d o l l m o n t . n e t

Ho Chi Minh City to Siem Reap through Pnomh Penh

13 hours on a bus. With infrequent, short stops. The lunch stop involved me getting my lunch serverd just as the bus prepared to depart.

Photos to come tomorrow after a tour of 3 temples. First impressions: Cambodia is *very* green and *very* beautiful. The people are very nice and friendly. Things are cheap like Viet Nam. My hotel, The No Problem Hotel, is nice with A/C, private bath and hot shower. The only problem so far is that wifi doesn’t seem to reach my room so I have to work from the cafe. $13 a night.

More tomorrow after a little touring.

Yeah–totally my fault…

Last night, I got jacked. I hear a lot of that around here, and I’ve nodded sagely and though “That won’t happen to me–I’m too careful.”

I’d pulled over to check something on my phone. A bike pulled up behind me and a woman got off the back and approached me from behind on the sidewalk. As she got to my bike, she came around to the road side and asked “Massage?” I said “No” and went back to what I was doing. She entered in to my personal space and I quickly put my phone in my pocket and dropped my hand to guard the pocket with my phone and wallet. She reached across my hand and grabbed my package. “Massage?” I pushed her hand away and told her to go away.

She got more aggressive and pushed toward me. I stepped off my bike onto the sidewalk and she pushed the bike over, stepped over it and continued towards me. I told her to go away and she turned back to lift up my bike. I rushed forward, grabbed the bike, got on and tried to leave. She came back around and stepped in front of the bike. She reached for my wallet pocket and I slapped her hand away. She grabbed my hand and yanked my thumb back. The whole time, she kept repeating “Massage?” and I kept repeating “No. Go away!”. Finally, the scooter she arrived on pulled up, she jumped on the back and drove away.

I was relieved. I’d gotten away with my phone, wallet and bike. I went home and counted my lucky stars. The only thing that happened was my thumb got a little tweaked.

This morning, I noticed that my wedding band was gone. When she was tweaking my thumb, and I was distracted by that, she stripped the wedding band off my finger.

People talk about crime in Ho Chi Minh City all the time. The reality is that it’s just like any other big city anywhere else in the world. There are rules and I ignored them: if you need to pull over, do so in a well lit area around lots of people. I didn’t do that. My mistake. I paid to learn a lesson. The good news is I could have paid much more. Had she been a little quicker and stronger, she’d have gotten my bike. I defended my wallet and cell phone and managed to save those. The two that came after me in my moment of stupidity were professionals that took advantage of a newbie.

Next time, I’ll be more careful…

47 Trips…

I’ve now ridden this rock around the sun 47 times, and here are some things I’ve learned:

Your comfort zone is a safe place, but it’s very boring. You need to spend at least a little time outside of it.

Get a large enough group of people together to make them identifiable, and they’re crazy. Americans are crazy. Vietnamese are crazy. Republicans are crazy. Democrats are crazy. Somebody, somewhere will think Identifiable Group X is crazy.

Fight for what’s yours. Don’t let go. Ever. You will always regret it in hindsight.

Never confuse “the first” with “the one”.

Keep your eye on the ball. This applies not only to sports, but to an amazing number of non-related fields. Politics. Business. Family. Work.

Each of us is given five balls. One is rubber and four are glass. The rubber ball is work. If you drop it, it will always bounce back. The other four glass balls are family, friends, health and integrity.

Major strides are being made in cancer treatment every year. There are treatments for breast cancer today that didn’t exist ten years ago. These treatments increase your odds of 5 year survivability. None of this matters, of course, if you get breast cancer today. This applies to any type of cancer.

If you’re being served “bbq meat”, never inquire too closely as to the type of “meat”. (I’m pretty sure Viet Nam is not the only place where this is critical advice.)

You can never follow through if you don’t commit.

In any argument, ask yourself “Is this the hill I want to die on?” You’ll be surprised at how much you learn to let go.

Let go.

Almost all of the sentiments expressed in “We Are The World” are bullshit.

A 110cc scooter can go 80km an hour.

If you brush up against a guardrail while riding a 110cc scooter at 80km an hour, bad things will happen. Really, really bad things that’ll make you wish you spent more on your helmet.

Children are irreplaceable.

Raising a child is like gripping a watermelon seed. This truism is truest during the teen years.

You will make mistakes. The biggest mistake you will make is a refusal to learn from your mistakes. Don’t make that mistake.

Leave a mark.

Take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but footprints. Leave those footprints in the odd places, off the beaten path, whenever possible.

I know it’s trite and smacks of Apple fan-boi’ism, but it’s so true: Think Different.

Nothing helps a child learn like sparking imagination. Lego, FTW!

You don’t have to be a child to enjoy Lego.

Smaller, faster, cheaper. At some point, it’ll be small enough, fast enough, cheap enough. That’s a good place to stop.

Learn to be satisified with material things.

Never be satisfied with the knowledge you’ve gained. Always reach for more.

Question everything.

“Perfect” is the enemy of “good enough”.

Never settle.

Torchlight FTW!

I have a confession to make. As a much younger man, I spent hours fighting monstors in the dungeons of Diablo and Diablo II. I’m on pins and needles waiting for the release of Diablo III, and I’ve been following the progress of what’s sure to be an epic game with great interest.

I’m not sure what appeals to me about Diablo. There are certainly parts of the game that are tedious and almost mindless. These are the parts commonly referred to as “grinding”–taking on monsters because you need gold or EP to level up before you move on with the central story. Whether I can explain the appeal or not, Diablo was one of my first gaming loves.

As we all eagerly await the release of Diablo III, a digression has appeared on the horizon. Part of the original Diablo team, combined with folks from Fate and Mythos, have created Torchlight. Torchlight resembles Diablo in many ways, but in many other ways it’s a very different game. For one, it’s more “cartoony” in style, which some folks don’t like but I love. The art is very well done–dark, yet colorful. The music comes from the creator of the original Diablo soundtrack and is wonderful. The gameplay is almost pure Diablo with a few “fixes” that I really like. In short, Torchlight has all of the things I love about Diablo and a few new things that make it even more attractive.

You start off the game by choosing a character from one of three classes: Destroyer, Vanquisher and Alchemist. You choose a pet–either a cat or a dog. Your pet is part of you and follows you everywhere. It carries a pack and you can move items between your pet’s inventory and your own. You can even send your pet to town to sell items! Once you’ve gotten your character and pet generated, you materialize in the town of Torchlight.

Torchlight is a mining town built atop a vein of Ember. Ember is the source of magic in the Torchlight world, and there’s a war going on in the mines for control of the Ember there. The battle is, of course, between good and evil, and you’re recruited to the forces of good.

So far (and I’ve played to Level 20), there’s very little grinding involved. Characters advance at a good, steady pace. Dungeon exploration is fun and there are a myriad of side quests that allow you to explore through a variety of tilesets and dungeon styles. Monsters grow in strength the deeper you go and the closer you get to the main Ember veins. The story line is interesting, and the main characters are well voiced. Everything about the game play draws you in to the superbly crafted game mechanics.

The system requirements for Torchlight are suprisingly mild. There’s even a “Netbook” mode! I’ve not yet tried it and my main gaming machine is gross overkill. Still, I can play at 1600×1050 and the graphics are stunning. The animation is smooth and there’s hardly any jerkiness (there have been moments where things start to stutter, but those typically involve large numbers of enemies being destroyed by multiple, chained lightning bolts).

If you, like me, were a huge fan of Diablo, I urge you to try Torchlight. It’s $20 well spent. Runic, the creators, are working on an MMO based in the Torchlight world, and I can hardly wait. I’m hoping they go the Dungeons & Dragons Online route and use in-game purchases to generate income, rather than a subscription model. If they do that, I’ll be all over it.

Dynamic vs. Static web pages

A discussion tonight about dynamic vs. static web pages made me think about how some people believe dynamic web pages are inherently “better” than static. Often, dynamic web pages are prettier, but they are not necessarily better.

Take Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, for example. It dynamically render’s beautiful images on the background of the page. It looks terrific, but it also takes about 5 times longer to load than Google.

If I want to search the net, I don’t need pretty pictures. I don’t need to see great background images. I need a search box, ang Google gives me that as fast as it can.

Sites like Bing and Google actually blur the distinction between dynamic and static–parts of Google’s home page, for example, are static and parts are dynamic. But really, the discussion here is not about static vs. dynamic, it’s about user interface design.

Make your page static. Make it dynamic. Either way–it just doesn’t matter. What matters is something called User Experience. UI design is one element of that. Site performance is another. If your User Experience is crappy, your users don’t come back.

And that’s what you should be concerned about.

Excuse me, sir. Your flood has arrived…

Last night I was heading home from a tutoring gig. It was quite hot, and a gentle rain began to fall. I recall thinking “How nice–a cool rain.”

Soon, the drops began to *hurt*. At that point, I pulled under some shelter and got into my rain gear. While putting on my poncho, the skies opened up. In moments, water was streaming down the road and the drains were overwhelmed.

Cold, dark, wet. Three not-so-great driving conditions when you’re on a scooter. I’ve not travelled the particular road I was on a lot, so I was unfamiliar with the topography. I had to resort closely following other scooters and observing water depths as they fought their way through ‘puddles’. Often, the water was over my footpegs and I was concerned about the engine flooding.

In the end, a 20 minute drive under normal conditions turned into an hour+ slog through the cold and the wet. Several lessons learned:

1) Timbuk2 bags rock. The outside of my messenger bag was soaked. The insides were dry. As it should be (but often isn’t).

2) The normally ‘charming’ habit of Vietnamese drivers who like to drive without headlights takes on a terrifying new meaning in a major rainstorm. WTF? If you’re going to insist on driving without lights of any kind, the very least you can do is avoid *me*. *You* can see *me*.

3) Disc brakes on scooters. Seems silly, but, trust me, well worth it. Especially if the idiot from point 2 *doesn’t* avoid you…

Windows 7 ship date…

Here in Viet Nam, it’s October 22 already. That means it’s the official ship date for Windows 7, and the whole world is holding its breath to see if Microsoft drops the ball (again).

When Vista was originally released, I did not get caught up in the fiasco because I was strictly a Mac OS/Linux guy. I didn’t have any active Windows systems at home. At work, the whole fracas was avoided by simply not upgrading XP systems. I read about all the fuss, but never experienced it.

I now have a PC again at home, and it’s been running Vista just fine for a little over a year. I never had any troubles with Vista and so, still, have no idea what the big deal is/was. A couple of months ago, I started running Windows 7. Access to MSDN means that I also been able to run the release code for the past month or so.

Is it better than Vista? Yes. Aesthetically, it’s much more pleasing. The new eye candy is not just pretty, it makes tracking open windows easier. It also makes arranging windows much simpler. The task bar is a much more useful tool and, because of the way program icons are now displayed in the task bar I can move it to a vertical orientation (preferred) without it looking goofy.

Has it been problem free? No. I’ve had a couple of Blue Screens of Death in the time I’ve been running Windows 7. To be honest, I think it’s a question of driver maturity. New drivers haven’t been vetted in the wild a lot. Now that the product is actually shipping, I expect this to change and I expect driver updates to resolve these issues.

Am I happy with it? Yes. Overall, I think it’s a better experience than Vista. Maybe not a lot better, but better. If I’d had a world of hurt with Vista, my opinion might be stronger, but I was unscathed by the Vista fiasco. Since Microsoft has gotten smart and is offering Family Pack Pricing on Home Premium ($149 for a limited time), the cost to upgrade is not as onerous as I thought it’d be.

It just might be worth it. This time.

Looks like a little rain…

Over the past few days, storys of Typhoon Ketsana have been causing all our friends back west to write or call with concern. Is everybody OK?

Happily, everybody is doing fine. Ho Chi Minh City didn’t get hit very hard at all. We were mostly dealing with high winds and a couple of serious rain showers as the storm cell skirted past.

There are a couple of more typhoons heading this way. It’s that time of year, so it’s expected. We’re in a good, solid house that we can button down pretty tight. Our neighborhood is new and drainage is solid. We’re not worried about flooding.

Oddly, I first heard news of the devastation in the Philippines and central Viet Nam from friends in the West. Since I don’t (can’t) read Vietnamese newspapers, my news intake is a little delayed.

Long weekends and relaxation…

My long weekend in Can Tho is coming to a close and I’m returning to Ho Chi Minh City tonight. I was able to relax even though I got quite a bit of work done. The pace in Can Tho is much slower than Ho Chi Minh City. Scooters don’t seem to exceed 30km/h. Cafe wait staff take their time. People go to bed after dark (but wake up at dawn–what’s the matter with them?). Traffic is much thinner. Things just slow down…

The trip to Ho Chi Minh City is approximately 180km. It’s a 4 hour bus ride. That’s right: 4 hours to go 180km. Fortunately, the bus is very comfortable. iPod+headphones+nap makes the journey speed by.

Back to work tomorrow with a couple of critical deadlines. Happily, I’m mostly caught up on the work so I should be good.

Note to FSF: Nobody cares…

The Free Software Foundation is running a campaign highlighting the “evils” of Windows 7. They highlight 7 deadly sins (of course) and they really make a compelling case against Windows 7. It’s a major shift for the FSF–they usually don’t get all political at this level.

Here’s the bad news: nobody cares.

Corporations that have adopted Windows and Office aren’t about to jump ship to Linux or the ever-elusive “GNU Operating System”. Too much has been invested in infrastructure and training. License fees have been paid. Sys admins have been hired and trained. That ship has sailed.

Small business may switch, but not based on this political action. That decision will be based on one thing and one thing only: impact to the bottom line. Any small business owner that makes this kind of decision without considering the bottom line isn’t going to be in business long.

I am a firm advocate and supporter of Linux. I use Linux every day in my job, both on the desktop and on servers. I have Windows machines, and I own a copy of Office. Why? Because it’s what my clients want. No matter how much OpenOffice touts itself as “Office compatible” it’s not 100% compatible. The differences may be minor and subtle, but when I create a report for a client and the formatting is messy because of the differences, it reflects badly on me. Not on OpenOffice. My client doesn’t care how I create the document. They only care that they can open the document in Word.

When a client asks for full functionality in Outlook, I can’t just tell them they should be using Thunderbird and Lightning. They’ve made a decision at the desktop level to use Outlook and I have to respect that. Now that they’ve made that decision, what’s the best way to give them the infrastructure to support it? Exchange must be considered because, while it may not be the cheapest or easiest answer, it is still arguably the best way to provide full functionality to the Outlook client. Linux based “free” alternatives to Exchange are still largely a variety of different services that have been integrated into a unified platform. If you can get them tweaked out properly, they work and work well. But they require a support infrastructure that’s often foreign to folks like my clients.

It could be argued that situations like the one above support the FSF’s contention that Microsoft locks users in and violates standards. They’re right, of course, but again the decision to go down that road has been made and altering course is often challenging and not cost effective.

I admire and respect the work of the Free Software Foundation (except for the whole GNU/Linux thing, but that’s a different rant). I wish them luck in changing the world, but trying to alter the course of ocean liners isn’t the easiest thing to do and may not be the best way to spend resources.