It's Burns Night tomorrow, (Jan 25th) but little has been announced in his honour in Pattaya that I have seen. Just a dinner at Nessie's Cafe, Soi Buakhao. I expect the main events will be taking place in Bangkok.
As a Sassanach, (south of Hadrian's), I had the good fortune to be invited to a Burn's Night dinner in Hong Kong some years ago. At the time, most of the powerful Hongs were controlled by Scotsmen so HK Burns Dinners were gatherings of some of the most powerful men in Asia. Sir Willie Purves, as head of two of the biggest Hongs, Hongkong & Shanghai Bank (HSBC) and the HK Jockey Club ranked above all.
Sir Willie and all the other 'chiefs' were sitting front and centre when a young man, new to HK, got up to Toast The Lassies. I hope my memory does justice to his words which went something like this.
"I've only been in HK for a few weeks", said the young man, "and I've already met Sir Willie Purves". "I asked Sir Willie where he was from in Scotland and Sir Willie replied Kelso. "Agh", says the young man thoughtfully, "Kelso, where a sheep tied to a lamp post is an entertainment complex".
The room was in uproar and nobody laughed louder than Sir Willie. The young man showed some true balls and I would guess he went on to a very successful career. It was a brilliant night and more than anything, it made Burns Nights special to this Sassanach.
Sierra Tangos
- Pattaya Rag Quiz sponsored by Club Blu (opens in just 8 days)
I will post questions most days from my Jan 19 post until Jan 30. You should e-mail your answers to me at pattaya.rag@gmail.com . You can e-mail me each time there are questions are you can mail me one time with all answers before midnight (Thai time) Jan 31. The questions will be sequentially numbered so you will know if you've missed any. Include in the mail the name you want to be known by if you win. I don't want to use a mail address to identify the winner. The winner will be announced on Feb 1.
The prize for the most correct answers is a free 'barf' in Club Blu so it will be of most interest to residents and regular visitors to Thailand. Here's the next question:
Q10. What in the medical world was first classified into the A.O.B. system in 1902?
Note: Barf covers the barfine only and not ST/LT fees. Also, it's up to you to get your choice to say "yes".
- Bird flu emerges in Nakhon Sawan - the H5N1 bird flu virus has been detected in Nakhon Sawan province, according to Department of Livestock official Somboon Srisuthep - the first time in 10 months the disease has hit in Thailand. Authorities suspected the presence of the H5N1 virus at a farm in Nakhon Sawan’s Chumsaeng district after thousands of chickens were found dead. A lab test conducted in Phitsanulok confirmed the chickens had died of the avian flu. [via Bangkok Post]
- Move over iTunes, Mozilla's Songbird is here - as a big fan of Firefox, I am always interested in any other projects that Mozilla might be dabbling in. Yesterday I began testing Songbird which is Mozilla’s open-source version of Apple’s iTunes music player.
Songbird has the same basic design as iTunes but it’s black (default skin) and with added functionality. As with iTunes, you can import your music, subscribe to podcasts, create playlists, rate each song, synchronise your playlists with your computer files and so on.
But let’s take a look at what makes Songbird different from iTunes.
First, as with Firefox, you can download extensions to make Songbird look and act the way you want it. In fact, this is Songbird’s biggest advantage as far as I can see - the open-source platform. I’ve still to delve deeper into the lengthy extensions list but right off the bat, I downloaded an extension that displays the Wikipedia page for the band you are playing, as well as extensions for iPod support, and the ability to play protected Windows Media files and Quicktime files. The extensions box is virtually identical in design to the Firefox version.
Secondly, again taking a leaf out of Firefox’s book, you can have tabs open up for web browsing within Songbird so in theory, you could look at your favourite webpages while playing songs (particularly useful if you need to search online for lyrics while a song is playing, for example).
Third, you have a choice of three music stores which gives you the chance to download new music. But what makes this different from iTunes is that here, you can choose between iTunes, Amazon’s MP3 store and eMusic. So you are not limited to one file format.
Fourth, and this is a neat one - you can shrink it to a basic version!
Other features include:
- Play Anything : MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WMA, and more.
- Multi-lingual: Comes in 39 languages.
- Integrated Web Search
- Style with Different visual skins
- Runs on Mac, Linux and Windows.
- Play the Web
- Play web pages as playlists and view any web page as a playlist.
One problem I have found is that you cannot run iTunes music files on both iTunes and Songbird at the same time. So if you want to run iTunes music on Songbird, you must first de-authorize and uninstall iTunes from your computer. This is the hated DRM copy protection at work, not the fault of Songbird.
Just to be clear, Songbird is not yet at the stage where it can be called an “iTunes killer” (the project is still very much in beta development) but it’s looking extremely good so far. As I’ve said, its biggest strength is in throwing open the source code and inviting developers to make new features and improve existing ones. Can you imagine Apple doing that with iTunes? I don’t think so! [via MakeUseOf]
- Kantaris media player makes VLC pretty - while Videolan Client (also known as VLC) is a great cross-platform application for opening pretty much any video file you can throw at it, the interface is a bit sparse. Sure, you can add custom skins, but developer Christofer Persson decided to go a bit further and build a whole new program based on the open-source media player's code.
Kantera is an audio/video player that can handle all of the same media formats as VLC and then some. It features an attractive skin, some trippy audio visualizations, and integration with Last.fm and Apple movies trailers. While the Kantera homepage touts the program's ability to handle audio codecs that VLC won't normally play, we've never had any problem opening WMA or other closed source file formats with VLC.
Kantaris doesn't appear to have support for hotkeys yet, which is a bit of a drawback. But version 0.3.0 which was released this week adds support for playing archived RAR files without extracting them first which is a pretty awesome feature. Kantaris is only available for Windows, but the source code is available so we wouldn't be surprised to see a Mac or Linux port sometime down the road. [via DownLoadSquad]
- You got to love the guy. As thousands of women will testify, Jack Nicholson is not one to keep himself to himself. And so it proved when the 70-year-old rascal was asked for a kiss outside a London restaurant. Phil Poulton told the Hollywood legend that his mother-in-law was Nicholson's biggest fan and would be thrilled to receive a smacker from him. It being 11.30pm and after copious refreshment, the veteran lothario was more than happy to oblige. However the woman who then saw that infamous shark's grin descending on her was Mr Poulton's 38-year-old wife, Lesley, and not his 64-year-old mother-in-law Wendy. "He just got hold of my wife and started snogging her," said Mr Poulton. "Everyone just collapsed laughing. I couldn't believe it." [via HuffPo]
- Diem, Vietnamese beauty. Hit the link and scroll to the right in the Picassa Web Album to see all 4 photos
- Clara Morgane - FHM Calendar
- One night, after a long hard day at work a politician went home. It was fairly late, around 10:00 p.m. All of the sudden, a masked man jumped out of the bushes and demanded all the politician's money.
"You can't do that!!" The politician cried. "I'm a politician!"
"Oh," said the masked man, "in that case give me all MY money!!"
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