Alex's Adventures in Thailand

[hawkiee552]

It's raining sideways! :O Isn't Thailand more of a winter-vacation destination because it's raining a lot in the summer? I believe so. I love rain though, but that's just a bit too much. As you said, it's nothing like in Norway, far from it.

[Alex]

Yeah, the monsoon season is right in the middle of our summer, but we never have time to go here in the winter, so summer is close enough.

[Alex]

Wow, time to post here again. Even though I've been pretty active on the forums in general, and doing way too much on the server to actually be on holiday, I still have a vlog sort of thing going here. This is a bit delayed, July 11th.

July 11th recap: I didn't do much, just stayed home, recorded the first part of the vlog. Got picked up by my mother and my aunt to go get a haircut (no comment, lol). Came back home, after a while it started raining like crazy, as you will both see and hear (unless you're blind and deaf, if you're blind, how are you here?) in the vlog/video/composition of 30 pictures per second.

The old computer that was showed didn't have much inside that I really wanted to take out, it would be too much of a hassle. I know it was running on a Pentium 4, and that it had 256 MB RAM (128 mb * 2). Wanted to pull out the HDD, but it was screwed into the case, so again, it was too much of a hassle.
Picture of inside the case of the old PC:


The newer PC that they have, I didn't take any proper pictures of, didn't really wanna touch it. Bad things happen if I mess around too much. I checked the DXDiag of it though, and it seems to be pretty good. It has an Intel i5-3470, 3.20 GHz quad-core. It had 8 GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon 6670 card. I don't wanna talk bad about my cousins, but obviously they know nothing of computers when they're playing both Half Life 2 and Far Cry 3 in windowed. The HUD of HL2 is even glitchy while they play, and as I mention in the video, Far Cry 3 seems to be running on ultra, which makes it lag. Not to re-mentions that they play IN WINDOWED MODE (who in their right mind can play in windowed mode {not counting borderless}!?).

Anyways, here's the video. Sorry for the loud rain in the second part of the video.

Again, if you wish to watch it on the YT page, click here.

July 12th: Went to a shopping center, found an ASUS laptop that I wanted, just because of the nice specs and price. (Some i5, 4 GB and GT 740M w/ 2 GB VRAM laptop). Couldn't buy it because my mother meant "I had a fully functional laptop already", when in reality that is true, it's gonna be so ghetto rigged soon (it's like 70-80 degress Celsius on idle, 90 when I'm in like Gmod) that I can barely boot it without frying my desk.
Anyways, ate some stuff and blah blah. Nothing much.

[DA KID]

Your voice sounds totally different on that mic than in TTT, Wonder how it is IRL....

[Alex]

I believe the sound from the mic of my cellphone is sort of the same as it would be IRL. I've noticed myself that my accent is stronger in the vlogs that I've made, than basically anything else.

[unicow2945]

You sound about 34% less Norwegian through that video, Alex. i think you're loosing you touch .

[Alex]

Trust me, my Norwegianness will never be lost.

Although, I think my accent is definitely different in this video than what I usually think I have. Might be I've been talking way too much using a more of a simplified pronounciation of things, since my family aren't really that great in English. Although my cousins are working hard to learn English, they're still some years younger than me (remember that I'm only 16, so "some years is actually quite young), but learning little by little.

[hawkiee552]

Now, Alex, I want you to listen carefully.

Take that black CRT monitor, pack it up in a cardboard box, and send it to me.


I WANT A CRT MONITOR, GAH.

No input lag, classic nostalgia!

[Alex]

You know why I won't do that, hawkiee (late reply is late, forgot to reply).

[Alex]

So this post should cover 2 days, July 13th + July 14th. As of right now, it's July 15th, I was supposed to write about it yesterday, but since my internet connection wanted to go down (not sure what was the issue, I've been troubleshooting back and forth, and in the end, we just called the support and they somehow fixed it). So that's the story behind the delay.

Now while I'm typing this, I'm actually typing it into a forum I created on my computer, using a local web server. Because the internet connection decided to go down again. Now I would call support, but they speak Thai, I don't know the language except for a few words. It wouldn't help at all. My aunt and uncle haven't come home from work yet, so I can't really ask them to do that until they get home, but without further ado, let me move on to my main topic of this.

July 13th: This date was probably the worst day of my holiday. We went to a city called Nong Khai, this city has a "direct" bridge across to Laos (even though you need a Visa and all to get into the country itself). So we decide to go, first we gotta pay someone around 3000 baht (600 NOK/100 USD approximately) for their help to get through the toll, we needed to sign papers and such. It was just a pain, but that went pretty fine. We came through, and crossed the bridge. Now on the Laos side of the bridge, we had to show this guy the papers so we could get a Visa to visit the stupid country. Now normally this would cost something as well, we didn't know the exact price though. The guy told us to pay 1500 baht (300 NOK/50 USD approximately) FOR EACH PERSON. In the end, it would be a lot for Thai people compared to us Norwegians, but I still agreed it was a lot just to get in the country.
Normally, we wouldn't have to pay that much, but because the embassy was closed (it was after all a Saturday), so whoever was sitting behind there could say ANY PRICE, and expect us to be stupid enough to pay. It's complete crap (I would say something worse, but this is after all FADW), and we just didn't want to go there anymore. Honestly, Laos is not really a popular country, why would anyone pay that much to go there? We decided to go back to the hotel, but suddenly some other issues came up. Since my family are Thai, they easily got a Visa without paying, but they had to go through the gate to get to Laos, and then back around to get back in Thailand, so we had to wait for a while. Not only that, but we had issues coming back into Thailand, we had to lie and say that someone was sick, because they wouldn't understand that it was too expensive. And honestly? I have no problem lying to people with higher authority during this case. We got through eventually, went back to the hotel and had a pretty normal day after that.

TL;DR: Laos sucks.

July 14th: The day after attempting to go to Laos went pretty fine, we ate breakfast, it wasn't really great (the hotel isn't really 5 stars), but it was OK. I wasn't hungry after leaving at least. As planned, we weren't staying in Nong Khai for too long, so we drove back home to Bueng Kan (the city/district I'm currently in, where my family also lives). It was a 2-3 hour ride, and I slept for the most part. Reason: I had been up until 4 or 5 that same morning and slept until 7 to prepare for breakfast at 8. I needed that sleep so bad.
This was just a normal day, me sitting at the computer, frustrated at our internet, because now it didn't work (this was even worse than the hotel wifi. It still is at the time of writing, because I can't connect to the interwebs) and I had absolutely no clue how to fix it. In the end, it got fixed and instead of writing this post as I had planned, I had to deal with the server for a while, and not much happened after that. I needed sleep and went to bed at around 12 AM.

Hotel room had a decently nice view from the balcony though


Again, as the time of writing this, our internet is still down. I tried factory resetting the router yesterday, not ever again, I had to login with some info I didn't have through 3BB (our ISP), and it was a pain to get. Restarting it normally still hasn't worked (I just tried it). I JUST WANT TO HAVE INTERNET ACCESS (because I'm addicted, duh).

Take care everyone.
-Cactus out