In my younger days (I am getting on a bit now, so I am allowed to say that!), I never dreamed that one day I would get a tattoo. Actually, I never imagined that I would find myself living in the tropics in the Far East, but that’s a whole nother story altogether …

More to the point, I would never have dreamed that one day I might attend a Tattoo Festival in a Thai temple!

Well, this morning my wife and I woke up outrageously early, and went with two friends to the Wat Bang Phra Tattoo Festival.

So how did that happen exactly?

A little background:

Last year in January, my wife and I went to Ayutthaya with her family to ทำบุญ (tham boon, ‘make merit’). While we were there we went to several temples and also to the monument of King Naresuan. At the end of the day we went to Wat Ayodhya where there was a monk doing tattoos for some of the locals. We got talking to the monk, and he explained what the tattoos symbolised, while touching up the (huge!) tattoo on the back of someone who was very obviously a regular visitor.

In the room with us were a couple of other people who had waited all day for this monk to come and do their tattoos. It turns out this monk only visits that particular temple infrequently, as he is a teacher at Wat Bang Phra (วัดบางพระ) in Nakhon Pathom province. Since there are literally thousands of temples of varying sizes in Thailand, I had of course never heard of this particular temple, but it turns out to be famous for tattoos.

While we were in Wat Ayodhya on that day, the monk gave three of us (my wife, her brother and myself) each an invisible tattoo, using a clear perfumed oil instead of ink, and a needle that does not go very deep into the skin so the tattoo is only visible until it heals. Please note, don’t think this means it is not painful! On a pain scale, I would say it stings – hard. We took the monk’s phone number in case we wanted to visit his own temple, and we all thought that would be that.

Well, a few weeks later after a few discussions, my wife and I decided that we would like a ‘proper’ tattoo. I was basically saying “I’m game if you are”, partially because she has a pretty low pain threshold and mine is fairly high. She was in quite a lot of pain when she had her oil tattoo done, and the monk said the ‘real’ (ink) tattoo was much more painful. So it was with some surprise that she said she wanted to go and have a tattoo done. We both decided that we wanted the ห้าแถว (ha thaew, five rows), as it supposedly brings prosperity and good fortune, as long as you follow the five ‘rules’ (precepts?) it describes.

So my wife called the monk, and surprisingly he remembered us. Possibly because there aren’t that many foreigners that visit and chat in Thai about the tattoos. He said we could go to his temple at the weekend and get our tattoos.

On the Saturday we went to Wat Bang Phra, which is a large temple about an hour’s drive West from central Bangkok. When we got there he was in a little air conditioned room surrounded by hordes of people, most of whom were covered in tattoos. Little did we know that Wat Bang Phra is actually famed for its tattoos, and that this monk is one of the teachers there as well as doing tattoos for visitors.

I don’t think I need to tell you that getting a tattoo by hand (as opposed to by the more modern machines) with an 18″ (45cm) needle is an extremely painful experience. And my wife wisely let me go first – although she had no idea how high my pain threshold is, the fact that it bled quite a lot and I whimpered from time to time allowed her to prepare herself for hers.

It took about 45-60 minutes for him to do mine, which is actually quite large (I have a large frame [note: this means I am fat], so a small one would have looked a little odd), and my wife’s smaller version took about 30 minutes. But trust me, it felt a whole lot longer!

Since we had them done, we have visited the temple with friends of my wife who also wanted tattoos – usually the invisible ones, but one of her friends had an ink one too. We also had ours retouched on the advice of the monk, to make sure they were just right.

And then, at the beginning of this month (February 2010), the monk called us and said that they are having a festival at the temple, and he would like us to come. We had no idea what it was all about, so we said sure!

Back to this morning – the Tattoo Festival!

So this morning we woke up at 4AM and got ready. Two of our friends who had previously gone with us for tattoos also arrived, and we drive to the temple.

We arrived at 6AM, and there were already many people there. Several hundred people were already getting themselves prepared for the festival which started at 09:39 AM, and finding themselves a spot to sit on in the large forecourt.

At around 7:30 we found ourselves a spot quite close to the back, which turned out to be a very sensible move indeed! At around 8:00 we got a taste of what was to follow, as we heard some screaming behind one of the buildings. We assumed someone was being over-exuberant, but then someone else did it. And pretty soon, we were seeing what was actually going on: some of the people who were covered in tattoos were being possessed by the spirits of the animals tattooed on their bodies! At first we thought this was bizarre, but then it started to become actually quite dangerous, as these people (who were genuinely possessed – my wife said that the people ไม่รู้ตัว, which literally means that they were ‘not aware of themselves’) would start screaming, then would stand up and run (still screaming) full pelt towards the raised area at the front where the monks would soon be sitting. Since there were by now many thousands of people sitting on the ground, this made for quite a few clashes and I saw at least one person slightly injured.

By 9:15 the place was so packed that you could hardly move, and the ‘possessions’ so frequent that it was difficult to avoid being collided with by someone who was only there physically. The most unnerving thing was that by now there were so many people there (we estimated well over ten thousand people) that it was not possible to leave. Especially since we were near the back and the exit was at the front!

I got trodden on only once, and four of the people immediately around us became possessed, but interestingly their companions (who are obviously veterans of this!) knew a trick that would calm the possessed person (possessee?) down and bring them back to this plane of existance – as soon as the people started screaming and waving their arms around, their companions would start grabbed the possessee’s ears and started rubbing them! We all tried to keep straight faces as we witnessed this, as it was too comical for words – I would like to say that we succeeded too, but it would be a lie.

After the devotions at 09:39 were over, the monks directed the crowd to move towards the front, where they could be splashed with water. While this is not unusual at a temple, it is terrifying when you find yourself standing in the middle of a crowd moving in a single direction, and about 10% of the crowd keeps getting possessed by spirits! I managed to avoid any damage to myself, and my wife and one of her friends who dared to come with us were similarly unscathed – but at one point the person behind me started going off on one, and then the person to my right started too! Honestly, I did not hit anyone, but the guy to my right did run into my elbow which I had raised to make sure we did not get barged into and knocked down in the crowd. Nobody was hurt in our immediate vicinity, thankfully – and I think less than a quarter of the people there attempted to get splashed by water.

After this, we went to ไหว้ (wai, the traditional Thai greeting) our friend the monk, and sat talking with him for half an hour in his room. This also helped us because his room has air conditioning, and we had been sitting in the morning sun until now. It was about 33C by then (91F), and we were all feeling the heat!

A new experience

So we were invited to this festival that we had never heard of, which turns out to be famous – and there are even sites from the West that mention it (see here, here and here, for example).

Was it interesting? Very much so! A completely new and totally unexpected experience.

Was it fun? In parts, yes – and in other parts it was terrifying.

Will I go again? I hope not! I expect that we will get a phone call again next year, and now we have been once we can either go again and avoid the crowds this time, or thank our friend the monk very much but be busy that day …

So last year when we went to a temple in Ayutthaya to ทำบุญ for the new year, and started talking to a monk who was tattooing someone … I had no idea that I would find myself at an exhilarating terrifying and very interesting Tattoo Festival this year! All part of life in Thailand, I suppose. There are new experiences waiting for us everywhere, and they are always hard to predict!

After using my own site as a sounding board for my rants, I liked the idea of having a rant site (for technical content) that was non-personal – by which I mean it has its own name and not mine – with no personal posts in it.

This site will become a blog for more personal stuff, since it bears my name. To me this makes good sense, as the more ‘neutral’ Poorly Rendered site can contain stuff that is not necessarily related to me, and my own site (this one – the one with my name) can have stuff about me and my life.

Given that my life typically centres around technical stuff and the latest (especially Apple) gadgets anyway, I can see Poorly Rendered getting a load more traffic than this one.

The new site can be found here : http://www.poorlyrendered.com/

Enjoy!

And please let me know what you think of the new site – both what you think of the idea, and what you think of the site itself, although right now it is largely without content!

After talking at a little length about Google Buzz yesterday, I was thinking this afternoon about what it would take to make it a success in the face of the functionality present in Twitter and email.

Twitter has what can best be described as a huge following. Sure, it has limitations – but for the most part people are OK with that. They are familiar with how to use it, and how it behaves.

But to me, the clincher is that Twitter has a published API. With that, anyone who wants to can write a Twitter client on literally any platform (any platform that has a TCP/IP stack, at any rate).

This has led to a plethora of clients for every smartphone, every desktop OS. Every system that people would like a Twitter client for. There is a Twitter client for the Commodore 64.

But wait – Google has an iPhone app for their Google Apps! Have you seen it?

Google iPhone App

I would laugh about this app if Google weren’t being serious about it.

They actually released an app that when you open it shows you a list of Google’s apps, several of which do have counterparts on other systems (such as Google Talk) – and when you click on one of them, it really does (and I am not kidding about this) … close the program and open the web-based app in Safari.

I am sorry Google, but that doesn’t cut it.

Google are talking about providing gigabit internet to people’s homes. Where they are based, there is almost complete 3G coverage at good speeds. But come on Google, don’t assume that everyone has this as an option.

Where I live, the government has not yet issued any 3G licences to any of the mobile operators for actual use. The only ones that have 3G have to say they are ‘testing’, and the service can be disconnected at no notice. There are I believe four or five cities in the country with this ‘testing’ 3G coverage, and I am fortunate that the city where I live is one of them.

When I went on holiday upcountry a few months ago I had mobile phone coverage and a GPRS data connection. Not 3G. Not EDGE – but GPRS. This is slower than what I had in the UK for “dial-up” access to the internet fifteen years ago.

Whereas dial-up speeds are perfectly adequate for simple text transfer (as used by the Jabber protocol used by Google Talk), it certainly doesn’t cut it for rendering modern web pages with images and AJAX, which is what you get with a Google web app.

On an ‘OS native’ application (one written to use the operating system and its own UI), you can switch between screens at the touch of a button. You can cache messages and information. On a web app, switching screens means loading a whole new page. Fine when you have unlimited bandwidth, but sucks at dial-up speeds.

So … Back to Twitter

As mentioned earlier, there are Twitter clients on every platform that has any life in it. In fact most platforms have several clients. How many clients are there for the iPhone, or the BlackBerry, or MacOS, or Windows? This is one factor that has contributed to Twitter’s success. Without it, everyone would have to use the web page to tweet.

If that were the case, Google would have a real contender with Buzz.

Google are not Stupid

Extremely successful in their core business, Google obviously do know what they are doing. I can not imagine they would release Buzz without having a plan for it (although I still wonder what happened with Wave).

Even today, two days after they rolled it out publicly, they have already made significant changes to Buzz – they have started to address the security/privacy implications of using it.

I am really hoping Google can turn Buzz around. It has a lot of potential. But really, a web-only solution is not going to be enough to make that happen.

Google seem to be taking over the world.

I know they have made a point of not being evil, but it seems that they are trying to corner every activity on the Internet, from web search, email to chat, to social communication to … whatever Wave and Buzz are about. I mean – they even have a free DNS service!

So right now, mere months after the raging excitement followed by bewilderment that was the release of Wave, we now have Google Buzz.

And the buzz (pardon the expression) on the internets seems to be … “what’s it for?”

Well, I ‘installed’ Google Buzz last night, and was playing with it a little today. My first impression is that they have taken several ideas and melded them into one. Here is approximately what Buzz does for you:

1. Allows you to follow people and for them to follow you.
2. When you post something, it starts a ‘conversation’ that can be continued by commenting on it.
3. Anything you say can be read by your followers.
4. Anything added to a conversation can be read by you.
5. Buzz updates to conversations you have participated in, appear in your Gmail inbox.

Allowing people to follow people and to be followed is nothing new. Add the ability to read what people you are following are saying, and this starts to sound remarkably familiar.

Yes, that’s right – at first glance Buzz sounds like a Twitter replacement.

However, it goes deeper than that – and if it sounds strange, it’s wider too.

Anyone who follows anyone in a conversation will ’see’ the conversation, and can contribute to it. So an interesting conversation will tend to spread among a wider audience as it gathers contributors.

The depth is that a conversation is not just a collection of comments by various people, but an actual conversation similar to how Gmail handles email threads.

If you use the Gmail website as your mail reader, Buzz sits within Gmail in a similar fashion to how Google Talk does, except that it appears as a label below the Inbox. In a similar fashion to how you receive Google Talk notifications in your inbox when you are not logged in, Buzz conversations also appear this way, and clicking on the ‘Buzz’ label removes them from the inbox.

(note: if you add a Gmail filter to automatically archive conversations whose subject contains “Buzz:” then the notifications do not appear in the inbox. Thanks to @lbutlr for this tip!)

There is of course no Twitter-esque 140-character limit to posts.

Conclusions

I have only been using Buzz for a day, and even in that day only on-and-off. But I think it shows promise. It is obviously levelled at Twitter, but given how popular Twitter is I don’t see it giving up the ghost just yet.

As a tool for conversations with groups of people, it shows a lot of promise. The functionality does seem genuinely useful, and if you weren’t a Twitter user I can see why you would think this was fantastic. However, to someone who uses Twitter to communicate with a multitude of people, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is just a Twitter+.

And are Google trying to take over the world? Only time will tell.

Background

So … I had the same basic layout for my website for the last eight years. It was getting a little boring.

I have been using computers since 1979, and writing my own software out of interest since 1980. My first job started in March 1987 with RCP (later RCP Consultants), and I stayed there until the end of February 2004.

At RCP we got a dial-up UUCP connection to the internet in 1993, and used it to do batch downloads of USENET and email several times a day. I wrote my first personal website in 1996, and it got its own domain name (this one) in 2001.

So you can say that I have a fair bit of experience with computers and with the internet.

And here we are in 2010. Frankly, it’s astonishing that my own website has hardly changed at all in eight years.

New Look

Really, I wanted a blog. Somewhere I could post my rants so they could be ignored by a much wider audience.

After trying to install one as a sub-page to the main website, and running into what can best be described as ‘technical issues’, I decided to replace the previous site completely … with a blog!

Feel free to comment on anything you see in here.