Improve your life … Smash your Electronic Gizmos April 27, 2005
Posted by Martin in : Computers , 3commentsComputers allow us to perform tasks we never have needed to be done faster than we never needed them doing before.
Marketing tells us that PDA’s, Laptops, Cellphones, MP3 players are all making our lives more fun and efficient but deep down I suspect somebody somewhere is having a good laugh at our techo-misfortunes. Life has never been so damn difficult with them all.
Cellphones have instilled in us this feeling that we need to be in constant touch with people 24-hours a day. We no longer appreciate the convenience of this and we get angry when friend dare to switch them off when want to speak with them at two o’ clock in the morning.
MP3’s, cellphones and digital cameras work great until their battery runs out and are unusable until the user can rush to the comfort of their plug-socket and sort it all out again. They require individual power cables which are too cumbersome to take out with you and paradoxically the appliances are also designed so small these days that you can lose all of them from the convenience of just one pocket.
The internet is so damn saturated with information that it takes hours to actually find what you actually want and the internet is my life and my business!
Today I have given up on a task which should be so simple I’d have assumed would take only a few minutes. I have been trying to get a pre-paid mobile phone SIM card delivered to a hotel in Glasgow so that Tik will receive it when she arrives there on Saturday.
My first Aikido Lesson April 24, 2005
Posted by Martin in : Health & Sport , add a commentToday I participated in my first Aikido class.
Since I was young I’ve dabbled in many martial arts; Judo for a couple of years although the small school never really got the students graded and I ended up with just two red notches on my white belt.
I got a little bored of Judo purely because all my friends were learning to punch and kick so I joined up for Ju-Jitsu getting to the similarly pathetic yellow belt before realizing that if I could get a yellow belt then the grading system was obviously based on paying the school enough money and certainly not on the development of any true skills.
Barry Price recently reminded me about my personal and somewhat unique martial art party-trick back in my good old Birkdale High School days. The idea was to break out of headlocks by just dribbling all over my attacker. Whilst probably not the most practical technique in a street brawl I do belive it was effective in niche situations.
During university I got interested in Taekwondo and studied it quite intensively for 18 months. Foolishly I paired up with the most pathetic old man there rather than searching out a mentor and, predictably didn’t get very far.
After graduating from university I did actually plan to go to live in Korea so that I could take my Taekwondo seriously until discovering Muay Thai (Thai Boxing) which I practiced almost daily for 6 months when I arrived in Bangkok.
Muay Thai was the only martial art I’ve studied which, even 2 years after my last class I could probably use effectively and I am still impressed that after all this time, my shins are still in a pretty tough condition. I guess the judo skills of break-falling might also be a lifeskill I’ve acquired as well.
So … why Aikido?
Barry’s visit to Bangkok in 2004 is back Online April 21, 2005
Posted by Martin in : Thailand , add a commentHaving had some major updates to his excellent blog site, my good friend Barry Price has re-published his comprehensive diary about when he came to visit me in Bangkok during March 2004.
Barry’s intelligent prose, odorous humour and his siamese-twin-like attachment to me for nearly 2 weeks means that readers can experience a fortnight of my life without me having to write anything.
Barry’s diary covers nearly everything. There’s a few incidents which he has presumably cut from his brain. I guess it takes anybody but Barry to appreciate the look of sheer terror and disgust on his face when a Nana Plaza go-go girl tried to impress him by dropping her panties to the floor and grinning like a child who’s just realized the humour in saying ‘poo-poo’ to everything.
Barry mysteriously has forgotton how being heckled by bar girls as we walk around Sukumvit I am addressed as a ‘handsome man’ whereas he is regarded merely as a ‘young boy’. Considering Barry superlatises me in height, weight, girth and age I was quite flattered to be mistaken as the older man of the pair.
I’ve had a number of friends come to visit me but I’d say that Barry’s visit in 2004 was one of the best times I’ve had out here. What topped the enjoyment for me above much else was the fact that Barry and I had lived quite separate lives for the last 9 years or so. Rekindling a friendship after all that time, learning all the gossip, reliving the good old days and mocking his bowling-pin physique was presumably a reason why Barry returned 12 months later to visit me again.
Barry has just told me that he’s soon to update his site with his diary for his Thailand 2005 trip which was last February. I’m looking forward to that.
You can read Barry’s Thailand Diary 2004 Here.
Are man-boobs REALLY that interesting? April 21, 2005
Posted by Martin in : Computers , add a commentI took a peek at my web statistics today and found that the 2nd most popular search word for my site is ‘man boobs’. This phrase relates to an article last week about me getting fat.
It’s made me wonder just what kind of people I’m attracting and whether possibly I should model a new business opportunity around the man-boob curious market.
I’ve had a search for ‘Rohypnol in Bangkok’ and there’s a few searches for ‘Horny’.
It seems that for every web entry which contains some bizzare phrase or topic, it is likely that somebody somewhere will be searching for it.
Purely for my own amusement I tested a theory a few months ago whereby as long as my page is being spidered and as long as I include some improbably rare phrase in it, I could get to the top of google’s search results. Creative marketers now are doing this purely so they can claim they are ” the number one leading [profession] according to top search engines”.
By deliberately entering “Worlds most passionate lover” into todays blog it is likely that within a few weeks I’ll legitimately be able to say that I (Martin Pavion) am the worlds most passionate lover according to leading search engines. I love how manipulative marketing can be and how online marketers can really use this to their advantage.
I’m going to paste a few phrases below just out of interest to see if I can get ranked number one for them. Feel free to check them in google in a few weeks time to see how I’m doing. You’ll have to enter the phrase exactly otherwise it’s unlikely I’ll be number 1.
Worlds most intelligent man
Worlds most interesting website
Worlds most impressive man-boobs
Worlds most productive employee
Worlds most enterprising man alive
Thailands most interesting farang
Worlds most passionate lover
World’s most intelligent man
World’s most interesting website
World’s most impressive man-boobs
World’s most productive employee
World’s most enterprising man alive
Thailand’s most interesting farang
World’s most passionate lover
It might be fun to be able to include a few of these phrases into my CV 
I successfully got my worlds most passionate lover ranking at number one before. I spent a little bit longer repeating that phrase in the old webpage but because it’s such a niche I have a feeling I can get to number one again.
Two Days in Laos April 15, 2005
Posted by Martin in : Overseas Travel , add a commentIt’s been three months since I was in Hong Kong so I had to leave Thailand to renew my visa.
Usually I do a daytrip to Poipet in Cambodia which is a horrible place, but, being in the North of Thailand, Tik and I took the opportunity to spend a day and a half in Vientiane, the capital city of Laos.
I was actually quite nervous about travelling there. I’d heard that, just like Cambodia, there are no ATM machines in the country so I had to carry cash with me. The Cambodian border is disgusting; full of pickpockets, touts, child prostitutes, dead babies, amputees and some of the most deformed people alive. I was expecting similar in Laos and was delighted by how wrong I was.
The border crossing itself was uneventful, but safe. The visa booths actually has reassuring signs on them stating ‘No Corruption’ although it didn’t specify if this referred to the staff or the immigrants. We took a songtaew from the border into central Vientiane which took about 30 minutes and cost us only 50 baht each (about 80p).
According to Tik, the Laoatians are similar in appearance and attitude to the countryfolk in the North East of Thailand. They are friendly, family-oriented and lead simple, non-ambitious lives. They too celebrated the new year and we got wet in the back of the songtaew.
I’m not sure if it was a Laoatian idea but we noticed many men wearing bras over their t-shirts, and wearing darker clothes - unlike Thailand where bright clothes are the norm. Laotians also use water bombs which are apparently banned in Thailand.
Shortly before 4pm Tik and I arrived at the Inter Hotel. The hotel came highly recommended by my friend Mylo but from the outside it looks pretty shabby. How wrong our first impressions were…
We checked into the best room of the hotel. It was incredible. The room (and the hotel) was decorated with tasteful Asian artworks, there was enough room to install a bowling lane if we’d have wanted to. We had a corner room with views overlooking the Mehkong river and down the street which hosted the new year celebrations. It was the nicest hotel room I’ve ever stayed in. We got the room, breakfast and 4pm late checkout for 1800 baht (less than 30 quid).
The hotel restaurant was fantastic. A meal of fresh homemade soup, salad, sizzling New Zealand beef, vegetables, ice-cream and Lao coffee came to $12 US. At 4pm Tik and I were hungry and should really have just ordered a snack but the tempation to make the most of the cheap food was too much. We ate far too much, ended up in bed trying to sleep off our bloatedness at about 7pm and got a cool 11 hours of sleep.