Kuala Lumpur

Well I’ve arrived in KL safe and sound. Breezed through check-in at Phnom Penh airport, and the AirAsia flight was very comfortable. I even got the sense that the flight was quieter than they usually are – perhaps a newer model plane.

As it was pretty much dark by the time I landed in KL and seeing as I didn’t know the city at all I decided to wimp out and get a taxi even though the price seemed quite high ($23 approx). The taxi ride was quite amusing as the driver seemed to know the hotel I was going to but was determined to get his GPS unit to give him directions. So he basically spent the entire drive playing with the thing and entering different variations of the hotel name whilst the unit constantly did “route recalculation”. After a while I realised why the taxi was so expensive (bear in mind I’m used to lower prices now) – the drive from KUL to the hotel, which is fairly central in KL is 66km, so that’s actually an incredibly good deal.

When we got into town he drove around where he thought the hotel might be which turned out to be a street with a massive market on it (KL’s china-town), so I jumped out and went searching through the jam-packed market.

I’m staying at Hotel D’Oriental Inn and so far so good. Clean, cheap, decent net connection – does the job nicely. I’ve only ventured out to get some dinner and am back in the hotel for an early night.

Only observations I have thus far:

1. The Petronas Towers look incredibly impressive as you drive into the city.
2. The mix of cultures here so far is staggering. You can see a massive range of ethnic backgrounds and mixes in people.

There appears to be a strong Indian influence along with a wide range of East Asian facial types and a wonderfully varied collection of skin tones, from the surprisingly pasty (makes my pale Irish skin feel like it doesn’t stand out too much), to rich dark skin. Ever since I left Ireland I’ve been fascinated by the variation in ethnology to which I’ve been exposed. In India I found it fascinating to see characteristics in some people which I could link to characteristics present in some of my Greek family (not sure what they’d think of me saying that), and could momentarily visualise the vast melting pot of ethnic and cultural background that exists around the world. Seeing things like this just makes me wonder how racism exists – it really is an insane concept.

Anyway, I’m just rambling here. Going to watch some more of “The Pacific” and crash out.

Image from Wikipedia

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

I’m looking for potential alternatives to Evernote, my current choice for taking notes.

The note-taking application needs the following:

• Desktop application (Windows7) with local storage of notes
• Cloud sync (can be self-hosted if needs be)
• Browser accessible notes
• Android App

Why am I investigating alternatives? I’ve been finding myself less satisfied with Evernote’s performance over the last while: I frequently find Evernote is maxing out one of my CPU cores; the changes from 3.0x to 3.5x were poor in a lot of ways and introduced the need for extra actions to achieve the same tasks; the destruction of most usefulness of the screen capture tool; and the android app is extremely dissatisfying (for example I often find that searches yield no results unless I’m searching for a specific tag, and that Android app taken notes either don’t sync or take an incredibly long time to do so).

Also, to be honest Evernote has a host of functions that I just don’t need. My note taking tends to be plain text, with very very occasional embedding of images. I don’t need handwriting recognition, I don’t really need full web page embeds, I just need a fast, eminently searchable set of text notes.

In addition, whilst I’m  all for a decent rate of application updates, Evernote 3.5 has them with such a frequency that I often find when I need to make a note I’ve got Evernote bugging me to update. Not only this but I just noticed that Evernote was using up 471.8Mb by storing every single update.exe, as demonstrated by the image below.

Evernote storing all app updates

As you can see each update necessitates a complete application download (would they not save a fortune on bandwidth by implementing a patch system rather than a complete application download?), and these application updates have slowly increased from 35Mb to 40Mb.

So if you’re an Evernote user and you’re wondering why your main drive is running short on space, just navigate to (on Windows 7 at least) C:\Users\~username\AppData\Local\Evernote\Evernote\Updates and empty it out.

If you’d like to do some more investigation into disk usage check out this handy application, Foldersize, which visualises disk usage for you.

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.

So I’ve finally sorted out my shit and booked flights, hotel and my ticket for WordCamp Malaysia. Really looking forward to it, and despite my current workload I’m hoping that I’ll pretty much be able to take it easy for the 4 days I’ll be in Kuala Lumpur. Obviously this is a wholly nerdy thing to be doing, but, well, I don’t care. Clearly I’m a nerd and there’s no getting around it.

I think if you asked me a year ago did I think I’d be attending a WordCamp in the near future, I’d have said yes. However the location behind that intention would most definitely have been Ireland. In fact I had I even had thought about setting up the first WordCamp Ireland, but got busy and never sorted it, instead Sabrina Dent and Katherine Nolan did, by all accounts, an incredible job. Perhaps I’ll make it to the next one. Still, little did I think that I’d be here a year later and prepping for a jaunt to Kuala Lumpur to get my WordCamp fix.

I’m not really sure what to expect as this is my first WordCamp, but I’m sure it’ll be a blast and I’m looking forward to meeting a whole bunch of like-minded developers.

Regarding the event itself, I’d say the presentation I’m looking forward to the most is Aizat’s “Beginning WordPress Plugin Development”, as it’s something I just have never quite gotten round to sorting out, and it’s almost certainly something I should be doing – if nothing else to make my own life easier with reusable functions, and hopefully to give something useful back to the community. There’s lots of other interesting talks lined up as well of course, and you can find more info out over at the WordCamp.my Agenda page.

At the same time I’m very much looking forward to having a look around Kuala Lumpur as it looks like quite an interesting place. I have to read up a bit more on things to do there and if anyone’s got any dynamite suggestions, please leave a comment below!

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

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.

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.

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).

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.