The Kingdom

I went to the movies yesterday folks, and saw “The Kingdom”. It wasn’t that great, but it was explained that I should get out of the house for a little while.

Mint’s Aunt was coming to visit. Essentially the woman is crazy and Mint wanted to keep things as simple as possible while she was here. In the end, however, the aunt and Mint’s sister wouldn’t leave until they got to meet the farang, so I met them after the movie when I plied them with sushi to ensure I would be remembered well.

Today’s the last day of school. Bek posed the excellent question as to whether there would be a certificate, a test, or cake. There was an assignment that was to be worked on over the weekend, and I’m pretty pleased with that. I wrote a story of mistaken identity, in which I see someone I think I know, and we chit-chat trying to work out how we know each other. It turns out to be a classmate of mine in the current class, but the story is set some time in the future. Clever huh?

bad pawn

Thais - and I guess a lot of people from Asian countries in general - have a very fluid concept of money. Mint’s sister wants to pawn a necklace of hers, and she can get about 8,000B for it. She offered the same deal to Mint. Mint didn’t have the money so she asked me. I didn’t really understand - I mean, it’s not like a real pawning arrangement, it’s like a loan with collateral, right? It’s not like me, as the pawn-er could sell the item without causing some kind of family tension. I decided to stay clear of it.

I should explain a little about yesterday’s post of the puke clock. It’s not like I wasted time on this - I actually had another project for which I had to learn about time manipulation. This was just the humourous face of that study. It took like 5 minutes. Seriously. That’s how I can be so busy, yet still have time to write the pukeclock script.

The Puke Clock

I hereby declare that Shaun Micallef’s new show, NEWStopia is fantastic. I have been watching it myself “on the wire” and decree it to be great.

When I was sick on the weekend, I was telling Godfrey about it. Those who know Godfrey well will know that he’s probably more knowledgeable in the field of paranoid pharmacology than a lot of doctors, and is usually a good source of info when you’re not feeling great as to what over-the-counter medicines pack the most bang for buck.

Anyway, in describing my symptoms, one of which had been vomiting, Godfrey made an off-hand remark that I had “better reset to puke clock”.

This is something our group of friends has known about for some time - essentially the “puke clock” keeps track of how long it has been since you last vomited. Usually it’s in the head of each person, but I got thinking that my brain real estate is too valuable to waste on such trivia, and PHP might be the best way to track it.

And if I learnt something PHP-related, which while once a hobby is becoming more and more work-related, it would be a useful exercise.

The time() function in PHP returns the current time, measured in the number of seconds since January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT, which is known as the Unix Epoch. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, when Unix time passed 1,000,000,000 seconds on the 09-Sep-01, there was a huge party in Copenhagen, Denmark to celebrate. Pretty fun stuff.

I recall that I puked pretty soon after typing last blog entry, which mentions that it was 3:20am at the time of writing, so I’m going to assume that my puke clock start date is 22-Oct-07, 03:30:00am. 1223609400 in Unix Time, according to http://www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm which is wrong. Presumably they have an error in their conversion forward, because other sites like http://soft.zoneo.net/Unixtime/index.php and http://www.epochconverter.com/ (and even http://www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm’s backward conversion) agree that it should be 1193023800.

I can find the current unix time pretty easily, using time(). Subtract the puke time from this, and you get the difference in seconds. At the time of writing I get a value of 266,000 seconds, approximately.

Then I did some fairly simple maths, like 1 year is 31556926 seconds, 1 month is 2629743 seconds, and so on. Whip in a meta-refresh tag for reloading the page every 10 seconds, and the net result can be enjoyed by all here:
http://www.chuckler.org/pukeclock.php.

Note that this code isn’t at all optimised, and is very longwinded. If you wanted to do this properly, you would probably write a function for the calculations, which are pretty well all the same, and save code.

HB to Rob W

Rob Wilson turned 1,000 yesterday, many happy returns dude.

I am in way more pain than I deserve. Yesterday I made the mistake of sharing a pizza for lunch with her Mintiness, and since last night have required several trips per hour to the bathroom. Around 3:20am this morning I gave up on the notion of sleep and decided to roll with it.

Why do I always do this to myself?

This weekend Mint and I bought gold from China town. This will be part of her sin sot for her mother.

Flight details updated again

ok, same details but a day earlier.

Fri 14/Dec. dep 0805 arr 2250.

This means I can make Rhys’ wedding after all!

flight updates

Well I’m no longer returning on the 29 November.

Those who have been keeping in touch with me by other means while I’ve been too busy to blog will know that I planned to have my surgery in early December. Unfortunately I cannot be scheduled then, so it’s postponed. Again. And now I’m flying back on the 15/Dec. Which means I get to experience the fun and terror of a visa run. More on that as it comes to hand.

And the Thai language course has been fun, if not very P-C. For example, we’ve learnt the words for “friend with benifits” and “ladyboy” and it’s only been 1 week.

Lots of work to do still, mustn’t dawdle.

Movie advert I didn’t understand

It’s been on at the movies for months at least.

The guy goes to his girlfriend and shows her two tickets and says (what sounds to me like):
“May Mangann” (not the same?)?

The girl then takes off running madly. At one stage, while crossing a bridge, she loses her will to keep running, but upon remembering the guy’s voice “May Mangann” she gets strength and powers on. At one stage, she races faster than a train, then she runs through people’s houses and yard, before finally crashing through the wall of her own place.

Then she picks up a phone and (I think) happily receives a text message.

Then the screen goes white, and three long-haired Thai trendy types say
“kap khun khrap something something something” while waiiing and I don’t know why.

I recently had Brek and Godez visit and we went to the movies and they thought it was hilarious, but didn’t understand it any better than I did. Then a Thai speaker came to my rescue:

Those adverts are always admonitions to turn off phones, and the idea is to do them in funny and entertaining ways. When the guy says: ไปดูหนังกัน - “Let’s go to the cinema together,” she remembers that the proper thing to do in such cases is to always turn off her phone first, and so she rushes off to do just that - and his words give her the strength to carry on so that she can go to the cinema with him. In the end, she doesn’t receive a text message, but actually shuts off her phone - and then the 3 university students say something like ขอบคุณที่ปิดมือถือ, giving the message of gratitude to all considered, for turning off their phones.

Day 31 in Bangers

Well dudes, I hereby calculate that this is day 31 of my time in Bangers. Today was a good day.

I decided to enrol in a Thai language course. It’s laughably cheap, and for my AU$200 (probably less now considering the sliding US dollar) I get 60 hours of teaching, spread over 20 days at 3 hours/day. There are 3 others in my class - a guy from Iceland, an American guy, and a middle-aged Korean lady.

I was this close || to giving it a miss today (and therefore this month) actually. I mean, with Bek and Brett visiting, and Godfrey visiting … and work … who will have time for these three hours per afternoon?

But I went. And I loved it. So far, I’m the most advanced student which is pretty cool too. Our teacher, Sunee, is gorgeous. The Icelandic guy can’t seem to produce long vowel sounds, and also appears to be tone-deaf. The American is doing pretty well, but being American, everything has an American twang to it. The Korean lady cannot pronounce “f” but is generally doing well and is super earnest in her efforts.

Today was mostly focussed on pronounciation, and learning their phoenetic system. No real vocabulary at this stage. Some interesting tidbits: whereas in Australia, we might say we “got everything correct”; in Thai, you say you “got no questions wrong”. You can make any adjective a negative by adding “mai” (not) to the end of it, so you don’t need to know the word for “incorrect” if you know the work for “correct” … it’s just “not correct”.

So tomorrow Godfrey gets in super early, and I hope to have breakfast together. From there, there’ll be some work, some lazing and maybe an early lunch before I go to school at 1pm. That afternoon I was thinking swimming followed by bars. Ah, sounds sweet.