Songkhla South has moved home.
We are now using a Wordpress blog over at http://songkhlasouth.com with all new features like Podcasting and dynamic Flickr and del.icio.us links.
Please update your links and bookmarks!
See you there!
Boring Boring: A Directory of Dull Things
Kicking off today's April Fools Special is a superb parody of mega-famous blog Boing Boing
Lots of hillarious working links and close attention to detail...not a classic April Fool by any means but clever nonetheless.
Well, there's two celebrations this month.and I may as well mention them both now even though the second is tomorrow at 3:30 pm.
Firstly, today is my 29th birthday and Thailand was kind enough to make it a public holiday (actually it's a celebration of some gathering of buddhists dating back to the time of the buddha's life.)
The other birthday is Life in the Wor Zone's 1st birthday which started on the 24th Feb 2004 in exam week. Looking back on that first entry it seems a little confusing, though it seemed I was just looking for something to write and an excuse to juxtapose it with some random image I found.
I should have blogged this next announcement yesterday but was getting far too drunk and posting nonsense on Ajarn Forum, but anyway Ajarn.com got a full page front page feature in the Bangkok Post's Educational Supplement, The Learning Post. I also featured in a separate section on page four about Ajarn Forum
Who says you can't get fame by sitting on your fat arse in front of a computer...er..I guess in this day and age thats not uncommon after all.
The Register interviews an individual responsible no doubt for making my e-mailing irritating as fuck everyday...a genuine comment spammer.
I hate these bastards, they fill up my inbox with their fake comments and I have to religiously delte them day after day...it's not so bad here at the Wor Zone anymore as MT is pretty good at fighting it, but Wordpress I can't quite bust it yet.
One other reason why you might not have seen me pouring my heart out over here of late is because I have been doing that on a new group blog that I founded over on Ajarnforum's hosting.
Myself and about 10 other intrepid souls are telling things how they are about living and teaching in Thailand. Check it out blog it and pass it on....it definately has it's moments.
The Morning News - MetaFilter in the Ruins
An entertaining read speculating on the banal conversations that will take place on closed membership, uber-bloggers blog Metafilter the morning of the apocalypse.
Look, if you can’t take two seconds on preview to see if someone else has posted the same story… For Chrissakes, how long have we been doing this? And CoolDev, don’t just front page some article from Drudge about the end of the world when you don’t have anything provocative to add. Quoting Elmer Fudd doesn’t count. We all have windows. We know it’s the apocalypse.posted by cricketjones at 7:43 AM PST on April 14
We all have (W)indows™. We know it’s the apocalypse.
Hee hee!
posted by mad_macs at 7:46 AM PST on April 14
Ok in the absence of any motivation to write heres the best of a little Stumble Upon session.
Ugly Wedding Dress of the Day
Nice design...silly concept, works for me.
WinMX - The best way to share your media
Yup it's still going, and I've still never got hooked to this one. Maybe I'll give this one a go.
Note to self, they're ALL bloody good if you have broadband :(
Ingrid Wong's Desktop
An inspiring concept in home pages though the excitment level drifts of rapidly once you've got over the oo thats a cool idea bit.
A t-shirt from some geekware store. I actually found myself laughing at this...what am I becoming?
Why Dreams Are Forgotten After Waking
From Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams'
Megaliths in the Carnac Region of France
Some wierd French megaliths in a new age stylee.
Sh'lot
What's with me this week, I just cannot muster the energy to even blog something from B3ta this week. To add to my woes Firefox has just vanished all of my Bookmarks including my lovely RSS feed list. Ajarnforum is going well, though it's taking up way to much of my spare time so my pet project slike this are not really happening. Well, lets get some stuff blogged.
Just a quick mention for our new friend at Ajarnforum GrahamB's new travelblog. He's not actually left yet, but for now he's practising with some pics and commentary of Scouseland.
For someone who's been in Thailand coming upto 3 years, this almost seems exotic.
I've been itching to play around with the new look Blogger, which updated very soon after I defected my blog to Movable Type, so I made one for my students and one for wifey. They look very similar at present as I used the same minima template. The really clever bit is that I'm using the best bit of Photoblogging software ever, which is Picassa the lovely image browsing software in conjunction with a little IM widget called Hello! Using the two together with Blogger makes blogging pictures with free hosting at blogspot a very liberating feeling. From desktop to blog in seconds. Thoroughly recommended.
The two Photoblogs I started are
http://ajarnkanchana.blogspot.com
http://worchor.blogspot.com
MT-Blacklist - A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin
Three cheers for Mr Jay Allen who is doing his bit to combat comment spamming in Blogs with this splendid Movable Type plug in. Hope fully this should see the end to Mr Gigi and his Viagra URLS once and for all. It's very easy to install (assuming of course you know what CHMOD and upload in ASCii mode means, (and since this is Movable Type and anyone who's installed it has had to do this 10 billion times anyway). There are no horrible Perl scripts to alter, and configuration is web based.
Taking an item out of a drawer.I opened a drawer by pulling it towards me. I picked up the object I needed and removed it from the drawer. Having done so I pushed the drawer with my hand, thus closing it.
Today I are been mostly looking at the mundane but fascinating.
Foundphotos
is a photoblog of random humanity found in shared folders of P2P apps like Kazzaa etc. What is interesting about this is the wonderful selection of photos each showing a tiny vignette of their lives. I like the meme in any case, from the techno performers to the girls dressed up for the ball, to the naked marathon runners(!)
It's all good.
O'Reilly Network: My Blog, My Outboard Brain [May. 31, 2002]
A great two year old article by Cory Doctrow of Boing Boing, one of the bigger blogs around, and one of my favourites. I like articles on Blogging whatever the snobs say about meta-subjects.
Blogging begets blogging. I blog because I'm in the business of locating and connecting interesting things. Operating a popular blog gives people an incentive to approach me with interesting things of their own devising or discovery, for inclusion on Boing Boing.
Just in case anyone is wondering why most of my pics are not showing, it's because free piccy host Photo Bucket is restructuring at this moment. They have assured everyone that they'll be back to normal soon.
Maybe it's time I hosted all my own pics rather than just my personal ones (which you can still see.)
It's ok...panic over... Photobucket is back to it's excellent self. It's a lovely free image hosting site, and saves me endless amounts of time with it's tag/url creation boxes for each pic I upload. Props to headhoncho Alex.
Children as young as seven in one British school are using weblogs as part of their normal routine, and are doing better than non-webloggers as a result, their teacher says.Weblogs, easy-to-use personal journals published on the internet, get children more interested in school work they might otherwise have disliked, says junior school teacher John Mills.
Brilliant use of Blogging in the classroom. Not only are these kids learning tons about HTML, and copy and paste, but they are also learning the fun of blogging at an extraordinarily young age. Things like this are needed in Thailand. I wonder if an English blogging club would work in the Wor Zone. Certainly students love to see photos of themselves online and comment on them. Could the advent of the camera phones I see everywhere play a part?
ThoughtPusher: Under the almost yellow sun
Thoughts from Fucket.
Under the almost yellow sun I was not meant to go fishing today. Although I had planned on it, and was expecting to be picked up at 12 in front of his house, the sea chose to frighten us all away. Maybe tomorrow, we were all able to communicate in our various languages. The rain has been randomly interrupted today by what seems to be an almost yellow sun. These swell sips of hope were not enough to calm the terrible sea. We were not meant to go fishing today in the deep, unsympathetic water. I'm stuck on the island again with the traffic, heat and myself... I might just go eat lunch... again. Spicy... everything is spicy these days: -trysts with the sea -my relationship with my girlfriend -decorating our house -every meal I eat -the weather
Slippery's settling down then.....could use more Teletubbies though, this blog.
LDMA's Thailand Blog - Life in the Wor Zone
I suddenly remembered, that exactly a year this month I attempted my first foray into blogging. It lasted about a week. I used a free blogging service called Pitas. It was ok, but I got bored very quickly of it, as the interface didn't exactly inspire me to log in and type away. After that, my harddrive blew up and I had to re-format losing all my favourites and e-mail. Then today I suddenly remembered the blog, but couldn't remember the name of the site. A 5-minute look in Google Directories found it, and luckily enough I was able to retrieve the password and get into it. So, have a look at the original Wor Zone blog in the week in which my school had a Royal visit and wifey Kan left for her Fullbright Seminar in the USA.
Clouds are gathering and suddenly with 30 minutes to go we see lightning in the distance....oh dear we mutter. The directors looking none too happy. Miraculously it manages not to rain despite the entire sky looking black...it even manages a rainbow later. Meanwhile all sorts of police and military types are milling around. Suddenly a whole load of soldiers turn up with marching band, and start lining up and shouting at each other. Next thing I know theres a plane descending rapidly over our heads and disappearing around the nearby army base, and 15 minutes later 3 police cars come screaming down the drive followed by the princess' limo. She's here to open a statue, give out some awards and scholarships, and take photos. Not that we see any of this as we're sat near the back with a ridiculous curtain in the way, so we have to really stoop to even catch a glimpse. TV crews were there so I thought I'd catch it on TV later, but I just sat through 20 minutes of every other Royal's day but hers.
After reading LDMA's last entry I thought it would be appropriate to present to you this gem from a student of mine. She's seventeen years old, in matayom 6... It consists of 4 questions about the future, which follow up the topic question 'What will life be like on earth in 15 - 20 years?':
1) Where will you be?
I will live in Pattanee
2) What will the world be like? (admittedly, a very innocent, general question)
Happy
3) What will you look like?
We will be cover the 3 province southern
4) What will you be doing?
Terrorist
Do you find that funny, or creepy? A seventeen girl among a majority of Buddhists who aspires to be a terrorist. Or did she just misunderstand the assignment?
She also likes D2B, KFC, reading cartoon books and sing a song.
I was awakened this morning at approximately four o'clock by my girlfriend. She had taken the night bus from Phuket and arrived shortly after I had fallen asleep. We'd been apart for two weeks and so I wasn't given a chance to sleep... and suddenly the sun was up. Rooster's cacophony, farting tuk-tuk's and general early morning noise that echoes up the courtyard of my building and shotguns into my sleepy apartment. Now, sitting here at work counting down the hours with a sore back and bags under my eyes, I have the opportunity pose a question to anyone who reads this: What's the difference between a duck?
mra drows ruoy ot htgnertS
I was invited by Mr. LDMA to contribute to 'Life in the Wor Zone'. However, I will no longer be working at Wor after this month as I am relocating to Phuket.
Nevermind.
I will use this blog and the permissions granted to me to establish a base from which I will launch my great Phoenix of World Domination. Do not worry. My minions are persuasive... but gentle.
-Strength to your sword arm.
This puts my feeble rant 'o' blog (thanks for the term Parf) into perspective. This man is walking solo across the Arctic Ocean, and somehow manages to blog his daily exploits, mostly about ice. This coming via the almost as intrepid Ben Hammersley (who I swear was in my year at LGS), who just completed the rather maschistic sounding 'Marathon Des Sables' in some arid location in Africa or sumfink. The iceman wins in the intrepiness factor because he seems to be khun diaw (alone), as opposed to the long-headed one who at least had 600 other nutters to compare bunyons with.
I should take the piss...I consider a walk up Khao Tang Kuwan, 5 minutes walk away to be the height of adventure...
Movable Type is a name I've been hearing a lot since I started blogging. Seemingly inaccessible, until last week when I bought a domain and some hosting it still seemed like a nightmare when I downloaded it yesterday. Every step of the way has been a hastle from configuring the GODAWFUL mt.cfg file(..um why not stick the instructions elsewhere so people can see which bits to change a bit easier?), to Blogger seemingly unwilling to give up my old archives via FTP until I'd tried every possible combination of ftp, url , and path configuration. (This included the revelation that the error messge I received for over an hour was fixable by simply closing and opening the explorer window.)
Still I'm posting like a trooper now, and even though all my old posts look slightly wierd due to the titles being bizarrely snipped (I might do a few of them till the end of this page after which no-one reads blogs anyway), it feels like I'm in the equivalent of the Rolls Royce of blog editors.....lovely interface...and features...lordy the features...well worth it!
Greetz to Tim.....pleeeze pleeze, pleeze, no more SUMO!!!
"Next, understand that BlogSpot is lame. Everyone with a blog knows a nerd. Damn near every nerd has web-space that he or she will loan/rent/give you. I'm one of them. Manny is one of them. Granted, blogspot isn't horrible, but let's face it, all the COOL bloggers have their own domain names and such. You do want to be COOL, don't you? "
Yes ok I'm a Blogspot lamer. Am I a part of the AOL if Blogging?
Is the tide turning for everything Google to not be cool anymore?
Look I'll get round to it one day. I do in fact lust after those gorgeous Movable Type jobbies that Bloggers with their own dotcom own.
UPDATE: This one article is what probably drove me to Movable Type...easily influenced huh?