rveeblefetzer's comments

A friend got slapped with a fine over this. He's a foreign resident, and he changed hotels while on a trip. That information is bundled up and sent to the authorities, and they cross-checked him with the address he put on his travel form. Thousand baht fine.

FWIW, I brought this same friend to the police station where I'm a registered resident in Shanghai, so he could stay with me on a 72-hour visa. At the airport, he was told that if he doesn't register and it's discovered, it could affect his ability to get a visa in the future. This was only a few months ago.

here's a Reddit account on finding fake rice:

https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/4u06wk/i_bought_fake...

it's black rice, which if you've never had it, you might've seen it in a pot or shop-packaged cup as dessert with coconut milk

When his fixer Dith Pran died, the NPPA magazine News Photographer talked about Schanberg's reporting and how it placed you on the bridge when the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh -- and how today, the first graf is the news and the second graf is reaction, followed by forward analysis.

The general complaint is that Cambodia is under Vietnamese influence, mostly stemming from its backing of and leading the defectors who overthrew the Khmer Rouge. People today complain that the top govt officials are still Vietnamese, whether by backing or by blood, as well as many of the richest tycoons; the primary deputy prime minister (there's plenty) Sok An is often called a slave to Vietnam, and he's in charge of the Apsara Authority, which manages the Angkor complex; Sok Kong (unrelated), is one of Cambodia's richest men and ran the conglomerate that held ticketing rights to Angkor for decades; he is ethnically part Vietnamese, and because Angkor's tourism revenue was suspected to be too low, complaints about the national landmark being sold off to Vietnam were so huge that it factored in the last general election. An age-old cultural hatred is at play here, which itself comes from old empire stuff.

I was once talking to Dougald O'Reilly, an archaeologist from Australian National University who's done a lot of research at Angkor Wat. He was talking about having just published a paper about a dig and centuries-old skulls they'd found, and a lot of technical data. He ended with a quip that it was a lot of head trauma, and, me not being a science guy at all, I thought he meant the paper was academically rigrous. No, every skull had had their heads bashed in.

>> I wonder if it will accelerate the pace of restoration of temples in the area.

Likely not; current restoration projects are a shitshow, with an utter lack of coordination and even communication between the various country teams involved. In one temple, the Indian team tried to clean a wall and stained it; the Chinese restoration crews make the plainest and cheapeast concrete fillers to plug gaps in rock faces, they flake if you touch them. And now, the authority in charge of maintaining the complex is struggling with how to balance the much-valued tourism with air pollution; UNESCO has threatened status and funding if it doesn't address the impact that mostly auto/bike exhaust is having on temple faces. Other restoration projects will only get initiated if someone else is spending the money, and also kicks back to Phnom Penh.

>> to the point where they filmed Indiana Jones there!

Alongside Indy, Lara and Tony Leung, my favorite film reference is at Beng Mealea, and bonus points for the article for mentioning that temple. It's about 45km away down a dusty rutted road, and before it was added to the ticket list, the only people who visited besides domestic tourists were Japanese, because Hayao Miyazaki took it as inspiration for the setting "Laputa: Castle in the Sky." If you ever saw the old Japanese tourism books with the blue outer edge, Beng Mealea was mentioned in that, and every non-Khmer there would be clutching it.

Can't wait to get details of this game here in Shanghai via VPN

Missed opportunity: the photo editor could've folded out the newspapers and shown ads below the fold. Would've looked great paired with the headline

You could search PGP keyservers for email addresses/domains of the local media where that retirement fund is located and take it from there, using your own judgment about the reporter and outlet, and how much you'd want to mask that communication.

The Blackberry alternative that was suggested to Obama was the Sectera Edge by General Dynamics, which made the F-16 before it was sold to Lockheed

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2234082/what-obama-won-t...

Per-word rates are the most common in English; in German language, it's per character. Sometimes news outlets will establish a relationship with a freelancer that use dto be called a dedicated stringer, and some of those contracts would include a base retainer for the month, with a specified sum extra for words or whole articles over the base agreement. Just recently I heard of a freelancer agreement with Forbes that included a low base sum for four articles a month (very low, tho I can't recall) and US$0.05 per click, and they'll take just about anything she pitches. Some people are excited about the model (including the freelancer doing it). I do think raises questions about whether important topics would not get addressed because they're not grabby enough, but that's less of a problem for an outlet like Forbes than it is for, say, a city or local newspaper (e.g., a routine city hall or school-board meeting)

In the US news business, $100k/month is strictly the domain of TV on-screen personality presenters; i.e., not the reporters, but network affiliate anchors who are referred to in-house as 'the talent'. Absurd sums of money when you look at the rest of the newsroom staff salaries, but this is all about ratings, sweeps and very local/regional popularity.

The phrase you would be looking to use in your pitch to the editor would be to offer it 'on spec'. Some publications mandate that the first piece they get from new freelancers will be submitted on spec. But when you're making a living from it, it sucks to hear that.

Just to be sure, I'm more used to seeing 50% kill fees, at least from Asia and West Africa (for Western or Western-run publications). 50% is customary, and with established clients, unsaid until the time comes

I'm a journalist; lots of my colleagues were floored watching the doc about the NYT, "Page One," when David Carr tells his editor, "I'm doing two more weeks of reporting on this, then it might take a week to write it and show it to you."

Gmail's conversation threading, or the Thunderbird Conversations addon, are the only thing I wish for with Mutt. I once asked on the mutt mailing list about this, but the solutions were pretty ugly, mostly involving all sent mail copied in the inbox.

Still, mutt is my main email client. I only started using it a couple of years ago, after Thunderbird started to strain with my mail folders. In 1990s college days, I used Pine. Mutt scared me back then, tho mostly because no one I saw using it then edited with Pico.

have you tried a Chinatown gift shop? The kind of place that sells baoding balls, incense and kitschy porcelain?