I find it ironic that everyone is so caught up in the media frenzy regarding 63 people dying from the Santika Pub fire on new years eve when over 260 people were killed due to motor accidents over the new year (more than 2000 injured).

I guess if situations like the Santika Pub fire occurred more often we would stop caring about that too.

I normally let Christmas pass me by here but I still call my family to wish them a happy holiday, so when I tried this morning only to get a message saying I had to contact CAT (the international carrier in Thailand) I figured I must have forgotten to pay a bill.

A few phone calls later it was revealed that there was indeed an unpaid bill for the massive sum of 15 Baht. They cut my service over 15 Baht! Let's look at that in Australian dollars:

15 Baht = $0.65 Aus

I recently began the process of renewing my visa and work permit, something that must be done annually, and have experienced so many head-shaking moments in a single day that it would be impossible for one blog post to contain them.

I was surprised to find that most of the immigration staff for the business section at the Suan Plu office don't speak english and have been complaining about the fact to everyone at work. One of our staff told me that I shouldn't complain because "Our King said all Thai's should speak Thai", to which I responded "Does he know everything? Would you jump off a bridge if he said to?".

I instantly regretted saying it, because obviously I would expect all Thai's to speak Thai, but Immigration is a place where nearly every customer is foreign and as English one of the main languages spoken around the world I would have thought they would have more than two or three staff who could barely speak english.

My abrupt response was also a result of my irritation at Thai's using any of the Kings words as an excuse or defense for something stupid. The blind and absolute devotion of Thai's to the king is admirable but I don't see how it could possibly be healthy for any free-thinking individuals or benefit society at all. Not to say that it doesn't, I just can't imagine how it would. After all, I don't know everything.

The other thing that got me really frustrated was Immigration policy, namely changes to it.

Staff at my office put a lot of work into preparing the paperwork for my visa renewal, constantly referring to documents from Immigration and their website to know what they needed to prepare. Unbeknownst to them there had been a policy change at Immigration which meant I would need a lot more documents than they had prepared. The idiocy is that the notification of the change was only available on the desk of Immigration staff at their office so they were basically saying they wanted everyone who visits them to waste one day (the minimum amount of time required to do anything at Immigration).

At least our staff got angry about this too, so I wasn't alone on this one.

It was a pleasant surprise when we were in Sydney that I found my mum still had a copy of Holding the Man, a true story penned by Timothy Conigrave, because I'd been telling Oui about it for so long and he spent any spare time we had whilst there reading it.

I told him that he would cry, as had everyone else I know who'd read it (myself included), but he wasn't convinced. He seemed quite certain that we were all a bunch of wimps.

As we'd been in Melbourne a few days prior to him starting the book he recognised references to many of the landmarks that are made, which helped to pique his interest further. When we got back to Bangkok I kept checking on his progress because I wanted to talk to him about it when he was done, but one day noticed that he'd stopped reading it. Apparently he'd gotten to the part of the book things got more and more depressing and didn't want to read it anymore.

I've tried to convince him to finish it but have been as of yet unsuccessful. For those wondering what the big deal is, I would recommend it over anything else I have ever read, just be prepared for the content.

I really love the frenzy people work themselves up to over the Securom DRM system found in many games these days. To my knowledge Securom is a PC only thing and some of the games using it are Bioshock, Mass Effect, Spore and most recently Grand Theft Auto IV.

The main complaint for the inclusion of Securom is that it can be used to limit the number of times you may install a game without having to make a telephone call somewhere to be authorised. The first time I heard about this developers were limiting the number of 'free' installs to 3 and I agreed completely that limiting the number of times I reinstall a game is ridiculous when I had paid for it. This is especially the case when you consider that the very reason this is implemented is to combat piracy and such a limit would not exist in a pirated version.

Grand Theft Auto IV has done the right thing and done away with the limit altogether but that hasn't stopped the securom haters from declaring a boycott again. I believe the problem is now the simple existence of Securom which once installed is incredibly difficult to remove without a complete hard disk wipe.

Now that there is no limit on the number of installs I think they're wasting their breath. The last complaint I had is gone and I don't see the problem with a software developer wanting to protect their property if doing so is unobtrusive and doesn't hinder me as a paying customer.

Not that I'm going to buy GTA IV, hell no. I'll probably download it from a torrent site and try it out, but it isn't really my style of game. See? Piracy doesn't always mean a lost sale because I never would have bought it anyway.

For todays lesson: everything I described above is actually software theft, not piracy. Software piracy entails selling stolen software, theft is only the use of it. I prefer pirate though, because it sounds more exotic than thievery.

Today when I was in Central Chitlom I saw an advertisement for a new Enya album on one of the many screens they have about the place and instantly headed to B2S on the top floor to buy it for Oui. He is nuts about Enya and I knew he'd like it.

The idea was that this would be a surprise but I'm terrible at keeping secrets from Oui so I told him. He's not much an Enya fan that he didn't even know there was a new album.

Last Sunday I woke up and did my weekend routine of walking stright to my pc and logging into WoW to discover that suddenly my performance had dropped dramatically. It was quite disconcerting after buying a new video card just a week or two before and I instantly set out to find out what was causing it.

This would normally be where I detail the lengthy and arduous process whereby I failed to discover what it was involving multiple reformats only to have it miraculously begin to perform well again, but I'll skip all that this time because there's just too much and I plain can't be bothered typing it all out.

It was Questhelper, the addon that takes all of the work out of questing in WoW showing you where to go and telling you what to do for nearly every single quest in the game, and suffice to say I have a few message boards to visit to retract some comments I made and deliver some apologies.

PC problems bring the worst out in me.

PS: If you run Questhelper, type in "/qh perf 25%" to see an immediate performance increase in WoW.

From the Bangkok Post:

Rival faceoff
At Bangkok City Hall, a rally in red vowed to prevent a "silent coup" by the judiciary. At the airports, yellow-clad protesters were "willing to die" to bring down the government. In the streets, two-thirds of citizens say they are embarrassed and ashamed for the country.

At first I laughed out loud when I read this, but now that it's the day after and the owner of the company I work for talks to me about possibly closing down I shake my head in dismay instead.

Addendum:
Red shirts = Pro-government
Yellow shirts = Anti-government
Everyone else = Caught in the middle

Since the release of Wrath of the Lich King I've noticed that performance in Northrend on my pc is quite slow and, for the first time in quite a while, I was forced to knock the detail down. The beautiful shadows were the first to go, giving back some performance, but even then the significantly pushed out draw distance in Northrend was making my video card (Geforce 8800GT) choke.

I'm not a person who likes to play at anything but maximum detail, thus the whining and begging on my part began.

I already planned to get a new video card at the end of the year, so I figured why not just use the credit card and get it now? Good plan, huh? Oui didn't agree. It took some work, but he reluctantly came around to my way of thinking (I gave him the silent treatment). Off to Jedi Shop we went.

I've been a nVidia user for a long time so that was what I asked for, but the answer was not exactly what I'd hoped. They didn't have any because they were expecting a new model to be released in about a month. The staff kept asking me why didn't I want to wait and get the new one, but I explained that I'm not a person who likes to wait.

I was desperate and not walking out of the store without something after going to the effort of convincing Oui, so asked about ATI's offerings and while they didn't have the top model (I had to 'wait' until Monday for that one) they did have the next best thing so I got that.

I ended up with the ATI 4870 HD and after installing it and testing it out in my pc I quickly discovered something important: my power supply wasn't cutting the cheese. It was pretty clear this was occuring as whenever I ran anything taxing the entire pc would shutdown. After checking the manual I saw it requires a 500W power supply and as mine was only 390W it was off to Jedi Shop again the next morning.

The new power supply (Gigabyte Odin Pro 550W) is very nice and now that there is enough power my pc isn't shutting itself down all the time. The video card is also working as intended and when taxed the fan in the dual slot design powers up with quite a lot of noise.

At least it runs good.

To those who've met me the idea that I am fat probably sounds ridiculous, but would you believe there are a pair of jeans that I am constantly switching between being too fat for and fitting just right? I mention this because I'm wearing them today and can feel that I'm getting to that stage again where I can't wear them because The middle part of me is getting too big once more.

It probably doesn't help that I haven't done any exercise for about 6 months and spend even more time sitting in front of my pc than usual.

In other news I read that 'Burn After Reading', the film featuring a dumb version of Brad Pitt, is playing in Bangkok and Oui doesn't want to see it. Bribery may be required.