001, it seemed like the medical system was worse than before. Difficult to get appointments, expensive, etc.
Soon enough I was back in Singapore. A recent trip to the doctor illustrates some differences between the Singapore medical system and the US.
I'm allergic to erythromycin, a common antibiotic.
Despite this being on my records at every one of my doctors, I've twice been accidentally prescribed this medicine by doctors in Singapore. This has never happened in the United States. I only noticed the mistake because I double-checked.
I'm going to Laos on friday. It's a malaria zone. I want preventive medicine, and the CDC recommends a drug called Malarone.
So I went to a nearby office of the Raffles Medical Center network of clinics. (Since it's Singapore, and not the USA, I simply walked in, saw a doctor within ten minutes and paid $11SGD. (about 7$USD). ) The doctor was unfamiliar with Malarone, instead wanting to prescribe other more old-fashioned medicines (mefloquine). Fortunately, I had the CDC printouts and knew exactly what I wanted. She consulted her little books, wrote me the prescription, and off I went.
The weird thing was that she prescribed for me four tablets per day for seventeen days. I was suprised, because the CDC said for prophylaxis, the dosage is one pill a day (starting three days before the trip and for a week after).
The pharmacist was also suprised. She asked me, "are you suffering from Malaria?" "Uh no, it's prophylactic." She said, well then you only need one a day, and she confirmed this with her notes.
The doctor clearly understood that it was prophylactic, so why such a mistake?
Tonight I was reading the little instruction sheet that comes with the drug. Even used as a treatment for Malaria, you only take it for three days four times a day! I was scheduled to take it for seventeen. And this is not a cheap drug. A course of seventeen pills was 125$SGD.
I think these stories illustrate how the liability/malpractice environment of the US has notably made doctors more attentive to detail than those here. I'm sort of non-judgemental on whether one or the other is a better system, but I do think it is undeniable that the basic character of the doctors is affected by their liability. This should not exactly be a suprise.
Anyway, in Singpaore you are well-served to question everything you are told and prescribed.
On the other hand, I had corrective eye surgery in Singapore that was performed by one of the top specialists in the world and it was at least two years before the same treatments was available in the US.