On Sunday night I had the pleasure of joining a crowd of Spanish and Dutch nationals and watching the World Cup final, wearing my finest red and yellow top in support of Spain. With the time difference the game didn’t kick off until 1.30am, but there was so much excitement in the air that tiredness never even came into the equation.

There followed two incredibly nerve wracking hours with much chanting and singing (with it consistently amusing me that the strongest Dutch chant was always “Olé Olé Olé”).

Anyway, I’m sure everyone knows now that Spain have won the World Cup for the first time, thanks to an excellent goal from Andrés Iniesta at the very end of the second half of extra time. The Spanish contingent went loco and I attempted to capture some of that excitement on my new camera. So I present a short picture diary of the most Spanish night in Phnom Penh imaginable, viva España!

Feliz pueblo español en Phnom Penh!

Click on photos to enlarge

And in case you missed the goal that ended nearly two hours of heart-stopping anticipation, you can check it out in the video below. I can only imagine the scenes in Spain – the country must have gone proper mental!

Update: every time I find this video it gets taken down by FIFA a little while later. So I’ve taken a copy of it and uploaded it to Vimeo, but made it private on Vimeo. Hopefully they don’t find my lowly blog and send me a DMCA take-down notice…

Date Added: July 13th, 2010 | 2 Comments

Spain celebrates

Congratulations to Spain on their 1-0 win against Germany last night. I was too tired to stay up and watch it but it’s great to see Spain knock out Germany and know that whoever wins the final it will be their first time lifting the world cup. I will admit that I had pegged the Germans for the win (no bets placed though ) but was rooting for Spain.

Of course, I’m biased in favour of Spain due to the large Spanish contingent in existence in Phnom Penh. I anticipate a late night on Sunday surrounded by loco pueblo español.

Olé, viva España, córcholis!

Photo by penguinstorm on Flickr

Date Added: July 8th, 2010 | Leave a comment!

Tomorrow evening I travel to Kuala Lumpur, giving myself a couple of days as a tourist prior to WordCamp Malaysia.

I find it strange that by travelling 3° west, I’m actually going to end up an hour ahead. Time zones really are quite arbitrary.

Time Zone Map

Of course, if time zones were completely arbitrary, I guess they’d actually just follow the straight line representations on the map, resulting in people having houses half in one time-zone, half in the other. Now that’d be complicated.

Kuala Lumpur’s time-zone will be nice though, the sun will set at 7.20pm instead of 6.20pm – definitely suits the night bird that I am a bit more. Very much looking forward to getting there and looking around.

Image courtesy of Nelo Esteves

Date Added: May 18th, 2010 | Leave a comment!

Today I bought a new Cisco Linksys WRT120N WiFi router to go along with the new WiMax connection that was setup for me last week by Ezecom here in Phnom Penh.

I won’t bore you with the exact details of my fun evening fighting with technology, but will abbreviate it into a series of points.

My evening went like this:

1. Set everything up (ignoring wireless routers instructions to install their quick-setup wizard software).
2. Do the thing that I know is the correct procedure (enter PPPoE details, click connect).
3. Feel confused when nothing happens.
4. Re-enter settings, re-plug cables, re-set router, power off/on WAN box, re-enter settings, and restart computer in various orders.
5. Return to point 2 (but skip point 5 next time around).
6. Reset everything and try the wireless router wizard I explicitly avoided at the start.
7. Get annoyed with wireless router wizard’s inexplicably convoluted practice.
8. Feel somewhat unsurprised when the router wizard fails to help, offers useless error messages, and has a troubleshooter that completely fails to do anything useful other than crash itself.
9. Get annoyed to find out the wireless router wizard has silently installed a 730mb ‘magic network’ program that I neither need nor want.
10. Uninstall all the wizard crap, reset router, try the basic steps again.
11. Feel disheartened when nothing happens.
12. Spend a while searching stuff on the net.
13. Try some more random things, unplug and reset the router multiple times, power on and off the WAN connection, and restart computer.
14. Feel quite pissed off that there’s still nothing going on in internet land.
15. Do a load of research looking up IP addresses and trying to fathom Ezecom’s network setup and possible hostnames for the PPPoE connection.
16. Admit defeat and accept that I’ll have to call Ezecom support tomorrow.
17. Decide randomly to try once more (having changed absolutely no settings whatsoever, just using the bog standard ‘this should work’ setup).
18. It works.

I should be delighted that I triumphed over technology, but I didn’t really. It just mysteriously didn’t work for 2.5 hours, and then did.

This waste of time battle with technology, and blog post, was fuelled by foolishly having a coffee after dinner.

Date Added: May 12th, 2010 | Leave a comment!

Whilst this might be quite a nerdy thing to say, I’ve always enjoyed packing a crazy amount of things into a tiny space. This efficiency for packing has been helpful in a limited number of situations:

1. Moving house
2. Going to Rathlin
3. Um, that’s about it

This evening, whilst relaxing on the balcony after a lovely dinner over at Warren’s gaff, the following photo was snapped of a Hi Lux flatbed truck carrying a marvellous and slightly crazy amount of stuff.

Whilst this sort of thing is commonplace over here, I still marvel every time I see such things.

Cambodia: A nation of incredible packers

Date Added: May 5th, 2010 | Leave a comment!

My previous experience in getting net access covered two continents, today I hopefully will add a third continent to that list.

Mostly I’ve had net access set up in Ireland and my net connection in Canada back in 2001 is a distant memory (the main memory being that my 2001 Canadian connection was faster than my Irish 2008 connection).

In Ireland it tends to go like this: call phone company and ask for broadband; phone company gets you to jump through some hoops and grovel before stating that you’ll be connected in about two or three weeks; three weeks pass and you still don’t have a connection, you call the phone company, sit on hold for about an hour before being disconnected just as you get put through; after you smash something in a fit of rage, you call them back, eventually speaking to someone who plucks a time from the air and assures you you’ll have a connection soon, you bite your tongue as it’s not really the call centre drone’s fault; this process of calling and various excuses being trotted out continues for a random number of weeks (may as well take the first number drawn from next week’s Lotto as an indication of how long it will take you to get broadband), until eventually you’re connected.

That’s a standard case. Personally I’ve experienced sagas with being forced to choose dial-up, not receiving the ‘always-on’ package I requested, and then chasing ESAT BT for 2 years for my refund after spending EUR350 in 2 months on regular dial-up calls; Digiweb assuring us there was no download cap and then throttling us to dial-up speed; Last Mile being incredibly shit; Arden Brisknet being a beacon of light and then becoming shit between noon and midnight every day (the improved again though); along with various other debácle along the way usually involving Eircom or ESAT incompetence.

Jump to Cambodia. I can’t say too much about it yet, but there are a few provisos. Speeds are a lot lower than those theoretically available in Ireland, but thus far I’ve been very happy with my office connection running at 512kb synchronously. I can make Skype calls whilst remotely connecting to a client’s desktop. Yes, 1Gb music software updates take about four to five hours to download whereas our current connection in Longford can do that in about 20-25 minutes, but still I’m content. It is also true that every connection runs through a proxy which causes weird issues with content caching.

However, today I rang Ezecom to place an order for WiMax broadband, my call was answered immediately, the operator took my name, phone number, and the package name I required and stated that a technical engineer would call me back to arrange an appointment. 3 minutes later I received a call from the engineer. He took my address and checked what time would suit me for him to call round. I hesitantly said “I’m at home all day, so whatever time suits you”, he replied with “2pm?”.

My god Gary, is this true? I may have broadband within two to three hours of placing an order?

I’ll update you on how it goes, but right now it’s looking good.

A shame on Irish telcos (or should I say, a plague on Irish telcos), for too long you’ve held a position of power where the consumer is your plaything, breeding the opposite of the required services mentality. How did this happen? Why is the Irish consumer desperately grateful when the telco decides to bestow internet access upon thee?

Today’s ordering experience was a delight, but only because I’m an Irishman used to being abused by almighty telcos.

Update

Ok, I don’t quite have internet. Seems I misunderstood something. Rather than a technical engineer coming round it was a sales guy with the paperwork for me to fill out. Apparently I’ll have a tech guy round either tomorrow evening or Wednesday morning. Still pretty good in my books.

Update 2

They’re here already! Now that’s what I call service. Hopefully the install goes smoothly and then all that’s remaining is to get a WiFi router for the house. No more slow Edge network browsing on my phone at home!

Update 3: 16:40 4th May 2010

From order to internet connection in my home in around 27 hours. Not bad going. Cambodia 1 – Ireland 0.

Date Added: May 3rd, 2010 | Leave a comment!

Last night I went out to dinner to say farewell to an Italian friend of my housemate. We sat on the edge of the Mekong and the rain poured down and sheets of lightning burst through the sky.

I was surrounded by Italians and the conversation turned to the small nature of the world and the seemingly incredible nature of meeting people in a remote location who turned out to know you great-grandfather’s neighbour’s nephew who used to bake their bread every morning (or something equally ridiculous). Whilst this phenomenon is well documented with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (which has more recently been applied to Twitter), it still amazes us to find that our connections link us to millions of people round the world.

Anyway, with this conversation I made the point that I was stunned that thus far, beyond the 3 Irish friends I had come to Phnom Penh to visit, I had only met two other Irish people here (with whom there was no immediate connection). I was somewhat proud of this; it was some sort of personal valiant stand against Kevin Bacon and his simplification of social connections controlling our lives.

The dinner wound down, the rain and lightning eased, allowing a pleasant tuk-tuk ride (avoiding occasional temporary lakes that had popped up) to my next destination, Nikki’s 80′s rooftop party.

Approaching her large apartment complex I could hear the cheesy eighties-ness echoing down the empty streets of PP. Within the complex I got into the lift to venture to the 9th floor and just as the lift door was about to close a call went out for me to hold it. In to the lift stepped two women, one of whom, with only a minor utterance, revealed in an instant her Irish upbringing.

Of course questions were asked and her home town was revealed as Longford, the vast metropolis at the centre of the county in which I had chosen to settle back in 2007. With much disbelief she questioned that I truly came from there, which is fair, considering my Dublin upbringing, but my mention of my tiny local village, Ballinamuck, cleared any doubts, as no one has any reason to know the name of such a tiny village.

To think that only two hours prior I had been smugly satisfied by my avoidance of all things Irish, my besting of the interconnected nature of the world in which we live. I dared not dig deeper into that social fabric, but I do not doubt that given a little bit of searching we would no doubt have found a common link. Ireland’s four million people are easily linked together.

The night continued with the meeting of an American woman, born in Ireland, who’d spent time there working at a hotel in Athlone. She could not remember it’s name but said it was on the lake. I hesitantly suggested the only lakeside hotel I knew in Athlone, the Hodson Bay Hotel, to which I am connected through Phil Knowd of the Irish Sailing Academy. Lo and behold it was the very hotel at which she worked.

Once again I am sure that with a small amount of digging, connections would have been revealed.

This world is small, and you should never consider yourself above that.

Date Added: May 2nd, 2010 | Leave a comment!

This mental workload has been slowly driving me mad the last while but the good news is that I feel an end is nearly in sight. There’ll always be PixelApes stuff to be doing but it’s the extra music work that’s been killing me.

Now I’m close to wrapping the short film score, a new track for a compilation on Stasis records, and a remix for John Dalton’s latest release.

I’ve got a contact at the Cambodian Living Arts Studio, and am hoping the facilities will meet my monitoring needs so I can proceed with mixing and mastering this work.

Only got a few other side projects to clear after that and then who knows, I might even get started on my elusive 2nd album (or alternatively I guess I could spend some time away from the computer).

Date Added: April 21st, 2010 | Leave a comment!

I just left the office. Nearly 11pm. On my way to get dinner I passed a big group of Cambodians out on the street, holding hands in a big circle dancing.

They parted hands to allow a motorcycle to drive past and then re-linked hands and carried on dancing. I could not hear any music being played.

Now I’m sitting in the outside area of a restaurant, sipping a banana lassi, waiting for my dinner to be served, and watching the world pass by.

I love this place.

Date Added: April 9th, 2010 | Leave a comment!

I think I have probably successfully communicated the sense of my inordinate workload in recent blog posts, and if not, well that would be a good thing as everyone admires the stalwart type. Stiff upper lip, by Jove.

Either way, yes I’ve been a little busy and, as a result, consistently tired. Last night didn’t exactly help my cause. Today my eyes hurt.

Reason 1: Office Lock In

As the bells chimed midnight I realised I was clearly not going to finish the proposal on which I’d been attempting (and admirably failing) to gain closure.

Oh, speaking of bells, I’ll divert for one second here. I was speaking with dearest mother at 6pm Cambodian time yesterday, just when the Angelus rang out on her radio (it was mid-day there). She asked whether it brought back memories of home. I had no answer. On reflection, it vexed me as it always has, the enforced religious connotations it provokes indicate, to me, the continued hold the church maintains over the state, and hence it’s broadcasting bastion RTE.

Imagine if you will that RTE broadcast a Muslim prayer in order for us to face Mecca. Uproar. Is there any difference between the Angelus and that? One is bells, the other an enunciated prayer, but the significance is very similar. I believe the Angelus is there for the people of Ireland to reflect and pray for a minute at noon and 6pm. So yes, it vexes me that even in Cambodia I’m still exposed to the influence of Ireland’s Catholic Church, a church with no shortage of incredible controversy of late, yet still it holds its control.

Anyway, detour complete, where were we.

Ah yes, at the wee hour. I ventured forth outside the walls of my little office. The restaurant downstairs understandably quiet. To my surprise I realised that all had departed: customers, staff, and the goodly proprietor, my gracious landlord, Caspar. A quick phone call confirmed, I was indeed locked in.

I decided, in the spirit of the aforementioned stiffness of ones upper lip, to say tally ho and attack with renewed vigour the proposal. Freedom from my office imprisonment would arrive in due course.

Two hours later it did, by which time I was ‘in the zone’, so I stuck around for another 20 minutes to finalise things. I finally made it home close to three a.m.

Reason 2: Rathlin

On plonking my tired bones down on my bed I was greeted with a bleep from Rhodan (my phone). An instant message from a fellow Audio Terrorist.

Apparently my lack of physical presence in the country does not relieve me of my obligations when it comes to organising our yearly outing at Rathlin. A point which failed to surprise me as I had already allowed such thoughts to cross my mind.

It begged another question though. What am I doing? There’s been a vague thought that making it back to Ireland for Rathlin would be great, but I worry that on returning I’ll be broke and it will make sense to stay in Ireland for the foreseeable future. My journeying will be over.

But then, it’s Rathlin, my guaranteed yearly highlight. We work our bollox off and try to do something a little more ridiculous than the year before, and each year I feel more proud of what we can accomplish on a barren rock off the north coast of Ireland.

It’s April. Rathlin is August. Given my current workload I’ve got May, June, July. Hong Kong is on the cards. I also have an idea of my return to Ireland being circuitous, crossing the international date line and returning via Alaska, Vancouver, Toronto and New York. It’s just an idea though, and I hadn’t really thought about when it would occur.

As you can see, the whole instant messaging chat got my brain all befuddled and active. Result being no sleep til 4am for me.

So yeah. What was the point of this ramble?

I got to bed late? Possibly. I’m hoping it’s more that I needed to voice thoughts which, as a result of this late night, were troubling me. That would be vaguely better than me writing an essay to just say ‘Last night I didn’t get to be til 4am’, something which would sit better on Twitter. Someone, get me an editor!

P.S. My late meandering home did offer me the opportunity to witness four young western lads sitting outside the 24 hour mini-mart smoking spliffs and occasionally snorting what I assumed to be coke off the table at which they huddled.

Date Added: April 8th, 2010 | Leave a comment!