A rose by any other name

Friday 20th

This morning I again had scramble eggs toast and bacon for breakfast. However unlike yesterday they were hot. This was achieved by a little known device called a microwave oven. I guess if I stay long enough I’ll learn all the tricks. For example the big screen flat TV in the canteen is a company one and has dozens of cable channels include a lot in English. However, I found too many channels as bad as none when trying to decide what to watch so gave up and went to my room.

The building with the carvings is the private home of the owner of the hotel. This morning I could get a better picture. However some of my first shots turned our “fuzzy” because of the condensation on the lens. The same thing happens to my glasses every time I leave the room, which is air-conditioned (if I remember to turn it on).

I took some photos on the way to the office. The town itself is fairly boring but there is a temple just as we turn to the road to the office. The drive is excitement itself with vistas of rice paddies and potato fields. kaao and man farang. The latter I think translates as “western thing”. There are also quite a number of these minitractors on the road. They use them to pull the cart as a means of transport and once they get to their fields, unhook the trailer and use it to plow or whatever farmers do with tractors.

Today was all about names – field names, well names, site names, truck, trailer and driver names. I wrote most of the edit screens and reports for those tables and started getting some of their actual data in. I used a monthly summary of tanker movements as my source and after sorting filtering and collating got a list of trucks and trailers that seems ok and a list of drivers that has the same driver multiple times with different spellings. I have the “definitive” list from the service contractors but it looks like a manual job to match up the multiple variations with the “correct” version. And they say programming is dull!

I am having most of tomorrow off and going to Prechabuan, which is a small city about 100km from here in the mountains. I have a driver and car for the day but not till 10am, so I’m planning a few hours in the office beforehand.

Jim arrived back and Spencer will leave Sunday afternoon so they have their handover tomorrow. Sunday morning I’ll meet with them both to discuss the program.

I left my phone charger at home so I’m hoping to find a replacement here and I wouldn’t mind getting a cheap bedside light. I also found a few days ago that my bracelet had broken. Can’t quite see how that happened as I wore it one day, took it off and the next morning a link had broken, Anyway I bought it in Bangkok the trip before last so I hope to get it fixed before I leave.