Inauguration National Anthem Mistake

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03JFHp5h3MQ

Oh man, I feel bad for the guy who sang the Star Spangled Banner at the opening of the Obama inauguration and messed up the last entrance on the word “brave”. I thought a couple entrances before that seemed a bit tentative, but then thought no, that was just my imagination – they must practice this a thousand times.

Then at the very end the band stopped silent and he came in with “B” for brave – just his “b” hanging all by it’s little lonesome with so many millions of people watching. Ouch! That’s one that would have me waking up in the middle of the night in a sweat for years.

You can listen to it at 1:24 in this video clip.

UPDATE: Mmmm…..I haven’t seen this posted anywhere else and no comments. Maybe there was no mistake, and it was just an audio bug in the time delay?

Praying for Heineken

I’m at a local village gathering for National Children’s Day in Thailand when a bus of monks pulls up (complete with the yellow robes like in the movies). I’m brought over to where they all sit down as a little crowd of about 30 of us kneel in front of them.

Chanting and praying starts – I fold my hands when it looks like I’m supposed to and bow when I’m supposed to. I think I was very professional overall. But I was a little nervous as to what we were actually praying for because I didn’t understand the chant.

Then the monk passes in front of us and drenches us in water; from what looked like long incense sticks dipped in water. During this time I was thinking of the Beatles when they went out meditating, and wondered if I should have dressed a little more hippy instead of my Polo shirt.

Before the monk bus left one of them came up to me and said “God Bless You”. And God did, because after that we had all the ice cream we could eat and all the Heineken we could drink – ALL DAY. I understand Buddhism now, and I also understand why they spend so many hours meditating and praying. If the ice cream and beer is good – it’s worth the time invested.

Eating Bugs in Thailand

For some reason eating grasshoppers and larvae in Thailand does not gross me out nearly as much as eating baby squid in China. Maybe it’s the crunch factor.

One of the things I love about Thailand is that I enjoy so much of the food. It’s the best overall food I’ve had in my life from any country. I mean – I like Thai food like I like peanut butter sandwiches; and that’s A LOT.

At a local gathering for National Children’s Day in Thailand today we had an all day feast of food, ice cream and liquor. And around sundown came out the primo drinking snacks – cruncy grasshopper and chewy larvae. They weren’t disguised or covered in sauce, they were just staring at you. So the big question is: What does grasshopper taste like? Mmmm…..a bit like wild locust.

Tourist Scams and American Guilt

One thing I have learned (or should I say real world lessons I have paid for) while being in Southeast Asia is how naive and guilty Americans are. When we are traveling abroad our guilt is used as a powerful leverage tool to part us from our money.

Two things to keep in mind when traveling in tourist areas in Southeast Asia:

  1. There are police EVERYWHERE and they are there to protect you. You will probably not get outright rolled over or beat up just minding your own business. (Although there’s always pickpockets.)
  2. The police can NOT protect you from simply being overcharged. So the main tool of the scam artist is using guilt to get your money. And guess who the number one easiest target is to use the guilt trip? Americans!

Continue reading “Tourist Scams and American Guilt” →

Backpacking SE Asia

Currently backpacking in Southeast Asia. Will return in a couple weeks and post boring slide shows and touristy comments. This is from an internet cafe in Southern Vietnam – horrible connection.

ShiverSail.com and RiderBark.com Facebook Spam

Reports in the last couple days of Facebook accounts being compromised and messages left on friends profile pages referring to the websites ShiverSail.com and RiderBark.com

The message on your Facebook wall may say “I saw a site displaying your pictures on shiversail-com-check it.”

Haven’t found the purpose of the spam yet, but I’m sure that information will follow shortly.

How to set crontab to permission 4755

Well this burned several hours of my time to get cronjobs running on a new server. I was manually setting crontab permissions to 4755 as CPanel requested before inputing a cronjob – but the permissions kept resetting themselves so my cronjob wouldn’t save. Do it from your ssh console as root instead; here is the fix:

If you are receiving the error “/usr/bin/crontab permissions are wrong. Please set to 4755” when in the cron section of cPanel, the commands below may correct the error for Redhat/CentOS/Fedora servers.

Log into the server via ssh or the console as root and run:
chmod 4755 /usr/bin/crontab