Posts by Olivier2553 418 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Aug 2016
Remember that is Thailand, different language, different alphabet. 95% of the people could not read one paragraph in English and among those who read, who would care to, and among those who care, most would think that if they don't understand, that is because they are lacking the vocabulary.
Who is crazy enough to read what is written on their shopping bags?
On my second trip to Mazar-I-Sharif, Afghanistan, I insisted I would not go through Kabul and endure the long and uncomfortable road trip. Instead I would only go if I could fly to Tashkent. There I had booked a taxi that took me South to visit Samarkand on the way to the border where I rejoined with my colleagues and our president. If crossing the border when fine for us, our president who was Persian but with a Swedish passport took a much longer time to proceed. I still regret I was not able to spend more time in Samarkand.
When I was a teenager, our return flight from a Greek camp had been overbooked, so we were rerouted through some country that was still part of USSR, we spent ten hours in transit, with no possibility to go outside, soldier with some big guns were making sure we staid in line.
Well, electricity can leak from empty plugs, sort of. Here in Thailand, I have often seen the wall plugs being installed on the neutral wire instead of the live (presumably in case the switch get destroyed and you touch the inside, it would be touching the neutral?).
As a result, fluorescent lamps would never go completely dark but would keep a constant glow due to the live being present all the time.
Things may have changed since a proper electric panel, including some sort of fault detector is now compulsory for any newly built house.
At my local Lotus supermarket, they have a table with a facemask detection system. It is installed in such a way that a small children or a tall adult are out of the way of the camera (anyone not in the 5 to 6 foot height I'd say). And of course, they need one staff to man the equipment, so the real benefit is negative (same number of staff, but added cost of technology).
Local is rural Thailand, I cannot say for other branches, I have only been to that one in the past few weeks.
On the part about privacy, I don't really consider it a breach of my privacy if a screen displays a message saying that I do not wear a mask while other punters around me could see by themselves that I do go uncovered.
Talking about Porn Hub, pornography is illegal, here, in Thailand, so major sites like Porn Hub are blocked at ISP level. But Porn Hub is sponsoring one of the major football team. All the youngsters who have a shirt from their favorite team know well enough what the sponsor represent and they cannot be blamed for supporting their team, can they.
Damn kids is still true. I have a smart phone that I used as a glorified MP3 player, I load my MP3 and listen at my stuff. But that phone may be borrowed by the damn kids or others, and then I may find it has the browser still on some page or other that I would never access myself.
I have always considered that the user who provides the address and fill the form knows what the address should look like in their administrative region, so address field should be as open as possible, with maybe an exception for the country as it is used to calculate the postage fee.
If addresses will be used for non mail stuff, like sending a physical person to a location, we are dealing with a more restricted area (maybe country size) and then the address can be formatted with fields that corresponds to the country>
I only once received a telegram since I live in Thailand, I was very interested to find that the address had been summarized for administrative purpose and consisted of the lot number where the house reside (with a sub-number is the lot has been divided further), the number of the district subdivision and the district post code. 3 numbers for an address is very efficient IMHO. Since, I am very careful when writing the numbers as I know it is all that matters.
It is not uncommon to see a rope attached to a truck (like 10t model), going up the electric poles and pulling the future electric cable (those pretty thick ones, 15 or 20 meters high up at the top of the poles, each spaces 100m apart, so it must be in the 10s, if not 100s KV). But they are using pulley on each pole when pulling the cables.
A decade or more ago, most of Thailand international traffic when down: all ISP had most of their different international connections running though a single sub ocean cable to Singapore (at that time, we were lucky to have a satellite link to Japan).
When working on a project for the University of Laos, I tried to tell them that they should invest into independent routing between their two sites, at that time Vientiane was going through a lot of extension and building and not a month would pass without the cable being cut. I did not manage to get my point through.
I'd say that with different hourly prices, I need a way to turn on and off some appliances when the electricity price is inside different ranges. But I will not spend my day having a look at my phone every 15 minutes.
Beside, that sort of automation has been available for decades, way before smart meters. My parents have been running like that for 20 plus years: the electricity would be at a reduced fee all the year long except during day time on 9 (or maybe 20 ?) days that are deemed to be very high demand (like the coldest of winter), if you used any electricity during those high price days, it was high priced, really (3 times the normal price comes to my mind). The days are not fixed in advance. So it was up to you to monitor if you were in a high price time.
And only running analog meter, the power company could send a signal (multiplexed into to 50 Hertz?) that you could use to automatically turn off stuff (electric cooker, over, electric water heater (they keep the water warm enough for 10 hours when they have proper insulation), washing machines, etc.) and turn on some signal light to remind people in the house.
I always visited during summer, so I never saw the system in use except the last time in Marsh 2019 when I went down to the kitchen one morning to be greeted by the red light.
I'd say it depends on the contract, but unless something explicit is mentioned, once you bought the licence to use a software, there is no time limitation. You will not get bug fixes if you don't take maintenance, but the software should not stop working only because you reached a certain date.
I remember reading something similar about railway maintenance. I think it was related to the brake. There was a choice to perform task one or task two and after that there was a final stage to do in both cases. The indentation of the printed manual was such that the final task looked to belong only to case two. Hence accident.
I don't remember the details, but that came about in a discussion on the advantages of a structured text editing (LaTeX) vs. a WYSIWYG.
I am usually firm enough with my tone of voice that when I say that I am busy and come back in half an hour, people leave me to what I am doing.
And when they come back, I explain to them what I was doing and why I could not be interrupted.
And I found out that just saying "not now, come back in 30" does not distract me nor make me lose track of what I am doing. Probably because I did not give them time to present their request.
But the, any pair of countries do some cross border trading and should unite their types of plugs, so you would end-up with a single standard all across the world. I don't mean that would be a bad thing, but that is not how the world works.
I had something similar happening in my condominium (apartment building) few years ago: the network ans Internet access was a mess: tunneling all the traffic to some company providing the service (I think they were supposed to keep logs of the traffic) instead of simply routing the service to the ISP. What once had been a decent system (Linksys WiFi running DD-WRT, a WiFi point to point link to the other building, so apparently people who designed the solution had some idea) but with no maintenance, the main router running on some Windows, no upgrade, the service was failing and needed to be rebooted several times a week.
The solution to reboot? The building technician would shut the power of the entire building, count to five and restore the power. You better not be in the lift when this happened.
It was not diving, but we would sometime have a river swim, wet suit, fins, mask and a tire in guise of a buoy.
Early January, some place near Paris, I think it was Moret sur Loing (a place that was inspiration to some impresionnist painters). We were done with the swimming, stationed on the bank of the road, just at the entrance of the bridge. Divers are not shy women would usually wear only to bottom part of a bikini under their wet suit. Imagine the surprise of the drivers by. A few accidents were barely avoided that morning.
After high school, I did not want to go to University, instead I did a 2 years technical degree in computer stuff. At the end of the two years we had a couple of months of internship that I did in a lab developing digital cameras for the television. My task was to interface a math coprocessor to a machine running a Motorola CPU, design the hardware, program the driver all in assembler... The students were assigned a professor who was in charge of following what work was being made by the student. For some reason known only to the university administration, the professor working with me was the person in charge of teaching us COBOL. No need to say that he never really understood what I was doing.
Or you could fish out the old board games and start doing something together instead if doing something next to each other...
Being bored is good, it the the time when you can let your mind drift out and become creative: I used to draft a lot of project at the time when I rode a bike several hours every week end. I had nothing better to keep my mind busy.
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