At 6.45 p.m. today, less than 300 meters from my apartment at Victory Monument in Bangkok, a bomb exploded killing one and injuring four. The incident occurred at the bus station next to Center One mall. I arrived around 7.30 p.m. and the scene was a mixture of shock and curiosity. An area around 400 square meters had been cordoned off and there was a large crowd of military personnel, policemen, forensics experts, and onlookers. White circles were being sprayed on the ground around fragments of the bomb and people within the sealed off section were examining the area.

A bus shelter had been damaged and there was shattered glass covering a small area of the ground. The BTS Skytrain was still passing by overhead. It’s unclear who detonated the bomb and why, but there have been six other confirmed explosions in Bangkok at Seacon Square, Sapahan Kwai, Sukhumvit soi 62, Tesco Lotus in Prachachuen, a police box in Nonthaiburi, and Klong Toei.

Unfortunately I could not understand the press briefing, but there seemed to be a fair amount of confusion as to the exact circumstances surrounding the bombings. Some New Year’s Eve celebrations are going to be cancelled. Every day I walk by the spot where the bomb exploded.

There are rumours floating in that the people behind the bombings are pro-Thaksin supporters. There is nothing to suggest the work of Islamic militants at this moment.

The general vibe is that people should be taking care tonight. Bangkok is on high alert. What a way to bring in the new year.

Addendum: The governor of Bangkok has allegedly cancelled all public New Year's Eve celebrations. A friend of mine called the owner of Club Astra in RCA and by all accounts the party is on there, although at this point in time it looks likely that my celebration will be spent at Gnarly Kitty's house. On the plus side, this means I may get a glimpse of her hi-so life, and I may even meet her dad.

I assume the question on the tip of everybody's tongue is: "Whodunnit?" At this point speculation is rife as to whether it was insurgents from the south, people acting on the current political climate, or a different group altogether. Whoever it was, they must have had a fairly high level of organisation; what that adds up to is mere guesswork. There have been simultaneous bombings in the south already this year (in August, 23 banks were bombed in Yala) but the violence has yet to migrate to Kraung Thep.

The number of people injured at Victory Monument seems be fluctuating between four and 20. Bangkok Pundit is blogging live with regular updates.

Addendum two: We just got word that another bomb exploded at Central World on the stroke of midnight. Other bombs have been found but have not exploded. Thai TV is covering it now. At least one foreigner has been injured; allegedly she has lost a leg.

Word is now coming in that three foreigners have been hurt. There were two bombs that exploded (and one that did not) around the Central World area.

Addendum three: There has been another bomb? Thai TV is producing some unreal images at the moment. A lot of blood has been shed tonight. We still don't know who has done this.

Addendum four: One more bomb has just gone off at Buddy Bar on Khaosan Road. I think the point has been made now, but what is the message? The most recent bombs have been detonated by mobile phones, which is what has happened in the south of Thailand on numerous occasions. A number of the other bombs today were detonated by a watch or some similar device. Are the pieces falling into place? There's still no official statement.

Happy New Year: Enough with the bombings already. New Year's Eve 2006 has been successfully rattled. The bomb on Khaosan Road has apparently been demoted to another "suspicious package". I spent most of tonight at Kitty's house watching TV, being forced to sit through an episode of the OC, and drinking gin. It wasn't quite what I'd had planned, but this is Bangkok after all, and it was fun to spend time with a few friends. The best thing that happened tonight was that I got to meet James Bond (Gnarly Kitty's dad) in real life. I also just got hold of UFC 66 so will be watching that before I go to sleep. It's 3 a.m. and I just arrived home. I was planning to go and meet Bill at Astra but it's closed, along with everywhere else, because of the bombings. Whoever did this has made quite an impression.

Techno’ tags: Terrorism in Thailand, Bangkok bombings

A word from our online friends

California hotels are comparatively more expensive than Florence hotel. That can be compensated in a travel packages by going for cheap airline deals. Once you plan to go airlines, more can be saved with cheap car rental deals, particularly for car rental Hawaii.

What inspires a person to put his life on display for all to see? Is it for fame, money, respect, recognition? Most of us have kept a diary at some point, but the thought of photocopying personal entries and stapling them up on notice boards around the city is unsettling. Yet that is precisely what bloggers do. According to The Blog Herald in July of this year, there are more than 70 million blogs on the Internet; we are in the grip of a global phenomenon.

People have been keeping diaries for centuries, and so with the explosion of the online world, the move to keeping these diaries in digital format is a natural transition; the only different being that 840 million people (according to the Global Research Agency) have access to what gets written.

Blogs have been around for more than ten years, with early versions consisting of basic webpages that were manually updated. Today, thanks to software such as Wordpress, the ability to create professional-looking, user-friendly blogs is available for even the most technologically illiterate. A few online tutorials, Google searches, and experiments are all that is needed to join the army of online diarists.

So what do these bloggers have to write about and, more to the point, why should anyone care? The subject matter for blogs is as varied as your imagination will let it be. There are blogs about everything from dogs, David Beckham, and beards, to Elvis, industrial revolutions, and rabbits. None of these topics sound much like a diary, but this is where blogs come into their own because they incorporate elements of journals, fanzines, discussion forums and news into one digestible format. People just write about whatever the hell they want, and Thailand is no exception, with both locals and farang contributing to the community.

In Thailand, blogs have become particularly prominent, partly because of the candidness with which topics can be discussed. Censorship is a tired path for discussion, but the new slant on it is that blogs offer a device through which regular people, as well as journalists, academics, writers, etc., can sound off against whatever is on their minds. Although the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology has a tendency to shut down websites left, right and center, the Internet is a difficult source to control.

Blogging has become a primary source for finding information about current affairs across the world. The military coup of September 19 highlighted the power of the blogger, as people in Thailand turned to the Internet to find out what was happening, while people outside of Thailand turned to it to get first hand reports about a news event that, for several days, was the top story on Google News, the BBC, and all the major wire services. The turning to bloggers for information suggests that people now demand more from their news; people want something more personal that reflects a desire share our thoughts and feelings with others.

Going back to my original question: What is it that drives people to put their lives on the Internet, to offer their opinions, to tell the world things that it does not ask for? Perhaps a blog is a way to be different. It gives a person a chance to air his views and establish that he is an individual and he can make a difference. It’s a way of ensuring that a person’s inner thoughts don’t go to waste.

Maybe blogging is just a hobby, something to do, a way to pass time. It’s a means to share in the same way as when you hear some juicy gossip that you just have to tell somebody. A blogger can talk about subjects nobody around him is interested in, and he might have 1,000 readers who can join in the discussion.

Some bloggers suffer from MySpace syndrome. They want to tell the world how great their lives are and how everyone else should be jealous. There’s nothing wrong this; perhaps it is human nature that drives some people to assert themselves as protagonists in the world around them. The lines between confidence, arrogance, and insecurity are terminally blurred.

I’m yet to really work out why I blog, but there is just something about it that interests me. My blog has it’s uses for networking and housing work I’ve written, but for the most part it’s just a hobby like any other.

Techno’ tags: The Internet, Blogging

After the anti-climax that had been superstar DJ-muppet Mylo’s set at Astra on Thursday, I went to Glow on Friday to see Atomic Hooligan. The DJ, Terry, was very impressive, but it was a shame there were not more people there. I was loaded on rum and cokes and was as drunk as I have been this year. At 2 a.m. I left and walked outside the club to find a taxi. A random guy from inside was with me for some reason; we said something to each other but I don’t remember what. We were walking along when two guys on a motorcycle pulled over and asked to see some ID.

It took me a few minutes to assess what was going on but eventually I figured out they were either members of the police, or else they were pretending to be so. One of the guys showed an ID that could have been anything, but he was pretty adamant that he was a policeman. I guess they were working undercover trying to bust innocent farang for walking on the road.

The scene turned a little ugly because one of the policemen was quite irate. The man who had driven the motorcycle was a lot calmer and I chatted with him a little bit. The problem escalated when the random farang guy went nuts and started saying things like: “Shit, it’s the cops. Let’s get out of here.” I looked at him and thought: Dude, what the hell is wrong with you? He was starting to flip out and it was making the nasty cop even more angry. “Passport! Passport!” he kept saying. Half the time I carry my passport, the other half I leave it at home. I had my pockets searched and one of the cops asked to see my wallet. I took it out of my pocket, removed all the money, and then handed it to him. He gave it back almost instantly.

I could sense that thing would get worse if I didn’t remove myself from the scene somehow, so I thought of the first lie that came into my head which was: “I work for the Bangkok Post.” I don’t know why I said it, but it seemed to hold some weight. I backed up my claim by pulling out a business card from when I had worked for Business Day (another English language newspaper). The man who had been driving the motorcycle seemed OK with me because I had babbled something in half-recognisable Thai, had waid him, and generally tried to be reasonable, unlike my new friend who was either a fresh face in town or just completely stupid. As I decided to leave, he had tried to run away and the cop had taken him down. It seemed a scuffle was imminent so I called over a cab and left.

I felt bad about not feeling bad for leaving him. I didn’t know him and he might have ended up with a broken nose, a night in jail, or both. But I just didn’t feel compelled to get involved in any shape or form. A decent human being would no doubt have at least attempted to help this guy out. I could have stayed behind and tried to reason with the cops or I could have tried to talk some sense into the foreigner, but I chose to just walk away. Would you have done the same? It was totally selfish, of that I’m sure, but at the end of the day my main priority is to make sure that I don’t get into bad situations, especially with the Thai police, or people pretending to be the police.

I wonder what happened to that foolish guy.

Techno’ tags: Bangkok Police, Living in Thailand

I’m at work right now and my comments yesterday about the internet being fixed were a little premature. It’s still broken. My connection at home is working OK, but in the office it’s just trickling through. For some reason I can still access Wordpress though, which is why I’m writing this. The problems may take two weeks before they are resolved. The fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the sea are only two-thirds of an inch thick. It’s incredible that this telecommunications disaster is due to these tiny cables. I never realized the abilities of fiber-optics.

The problem at work is that we can’t access our backoffice, which means we can’t update live content. It’s pretty frustrating.

Techno’ tags: Asia Internet Blackout, Bangkok, Thailand

I arrived at work today and found out that in Thailand it is an unwritten rule that everyone goes to work late during the final week of the year. That’s great, but why didn’t anyone tell me this before? I could have slept in. Tomorrow is the last working day of the year for me. I’m going to get native and go in at 10 a.m. I probably won’t really, because I have a built in farang trait that makes me feel guilty for doing such things. I don’t know why, but I feel bad about myself if I’m late or am at work and not doing anything. Sometimes I’m late if something happens like I lose my keys or can’t find my shoes, but for the most part I’m there come rain or shine.

Today, however, was about as lethargic a day as I’m ever likely to have because the internet broke and, working for a website, I was limited in the tasks I could perform.

It all started at around 10 a.m. The internet just stopped. I figured it was another IT problem, like maybe someone had blown something up trying to make toast for breakfast. Someone mentioned that the internet was going to be down for three days. I laughed. What a stupid thing to say, I thought. But it turned out to be true, or at least half true. There had been an earthquake in Taiwan that had crippled the net across Asia.

From the Bangkok Post today:

Telecommunications across Asia have been severely disrupted because of damage to undersea cables caused by Tuesday's earthquake near Taiwan. In Thailand, Internet access slowed to a crawl, with up to 90 per cent of e-mail and web access impossible. There was no word from CAT Telecom, the government monopoly which supplies all Internet service to Thailand. Repairs could take three weeks, Vice-General Manager Lin Jen-hung said, but quality would improve daily.

Work in my office today ground to a halt. The initial mood was one of relief, as people started chatting, a few lazed around on the sofas, and I think someone took a nap. After a while though people seemed to get bored and most found some sort of task to pass the time. I wrote down my goals for 2007. They largely consisted of: Making more money, becoming better at what I do, and (for my own sense of self-worth) doing something important. I need to buy a new camera and phone, and so more money would be useful.

The internet seems to be working OK now. Most websites are accessible and MSN is back. I thought True Move’s service couldn’t get any slower, but it has. Hurray for “broadband.”

Techno’ tags: Internet, Bangkok, Thailand, At Work