New BLOG link click on this title

Despite the fact that I have found a workaround and can now post images here by going to the Edit HTML function, it is rather tedious...

And anyway, after more than 2 years it is hardly my new life anymore!

To access the new blog site click on the title of this post or:-

CLICK HERE

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Photo Upload:Random

It makes no sense at all- some days the import of photos works and other days, nothing!

Wed: New Canon Powershot A2200

Click here to view album

Canon Camera 7yr Itch

Photo upload for Blogger has crapped out again... I thought it was a Mac Snow Leopard problem but its not working on my Windows machine either... Bugger.

Anyway, the shots are in the album and I am getting very bored with this problem as I really like to include photos in my blog... and I tried tumblr.com, the "micro blog site" but even that's down right now.

From Canon Camera 7yr Itch

Anyway, as you will see from the album cover I have a new camera. My Sony Cybershot did a great job for a long time (7 years I think) but now it has a problem, looks like moisture got inside and has damaged the view plate. If you look closely you can see what seem like grease spots when I take a shot of clear sky or plane flat colours... annoying. I put up with it for a while and then it ruined what would have been rather special shots. So enough of that.

But Mr Sony won't be wasted. Kaan can have him, and then he will pass his one on down to a nephew, and so it goes.

Soundtrack: Etta James screaming "Lover Man, where can you be?"

The Venture
Never let it be said that I am one to shrink from a challenge, so here's the news of a secret project: Kaan's Restaurant. It has to be a bit of a secret because I KNOW that my mate David of West restaurant fame, and my dear friend Lawrence back in Sydney will both tell me I am crazy, but I don't think it's so mad at all. It won't cost much to set up, just a few thousand dollars, and we found a great location today.

It's a place right in the middle of the buzz just south of CMU, a place where thousands of students go to eat and wander about each evening. Location has got to be the key, and students are a big market- and a lot of them have money to spend, especially on food.

So we shall see how it goes but I think this one will be a real goer.

From Canon Camera 7yr Itch

This is the fisheye lense effect done in camera- 

a lense setting for what possible purpose I do not know.

Meantime of course there is the study to keep up with, and I am doing at least a few hours every day, sometimes as many as eight full hours, and of course, on the eve of a submission it is an all-day and late into the evening review... I am now writing about six drafts for each assignment- a lot more than I used to. Of course it remains to be seen if all this extra effort will be appreciated; in the past it was often the ones dashed off in one go over a couple of days that got the high distinctions while those I toiled over for weeks scraped in with a credit, not a good sign. Anyway, we shall see.

It is with a little tear in my eye that I see my Sony Cybershot pass away. She went with me everywhere, crawled the bars of Pattaya, the beaches of Koh Samui, the Burmese mountains, the many rice fields of Lanna, not to mention Tonga, Vanuatu, Africa, Singapore and the Philippines. She was a loyal workhorse of the best order.

From Canon Camera 7yr Itch

Vale! Ms Cyberre!

With the acquisition of this new photographic marvel you can expect some newly fabulous images to enjoy, when I get a chance to escape my desk!

Thanks for dropping by on this rather warm evening, but not hot enough for the aircon- that was this afternoon- See ya!

908 Policy and Planning Assignment #1

hh

5:20pm Monday and I feel like a blossom; MAppling908 Ass1 completed and sent off and even more have when I realised I have 16 days, not 13, till my next two assignments are due- like getting 3 days extra in your life for free!

The last two days have been a bit warm, back in the 30s after a week of chilly rain, and the cold water is coming hot out of the tap by midday but luckily the apartment remains comfortable, no aircon yet just a fan and the door open to catch the occasion zephyr.

So that means the pool should have lost its chill and its time to go for a splash, and then a walk around in the evening cool, and tonight to take it easy for an early night.

Tomorrow will be a morning of brainstorming and mind maps, followed by the first research phase. These two assignments are worth 40% and 30% each so that's a large chunk of each subject.

At the same time I am distracting myself a little by learning the latest version of iMovie. No choice really as the new system Snow Leopard doesn't like the old version... ah, so it goes. So you can expect some more movies from me before too long.

Did I mention the pool? I applaud myself for getting a condo with a fabulous view and a pool that you can swim in 9 months of the year. At least I got some things right.

Thanks for dropping by.

Roll out the essays!

And let's have an essay of fun!

So on Friday I sent off my first assignment (English for Academic Purposes/EAP) for semester 2 of the Master's... and now 3 days to go for delivery of the next one- Language Policy and Planning.

The first one drove me a bit crazy. It's the first time since 1973 and 8 years of study along the way and it's the first time I have studied full time. It is a bit of a luxury but a good one.

But at the same time it means that I am putting a lot of effort in this, a lot more than I would have if I had been working as well. I get totally excited following some research thread, get a whole new angle on something, and have to sit down and rewrite my essay again... I am getting to four or five drafts now.


And frankly the policy and planning subject is a bit weird to me. I want to understand how to make it work, how to design policies and methods of implementation that really work properly, but of course there don't seem to be too many examples of that.


That's my way of thinking- how to make it better, how to get the best result possible... reality is that it is always a compromise between warring parties that ends up in a bit of a mish mash. Still, there must be an effective language education system somewhere in the world, mustn't there?


3 days for my case study of Namibia- a disaster. They announced English as the national language in 1990 and now maybe 7% can speak it, while most of the rest still speak Afrikaans, the language of their previous colonial masters (who still hold the wheels of power).


Then 13 days to a double barrel event- another for EAP and the first for Organisational Communication, which again I thought would be about the best practice in running an organisation. Instead it seems to be about reading Mission Statements and such, and comparing them to reality- for what?


Is this the reason that you don't get the low down on your subject until you start? It's like Buy before you Try. 


So anyway, it's OK. I never thought it was going be all Fun in the Sun but sadly my optimistic nature does take me in that direction all the time.


OK, so shoot me!
________________________


My Big Night Out (A more of less typical Saturday night)


So Saturday was all about putting thoughts on paper for the Namibia case study and by 6:30pm, after 8-9 solid hours the first draft is done. I am just about to print it out when David rings: Where are you? When are you coming?


This means he has no customers and he's bored. So I print out the draft and head for West where David tells me he will actually sit down and have dinner with me (something which NEVER happens- as you will see...)


So I get there and true enough we do get to have a beer and a fag and eat our soup, and then panic ensues as 8 guests have arrived all at once, so of course David has to go to the kitchen and get things in order... (See?)

Dinner last night (vegetable soup with fresh bread, fish with lime sauce & mashed potato, rum baba with a dollop of whipped cream- Yum! at West, and a bottle of South African St Clair red wine for 280B BYO) was served with a large helping of Dominique's regular rant. (He came and joined me while David was in the kitchen, which of course annoyed David, but what am I supposed to do?)

Dominique is determined to convince me that any optimism I have about people or business in Thailand will be crushed by greed, corruption and endemic laziness. 


He runs a bakery here, has a Thai wife and has no end of horror stories. He has been here more than 10 years. I ask him why he stays; he has a business, this is his home... and most days he's up at dawn, bakes all day doing most things by hand, and then of an evening travels around town with a big tin basket hawking his wares- which I am guessing are the days leftovers. 

Seems like a gruelling way to live if you ask me.


Anyway, it was hardly news. I have been meeting Dominique at West by accident about once a week for almost a year, and each time he tells me another version of Terrible Thailand. Like that old magazine Ripley's Believe it or not?, Thailand, You Wouldn't Believe It But... ! is the regular pastime of expats here. Frankly I am bit tired of it. There really are a lot of wonderful and fun things that happen here, and I would be a lot happier if people could talk about them!


(Maybe I need to find some optimists to share my time with...)


After dinner, I popped over to the Soho bar, a 5 minute walk from David's restaurant, and had a few drinks. It was empty when I arrived at 10:30pm but then the second shift arrived and I had an amusing chat with Ken, a rather tall black Canadian guy here for his second time and having fun. 

I chewed his ear with stories about Australia and New Zealand: language quirks, weather, population, animals. I have become a walking National Geographic. 

And he told some about Canada and his travels, when I gave him a moment.


By now it's 12:30am and the bar has closed, and Kaan with his wonderful timing turns up wanting a drink (no deal, Scott runs his bar strictly to the regulations to save on bribes and hassle), and so off we go looking around, but it's a doomed crusade as the party at Prasertland just wound up and all the bars are full as googs, and there's actually a traffic jam of people pouring out of Prasertland looking for another place to party! and so we just have to go home. 


And even though it's after 1am already, and the rule is that you stop selling alcohol after 12,  the shop downstairs quietly sells us some beers anyway. So there's a nice thing right there that you wouldn't get in Australia.

By this time I'm actually pretty tired and dozing off but somehow my second wind arrives and we get to have a chat- about all the things couples need to chat about... managing life, the uncertain future, making things better, why we get on each other's nerves...

And then at some ungodly hour, the night comes to an end.


Total cost: about 1,000B ($33) or 3.5hrs work.
_____________________________


It's lunchtime Sunday now. It's warm and sunny which is a pleasant relief after last week when we had several days of wind, rain and cold down to around 12 degrees in the day time. But today is balmy, bright blue sky and a clear view from my window through clear skies to the mountains in the distance. 

You don't often get that in a town set in a valley with a fair amount of pollution. Most days the mountains are lost in the smokey haze.


And it's Sunday so I am going to take it easy, and then throw myself into the study tomorrow. Maybe we'll go somewhere for lunch.

Monk making Mar 2011

Kaan lent my little red video camera to a friend who used it to take stills of a monk making ceremony.

I've never seen one of these. If you look at the photos you will notice that people take turns cutting off his hair, and he just sits there quietly, and alone, until it's all gone, and then he gets the white robe.

To have a child become a monk is believed to be very good merit-making for the family and especially the parents. Merit making is basically storing up good luck either for this life or the hereafter, which has become a bit confusing, as here they have Buddhist Heaven and Hell, and then somehow, reincarnation after that... How did that happen?

You will also notice that it's quite a crowd gathered to watch this haircutting transformation, so it seems to be a grand occasion... I am sure it took a LONG time and that people mostly just sat around looking, something that I am not good at doing; doing nothing that is.

I apologise for the quality of the pics- that little video camera was never much good for stills.
_________

Thanks for dropping by... let's chat again after the Namibia project is done.

Difficult, impossible... normal.

It's Tuesday morning and it's quite cool and cloudy. It's been raining and the cloud cover keeps the temperatures in the mid 20s- should be good study weather. But nothing is perfect.

This is the first time since 1973 that I am devoting myself to study rather than working at the same time and juggling stuff around. Of course there are still other things to deal with like renting the apartments, paying bills and such, but the main task for these three months is to complete the master of linguistics.

However it is not so easy for me to concentrate on just one project. For one thing, I find that I can only really concentrate for about six hours during the day, and then I need a break. Maybe my brain at 56 just isn't as durable as it used to be.

For another, once the study is done for the day I have too much time for my brain to wander aimlessly through all those annoying life questions about the past and the future, questioning my choices, wondering where I will go next, reassessing possible strategies for the life ahead. Basically asking that age old question of what is possible, how good can it get? And how bad. And of course realising that the questions will not be answered for a while.

I know I look a bit insane in this picture of me and Kaan on the way back from Burma, but then again, I am a bit crazy really.

On top of that an odd thing happened yesterday evening as I completed my analysis of my latest research; my teaching method for academic English lacks a research foundation. I use an approach developed in the 80s in Australia (of all places!) called the Genre Approach, or something like that, whereby we teach students how different texts and presentations are assembled so they can make their own. It is too complicated explain in detail here but the point is that I have been applying this for over ten years and realised yesterday that no-one has ever done a serious longitudinal study to verify its value.

There was a study done at UNSW in the late 90s by a PhD student that I read in 2000-2001, but he wasn't an educationist or a linguist. He was some weird sub-branch of service industry analysis (I think) and frankly there's almost no chance I will ever find it again.

Interruption...

So I just had a little light bulb moment- why not do a Google search using EAP "longitudinal" and see what comes up? Sure enough, not a lot. A worldwide search comes up with three research reports, not a lot for a method that has been in use for more than 20 years! And yet not surprising.

Education research seems to have been in the 19th Century Armchair Philosopher category for some time. Instead of testing ideas, which is bit difficult since we need to actually test what people are doing, the trend seems to be to just, well, think about them... If teachers were engineers using this technique a lot of structures would probably fall down.

So now I have three more articles to read and maybe there will be some useful data but really, just three studies in 20 years? Not a lot. And then of course there will be a further rewrite of my own research paper. I don't even know what version I am up to- at least number 6.

See that's the problem with devoting myself to study; my brain just runs away with itself trying to make ideas cohere and locate what's missing in the puzzle, and that can go on forever. When you are working at the same time you have to limit the time for your study projects, you throw yourself into the time available, and then you finish on deadline, and move on.

What I do now I start the research projects as early as possible and devote all the time I can manage. This is a very different experience, and quite draining in a way that working is not. It is also a bit lonely.

Sometimes as a result of being here, of that sense of isolation that comes from being in a foreign country and now with the added isolation of studying alone in my room, it is easy to be self-indulgent, to do the "Woe is me!" scenario, the "What am I doing here?" scenario, and then I remember these monks I saw in Burma just a few days ago.

There they are in their robes, in a country controlled by a military junta that allows very little personal freedom, and certainly no guarantee of it, poor and with very few prospects of escape, and I realise that they would see me as crazy because I have so much more than them, and so many more opportunities...

So I guess I'll just get on with it now, read those three articles, see if I can find the missing pieces to the puzzle and hopefully finish writing this, my first essay for the semester, before the end of the day.

The student life is a very very odd life indeed.
 __________________________________________

Postscript: Breaking News
Well the good thing is that I was right. I just found a journal article that echoes my own concerns about the lack of empirical evidence but one that also summarise the small number of empirical studies done to date (2006) by Jessica Tardy. So it was not a red herring and I was not losing my mind.

What disturbs me about this is that the reading list for the subject includes none of these empirical studies. Isn't the effectiveness of EAP a rather important element when studying EAP?

Maybe not.

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)

Liam Aiken, one of the unfortunate children

Most of the time the movies on TrueMoves satellite TV are rubbish, and then by accident they show something decent like Lemony Snicket's masterpiece. (Click HERE for Rotten Tomatoes take or on this blogs title.)

Honestly I think this is Jim Carrey's best movie ever. The fact that he actually manages to NOT be Jim Carrey is probably the point here. Not to mention Merryl Streep and Jimmy Connolly.

Great cast, wonderful story, fabulous images and some hilarious characters come together to make this a real gem. And most amazing of all, the final credits are a wonderful work of artistic animation all in their own right.

Jim Carrey being truly evil.

So that was my thrill of the evening, with a dessert of The West Wing. I got 42 discs from Burma, the whole series, so that's going to be my evening reward after a hard days study.
___________
On other news?

Yesterday I went to CMU, signed the final result papers, collected my pay and in so doing, ended my work for the semester meaning that I don't need to go back till May 10 when the visa process begins again.

I was out for a bit more than an hour, and came home dripping wet and exhausted- making it impossible to concentrate on anything for the rest of the day. Take note: go out in weather only after doing the key mental work of the day. The tropical hot season and any kind of work are antipathetic.

Last night was a little bit funny. We (Kaan and I) got new phones in Burma, some sort of Nokia "brand" fake but the manual was for a different phone so we couldn't work out how to open them. On top of which several functions wouldn't work without an added memory card. So last night off to Kad Suan Kaew to the phone experts who opened the phones and put 4gig cards in each (350B each) taking the total cost (1,600/1,900) to around 2,100 baht ($63) each, a small fortune in the Thai schemata but had to do something as my new 2nd hand one is buggered. Now they both work like a dream, though for some reason Kaan's has a different operating system from mine!

Nokia N98i with "32GB memory" on the back cover when in fact it had none at all! And an "8 megapixel" camera which I am sure is not true. Ah, never mind, it works!

I woke up at 7:30am today, had some coffee and somehow it is 9:17 already and all I've done is read the news and write this. It will be 10am before I am on deck for functional action, and that's OK, but not perfect.

I need to develop a routine just as Stephen and Virginia Woolf would do each day; mornings for breakfast and writing, then lunch, the afternoons for readings and a walk, and finally of an evening, dinner and a little bit of socialising. And they did that 48 weeks of the year, only stopping for a 4 week holiday once a year... or so I read somewhere. But that doesn't really make sense as Stephen was a travel writer, so he must have done more travelling than that!

Oh, and speaking of travelling, there are some photos of the recent trip on picasa (Click HERE) but I really have very little to say about the trip. Four days of driving all directions but south looking at the sights, most of which I had seen a few times before, was a change of scene from my usual circuit but nothing surprising happened really. Temples, markets, quirky artist centres, good restaurants (Wiwat is a genius in finding them) and lots of "normal" Thailand- you really can't be a tourist after more than two years in a place. Still, it was a pleasant change.

And now, the day is sticky already, but take a shower anyway, turn on the aircon and get to work.

See you in the spring.