Where is David?

I’m always curious about who (if anyone) reads this content. I hardly receive any email at my address for this site (my first name @ this websites’ domain) so sometimes I have to check the server statistics to make sure I’m not just talking to myself here. One interesting feature is I can see how people arrive at this page. Most people arrive directly, which means they type the address whereisdavid.com into their browser or they click a bookmark or something. However, about 5% apparently arrive via some sort of search engine, and due to the wonders of modern nerdiness, I can actually find out what these people search for when coming to my site. Here’s the list of the top 10 phrases that bring people to this site:

US singer Ho recovering after stem cell treatment

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Hawaiian crooner Don Ho is recovering in a Thai hospital after undergoing an experimental stem-cell treatment yet to be approved in the United States.

Ho, the 75-year-old singer of standards such as “Tiny Bubbles” and “I’ll Remember You,” suffered from an ailing heart that made it difficult for him to do normal things such as climbing stairs, his doctor, Kitipan Visudharom, said on Friday.

“He told me sometimes it was hard for him to finish a song,” said Kitipan, chief cardio-thoracic surgeon at the Bangkok Heart Hospital, who injected stem cells into Ho’s heart on Tuesday.

“It will take time. At least a couple of months before we see a good result,” he said. “Usually we send them home in four days. But in his case we may have to wait just to be safe.”

The use of stem cells — master cells in the body which can develop into any cell type — can pose an ethical dilemma because those derived from very early human embryos are considered the most promising for treating human diseases.

South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk, whose team made global headlines by developing tailored embryonic stem cells and producing the world’s first cloned dog, sparked a storm of controversy after admitting two junior women researchers had donated their eggs for his work.

But stem cells harvested from a patient’s own blood may not only sidestep thorny ethical issues but could also prove safer than cells from embryos, said Robert Clark, chairman of Theravitae, which developed the technology used in Ho’s surgery.

The harvested stem cells are allowed to multiply before being injected into a patient’s heart or arteries to regenerate diseased tissue, considered the first such procedure of its kind.

“We tried very, very hard to make a product which was first morally and ethically correct. To do that, we only work with a person’s own blood,” said Clark, in Bangkok for the procedure.

“The reality is your body has everything it needs to build and repair your body,” he said. Embryonic tissue “will never be safe. Because it’s not from you.”

The treatment, which costs around $30,000, has been performed on 70 people since a clinical trial in August 2004, mostly in Thailand, Clark estimates.

More than 30 percent of the patients have come from the United States and “virtually all” had shown signs of improvement, he said.

Clark said the procedure was likely to become available in the United States in 5 to 10 years, but that he expected a steady growth in the number of heart patients seeking the treatment in Thailand.

“By June of next year, 100 people a month could be coming to Thailand for this procedure,” he said.

Ho, for his part, was in good spirits and was scheduled to leave on Sunday, said Haumea Hebenstreit, his assistant.

“He’s feeling wonderful. From the minute we arrived he’s had a positive mental attitude,” she said. “Before they finished stitching him up, he was joking with everybody, wanting to kiss the doctors, the nurses.”

Had a pretty interesting day today. Woke up and walked from my house to the U.S. embassy, a 25 minute walk, just to see what was going on on the streets of Bangkok. I stepped out my door and everything was pretty much the same as usual, but less people out on the streets. Those that were out on the streets, however, didn’t give much indication that anything unusual was going on. Since the last coup was about 15 years ago, I guess everyone older than about 20 possibly remembers one or more of these from the past, and they didn’t seem too concerned to say the least. Schools and government offices were closed, as were most offices, but restaurants and many stores were still open. Public transportation was running as normal as well.

The (now former) Prime Minister Thaksin had been having political problems since an election last April. When talking to people about this, most young people seemed to indicate that they didn’t care for Thaksin so much, but that didn’t necessarily mean they supported the opposition either. Basically, Thailand is like many other countries in this world, run by an elite group of people. It is difficult to see now whether this coup is truly about returning power to the people or is merely another squabble among said elite.

The said part is, this is (in my opinion) almost definitely going to affect Thailand economically. For starters, military coups have a tendency to scare away tourists. No matter how much you assure someone that it’s a peaceful transition and whatnot, the fact of the matter is that Thailand is now under martial law, has no constitution, and no legislatures whatsoever. It’s a military dictatorship…..and that worries most people. The second thing is that Thailand hasn’t had a serious legislature since elections in April, which were thrown out. Everyone in office (as of 2 days ago) was merely a caretaker minister, lacking any permanent power. If you’re a large international corporation looking to start building a factory within the next year in Southeast Asia, where will you build it? Two years ago, I’d say Thailand would be at the top of the list, but now I’d say it’d probably be more toward the middle. Big international companies like to have friendly relations with the countries they invest in, but if you don’t have a permanent government, this shakes their confidence in the fact that, if the temporary government doesn’t last, maybe the new guys won’t like them as much, thus putting their investment at risk.

As for the TV situation, CNN, BBC, MSNBC, Bloomberg, etc, are all back on the air now. Oops, I forgot NHK, the Japanese channel, yup, that’s back on too. Good thing the military blocked that, or else all of Thailand might have gotten in a tizzy with all that crazy Japanese propaganda going on….you know, like Ichiro got another base hit, and North Korea was reportedly doing something belligerent again. I was actually watching CNN for a minute, and when they broadcast something about the Thai coup, it cut away to a ‘We’ll be back shortly’ kind of message, as if someone flipped a switch to kill the signal. Coverage returned halfway through the segment, I assume because the censor realized CNN wasn’t saying anything bad about the coup, just relaying the facts.

Basically, this whole coup business kinda bores me now, hopefully I’ll have some time tomorrow to write about my recent Shanghai trip I took. I forgot my camera but hopefully will get some photos from my friends to share on this site.

Ok, I’ve just woken up today, but can’t really give too many developments yet. CNN and BBC are still blocked, but some channels of Thai TV have resumed programming. Below is a video of the TV message that was broadcast repeatedly every 5 minutes yesterday. Unfortunately, it’s only in Thai.

So it looks like this is the real deal folks. As of a couple of minutes ago as I write this post, CNN and BBC have now been blocked in Thailand, which were the only TV stations reporting on the coup here. I still have access to the CNN website as of now, but not sure for how long that will go on.
Thai TV channels are all controlled by the military now, and are currently playing a bunch of songs praising the monarchy as well as a message read by an announcer (in Thai) that I will try to record and put on this website.

ok everyone, stay calm….at least for now. I’m sure everyone’s been watching CNN and has been seeing that there’s some crazy coup attempt going on in Thailand. Well, it looks like that’s true. I’m pretty much holed up in my house right now in the middle of Bangkok, so the only information I have other than CNN is my friends messaging me every 5 minutes

For those of you who want a quick tour of Bangkok without leaving your computer, I picked 6 photos from Google Maps to show you just exactly where David is at the moment.

Bangkok by Air

Sep 6, 2006 - 6 Photos

new video I just finished editing for a group called Master Chefs: