Callum’s musings on the world at large…
Three hours in the dentist’s chair with a hellish hangover from a seriously drunken night out last night. Well, it is my last weekend in Bangkok I suppose!
These Danish Couch Surfers are staying with fellow Bangkokian surfer, Poe, who I think will be taking over the reigns as Bangkok’s most prolific couch surfer when I leave. As you can see beer was fairly high on the agenda… 
Asher and Simon, who had to be literally torn away from the game on his mobile phone!
10 days to go… Or is it 9, I’m not really sure. I leave Bangkok 10 days today.
It’s almost getting to that frantic stage again, I’ve got a root canal on Saturday, I need to get a new bag this weekend, and I’m working like mad trying to build up some freelance work before I leave. Check out my new profile on RentaCoder.com.
It is done. The flight has been booked. February 2nd at 11:05 in the morning I shall depart from Bangkok where I’ll fly to Singapore, sit about for probably an age, and then board a plane to the land of Ozzy!
Australia here we come, g’day mate!
I need some work done on my teeth, a root canal and probably a crown. Given that I’m going private here in Thailand, I decided to do as a good consumer does and shop around a little for the service. Comparing a few factors, price, professionalism, proficiency in English, standard of care, etc.
Were I shopping for a car, the process would be fairly simple. I’d go to see a few shops, meet a few salespeople, have them talk me through the pros and cons of the various vehicles they had to offer, then make a decision.
Were I shopping for a new accountant, likewise I’d meet a few professionals, discuss my particular circumstances, make some judgements, and then choose a practitioner.
However, not in the medical business. I’ve already been advised that I need a root canal and then a crown, so my questions are fairly straightforward. How much will it cost, and how professional do I think you are. Today I went to visit BNH hospital’s dental clinic. When I booked the appointment I said I don’t want to pay anything, I simply want to know how much it will cost.
Upon leaving the dentist’s office I was informed that my bill was 720 baht. After much debate with an overweight, rude, abrupt Thai woman, I finally accepted to pay 300 baht for the consultation as they’d already wasted too much of my time discussing it. I notice security had been stationed outside the door lest I should decide to run out on my ten pound bill!
In what other business do you pay for a professional service practitioner to attempt to win your business. Honestly, these doctors and dentists have got a scam going. Well, no more I say, to hell with BNH, they just lost potentially 30′000 baht of business for 2% of that. Rant over.
Since my introduction to bash scripting a couple of days ago, I decided while on the phone to my momma, to write a little script to monitor my internet connection. Being on the second floor with the router on the fifth floor, my connection can be a little ropey at times.
I did write the beginnings of a script, but while reading the ping man page (new window) I discovered a great little option called flood ping (-f) which instead of printing a new line for every ping response, prints a full stop (or period) “.” every time a ping is sent, and a backspace every time a response is received. Thus you see a list of dots appear if packets are being dropped, and nothing if packets are being received.
Exactly what I wanted, no scripting required! Gotta love linux…
Quick tech note, you need to set an interval unless you’re running ping as root, so the full command is “ping -fi 1 x.x.x.x” where 1 is the inverval in seconds an x.x.x.x is your destination address or hostname.
For anyone not interested in Linux, skip this post, it’ll just bore you…
I whipped up a tiny little script today to automate something that’s been bugging me for ages. At home, I have an unreliable router, particularly unreliable for DNS purposes. So I manually override the default DHCP settings and specify the ISP’s DNS servers directly. Today I wrote this little script for NetworkManagerDispatcher to do this automatically for me.
#!/bin/bash
# Script to dispatch NetworkManager events
#
# Update /etc/resolv.conf on thouse network
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo “$0: called with no interface” 1>&2
exit 1
fi
# Run the right scripts
if [ "$2" = "up" ] && [ "$1" = "eth1" ]
then
iwconfig $1 | grep ESSID | while read interface junk ieee essid nick
do
if [ "${essid:7:5}" = "T-Two" ]
then
cp /etc/resolv.conf.thouse /etc/resolv.conf
exit 0
fi
done
fiIf that’s double dutch to you, don’t worry. It’s a very custom script which only really applies to my situation, but you never know, it might be useful to somebody, somewhere, one day…
I read (new window) that bombs were found and removed in Khao San Road and Suan Lum Night Bazaar. Both of which I visit regularly. I’m seriously considering leaving Bangkok as a matter of urgency.
My main concern is that nobody seems to know who was responsible for the bombings and whether or not they’re like to continue. If it was clearly identified as a one-off event, I’d be happy to stay in Bangkok for the rest of the month, but if not, I just don’t know.
I’d welcome any feedback / thoughts / suggestions.
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