It’s sitting in the UK right now, my friend Bear is going to bring it over with him when he comes to visit me on Koh Phangan next month. I am a bit worried though, Bear has a history of breaking things. Last time I took him out on my boat he flooded the shower, ripped the flag, broke the flag pole, destroyed the hatch, demolished the windscreen, destroyed one chair and dropped the other in the river.

Fingers crossed he is a little more successful in transporting a laptop from Europe to Asia, oh dear, thinking about it I am getting more and more worried!

It will be good to see him though, we haven’t met up for two or three years now and he’s a good friend, I think he is really going to enjoy the island.

I use a CDMA connection supplied by CAT telecom for my Internet access, the best way to describe it is that it is similar to an old duel channel ISDN setup except the latency is much higher.

Today I needed to re-install Windows XP on my Asus EEE PC, I also installed Outlook 2007 and Word 2007. I navigated to the Microsoft update page after I had finished the install and scanned for all updates. It came back with over 800Mb of things I need to download to patch my operating system and software.

800Mb doesn’t sound lie a lot these days but when you are averaging 14Kbps download speed it adds up to around 17 hours before it completes. This is just too damn slow, 24 hours to install a PC and all updates, ridiculous.

We are starting to see them everywhere, you just cannot escape them these days it seems, tags are the most trendy way of identifying and categorising everything, blog posts, bookmarks, even your entire file system.

I can’t help but think they are negative in some ways, using tags is a fairly sloppy way of organising data, they may work well for categorising websites but tagging files? Surely this will lead to bad naming conventions and a disorganised file structure as people begin to rely on tags to find their files and folders?

Personally I think they are very useful for categorising articles on a website or some other type of web content that needs to be grouped together for easy reference but it seems to me that people are trying to find excuses to use tags everything they can think of.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned, I am used to strict naming conventions and careful data management, it comes with my background. Personally I would never consider using tags as a way to organise my file system.

I have finally gotten sick of the terrible GPRS service offered by DTAC here on the island. Actually that’s not really a fair comment, it can be incredibly good, in Bangkok I get maximum speed but I am afraid at my house it’s touch and go, quite often it will lock up and I will need to reset my cell phone to get it working again.

So yesterday I purchased an AIS SIM card and tried out their EDGE offering, it works fine, a little slower than DTAC but it does not suffer form the same lockup situation. So today I had to go and buy a cheap phone to put my old DTAC SIM card into because everybody has that phone number for me in their contacts. I always said I would never be one of those sad bastards that carry two phones, I guess I was wrong.