Log of Changes, and Blog

I much prefer structured websites over social media such as Facebook timelines. I try to fit thoughts into their appropriate pages in an overall structure.

Over the many years, I have considered running a blog similar to many other people, but when I think about new things to add, usually I just come out updating existing pages instead, or adding a new website page, and that will continue to be my preference for the most part.

This "log"/"blog" page is basically a timeline of updates of the website. If an update is substantial, rather than a relative tweak, then I note it here. If minor, then I don't note it here.

Facebook timelines are useful for many people who depend on the Facebook algorithms to show new entries on the timelines of other people or organizations. I haven't been using Facebook much, either for my personal page or for my topical pages (such as space settlement, human existential threats, and some longtime business), so if you want to see updates to this website, then you'll need to check here instead.

Blogs generally don't have the benefit of algorithms promoting postings, or things like the consolidated "following" of multiple entities on Facebook.

When I updated the log below, I found some old blog postings, some of which predate Facebook's rapid increase in popularity with the advent of mobile devices, so I went ahead and included many of those old postings way down the page and made them public.

Log of Major Updates

In 2026, one of my New Orbit resolutions is to log updates of pages, so when people return, they can quickly and easily see what's new. This log is of only major updates, not minor tweaks.

2026-01-19: Extensive updates of the page now titled Our instincts, yourself, society. The beginning of the page, over many paragraphs and now with a bullet list, was created anew.

2020-08-20 : I finally made the site mobile friendly.

2020-08-19 : I added the section Our instincts, yourself, society

2020 : COVID wiped out a lot of our business, since our real estate business was geared mainly to relocating expats, and the incoming travel ban put an end to that, plus many multinational companies put a hold on their plans. Therefore, I had to spend a lot of time trying to find alternative income for myself and remaining staff.

Old Blog

2012 February

It is extremely frustrating how little time I have to spend on my humanistic pursuits -- space settlement and the human extinction issues. Nobody pays me anything for this, and practically no donations come in on my websites. I depend on my private business to support everything, all on my own individual shoulders.

Unfortunately, my business had a major setback in 2011. I depend mostly on my real estate business, helping expats coming to Bangkok, Thailand to find a home to rent (house, condo, apartment), most of them working expats. Bangkok is at the mouth of a huge river, at nearly sea level, a flat sedimentary flood plane which has been above sea level for only a very few thousands of years.

In late 2011, there was the greatest flood on record since the other great flood in 1942, with massive economic damage. Many entire industrial estates were flooded with massive damages. My neighborhood was flooded for more more than a month, under up to 1 meter of water, and we were one of the later ones hit and not nearly as bad as others.

The international news on this was, of course, sensational, and not in detail.

In any case, we had a dramatic drop-off in arriving customers over a 3 month period, while our office overhead expenses remained the same.

2011 New Year

New Year is always a special time to review events and progress over the past year, the resolutions & goals of the previous New Year, and goals for the next year.

I never go away on holiday for New Year since hotels are largely booked, choices reduced, and good choices more expensive, plus plane fares more expensive, more crowds, and there are drunks out driving the highways. Sometimes I take my break a week or two early since foreigners often wind down for the Christmas - New Year break, but this year it may be a post New Year break.

I enjoyed just relaxing in and around home with my wife. We plan to go to a nature retreat this month, perhaps in the mountains of Chiang Mai, visit some good friends, and I also want to visit a permaculture project there, plus of course write and work on some personal projects. It's good to get away from interruptions and distractions, though it's always a concern to leave our business and customers all in the hands of staff, and we never let go entirely, though my wife is an excellent manager for me.

The last few years with my wife have been the happiest in my life going back quite awhile, and the future looks very interesting.

2011 January 5 - sports, and team / fan loyalty vs. selfish money

Sports ... it gives us another prism to look at human nature. I see it as the tribal warfare instinct in humans. And also the relative status instinct. It's insane at times. It's interesting to analyze my own instincts, too, about my home team. I've lost interest in sports over the years, but occasionally I'll pay attention. It's not nearly the same as my fervor in my young years, but it reminds me of those times, and I find it interesting to try to experience what others experience to varying degrees.

My in-the-city weekday/workday apartment has only 3 foreign channels -- CNN, NatGeo, and a sports channel which shows mainly soccer, cricket, rugby, and everything else besides American football -- but surprise, one morning they were playing the game of my alma mater, the #8 Arkansas Razorbacks, playing the #6 Ohio State Buckeyes in a BCS finale. 12 hour time zone difference.

This time, the end of the American college football season, is also the time when many top college football players make a decision on whether to go pro rather than return for their last year on their university team. I find it questionable when a teammate sells out for cash, choosing money over typically about a million loyal home state fans and alumni, and over teammate loyalty, too. Incredible. They're unlikely to have as much playing time or stardom on the field in the pros as they are in college football. It's all about the money.

If there are special circumstances, maybe there could be exceptions, such as if they come from a very poor and needy family and/or intend to donate a huge chunk of their pro salary to youth development in their community, or something like that.

However, most of them appear to do it for one reason: just money for themselves. Never mind anybody else. Good bye loyal home fans and teammates, just let them down and head for another place where they know nobody but there is a stack of cash waiting. Supremely selfish.

The encouraging thing is that most top players stick to their teammates and their loyal fans, rather than go for the money in the pros, including a lot of top student athletes who come from poor families. Those are good role models and leaders. It's good to see them among the next generation.

January 16, 2011: Added some YouTube videos to the end of my page from the period I worked for the American defense establishment at ages 25-27 in 1985-87, and resigned "defense" work altogether. The videos are of President Eisenhower warning prophetically about the "military industrial complex" (interesting again in light of the Iraq war) in his final speech as President, and an excerpt of Kennedy's speech a few days later at his inauguration as the new President when he asks "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" and more "whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world ... the same high standards ... with a good conscience, our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds ..."

January 1, 2011: Posted a page on Religions, Artificial General Intelligence, and God

August 22, 2010: Rewrote the beginning of my history of Age 47 to date since it was created and last updated when I was 47. :-) In 2010, I turned age 51. Looking at the dates since my previous revisions, holy moly, I wrote the last one just two weeks before some major changes in my life started, a whole new chapter. I also got married in 2009 and traveled with my wife, updating the Other Countries traveled page.

August 28, 2010: Quick trip to Saigon, Vietnam, with my wife. See the Travel section.

February-May 2008: Wrote some new travel pages while on buses, but processing photos is relatively difficult on a laptop so mainly did the text.

January 21, 2008

More than doubled the content on the Issues page. And considerable editing of other pages.

Added the health food page.

January 1, 2008

Uploaded the section on my business outlook entitled "Business, Initiative".

I am still working to get this website out of frames and into a floating menu. I plan to convert it to my new TreeCMS content management system, out of the old manual HTML coded website.

December 2008

Had an interesting meeting with a guy visiting Thailand who emailed me and wanted to meet. We met at the Gloria Jean's Coffees place on the ground floor under my central Bangkok office. I was very late but he was happy on the couch with their free WiFi by the big windows... Very nice guy, who said he had read this personal website of mine and some of my other sites, and said he wished for my success and shared some of his business secrets with me.

November-December: Minor edits and adjustments, menu development.

A day in 2008

Had a private investigation case for a lady in Australia who wondered why her husband went to Bangkok often "for business" -- over the weekend (only Saturday-Sunday) -- and didn't give her his hotel location. She's pregnant so I was dreading the possibility of breaking bad news to her. In these infidelity cases, I feel like I have the job of the military men who go to knock on the door of parents whose son was a casualty in action. Never a casual job despite its repetition.

Agents followed him from the airport (one lady agent this day being too pretty to do surveillance, so I was concerned she'd be noticed and remembered, hence I took her place later), and he went to a top notch hotel, so I decided to join this one for a change in scenery from home, by sitting in the lobby to watch and do internet and write. So I essentially get paid per hour to sit there and write freely, just glance at passers-by, notify surveillance if he's on his way out, and take any photos/videos if he's with a lady.

Fortunately, to our surprise, it was really just business, as he sat with two colleagues in the lobby near me discussing business, and they went out for a dinner and returned without even entertainment after dinner ("this is Bangkok"), and didn't go out. We left at 2am. What a relief this must be to his wife.

The cost of these places is astonishing. I would never pay nearly $200 per night for a hotel room out of my own pocked.

I could do so much with offshore labor on humanistic causes for that kind of money ...

Finding free time to write is often a challenge, and at times I've wished I was a security guard on the night shift, seeing how those guys have such free time (which they squander watching commercial TV, not the CCTV). I could live cheap and get paid to research and write whatever I wanted. My own P.I. company and surveillance is the next best thing, and it gives me changes in venue, as well as forcing me to see diverse parts of life.

The personal stories I get from customers are like living vicariously, and there is a major counseling part to the job. However, like my psychologist father, I get the same themes and stories over and over ... and wish I could find a good replacement for myself on counseling days like those. Oh, the emotional dramas... As I tell people, my father is a Ph.D. psychologist, so I am a bona fide laboratory mammal. (Actually, an ape primate mammal.)

Surveillance and P.I. work is not easy, and customer satisfaction is always a challenge. So much is out of our control.

Another change of scenery

Have a P.I. case in Petchabun province that I would really love to help out on because there are so many beautiful places up there in and around the mountains.

(It's just visiting an address to find out about a Thai wife who has either neglected or broken off communications with her worried British husband, shortly after returning home, and there are children here, too. We can't do the case immediately because of weekend surveillance booking, and normally send two people upcountry for safety reasons, not a Thai lady alone. It has been an exceptionally busy week at P.I., a very unstable business.)

Petchabun province is mountainous and a popular retreat for Thai tourists, but not one of the most popular places for foreigners. Far from major airports, not much tourist oriented transport infrastructure, and no concentrated hotels/restaurants/bars places. There are also a lot of Dvaravati ruins spread around, up to about 1500 years old, but they are in an advanced state of decay here in the tropics. Nonetheless, it's nice to just go visit those places and sit there awhile and meditate. There's a small outdoor Vietnam War era museum, as Thailand fought a communist insurgency. The damage to an armored personnel carrier there is awesome from a materials science and explosives analytical viewpoint.

Unfortunately, I have a major American customer who just arrived here to buy a luxury condominium with a signed contract to complete it by Wednesday, and have inspection and legal matters to handle Friday-Wednesday. So I must send an agent if the client is agreeable.

I love changes in scenery and new challenges. Some of those challenges are steep and stressful, but I like solving problems and seeing new and different things.

Feb 24, 2008, Sunday: Aging and Retirement

Visions of old age ... sat near an old lady at Starbucks in Future Park (outer suburban Bangkok) and had a small chat. I like talking with old people, who tend to have wisdom plus they have free time and in retirement tend to not be too preoccupied with business or family or mating. This old lady had very charming English, and spoke to me in old accustomed ways, like a proud daughter of a foregone generation who knew the knowledge of other lands. She was from Calcutta, a lifelong teacher. However...

... periodically this lady kept repeating herself, revealing she's in early Alzheimers with serious memory problems. Scary that someday we could be this way. She told me she was bored with retirement, and I've seen retired people go to pot mentally, but this was different. She "came to Bangkok for a change in scenery", something I can relate to as I find changes in scenery refreshing, which is why I like to travel. She was physically very fit walking but looks very old, balding, prune face, aging spots... Someday, we may all be like that. Don't wait to retire to do your best works in life. And I wonder how much she will remember of this trip, much less be able to share with the world. If you lose your mind, what have you got left in life?

Don't wait until you're old to do your best works in life.

P.S. When she left, she forgot her bags, but her companion soon came back for them. (As usual in suburban Bangkok, nobody else touched them.)

February 2008

After getting back from my vacation up north, I've been catching up on business, and trying to set up standard operating procedures (SOP) for others to take over more of my tasks, yet for our customer services to be reasonably complete and exceptionally high quality. This is a constant challenge of business, and is why mine has grown so slowly. I could do a lot better about training and wish I had someone in my company or a partner good at this.

I feel like screaming HELP !!!!!!!

Trip to Northern Thailand and Myanmar (Burma)

This is covered in my Travel blogs, and my style of travelling

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