peteg's blog

Website launch.

/AYAD/Project | Link

We're famous, we've got the top hit on Google Việt Nam for "DRD", and on the front page for Google.com. The launch went fairly well, with demonstrations of the "zoom" layout and the JAWS screen reader, and good attendence by the press. There were some good questions and I was exhausted by the end of it.

DRD Website Mới live.

/AYAD/Project | Link

Partly by accident, partly by design, the new DRD website is now live. It has some remaining rough edges which I'll be ironing out this week and next. We'll have a launch press conference this Sunday, June 29. Any and all feedback is very welcome.

Howard Marks: Mr Nice

/noise/books | Link

Read all-too-quickly on the road from Hanoi to Hoi An. What starts as a moderately entertaining drugs, sex and rock-and-roll story set in Oxford and London degenerates a bit into a bitter diatribe against the DEA. The humour tends to be wry, and the secondary characters suffer from a lack of detail. The portrayal of prison life is quite good, but one has to wonder just what his ethics are, given how many greasy people he would've had to deal with.

Andrew X. Pham: Catfish and Mandala

/noise/books | Link

Read very rapidly on the road from Hồ Chí Minh City to Hà Nội. Anyone interested in post-đổi mới-Việt Nam should read this book. While the prose is not uniformly excellent, by-and-large it is, and the stories are masterfully woven even when some go unconcluded. It is the most insightful book I've yet read about this country, and the lives of those who stayed and those who left.

The Painted Veil

/noise/movies | Link