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I realized, just last week, that my problem with Bangkok (or Thammasat, rather) wasn’t Bangkok. It was me. It’s like this: I went to Bangkok for all the wrong reasons.

Talking to other people that have travelled to Thailand, I realize that people to to Thailand for its beaches and its parties. Which means, had I wanted to hang out on beautiful beaches and go to racous parties, Bangkok would have been a perfect fit.

Unfortunately, (and I say this with perfect candor, but a slight smile) I went to Thailand to study, and for a cultural experience. Small wonder I was disappointed. =)

Not that I didn’t find aspects of Thailand (heh, parties aside) that I enjoyed: I certainly did. But it wasn’t what I was expecting. I was expecting vibrant, genuine culture; challenging education. In short, I was expecting India. Which wasn’t fair to Thailand, and it wasn’t fair to myself.

So I guess the point is this: um… what is the point? Oh, yeah. That the right reasons to go to Thailand are, well, what we might call “all the wrong reasons.” But they’re really the right reasons to go to Thailand. Which sounds like double-speak. (I’ve been reading about Islam all morning– go figure, that after reading about religious principles, double-speak should emerge…) But anyhow.

It’s been good.

It really has.

I’m working on a new feature for the blog, at present, that will automatically record everything interesting that I do (heh, well, that feature is easy, since I don’t really do anything all that interesting) and catalogue my thoughts. Heh. Unfortunately, this feature is dependent on the Easy Button, which Meekyung and William keep promising, but, like Duke Nukem Forever, never manage to produce. =)

So I guess I’ll stick to doing things the old fashioned way, for now.

Today was my last day at Parikrma– bittersweet, of course, but the staff and school gave me an exceptionally warm send-off.

My bags are almost packed. It’s a tight squeeze.

Um. Random thought:

I, for one, applaud Google for their launch of www.google.cn– the so called “emasculated” version of Google that meets the Chinese government’s standards of censorship. Apparently, I lot of people seem to think that Google is the ACLU, or some sort of international human-rights bastion. It’s not. Google is a search engine– a tool that allows individuals to use the internet, and use it effectively and efficiently. By providing a Chinese version of their search services, Google is extending this service to million of Chinese internet users.

Besides, it’s not so bad. A search for “overthrow the chinese government” returned 963,000 results. Granted, that’s ~200,000 less than Google.com’s 1,180,000 results, but that’s still almost a million more results than Yahoo’s www.yahoo.com.cn’s 5,090 results for the same. =)

Well, to a lay person, there may not seem like much different between dir *.dll and del *.dll, but if you’re a computer guy, you’ll notice a subtle and, oh, rather important difference. Especially when you run that command in the system32 directory. And you don’t have any operating system disks or fun things like that.

Oh, and it would be one thing if it was MY computer. It’s not. My computer doesn’t feel like turning on these days. It was Shukla’s computer. Who is Shukla, you ask? Oh, just the founder and head of Parikrma. No, she won’t mind. It’s not like the information on her lappy is important, or anything.

But it’s like this: why am I still at the school at midnight? Because of a wonderful piece of spyware called VX2 (at least I think that’s what I’m dealing with). It’s ingenius, really: I can tell you just how it works. I just can’t tell you how to stop it. But it goes something like this:

When installed, it creates various copies of itself to the system32 directory as .dll. Amazingly, despite all being the same file, it ranges in size from 220kb to 240kb– yeah, go figure that one out. Having created a copy of itself, it latches onto a Windows service called WinLogon, which handles, as the name suggests, log-on and log-off operations. When Windows 2000 or XP boots up, WinLogon is called, which in turn calls all of its dependencies– one of which is VX2. WinLogon is a critical system process– meaning that it can’t be stopped or paused while Windows is running. So long as WinLogon is running .dll is in use, and can’t be removed. .dll does two things: it randomly throws up some pop-ups when there’s an internet connection, and it perpetuates itself. It monitors its registry keys such that if they are deleted, they are instantly replaced.

Since WinLogon is a critical system process, it runs even in Safe Mode. There’s no way around it.

When you shut down the computer, .dll builds a new verion of itself and changes the registry, such that even if you shut down, go through the recovery console and delete the file, you’re not going to get the RIGHT file. There’s no way of knowing which instance is going to be used next, and no way of deleteing all the instances because the file name and size are both random in a directory full of important DLLs.

The ONLY possible way to beat this, that I can think of, would be to use a program like ERD Commander, which provides CD-based access to both the Windows file system and the Windows registry.

Unfortunately, I’m in India. I certainly don’t have a copy of ERD Commander.

So, I’m at an impasse. Fortunately, there was a backup of all the DLLs I inadvertently deleted with my typo under the system32\\dllcache directory– getting the computer back up and running was just a matter of finding that fortunate trove of DLLs, and then pressing “n, enter, n, enter” about a thousand times while I copied back the DLLs I deleted, and didn’t overwrite the potentially newer DLLS already in system32.

I’ve scoured the net looking for solutions. No luck. So I’m going to go home and sleep. I’m good at that! =)

The lappy is, officially, dead (see: doesn’t turn on). Again. =)

Some dude just rode past the internet cafe on a horse, smoking a cigarette. Which makes me laugh.

And the power is out, yet again. Thankfully, the internet cafe, like any other business that wants to do business in India, has a beefy generator. Although, frankly, I wouldn’t complain if the power for the stereo went out– it’s been playing the same annoying pop-40 tracks for the last two weeks. Ug. I don’t know how the workers here can stand it. I come in for an hour a day, and I’m sick and tired of the cd. They work here for 10 hours a day. Hmm. Maybe they’re on drugs (unlikely, because I don’t think any Indians are on drugs, but hey–).

Heh. I’ve been actually quite concerned about how I’m going to manage transporting home everything I’ve accumulated over here. When I arrived in Bangalore, I had too much stuff. I had so much stuff that I had to strap things on to the outside of my bag. And now? Well, I have even MORE stuff. Mostly books. But if I keep coming up with clever space-saving ideas, I’ll be ‘aight. Like this one, that occurred to me late last night: I’ll unstring my guitar, and fill it with shirts and other soft, small items. Brilliant! And, of course, the guitar itself gets to wear my sweatshirt (which, mind you, was an entirely stupid thing to bring to South-East Asia in the first place)– both as protect, and as one less thing to put in the main bag.

Solid. =)

I can now cross “get hit by a car” off my list of things to do before I die.

Heh. I had the iPod on and wasn’t paying much attention anyway as I walked down the road back to my apartment. They drive on the left-hand side of the road, here, but I generally walk on the right-hand side anyway, cuz, well, I’m an American. =) So, as I’m walking down the right-hand side of the road, the rickshaw driving towards me pulls off to its left: right in my path. So, of course, I step out left, into the middle of the street, and HORNSCREECHTIRESBOOM… fortunately, the driver wasn’t going very fast, and had lightning fast reflexes. I wasn’t even hurt, although I probably deserved to be. Well, my pride was rather hurt, but that’s nothing new. It now occures to me that the rickshaw pulled off the road not to be a jerk and block my path, but rather because there was a a vehicle coming behind me…

When I say “mini van,” I mean that in a rather literal sense. Here’s a picture:
They’re rather amusing. They have an amazingly high center of gravity, an engine smaller than a lot of motorcycles in the United States, and are the only alternative to autorickshaw for a taxi. The engine is in the back, so when you sit in the front seat, sometimes your toes are less than 12″ from the car in front of you. And that’s just normal Indian driving. =)