Well, you probably notice that I don’t update this blog much, hell the only reason I am now is

a) because I just renewed the domain for 2 years despitethe fact that IU’m leaving Songkhla in 2 weeks

b) because I feel terribly ashamed of those dreadful pay per post entries I did…but fukit…it paid me 25 us dinars…deleted now and won’t happen again..promise…

Well it was my last day of school today, and despite me being late fro work practically everyday for the past 2 years they had a posh leaving bash for me at the Pavillion hotel…they even bought me a genuine Adidas polo shirt…wow!

I do like the department people..they are genuinely nice, but it’s jut the same I can’t say the same thing about the petty minded penny pinching director…definitley time to move on.

As for the blog, well perhaps it will get a name change in the near future, but I’ll be keeping the posts here whatever…it’s the only blog I have and it’s survived for 4 years now…ok not well maintained…but while the 2004 posts still remain it’s something I’m proud of, from Life in The Wor Zone, to Songkhla South, to who knows what the future holds….

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I’m not sure if I mentioned this before on my blog, but I’m in the middle of a distance learning course in my perpetual attempt to get myself respectable qualifications. So I applied last year to do a BA top-up in Business and Management from Sunderland University, and it’s administered for distance learning by a group called RDI.

To start with I had to get the equivalent of an HND in Business and Management, so using my prior accreditation I was given seven additional HND modules to do. 5 essays and 2 exams later I’m finally about to start my degree top-up modules.

It can be a bit tricky juggling work and distance learning and so far I’ve managed fine, but if there’s anyone in the situation where juggling work and family life is simply impossible, it would probably be hand to know somewhere that you can buy an essay.
Some might say that it is a risky business doing so, but this organisation writes custom essays based on your own writing style and tailored to the level of study you undertake. If you are doing something a bit more involved you can also buy a custom research paper.

While I managed to get my work done ok, one sometimes has to wonder what would be the greater evil….risking financial difficulties through not being able to balance work loads or “sub-contracting it out”. Take a look at the site and decide for yourself.

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Booooring.  Thursdays week 1 start crap, continue dully, and finish on a low.

Starting out this morning were the M3’s they don’t know what to do with…so they stick them all in a class together and give them to the most junior teachers.  This morning one student was not altogether certain how to write the letter “D”.  The class includes the hulking but pleasent Harris, the boy who is only known to me a Fnarr, and there are 30 other equally vacant blank faces.  The easiest activities are beyond them, and it’s a countdown til Lunchtime.

So here we are at the arse end of the split shift.  The internet is spoadic…the proxy keeps refusing connections every 5 minutes.  Afterwards comes the M5 equivalent of the M3 class of the morning….nice but dim.   My only respite was abusing the cold calling kids book seller for only selling her books in a set when I only wanted one…a collegue stepped in and we split the order.

You can see it’s a really exciting day today right? Roll on the weekend.

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Today my classes celebrated worldwide Seven Eleven day. During rolecall instead of “present” students said “beep beep” mimicking the irritating sound made on entering a store, and we all waxed lyrical about barely edible hotdogs, slurpees and junkfood.

In honour of this special day here are 11 Seven Eleven facts courtesy of da wikiwikiwiki.

1. Since March 2007, (7/11 is) the largest chain store in any category, beating McDonald’s by 1,000 stores.

2. The company was founded in 1927 in Dallas, Texas, USA, when an employee of Southland Ice Company, Joe C. Thompson, started selling milk, eggs and bread from an ice dock.

3. Initially, stores were open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., hours unprecedented in their length at the time, hence the name. The company began to use the 7-Eleven name in 1946.

4. About 100 stores in Oklahoma, USA are independantly owned by a Roman Catholic family, and so do not carry adult magazines, contraceptives, or lottery tickets. They pay higher wages than regular seven eleven stores in the USA.

5. 7-Eleven has been consistently ranked in Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500, most recently being selected as the #4 overall franchise. In addition, they were also ranked #38 in Fastest-Growing Franchises and #2 in Low Cost Franchises.

6. In Thailand 7/11 is popularly referred to simply as “Seven” with the “Eleven” rarely mentioned in casual conversation. The franchise in Thailand is the Charoen Pokphand Group, which in turn grants franchises to operators. There are 4,055 7-Elevens in Thailand, of which more than 1,500 are in Bangkok, making Thailand have the 4th largest number of stores after the US, Japan and Taiwan.

7. An episode of Futurama showed a 31st Century version of the store, with the logo name rendered as 7¹¹ as if to denote “7 to the 11th power”. A sign beneath it boasts that the store is “open 28 hours”.

8. Supermarket News ranked 7-Eleven’s North American operations No. 11 in the 2007 “Top 75 North American Food Retailers” based on 2006 fiscal year estimated sales of $15.0 billion. Based on 2005 revenue, 7-Eleven is the twenty-fourth largest retailer in the United States.

9. Rock band 311 used to manufacture T-shirts featuring the 7-Eleven logo with the numeral “7″ replaced by a “3.” However in 2001, the band received a cease-and-desist letter from the corporation. Relient K also sold merchandise in 2001 featuring a variation of the 7-Eleven logo but eventually phased them on their own accord having never received a complaint from 7-Eleven.

10. Japan has more 7-Eleven locations than anywhere else in the world, where they often bear the title of its holding company “Seven & i Holdings”. Of the 28,123 stores around the globe, 11,500 of them are located in Japan. 1,396 are in Tokyo alone.

11. On the 7th of November in Australia, 2007, a free Slurpee will given to any customer that says Happy 7 Eleven day to the person behind the counter between the hours of 7am and 11pm. This sadly just results in blank looks in Thailand.

Happy 7/11 Anyway!

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I found a bunch of mentalism ebooks on the net the other night, and some of the effect described are so ridiculously easy that even I was able to pick them up.  Well, all good mentalists need an audience, and fortunately I’m paid to have an audience, so I tried a couple out on them.

The first effect involved a 1, 5 and 10 baht coin.  I would write down my prediction on a piece of paper and have a student pick a coin.  I would then reveal my prediction as being identical.  It’s so laughably simple but it got applause from every class I did it with, though doing it more than once is dicey as they’ll get the trick.  I won’t spoil it by revealing the method here!  Oh well, it livened up an otherwise rainy and dull day!

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I’m getting back into the notion of blogging again as a way to express myself.  I have just started a separate blog called Terrible Webwrongs to curb that urge of mine to blog stupid shit, and I’m going to give pay per post a go to see if I can’t squeeze some cash out of this thing..after all I am still paying for it to be hosted.  I’m not expecting to get rich off it, but I am curious to see how it pays…in my experience I don’t hold much hope for it, but we can but try.

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Just figured out video blogging, and since it’s ages since my holiday in Krabi, perhaps my mood at the time may sum it up better than my mood now!

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I received a call from my wife late last week, who informed me that she’d got me a teaching gig and that I couldn refuse it, and it would be on my day off. To say I was a little miffed was an understatement. When I then found out it would be teaching 25 newly-apppointed school directors, and that the request for my presence there was by the local area head of the MOE made me even less inclined to do it, but apparently I had to do it, so with my 3 hours worth of lesson plans, yesterday off I went to the school hosting the seminar.

True to form all the male Directrors were hardcore Chang drinkers and Krong Tip smokers and all the female directors were prudish but apparently a fan of English males (so they said!). I was of course the youngest person there at 30, with most of the participants well over 40. Played some fairly well-worn games such as the great Toilet Roll Fiasco, then gave them a worksheet of true/false questions on the differences in Thai and Western (mostly UK) culture. I pointed included the fact that newly qualified teachers in the uk make at least 120k baht per month on startingwork. That shocked them. They were also blissfully unaware of the impoliteness that commenting on someone’s weight carries in the UK, and also surprised that us farrangs get the willies about umbrellas up indoors. We played a word association game afterwards, and then gave them some useful phrases of English in case they ever managed to persuade a foreign teacher to come and teach in what are mostly boonie schools.

What was interesting was that despite these people being heads of schools, their language abilities in English were little more than many of my Matayom 5 students, and funnily enough so was their classroom manner. Sure they got on with what I asked them to do but not with a lot of shyness, finger poniting at the next person when they didn’t want to participate and giggling. A pretty surreal day all in all, and not a gig I want every day, but I enjoyed I suppose as it was a break from the norm.

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About 2 years ago when Flickr had just launched I heard about it and signed up. They used to have this live chatroom called FlickrLive, which for one security reason or another shut down after they started getting bigger and focussing on the tagging and photography end of things. What I loved about FlickrLive was the totally abitrary way you could just insert bizarre pics into a live chat environment, and save them to what was known as your “shoebox”. It wasn’t like it is now, full of stunning Photography, more it was other photos found on other sites like Worth1000.com, and people would just curculate each others pics. I mean even Stewart (Flickr head honcho) was playing with it. This was why after 6 months of not using Flickr, which subsequently blew up in populrity, that I found my self banned from public view for having lots of idle poached photoshopperie, and found my account not capable of being viewed in public. Fortunately they were nice enough to unflag me once, I’d removed the nicked stuff.

Anyway, back to the Live connection. One thing I remember being really into at the time was bad and banned album covers.

I even made a Flickr Group about one of my favourites -

While I’m there allow me to post a link of some new contenders for the Worst Album Covers ever in this great new Flickr group I found this morning.

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Just on another thing today we went to the as usual hot and slightly depressing Songkhla Zoo, and photos are online at my Flickr site. I’m assuming you know how to get there…it’s not hard.

The otter thing I am doing is testing out wblog an external blog entry creator. If you can read this it works amazingly enough!

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