I get Leied

Saturday 11th

Today was the day I was supposed to go home but here I am again, working in the office at Wichian Buri, even though it is Easter. Can't really complain, I get paid well for it.

There were a number of problems to sort through, some of them trivial and others a bit more complicated but being on the spot with real data makes it easier to duplicate the errors. Once that is done it is not too difficult to fix. One tricky one was the protect/unprotect of excel spreadsheets. I hadn't got the parameters correct and it was using a logical value of true as a password when re-protecting it. This meant they could not unprotect it because they didn't know the password. A quick google bought up some sites that allowed me to unprotect the existing sheets and also returned the password needed. Another site gave me the correct parameters so this won't happen in the future.

It is Songkraan here and one of the girls in the office gave me a floral necklace. Another one squirted me (gently) with water. The sprinkling of water is a tradition for this time but in some places this has degenerated into an excuse for water pistol fights and wholesale drenching of people with buckets of water, garden hoses and so forth. Fun if you are in the right mood but annoying otherwise.

Last time I was here, I plugged the network cable into my laptop and immediately had access to email, the net and Skype. This time it was much more complicated. Eventually the IT girl called me and I got it all sorted. Apparently Thailand has just introduce some sort of internet censorship program, literally the day before I arrived. This requires companies to track sites visited or some such and so everyone requires a login to access the net and so forth. Australia is proposing something similar but let's hope it never gets passed.

It was after 6 before I left and I was still working on some plotting issues. It was raining fairly heavily by then and I was worried that there might be power cuts again. We'd already had a brief outage earlier in the day. Fortunately it didn't happen but there were a couple of times when the satellite signal was lost for the TV. I watched a bit of the masters and then had a relatively early night. Photos are of the room.