Happy Anniversary Babe!

Happy Anniversary Babe!

Married six years today! Well done us. I remember it well – had to be up early that morning to get ready for the monk ceremony which was a beautiful way to start the day. Then heading to Bang Rak to complete the formalities. Finally the reception – we really stuffed up there, having it on a pay-day Friday and Bangkok put on some of her worst traffic ever with folks stuck in two-hour taxi rides from hell. We had the easy part, just standing around and thinking no-one was coming 555. My father would pass away only a few…

In stasis

In stasis

Nothing puts a dent in your hopes and dreams like cancer. Forget about next month, all we can really do is worry about the immediate future. What’s on the docket for next week, so to speak. ‘In stasis’ – an apt if unusual term. We’ve finished the first round of chemo and the next one kicks off on March 4th. We recently filed the insurance paperwork and haven’t heard back yet. Hoping they don’t stuff us around. You only discover how good your insurance is when you make a claim. The wife then bundled us into an accident policy, which…

Life rolls on

Life rolls on

Another first – pushing the wife around the local mall in a wheelchair! I might as well have been driving a bulldozer as people can’t get out of the way fast enough. Lovin it! In many ways, life rolls on! Meals have to be prepped, dishes washed and clothes hung out to dry. I’ve got all that sorted, this is where I can really shine. Housework – so meditative! I washed the car for the first time last weekend. As good a 30-minute workout as I would have had at the gym. Had I attended one. Which I don’t. Hate…

Cloudy, with a chance of chemo

Cloudy, with a chance of chemo

At least she has a decent view, I thought, as I ponder the 200 buck plus price of the room for her one night stay. Ah, the concrete jungle which is Bangkok. How I miss gazing out at it while near comatose in the back of a taxi after the bars have called “Time, Gentlemen”. While the jungle animals were mostly asleep and the traffic a little lighter. Those halcyon days. Be here now. We’ve checked in to the hospital and visited the food court. Pretty decent offerings by the look of it but I’m not hungry. The Mrs has…

My wife has cancer – Now what?

My wife has cancer – Now what?

My wife Tam was recently diagnosed with cancer. That’s so fucked. But then I thought “In six months I’ll be able to own this joke”: Me: My wife got burnt the other day. Friend: Badly? Me: Yeah, they don’t fuck around at the crematorium. The above should illustrate two things about me: 1) I’ll need humour to get through this and 2) I swear It’s a lot to come to terms with, in a short space of time. Here’s the latest: Disclaimer I’m not a medical professional and treatments described here may not be suitable for anyone else. If you…

How to scan with a wifi networked Epson L355 on Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty)

How to scan with a wifi networked Epson L355 on Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty)

Long story short – possible, but no walk in the park. Beginning to think we linux users are masochists. The price of absolute power, I suppose. It’s a shame my ScanSnap 1500 broke down sometime ago. Not so much broke-down, rather some nasty looking goo started leaking out of it and I thought it a good idea not to power it up until I took a look under the hood and work out what’s going on. Like many things, this has been put on the back-burner. There’s really not much need to scan documents anymore, and with the amount of…

Merry Xmas 2019

Merry Xmas 2019

How was your Xmas day? We had a quiet one here, just the two of us if you don’t count the Canadian lobster. The wife had to work in the morning while I teed up some carols on YT. It was enjoyable to listen to them throughout the day. We started with some prawns on the BBQ. Note to self – shouldn’t have drowned them in olive oil, the flare-up blackened them somewhat. Still tasted good, though. Washed down with a nice NZ Sav Blanc. Then on to the lobster which we picked up from Villa Market. Hard to fit…

Getting the Ricoh SP230 DNw up and running on Ubuntu 14.04

Getting the Ricoh SP230 DNw up and running on Ubuntu 14.04

Let’s call it a Xmas present to myself – I purchased this printer as my old HP Laserjet had finally given up the ghost. It owed me nothing as I managed to squeeze about 8 years out of it! Remember kids – getting it out of the box is the easy part, it the setup where the rubber meets the road. First I tried to run the installation program on the CD which needed a Windoze box, enter my trusty Virtualbox VM with Win10 as a guest OS. Hit a roadblock when it couldn’t detect the SSID of my router…

I’ve dropped 24kgs without really trying

I’ve dropped 24kgs without really trying

I’ve been overweight for most of my life – still am but things are heading in the right direction once again 🙂 Friend Marko sent me a pic from Dec 2013 recently and I thought I’d try on the shirt pictured in the photo as I knew I’d dropped a fair amount of weight since then. Wow! – I could now button the shirt up which was impossible when I was at my heaviest (about 133kg). I’m proud and surprised I’ve dropped a total of around 24kgs – but it’s taken time and there have been no ‘magic bullets’ of…

A taste of Issan

A taste of Issan

With my ‘permission to stay’ date fast approaching, it was time again to head to the other side of the Thai border for a while. This time around, I decided to catch an AirAsia flight to Vientiane, Laos and stayed the night before heading south to visit a few places I hadn’t seen before in Thailand’s Issan region. I didn’t bother doing any sightseeing as I’ve done that a few times before – just grabbed a cab from the airport to the hotel and soaked up some of the local Beer Laos (cheap as piss!) while sitting outside a small…

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