After finishing my blog last night I decide to read a bit before going to sleep. This revealed 2 problems. The light switch can’t be reached without getting out of bed, which sort of defeats the “read till your eye close” method of dropping off and the bed was very hard.
I have had some back problems from several weeks before I left for NZ. These paradoxically occur when I am lying down and it’s fine when I’m moving about even engaged in vigorous activity such as sport. The hard bed didn’t help much but I did get a reasonably good night’s sleep. It’s just getting up at the end that’s painful. I woke briefly a few times but the final awaken was caused by a rather heavy rainstorm about 6:30. I have adopted the guideline that if it’s too dark to read the time on my watch, it’s too early to get up anyway, so I rolled over for another 45 minutes of kip.
I had showered and dressed and was heading for breakfast about 10 to 8 when I saw my driver coming towards me. It seems my attempt to add the half past to the 8 o’clock in Thai last night had been missed (or mis-pronounced). Breakfast was another buffet or that somewhat less luxurious than in Bangkok. I had ham, scrambled eggs bacon and toast, most of which was coolish.
We arrived at the office about 8:30, where I checked my email and so forth. The pictures show my office, the passageway outside of it with a view of the adjoining farm land and part of the nearby yard, a mixture of farm and oil field elements.
I then started on the first minor modification – allowing the user to define the directory where the data is located. This approach is used in several of my programs but not in this particular one and will be necessary so that different users here and in Bangkok can all access the same data. This seemed straightforward but some how something I did cause a weird error that stopped the program from running. In the end, I had to recopy the original main file and manually redo the changes to get rid of it. Just one of those strange things that happens occasionally.
I then started looking through some of the files I had been given and in particular the ones that record the tanker trips. This displayed the problems caused by the romanisation of Thai names, as one driver had 4 or 5 different English spellings. I was still finding some other typo errors in the file when one of the women came and said lunch was ready. It was nearly midday.
Sure enough, individual lunches had been sent from the canteen. The western version had a plastic bag of tomato/macaroni soup, braised steak and vegetables and apples in platic containers. The Thai version had soup and several stir fry type dishes and rambutan and longan for fruit. I don’t think I’ll starve here.
I caught up with Spencer as he was eating his lunch in his room and then we moved to my room with a whiteboard and projector. We had a good session and I had enough info to do most of the data design once we’d finished, deleting tables from the UK system that were not required, adding others and modifying some of the rest. A lot of this is due to naming conventions, which vary from company to company. In some ways this is more like the Indian system than the UK one.
I left the office around 5:30 and found my driver already waiting. We stopped at a 7-11 in the town on a street perpendicular to the one we use to get to work. There was a reasonable number of shops of various sorts there and a bit further on, so he said, a market. There may be somewhere to explore in a few days if I get some time off and can work out how to get there. He also told me that Wednesday is BBQ night and there was indeed a veritable smorgasbord of delicious BBQ food. I had crabs, prawns, pork spare ribs, chicken drumsticks, steak, mussels, snapper with a sauce that turned out to be quite spicy and some salad. Afterwards there was fresh fruit and caramel broule. (see note above re: starvation, danger of) I am attempting to learn the Thai words for the food I’m eating and this included sapparot, taeng moh and kha nun for pineapple, watermelon and jackfruit.
I then read or perhaps re-read, some of yesterday’s Bangkok post and then wandered around the hotel area. Its name by the way is Hotel Pyramid. Some of the buildings are made from pine logs (or at least have a veneer of them), looking quite rustic and one large building of unknown purpose has some wooden carvings of hunting guns and various animals (baboon pictured) on or around it.
The canteen itself is an outdoor pavilion with some interesting carving and a couple of wooden lounge/sofa sized chairs, which are themselves pieces of art. It is now 9 o’clock and having made the mistake of lying down reading for as while before writing this, ( and suffering when I got up again), it is time to do so again and get some sleep.
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