I just came in from picking chillies off our bushes in the front yard and began errantly picking my nose when checking email.

At least I'll never make that mistake again.

Avert thy gaze if thee be eeeasily frightened: Hark, a monkeypig!

P.S. Baby blogging is a lot more enjoyable than I ever imagined it would be - it doesn't feel gay at all. I'm sure it looks pretty gay sometimes, but please bear with the apparent gayness (which actually isn't gay at all) and enjoy my occasional non-baby posts as well.

If (Cyndi Lauper) + (Gamorrean Guard) doesn't make you smile, you just don't deserve the Force.

The sordid history of Skyline importation into the US as told by 0-60 Mag: Access Denied

A lifetime ago (13 or 14 years ago to be a bit more exact) I sat in a stuffy classroom in Tenri, Japan, and started penning my first essay in Japanese. Not having yet learned any kanji, I wrote it entirely in the phonetic alphabet known as hiragana. It began something like this: One day I walked to the main worship hall and saw a purple dog...

Thus, the legend of the murasaki inu (purple dog) was born. It was a recurring theme in later essays (four years worth to be exact) as well as many blues/enka jams (anata ha tashika ni aru / watashi no murasaki inu) when Cosmic Buddha would rock abandoned parking lots, smoky music studios, and our guitarist's cram school late at night.

Well guess what?

I saw a purple dog today. A purple dog, here in Mahasarakham, Thailand. (Nam and I were taking my mom to see the fish sanctuary, so I have witnesses.)

I don't think it was naturally purple. It looked like purple iodine solution (used for disinfecting wounds) had been liberally applied to a shaggy white dog, but that's not the point. It was a purple dog.

That is all.

The ultimate chillout chain reaction bubble game.

(It's all about level 12, yo)

In my previous entry I was trying to pass off my own photo as Max, without much success... Besides the comments, some people sent mail asking if it was really Max's photo, so I guess we don't look as similar as I thought we did.

But then again....

Max is now 5.4 or 5.5 kilos.

UPDATE: An admission

This is an original ad for my new (old) toy, a Yamaha Chappy most probably made in the seventies, imported from Japan into Thailand. Actually, it has all the signs of having been stolen at some point, and it wouldn't surprise me if that's how it got to Thailand. I bought it off my boss who apparently bought it right after it was brought over. She let me have it for just about $100 US (3500 Baht). w00t!

Engine size: 50 cc
Top speed: 35 kph on installed speedometer, reading at over 40 on the much newer scooter riding along side during test run

This thing really puts a smile on everybody's face - it's fun to ride and fun to watch people's faces light up when they see you.

Pictures of mine to follow.

///////////////////////////

Note: I had to do some horse trading to eventually get a little scooter I liked. This all started soon after I came to Thailand, about eighteen months ago.

First I bought a JRD (Chinese brand) 125cc "Snow" which had a remote starter, talking alarm system, and Vespa-style rear footbrake for 20,000 Baht (about $600). Then I bought a Suzuki Crystal in very rough shape for about $30 and sold the JRD for 25,000 Baht (about $750).

Then I bought a metallic gold automatic 50cc job from the eighties airbrushed with a Finding Nemo theme (hence dubbed "Nemo") on the cowling. This was also about 1000 Baht, or $30. This is the only bike I may have lost money on as we can't find it - it was left at my brother-in-laws house as a spare ride, but just went missing quite recently.

Then I got word that somebody wanted to buy the Suzuki for $60-$90, although this hasn't been confirmed yet.

The person I sold the JRD to went back home quite recently, and was at a loss about what to do with it, so I bought it back... And sold it the next day for no profit, since the only reason I bought it a second time was because I felt bad for the person trying to get rid of it.

Actually, this deal fell through and I had to look for another buyer because the first buyer couldn't come up with the cash and started asking for a discount. I laughed and said I could sell it the next day for more than the price I had offered him, and that's exactly what I did.

Two weeks after that, the Chappy came into the picture and I strongly believe this is because I'd created some powerful horse trading karma getting to that point. I must admit, it's a lot of fun playing horse trader when you're on a roll... Now, if I can only find some way to turn this Chappy into, say, a CBR...

These are really good:

• Our Electric Future by Andy Grove (of Intel fame)


• A Trio of Videos of Neal Stephenson Talking About SF

Here's some food-related links a reader sent me a while back:

• Meatwater, High Energy Survival Beverage


• Incredible Sushi Art


• Beijing takes dog off the menu for Olympics

I sometimes get inquiries about implementation of the native Movable Type captcha system for comments, often from people who are on the same webhost as this site but cannot get the captchas to work.

You might just be in luck if you're looking for a fix for the following message that appears at Blog Settings --> Comment settings --> Comment Display Options --> CAPTCHA Provider:

"You will need to speak to your host about Image::Magick and if it is installed.
CaptchaSourceImageBase is a configuration directive."

As you can see, any really useful information is kind of left out, but a bit of Googling reveals the following: CaptchaSourceImageBase is simply a line that needs to be added to your mt-config.cgi file.

Specifically, edit your-path in the following and add to mt-config.cgi:

CaptchaSourceImageBase /your-path/mt-static/images/captcha-source

Hope that works for you.

My free time this week was spent poring over charts like the ones viewable through this WHO portal and checking the feasibility of delayed schedules...

More pics to follow, of course, but Mr. Max is now up to 5.2 kilograms! We watched Scratch together today. It was as good as we remembered it (we watched it together 6 months ago when mommy was sleeping on the couch).

- Just because the scenery in the background looks like the kind of riverside restaurant you often see driving the highways around here. There's nothing like the funky beat and syncopated yowling of molam to make you feel happy and at home in Isan.

So a friend asked if this is really the last time I'm changing webhosts this decade, to which I could only reply, "shit, I really hope so." Well, third time's a charm and all that (My three for posterity's sake: FeaturePrice, iPowerWeb, Dreamhost. Yes, I sure can pick 'em).

I have a bunch of stuff to post, but getting this site back up took it's toll. Time to sleep so the baby can wake me up....

ATTENTION ALL HANDS!

PREPARE TO BAIL OUT!!

WE'RE GETTIN' THE HELL OFF THIS PATHETIC SHIP OF FOOLS!!!

///////////////////////////////////////

cosmicbuddha.com will be down/not fully operational as we change
webhosts this week. Please be patient and know in your heart that THE BUDDHA SHALL RISE AGAIN!!!!

P.S. to Dreamhost: Fuck you very much!!

w hts vwls, prcs

The best article in recent memory on the current state of B-boy affairs.

However, I think somebody needs to reassess the relationship between B-boys, breakdancing, and hip-hop, if for no other reason than to appease the demon soul of the New York City Breakers:

That's them performing for Ronald Reagan!

/////////////////////////////////

I think this post is as good an excuse as any to embed that Little Superstar vid again:

... Or an awesome screen saver.

Check it out: Moodstream

Continuing with my recent affinity for three letter titles...

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

I must admit that vimeo blows away other video sites with regard to quality, even at the non-HD setting.

Almost ten days ago I wrote briefly about how this site got haxx0red and had been unintentionally serving a hijacking script, and how you would probably have trouble even visiting if you were using FF3. As it turns out, if you attempted to visit any of the pages here through Google, you also got a warning about this being a potential attack site. This was pretty fucking annoying, truth be told. Irony of ironies, I used Google's very own Analytics service to watch how traffic was directed away from my site day by day as a result of scary warnings from Google and Firefox 3.

Quite honestly, I assumed that the road to reconciling this problem with stopbadware.org (the people who you need to go through to get taken off the "attack site" list for both FF and Google - oh, and possibly some antivirus/antispyware apps as well) would be a long and possibly ultimately futile one.

This suspicion was fueled by the results of the first review I asked stopbadware.org to perform on my site after I had cleaned the hijacking script off it: They said their review showed my site to be clean and that they had asked Google to perform their own review. Google's review came up with the result that my site was still infected, but this was highly suspect in my eyes because the directories they claimed to find infections in no longer existed - I'd deleted them in my initial cleanup of the site! Was Google searching a cached version of my site? Was it a version Google itself had cached? Madness. I explained as much to stopbadware.org when I requested a second review of my site...

I checked on the status of my site last night and saw that "Google has removed the warning for this site." I checked in Google search results and in Firefox 3 this afternoon and it seems that my site is being treated as normal again. Overall, I'm very happy with how things turned out and found the review process for stopbadware.org to be reasonably expedient considering the number of requests for review they must receive.

I must admit, however, that I don't agree with the way FF3 or Google is handling sites that got hacked like mine did. It seems way too much of a "nanny state" mentality to me, especially since the same functionality is already built into many antivirus/antispyware/antiadware apps. I'm not saying that I want people to get infected with malware; I'm saying that I don't think it's the role of search engines or web browsers to protect people from it.

////////////////////////////////////////////

thx, gen.