There is a horrible show/channel we get on true visions satellite TV service here. It's called Lin Ping Reality/The Panda Channel.

It's not that I particularly hate pandas, just that I think they're boring as hell. Why do they deserve their own channel/reality show for xmasman's sake?

One good thing has come of this, though. I now know what color a panda's bunghole is:

This is just one handy fact I learned this year - here's to even greater discoveries in the year to come.

Surprise, surprise...

How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room.

A good read on Mohammed Ali's opponents, searching in the not so distant past, and how we all grow old and disappear: Shadow Boxing

Note: According to the MeFi article where Google directed me, the hustle referred to seems to be this: Fast and Loose.

(thx dm)

My coworker caught this fine specimen somewhere near our offices. Curiously enough, he let us hold him and didn't try to run away at all. When I got back home, P'Kaew told me that this kind of lizard usually bites and doesn't let go, so I guess we were lucky...

Gearing up for season 8, yo!

In the true spirit of Christmas, we visited the biggest shopping mall in this part of Thailand, Central Plaza Khon Kaen, that just opened a few weeks ago. We were mostly there to buy Max a new booster seat for the car so Mina could inherit his old one, but we stumbled across a very recently opened foot spa featuring 15 minute doctor fish treatments for 99 baht. We've seen doctor fish spas on TV for the past ten years or so, and we always wanted to try them out... I mean, a stupid fish willing to gnaw on my stinky dogs? I had to try that!

The verdict: It's kinda freaky at first. The fish are actually eating you, so it takes some getting used to, but it was worth it. Your skin comes out feeling very smooth.

Note: Max was totally freaked out and wouldn't touch the water, even though he usually likes fish and aquariums.

...which I take as an extremely fortuitous sign. ...and at last, I have time to blog again, all because of our Baby Bjorn carrier (thanks mom and dad!). I didn't use it with Max for the first few months partly because he was so small (born 1 month early at 2,400 grams), but today I noticed that the label said it could be used for babies over 3.2 (?) kilos. Mina is 4.2 kilos as of yesterday (born at 3.5 and naturally dropped a bit of weight the first few days).

It says a lot that this review was ten times more interesting than the movie itself. I found that some of the links weren't available through the "related videos" sidebar part way through, so I'm linking every part below:

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review Part 1/7

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review Part 2/7

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review Part 3/7

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review Part 4/7

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review Part 5/7

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review Part 6/7

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review Part 7/7

Having now experienced a C-section at both hospitals in Mahasarakham, my wife and I spent today comparing them and we've come to a conclusion: The government hospital is better for childbirth, and in a couple years (when construction of the new children's wing is supposed to be completed) will probably be on par with anything Khon Kaen can offer with the exception of Khon Kaen Ram (which is on a different level than other hospitals in the region in many aspects, because of much deeper pockets).

Background: Our first baby, Max, was born a month early and as a breech baby, which necessitated a C-section (In Thailand, a Caesarean is called a "Caesar." I personally prefer "Caesarean" to the Americanized version, "Cesarean," because of the root origin.). We had been contemplating having the baby at one of the two hospitals in Khon Kaen mentioned above, but we hadn't checked them out yet and when we got in the car, my wife didn't want to endure the 45 minute drive to Khon Kaen. So we decided on the government hospital (Mahasarakham Hospital), mainly because Nam has good nurse friends there. We'd actually checked it out the day before and were apprehensive because (A) the facilities were old and dirty and (b) being a government hospital, there are masses of sick people lining the hallways (also, up here in the country, patients are often accompanied by entire families who lay out straw mats in the hallways for eating, waiting, and staying over). One thing that worked out in our favor was that while the natural childbirth rooms were appalling (three cots per room, no partitions, no air con, cobwebs and dirty acoustic ceiling tiles paired with ceiling fans, etc.), the surgical facilities were clean and modern.

The main problem with the government hospital, however, is overcrowding. There's nothing like carrying your newborn through throngs of dirty and diseased to make you crave a clean environment... And that's the main reason we decided to have shrieking child prodigy #2 at the private hospital, down the road behind SermThai department store, in downtown Maha Sarakham.

At first, it seemed like we had made the best choice, but a variety of factors proved this to be wrong. This hospital has just started a process of rebranding as Thai Inter Hospital Mahasarakham, which basically means that they have new letterhead and a new logo, and plenty of neato blueprints and design concepts posted around, but as of right now, it's just a semi-old private hospital with a new name (as a side note, there was a poster in our room saying they have ties with this facility in Koh Samui). The first big problem was directly related to this rebranding process - they were completely redoing the room directly above the ICU with sledges, hammer drills, tile saws, the whole bit. This was a bit disconcerting, to say the least... I briefly entertained the idea of wheeling Nam and the baby out of the hospital and up the street to the public hospital. It was pretty bad. Luckily, the nurses let me take the baby up to our private room and Nam followed an hour later when she got cleared from the ICU. This problem is a temporary one, but there were other problems that were rooted deeper in the system.

The nurses were mostly inexperienced. Some were young and inexperienced, other were inexperienced with newborns. This is a big problem in a maternity ward. Luckily, this was our second time, so we could recognize shaky decisions and when to question them.

• The only pediatricians on staff (1 or 2) were part time and visited only once a day.


• Overall, doctor visits were too few and seemingly meaningless. Random doctors would wander in, glance at the baby, comment on the musical teddy bear we'd brought to sit next to her (thanks, mom!), and as we later found out, bill us for their presence.


• The sheets and hospital gowns were old, cheap, worn out, and worst of all, poorly designed and ill-fitting. We were willing to pay extra for better service than could be had at the government facilities, so we wanted better basics.


• The FREE! WIRELESS!! INTERNET!!! was broken and nobody knew how to fix it...nobody even understood what was broken... I immediately recognized this situation as hopeless and subscribed to DTAC internet service on my mobile (200 baht for 100 hours/month) and tethered it to my notebook.


• Billing problems... even the hospital administrator in charge of our account eventually admitted to irregularities and cut 30% off our bill. We had to work for it, though. The basic problem was that they tried to get us to pay for extraneous items, be they things like a (seemingly complementary) bag of cheap toiletries at 10 or 20 times markup, or meaningless services like official doctor visits where the doctor gets a cut for just being in the room for a minute... and It's not like we aren't aware that this is standard practice elsewhere, it's just that we are unwilling to accept it. So we pulled our ace and simply stated that if they insisted on unfairly charging us, we'd let everyone at both our universities know about it. So yeah, they cut down the bill three times and it eventually came to 30% of the original amount... But the very fact that they started out at such an overinflated figure hints at an endemic problem.

So far, it's taken me eleven days to get this post to this point... and both babies are crying again...

This Hainan Chicken recipe vid that my cousin Kris made yielded a meal so good, we won't eat it outside anymore (there are tons of these chicken rice vendors in Thailand, but I've never had one as good as we made a few nights ago). I tried making a couple different sauces and they both turned out really well. Thanks, Kris!

After my initial curiosity was sated by the sheer WTF does this thing do factor of Google Wave, I didn't really sign in and play around again until today. At that point, the Wave must have been amazed that someone was still around, because it chose to send me more invitations. I sent invites to everyone who asked for one last time, and I still have thirteen left.

If you want a Google Wave invite, leave a comment here or send me an email (address in the blog banner above).

Facebook's New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Now Is It Facebook's Microsoft Moment?

Why Facebook Changed Its Privacy Strategy

NOTHING IS FREE.

When Max lays down next to her, he won't let anybody else get close!

Nam says this is the worst possible excuse for why I didn't run to see why the other baby was crying.

This could be a killer app. I've dreamed about something like this since I saw the first integrated webcam/OCR app on a VAIO 12 years ago..

///
We just did the initial culling of all the photos taken since last week. Tomorrow, I need to design a New Years card and get it out to the printers.

Nam is dealing with breast pain and I'm taking care of the baby most of the time. It's cool that she's small enough to be carried around so I can basically do whatever I feel like doing. Sometimes I put her down, but I have this anxious worry that the blanket has fallen over her face, or that she's rolled into a pillow, so I end up checking her every five minutes. If she's sleeping too soundly, I end up poking her to make sure she still moves. She's sleeping much more today than the past couple days, though.

I'll get around to posting more photos sometime, but the truth of the matter is I think newborns look like old people, or sea turtles, for the most part... Mina looks much better than she did a few days ago, though. The ruddy complexion went away, and for the most part she looks a lot cuter and less sea-turtley.

Mina just watched this with me and she agrees - it's hilarious!

(via)

Note to self: LINK

Nam recovered much faster than everyone thought (this is just the 2nd day after the op!) and we are now at home... It's so much better than being at the hospital, mostly because I can walk around in my boxers freely.

Mina is a fixture installed on my arms.

Meconium exploded more than once last night.

Nam is doing much better - the saline drip and catheter have been removed, and she is up and about.

Colostrum has just started to flow, and the baby makes little piggy noises when feeding.

That is all.

I was ready to pass out when the baby threw a fit because her diaper had burst in what can only be called a meconium explosion.

Cleanup on aisle seven!

Don't watch 'em if you hate reading about other people's kids... I never get much gooier.

Everything went well!

We have a new baby girl... Her name is Mina (美奈), pronounced mee-na.

Unfortunately, almost no one in Nam's family has the courage/skills to hold a baby, which means I am caring for Min and Nam while they take care of Max. Oh, well. Baby Mina is strong. Baby Mina likes being held. Baby Mina is already suckling. Daddy is going to upload a series of photos representing the first few hours with Mina via EDGE-enabled mobile phone, so it may take a while...

Pushing a 225 50 R17 (this set of mags was once on daddy's Crown, but they scraped the wheelwells on even small bumps and made manual steering very heavy!).

I ran around doing errands all day after waking up fairly late - Nam got up early to do something and she's off doing something again. I'd protest that it's better for her to lay around and get rest, but everybody deals with this kind of stress in different ways. We are excited, and happy, and anxious.

Tomorrow is a big day.

The C-section is scheduled for 9 am. I plan to watch. Max will be with his babysitter, and later at grandma's house with his aunt. I will be caregiver for a week or so, in between teaching what few classes I have this week (there are holidays on Monday and Thursday).

Washington post correction:

"A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number."

LINK

I'm testing Google's public DNS servers out. If your ISP's DNS servers suck or you are just curious, you can try it out too: Configuring your network settings to use Google Public DNS

//

Note: They have the coolest IP addresses:
8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

We are officially scheduled to arrive at the private hospital behind SermThai department store at 8:00 on Sunday morning. We went to check out everything in person tonight and take over some documents from Nam's OBGYN. I have been informed that I can watch the caesarian if I so desire... I'm still thinking about that one.

A small mountain of luggage has been prepared for the few days to a week stay we are planning on; I'll load it in the car tomorrow.

We went to the clinic today for a final checkup and it seems the baby may be a big one... If head size is any indication, perhaps even four kilograms!

We are in a unique state of being anxiously busy yet trying to relax...

(via)

wow.

In older news, Chrome is the new Firefox, Firefox is the new IE, IE is dead dead dead, Netscape is the old Mosaic, and Opera is still Opera. Oh, and Safari isn't as good as Chrome.

* I'm currently using mainly Chrome on my laptop, FF on my desktops (I'm addicted to too many extensions and have invested too much time on tweaks/shortcuts/optimizations to give it up, but it's too slow on my portables), and Opera as a secondary on both, but am finding too many sites designed to hate Opera...