• 16:52 I washed myself with medicated soap this morning. Smelled like sulfur all day. More brimstone than rotten egg, thankfully. #

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Originally uploaded by mattspong

I got to work on Friday to find one of these waiting for me on voicemail. It wasn't very effective, because I had a long message, and I only heard the end of the recording. I thought it might have been one of our technology suppliers returning a support call, because the hissy phone line sounded like an overseas call.

Anyway, the other guys in the office told me what it had actually been, and we started talking. My cow-orker (who shall remain nameless) piped up and told us that he had actually heard of a similar scam involving email! Yes, it appears that there have been instances where people were sent email which claimed to be from a friendly party, with an attached photo or game, which was in fact malicious software! Of course we were all shocked at this disturbing news. Still, his CV claims he has about 10 years experience of IT support, so guess he must be right. Sigh.

I took a minidisk recorder to Bali and recorded as much music and ambient sound as I could. Unfortunately my stereo microphone plugs directly into the unit, and it picked up the sound of the motor in quiet moments. Still, I managed to capture the louder music perfectly. Click the links below to download and listen, average size of files is about 50M.

2008-03-04_Night_market.mp3	Walking around the night market. Scooters arriving and departing, indopop playing from a music stall, hungry kittens, fish being chopped on a block, knife sharpening machine, people talking.
2008-03-04_Kuta_Melasti.mp3	People bearing offerings, walking in procession along Kuta beach. Massive gamelan orchestra accompanying a priest chanting over the PA.
2008-03-05_Ubud_Melasti.mp3	Dozens of dump trucks full of people with offerings, most with onboard gamelan and flute orchestras, gunning up and leaving Ubud at the start of their journey to the sea for the Melasti ceremony.
2008-03-05_Ubud_temple.mp3	Recorded on the street between the main temple on Hanoman street and the banjar. The gamelan orchestra is playing in the banjar, the chanting priest and his bell are in the temple across the road. Slow and mysterious.
2008-03-06_Ogoh_Ogoh.mp3	Highlights from the Ogoh-ogoh ceremony. People arriving, the priest blessing the monsters, the start of the procession, and several ogoh-ogoh, carried by chanting men and accompanied by gamelan bands, go past. Good stereo effects, very exciting!
2008-03-07_Nyepi_rain.mp3	Tropical downpour on Nyepi day. You can hear some children playing in the background.

I was a clinical psychologist attached to the execution of a psychopath mass murderer. The prisoner was a composite of Hannibal Lector and Genesis P Orridge. He was basically Genesis, only he had pursued a life of crime and killed hundreds of people. Nether the less, I still respected him for his writings and musical output.

He and I, and several guards and doctors and other officials, were enclosed in a special execution suite, like a house without windows and with a time lock on the door. The method of execution was poison pill. At the set time, a guard would read the charges and sentence, and he would hand a poison pill to the prisoner to swallow. Later, the time lock would open and we could leave.

He was nervous but not remorseful. As his psychologist I was trying to help him come to terms with his fate. I talked to him constantly, trying to explain that there was no other choice, he had to take the pill, there was no escape. He listened but didn't seem to agree, he had a smug air that revealed he had a plan.

The fatal hour arrived. We gathered in a small chamber. The prisoner sat in a chair, we surrounded him. The head guard read the sentence, and the doctor handed him a small clear capsule and explained that it contained a painless poison that would kill him within 15 minutes of being swallowed.

He seemed to be listening impatiently, and before the doctor finished explaining the effects of the pill he interrupted him and said "Okay, okay, I understand." He took the pill in his hand, then, turning to the head guard, he handed him the pill and said in a strange flat tone "Well, I guess you better take the pill now." To my horror the guard swallowed the pill, and nobody else seemed to notice. They reacted as though the prisoner had swallowed it. I realised he had hypnotized everyone else and they were under his control.

Starting to wind down now. Having a pool, and being in the less than fascinating confines of Seminyak, calmed us down. I was starting to get a bit sun burnt, although it was different to the sunburn of my youth, the sun is less harsh than the Australian glare, perhaps the humidity, the water vapour tunes the frequencies so they do less damage.

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We had to deliver the Katana by 8AM to the rental place in Kuta. The owners assistant rolled up precisely at 8 and inspected the body for dings. No new ones, so we were in the clear. They got a half full tank of petrol too. When we rented it there was barely a cup, just enough to make it to the station for a fillup. All our driving hardly burnt a single tank, we half filled it when it was almost empty and that's what we returned to them. Distances in Bali, in Asia in fact, seem much further than they really are. There are no good highways and bypasses and the difficulties of the journey are what we use to estimate it's length.

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Michelle's mum Pam had to rush to hospital this morning. She's had a long-running pain in her abdomen, and it got much worse this morning. It appears to be a urinary tract infection. She'll be on some serious antibiotics.

It's the last full day we have the car, so we feel we need to use it. Neither of us has been down into Badung, the large pendulent lump which hangs below the man mass of Bali by a thin isthmus or bombora or whatever, the flat neck of land where Kuta and the airport are situated. We decided to head for Uluwatu, to see the famous temple on top of the cliffs.

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It was our last day in Ubud.

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We planned on driving today, which is mostly what we did.

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Nyepi day was the climax of our holiday. Everything after that was a comedown.

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Recently, after we returned from Bali, I noticed that some of my favourite websites were offline. Greylodge was innaccessible, as was Alterati, a sister site. They provide a lot of torrents of interesting documentaries and rare and fascinating stuff. Note that not only couldn't I browse them, but pings vanished and were never seen again.

But then, today I idly tried their addresses using a web proxy, and lo and behold, they were still online! This obviously meant that my internet provider, Pacific.net, was filtering them.

I don't remember them every telling me they were planning to do this, and I certainly don't agree with this shit, especially since they aren't filtering The Pirate Bay or the other major torrent sites. It suggests their problem is more with the contents of Greylodge's material rather than the bandwidth costs. That doesn't make it alright, I pay for the bandwidth in the first place so I have a moral right to use it for whatever I chose.

So, anyway, in this image you an see on the left Safari displaying the problem, and on the right Firefox displaying the solution. I downloaded and installed Tor, The Onion Router. It's meant to provide anonymity for whistle-blowers to talk to journalists, or for people in China to browse sites blocked by the Great Firewall, and it works pretty good for my purposes too. Once you install and run Tor, you add Torbutton to your Firefox extensions, and then Firefox farms off all requests to a network of Tor relays, who pass it along for several random hops before one of them retrieves the page for you, passes it back up the chain, and it slips past your net filter and into your browser.

Of course it is slower than straight forward browsing, but until I can change to a more honest and decent internet provider (which I will do ASAP), it works for the blocked sites. And, might I just add, Tor was coded by some of the dreamiest looking hackers I've ever laid eyes upon. I mean, just look at these guys!

Nyepi day, the day of silence. No traffic, no bikes or cars, no fires. All I could hear was roosters, rice birds, distant children. We emerged to find a thermos of hot water and some fruit left on the balcony. Westerners are allowed to break the fast but not allowed out on the roads. Nyuman and Madam Ketut's children played cards quietly in the courtyard.



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Ogoh-ogoh day. I don't know if that is what this day is actually called, but today is the ogoh-ogoh ceremony and that is what we called it.

We left early, driving north-east in search of ogoh. Once we left Ubud the morning scenery was captivating. Padi fields swept right to the road like waterlogged lawns, groves of oil palms and coconuts, patches of red dotted chili bushes and yellow spotted beds of marigolds.

But we were hunting monsters. Ogoh-ogoh are large figures made from paper mache or foam over frames made from bamboo, wood, chicken wire and wicker. They represent demonic figures from the underworld, often taking forms recognisable from pop culture, or caricatures of westerners or politicians. On this day they hold a ceremony in the evening where they lash them to large bamboo frames, carry them around the villages, shake them, rush them here and there and generally animate them, and this is meant to convey the impression that a larger, fiercer and more powerful army of demons and spirits has invaded Bali and is muscling in on the territory of the local djinns and efrites. These, scared by the colourful new monsters, fly away offshore and regroup. When they return the next day, on Nyepi day itself, they find that Bali is now totally deserted. No smoke from fires, no people walking the streets, and the only conclusion left is that the army of super demons has eaten every soul and there is now no reason for a self respecting regular demon to bother with the place. So they obligingly fly away into the sunset, to bother some other island with less enlightened population, and in this way the Balinese effectively clear out the demons for another year.

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Luckily the drain work in the gang outside the hotel hadn't yet encompassed the entrance, so after collecting our car we were able to load the luggage and leave. It was good to get out of Kuta, even if it meant driving in Bali.

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Michelle was intrigued by the night market I told her about, so we requested a wake-up call and visited it together. This time I recorded some ambient sounds on minidisk. I think I should ditch that thing. I had a nice small stereo mike, but it plugs directly into the unit and picks u the sound of the motor spinning the disk. Solid state recorders are cheap enough, and worth it for some serious environmental recordings. There were kittens running between the stalls, wild ones eating the rice out of offerings. Cats n Bali tend to have a stumpy tail, or a club tail, or no tail at all, like Manx. I used to think they had all had accidents with the ever present scooters, but these kittens also had stumpy tails, so it must be genetic.

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Because of the jet-lag I woke up extremely early, but I took it as an opportunity and left the hotel around 5 to see what was happening before the sun rose. It was quite cool, although distant lightning from some storms offshore said it would get much hotter and more humid later.

I followed the smell of smoke to the nearby corner of jalan Melasti and Legian. There was a green corrugated iron fence, which has always been there and I always assumed fenced a vacant lot, but it turned out to be a night market. Gaps were opened in the fence, the smoke was from cooking fires, and an endless flow of locals on motor scooters poured through.

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We get cheap airline fares through Michelle's work. Because she works for an airline (Fedex) she gets discounts. The tickets aren't standby, they are firm bookings, but we are first in line to get bumped if there is an overbooking. They cost about 25% of normal, at best.

We flew out Garuda on 2nd March. Garuda has a reputation for rough flights because the pilots tend to be cowboys who like vertical takeoffs and sometimes they ignore tower instructions. Our flight was pretty good. I think I saw the Crookwell windmills as we went over, and rotary irrigated fields of potatoes.

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Michelle and I have been spending the last 5 days at Dyna Villas, a nice luxurious resort place in Seminyak, and a huge contrast to the basic hotel we stayed in Ubud. We have a walled compound, our own pool, and we've been spending a lot of time in it. Nude, of course, what use is a private pool if you don't skinny dip? I can't upload photos because the internet here seems to have a taste filter...

Lots of stories when I get back to civilisation, including Balinese heavy metal, rice paddies, naked women, lots of sweat, ghost stories (we saw one!) and too much shopping.