Changkhui: Changkhui

An episode born out of a suggestion from our familiar friend on Twitter. So we invited her to join us again, though it's the 1st time she joined us in 2009, mEnE was back in this episode. Also, another listener saw what we tweeted so he joined in as well, and that was Ben Philharmonics. Since this would be about the current epidemic in Thailand, so we had Zybernav back to share his experience in dealing with it. This Skype conversation was heavily edited, due to very long delay, almost 10 seconds in some instances, on a Skype connection. mEnE and Ben shared how their companies deal with the epidemic.

Having read many topic threads on various webboards, I could not help but notice some unspoken rules on some of them. Therefore, we invited 9aum (twitter.com/9aum) and Ford (twitter.com/FordAntitrust) to share their experiences. Both were webmasters and administrators on http://www.thaithinkpad.com and http://www.thaihi5.com and run their own blogs. The conversation went from the usual problems on webboards to what to do when you were new to the community and went on to touch on some aspects on software and tools selections.

What was WolframAlpha? And who was this Stephen Wolfram? These two questions popped up on my head when I first heard about it in This Week in Tech #195. So we asked Piyatad (Job) and Worawat to do some research for the episode so we could talk about it. This is in reference to the site, http://www.WolframAlpha.com, the computational knowledge engine (as written on the site). The service was good, full of results and we were all impressed and hope to spread some news for this site.

We are honored to have khun Adit Harinasuta as our guest on this episode. He was once the chief commercial officer at TOT and went on to become the Head of Products and Services at Starhub, Singapore. He gave a somewhat different point of view on having a 3G service, since he had an experience of offering that to Singapore customers. Also, a glimpse of future telecom operators. I have to apologize for the background noise (from my two sons), but that's something I have to live with under the circumstances.

For some reasons, Ood, Job, mEnE, Aum, Tum and Kangg visited my place on June 20, 2009. Some came at the same time, some came alone. Anyway, since Aum and Tum brought along a new MacBook Pro and Kangg had also updated his iPhone to the new firmware 3.0 so we decided to make an episode out of it. Since the content was really going into DualGeek's territory and they would have done a much better job than we did, so we named this episode as a tribute to DualGeek. This was really a Mac-oriented episode.

Since the baby panda was delivered on May 27, 2009 at Chiangmai Zoo, it had gained some publicity. As part of the job, I had to participate the Panda naming event on Monday June 15, 2009 at Thai Post Convention Hall, Bangkok. The event was meant to narrow down the names of 10,000+ titles to 4. There were some 30 celebrities gathered to help selecting the names. However, there were some doubts about how the voting process was done. So I decided to share what I saw on the day. Thank you Thai Post (http://www.thailandpost.com) and the Zoo Organization for the event (http://www.zoothailand.org).

Koson suggested the idea of talking about Google Wave but I was pre-occupied with my son, so we had to postpone it for a week which fitted nicely with WWDC 2009 schedule. So here we go. We talked about the 2 events and some other events that took place during the week.

Suphajee Suthumpun, from IBM Headquarter, gave a speech at the Prachachat event on June 4, 2009. Due to family matter, I had no choice but to use this for the episode. Thank you Prachachat for the invitation and khun Suphajee Suthumpun for her speech.

We were honored to host one of the first, if not the first, podcasters in Thailand, Wee Viraporn. He was a co-founder of the Dual Geek podcast. A month ago, he launched a new podcast with a different group of friends and listeners, Design Pai Bon Pai (http://www.designpaibonpai.com). The podcast was meant for those in the design industry, with as many as seven founders. We started with Design Pai Bon Pai in mind, but manage to talk about something else along the way.

The last time he was in Changkhui was last year, meaning a very long time ago. As usual, we asked he could share whatever toys or gadgets he had been putting his hands on. So he picked Sling, as from SlingMedia.com and the Amazon's Kindle app on iPhone. Then we talked about something that fit-in in between a notebook and an iPhone; something a netbook had been trying to fill in.