Today, I went to the Burmese embassy. One of the staff said "Burmese postal system sucks!" Government employee does not trust the government service. :-)

During Thingyan last week, I went to a beach here in Thailand. It was fun. I ran every morning and every evening. Swimming twice a day was also a fun thing to do.

He Changchui, Assistant Director-General and FAO Regional Representative for Asia and the Pacific, said the followings:

He Changchui said that Burma, one of Asia's poorest countries, does not have the personnel or facilities to deal with the outbreak [birdflu] but added that U.N. teams will focus on it in the coming weeks.

Burma is one of Asia's poorest countries. When will we wake up for a change?

A Burmese girl selling watermelon (Picture by Neil Sowards)

Rich people in Burma buying gold :-)

http://khitpyaing.org/modules.html?name=Sections&op=viewarticle&artid=988

Recent salary hike caused the prices of commodity and gold to soar. Fearing inflation, rich people are buying gold. In Burma, the powerful and the rich are getting richer and richer. Who are going to stand up for the rights of the oppressed and the poor?

When I am out of Burma, I have to constantly remind myself of people in Burma and their sufferings. Otherwise, I enjoy easy life outside of Burma and don't want to go back to Burma. Here are some pictures of schools in remote places of Burma.

Classroom (Photo by Neil and Diana Sowards of Friends of Burma)

School (Neil and Diana Sowards in the picture)

Slashdot banned Thai IP address for a while

I always read www.slashdot.org for tech news. Yesterday, the site banned 203.144.143.3 (my ISP's proxy) saying that the address was abusing the site. All the ISP in Thailand, I think, forced the users to go through their proxies. It is a bad idea in a case like this. It blocks the whole country, Thailand, from accessing Slashdot site. I couldn't read the news for a few hours. Censorship is a bad idea.

Frustrated with the censorship, I used SSH tunneling to access the Internet.

Here is what I did on my Linux box.

Log into my remote ssh server using ssh client from command line. port 8080 is for local port forwarding. I will have to use this port 8080 in my Firefox settings. SOCKS Host: 127.0.0.1 is my local host and port 8080 is what I used for SSH tunneling.

ssh -D 8080 -l myusername myserver.net

Or if you want to use Putty client

putty -D 8080 -P 443 -ssh myserver.net (if using putty)

Configure the Firefox Connection setting

Edit > Preferences > Connection Settings > Manual proxy configuration

SOCKS Host: 127.0.0.1:8080 (Socks v5)