Trip beyond the sea level-Siam Ocean World

I took my son to Siam Ocean World at Siam Paragon Shopping Mall, Siam Square, right in the very heart of Bangkok. It's my second time already and it's my son's fourth. He loves aquarium so much. He had a dream of being an animal ecologist, especially marine. He asked what it take to be a marine biologist, I told him that he need a Ph.D. in that and would take 5 years to make a Ph.D. He said he would be too lazy and asked if he could do it in three. This is what a three grader thought.

The Aquarium is the biggest in South East Asia with a lot of fishes from many region of the world, including Amazon and the Antarctic. It also features many extra shows, such as, the glass-bottom boat, the fish feeding, the magic show underwater, and the 4-D movie.

Pictures above explain it all. See for yourself.

Lucky Kiss

My son is now craze on cards. We play Poker every evening. His mom told him that kissing daddy brings good luck. So every evening, he give me a long deep kiss on the cheek. True it works like charm. He always wins on me with his lucky hands.

iMac at home

Last week was the long weekend holiday in Thailand. It's Songkran day where it was supposed to be the hottest days in the year and people started to go out on the street and played water fight. All soaked and wet. Many people just took this chance to go out to the suburb. Traffic was so damn bad out of Bangkok.

I decided to stayed home enjoying the traffic free in Bangkok. You will experience this just twice a year on Songkran and the Newyear holiday.

I decided to buy a 24" iMac for me and the kids to play around with. It's the third Mac that I had in years. The first one was the Mac SE (The first 32 bit machine) that I bought back in my collage years. The second one was the very first iMac (the triangular-shaped screen monitor). Now I have the Leopard.

My 8 year old son was so excited. After unboxing and plugging on to the Internet, my son start playing around with it. From just a few minutes demo at the store, my son could edit a movie within the first hour of his experience with Mac. He found the small camera that are embedded on top of the screen and start video recording his picture doing some drastic acts. He recorded it for a 2 minutes video. I then had it synced to my Apple TV and the rest of the house start enjoying his first video.

The next day, I started doing the wiring for my in-house LAN cables. I really do not like the reliability of WiFi at all. My Apple TV has network connection problem using WiFi. Every time it goes idle (after not using it for a day or two), the connection just go off and can not resume unless reboot. I finally got back to the old conventional way of cabled network. Now I have a small LAN in my house with NAS box for file sharing. Probably I can start exploring the Time Machine features of the Mac pretty soon.

Abu Dhabi

Last week, I went to a conference in Abu dhabi, UAE. I spent 2 nights at The Beach Rotana Hotel. It is a five star hotel and probably the most precious one in Abu Dhabi. The whole things in Abu Dhabi was built. It was amazing to see how money can do the changes. Everything there is man-made, the beach, the sea, the tree, the poolside. They are all made up. the restroom is so grand.

The weather was not that hot. It's just about the same as in Bangkok in mid-summer. I believe it will go a lot hotter in May or June.

Next to the hotel is a large shopping mall. It's called Abu Dhabi Mall. It a very modernize with all the brand-name shops. We dine there everyday at the food court. There are many nice shops but prices are slightly higher than in Bangkok. It was good that the money still remained in my pocket.

One thing nice about Abu Dhabi is that the grocery mart is so big and you can find a lot of things from around the world. I bought back many Kilos of Pitasschio and cashew nut. They both tastes so delicious.

The only airline from Bangkok is Etihad. Abu Dhabi is the central hub for Etihad. The airport is small and not so busy as Dubai. The shops there is quite alright. It look a bit old, but I'm sure in the future, it will just as big and busy as Dubai.