Day 1
The carcasses of half-finished buildings are scattered all around, the dead husks of the 1997 Asian economic collapse. Their bare concrete and rebar bodies lay like dried up insects, thick on the ground. For some reason, the rebar sticking up all raw and naked makes me think of mosquito legs and cockroach antenna.

That's the way of it, I guess, boom or bust. Back in 1996, it was boom, baby, all boom. The next year, it was bust, with abandoned construction projects and wealth pissed away on real estate and high tech.

Now, a decade later, it's boom, baby, all boom.

Bust or boom.

For some people, it's all the same. Riding the hotel shuttle in from the brand-new run-down airport, the rusting metal makeshift roofs carpet the land beneath the elevated road. Each patch constitutes a little poverty-stricken village, where it looks like one good wind would blow away the villagers' possessions, roof and all. Maybe it would blow away all the villagers, too. All around them, new glass-and-steel towers reflect the sunset like a warm hearth, like a rosy future, like the blood of the masses. They glint. They gleam. They sparkle.

For now.

The first thing I notice about the Miracle Grand hotel is how dingy it's become. Just five years ago, it gleamed and glinted. Now, the signs tacked up the western tower are fading and slightly dirty. The concrete patio at the entrance is cracked and chipped.

Inside, it's still sharp and shiny, so I guess the decay is strictly cosmetic. The staff are the same staff that waited on me last year. The rooms have the same carpet, the same marble bathrooms, the same cheap hotel desks. Only now, the veneer is peeling away from the front of those desks.

Time does that to the best of us.

The second thing I notice is that the minibar still has Singha beer. That's good.

Day 2
The secondary server, the one that is supposed to mirror the primary and provide failover, is inoperable. Do not ask why. It is embarrassing. Suffice to say it involves a string of misadventures, starting with a full-sized SATA card and a half-sized server case. The story goes downhill from there.

There is a tech mall about a kilometer down the road from the Miracle Grand. We cab there after work, my brother and I. Dan is looking for a motherboard with 64 bit PCI slots, a type of motherboard peculiar to server hardware.

We only find desktop motherboards, which come with 32 bit PCI slots. As you can see, they are only half good enough.

The tech mall is astounding, dozens of little shops with every kind of geek goody imaginable. We pass one shop with bootleg DVDs. They are showing 300, the thrillingly violent film that merges CGI with live action in a beautiful and macabre way that only geek artists can achieve. The movie hasn't even left the theaters back in the states, and won't officially be available on DVD for another couple of months, at least.

They get all the candy early here, thanks to the wonders of piracy.

I'm sure if I purchase a copy, the ghost of Jack Valenti, the long-time head of the MPAA and pusher of bad copyright law in the United States, would hunt me down and as punishment make me watch all the unsold legitimate copies of Battlefield Earth over and over and over, unto the end of Time, amen.

Jack Valenti died today. So there is good news, even if the secondary server died a mysterious and inexplicable death.

Jack Valenti's death is perfectly explicable. He was an old man, filled with acid and dead cockroaches, like the shells of half-finished Bangkok buildings.

The autopsy showed he was a cyborg.

God have mercy on his soul.

I won't.

Minibars are magic.

I made the beer disappear last night. Tonight, it has reappeared.

The best thing about being in Bangkok is the food.

Theerayoot and Udom took Dan and me out to lunch today. There's a small restaurant down the street from where we work in Kai Rai. The aprons of the workers there say they have "Good Food Good Sanitation." That's reassuring. The aprons say other things as well, but the rest is in Thai, so I can't read it.

I really should learn Thai. I should at least learn, "Good Sanitation," and, "64 bit PCI slot." That'd make life a lot easier.

The food was excellent. I ate there several times last year. They always have good food. And now I know, good sanitation.

The cars passing by on the elevated roadway, and down below on the non-elevated roadway, remind me of the Ratchet and Clank level, you know the one, Metropolis. The cars go by in that unvarying, constant way reserved for video games and Asian cities. It's insane, they way the drivers make up their own lanes, cannibalizing parts from the other side of the road, or driving on the shoulder. In Bangkok, there is only one driving rule that I've learned:

It's all good.

There are very few dents in the vehicles. Even old broken-down vehicles seem to be dent-free.

I imagine we'll have to find a better tech mall tomorrow. We need that second server up and running, as I'm supposed to set up redundancy for the one server we have running right now. It's hard to have replication and redundancy and failover and all with only one server.

I do like the tech malls. They are way cooler than Best Buy.

Dan says, "I think it's because they have to think about driving." I gather he's talking about the lack of dents in the vehicles. "They aren't all talking on their cell phones, or drinking shitty Starbucks coffee, or crap like that. They have to pay attention when they drive."

He might be right. It's an hypothesis, anyway.

The lightening storm has passed now, heading north of the Miracle Grand. I'm working on the minibar magic trick again, and watching the storm pass overhead. An hour ago, the lightening was striking all around us, one so close the crack of the thunder sounded almost before the lightening faded. I watched out the window, hoping to see the lightening strike a pole, or a building, or a passing dentless car, but it didn't. Nothing exciting ever happens here.

Day 3
300 is not a good movie. It was a lot of fun, and it'll probably win all kinds of special effects awards at the Oscars next year, but it really isn't a good movie.

Snakes on a Plane. Now that is a good movie.

I woke up at 0-dark-30. I lay in bed an hour, trying to will myself to go back to sleep, but it was impossible. I finally caved, and crawled out of bed at 0530. I figured I'd finally get started on Beerhackers, a project I'm interested in doing. Of course, the hotel wireless is down, so I can't get to all the documentation I need.

Strange how dependent I've become, we've become, on the internet. If only I'd've downloaded all the documentation to my laptop. I have it at home, of course, on my home server. But I can't get to that, either.

Dependent.

I'm still playing with GObject, the object-oriented basis for Gtk+ and the GNOME project. I don't know it well enough yet to just dive in an write a new object off the top of my head, though, so I'm stuck for now.

Stuck.

Dan and I wrote a screenplay. It's a movie about a secret government agency that handles the coverup details of alien sightings. It's called Alien Insurance. It's an arm of Majestic 12 that has a cover as an insurance agency.

It's very funny. It'd make a great Sci-Fi channel movie of the week or something. It's as funny as 300, and as tightly written as Snakes on a Plane. So you know it's good.

It's all good.

I got an email from my niece Nichole. She's such a great kid. Aliesha and I took her in at fourteen. She calls me her Drunkle Tony.

Here's the email:

hey Tony,

Nichole

Huh. That's a helluva note.

Dan found a replacement motherboard today. He spent the rest of the day looking for RAM for that motherboard. We have a very elaborate plan that involves 512MB now, with more later. I guess we'll wait and see.

Day 4
I'm not ready. Not at all. I think I'm still drunk. I am certainly still tired. I don't like the feeling. I am not ready for more work.

I imagine I still reek of alcohol. I know my mouth tastes like a Bangkok river. I've brushed my teeth, had coffee, water, and brushed my teeth again, and I still taste last night. I taste like stale beer and second-hand smoke.

I suppose I should be working, but I don't know what to do. I performed the upgrade yesterday, in preparation for installing Slony, the replication software. Everything is good.

It's all good.

Except for my mouth.

Or my head.

I'm not hung over, really. I'm not even recovered. I got by on four hours sleep, for the third night in a row, and I can't focus. I can't even try. I certainly can't care. There's no headache, just a general disjointed feeling, like my head is encased in lucite.

I feel a little bad. I'm supposed to be working, getting stuff done. I feel a little guilty.

But not really.

I sleep. A lot. Like, twelve hours.

I told Nichole nothing like her little cop killer ever happened in my college days, but I remember better.

Once, some kid I didn't know snapped. He bludgened four people to death, including a guy who worked down the hall from me. He killed himself, but not with a hammer. So I guess college hasn't changed that much.

Day 5
Malin tells us the place is called "Frosty Beer," or something similar. It's a seafood joint, with tanks of normal and strange-looking sealife walling off the restaurant from the sidewalk, a sort of death row for crustaceans and fish. Z. and I let Malin and his wife order for all of us.

The mugs were half-filled with water, and then frozen. The Singha slushes up when poured over the ice, but as the ice is frozen solid in the bottom of the mug, it provides very little surface area. I drink the beer quickly. I don't want it to get all watered down as the ice melts.

Malin's wife talks quietly to Malin in Thai. She speaks a little English, and when Malin and Z. go out for a cigarette, we chat. She speaks so quietly, I don't hear much of what she says over the traffic and the murmurs of the other patrons.

The food is excellent, of course. A beautiful young woman keeps my mug filled, and when the ice finally melts free from the bottom of the mug, she brings me a new one, with fresh ice, and fills it with Singha.

At least this part of the day went right.

The redundant system refused to sync. This all worked so well back in the states, in our lab. Here, though, out in the wild, nothing is working, and everything goes wrong.

The systems are not syncing.

Nichole writes and asks when I'm coming to fetch her from campus. She says she needs to be out of the dorms by Saturday, in three weeks.

I hope to God the servers are syncing by then.

Day 6
Thaksin Shinawatra was elected President of the Thailand Professional Golf Association yesterday.

Back in September '06, the Thai military staged a coup, removing Shinawatra from power. He has been in exile ever since. Now he is President of the Thai PGA.

Life is funny like that.

At least, I'm laughing my ass off.

I call my wife. Aliesha asks, "Will you be able to take Friday off to fetch Nichole?" We don't talk much. Each minute is US$1.50. I tell her about Shinawatra, and how I laughed my ass off, and I tell her about my problems that day with replication.

She tells me she loves me, and I tell her I love her, and we say good-bye.

The problems syncing yesterday were due to a hard drive failing on the RAID array. All I had to do was look at the syslog, and I would've seen it, plain as day.

Plain as day.

After I get the systems syncing again, I get the admin password for our layer three switch, and configure the VLAN.

I'm winging it. Totally winging it.

I have a friend who claims everyone is winging it, from the best-paid CEO down to the janitor and homeless person. Jeff says, "The CEO is probably winging it even more. Maybe they're worth what they get paid because they're good at winging it."

No CEO is worth US$20,000,000 a year.

Day 7
The tuk-tuk driver convinced us the World Trade Center was closed. "Closed on Sunday," he said.

Of course, it was not.

We realized it was only the one store, there on the corner, the one that sold bronze and wood statues of elephants and half-naked women and the Buddha. By the time we'd realized our mistake, we were already piled in, traveling someplace "better, much better."

Poor tuk-tuk driver. The traffic was too dense, and he had to stop. We jumped out, J. and Z. and I. J. gave the driver a 100 baht for his troubles, and we walked the half-kilometer back to the World Trade Center.

If there is one thing I love above all else in Thailand, it is the freedom. Thai means "free," and the people live that way. The street vendors hawk everything from chicken to t-shirts to cheesy bizarre sculptures made of springs and bits of metal soldered together.

There is a kind of freedom that is certainly lacking in the US. Here, it's illegal even to take a beer out in public. And while my government is busy taking away freedoms and putting up walls of red tape, Thailand moves forward with an anarchic frenzy.

As I wander from vendor to vendor, looking for cheesy magnets or beautiful silk sarongs, I am stunned by the strangeness of it all. My body feels as if my head is too huge. The constant barrage of Thai speech crosswires my brain. I feel like a big, clumsy, stupid giant among a sea of short beautiful graceful people.

Everyone is polite, exceptionally polite.

I'm told many Buddhists will try to stop a fight, should they stumble on one. They believe they are saving two people: the victim, certainly, but also the attacker. It is their belief the attacker does violence to himself, as well as his victim.

I can believe it.

I feel it every day.

I'm tired now, and ready for this trip to end. I don't want to be here any more. I don't want to return to the states, either, but Aliesha's there. I do want to return to her.

This trip has been half-finished, like the empty shells of abandoned Bangkok construction. Everything about it feels half-done, and not just the replication and failover. We'll get that working, and Z. and J. will do their training, and we'll go home. I don't think that'll end the sense of incompleteness, though.

I'm not sure even Singha can help.

The fridge has performed its magic trick, as if to say, "Singha might not help, but it can't hurt."