Well, we finaly took the plunge and did more than move between the restaurant and the beachside cabanas and organised an afternoon of diving (and snorkeling for neens)

Dive 1: Japanese gardens

The highlight of this was a swim through a small cave

Dive 2: Twin rocks

An abundance of fish life, including a couple of moree eels, clown fish and a stingray. 2 ‘pinnacles’ of rock out in the ocean with schools a small fish milling around them.

Started the day by tearing into the water out in front of the Cabanas armed with a snorkel. The tide was still coming in but once you swim out through the shallows the reef begins. Another 20 metres out over the fringe and the bottom drops away to a couple of meters and the coral comes alive. Schools of feeding fish and plenty of sea cucumber.

Not bad for 50 metres from the sand.

Arriving in after taking planes, boats, taxis and bumpy truck rides to our final destination we were delighted to see that the Koh Tao Cabanas had lived up to its reputation. Our lovely appointed room on the hillside beautifully decorated with thai colored silk pillows and wooden artifacts complete with semi outodoor-inn shower.

A stroll along the waterfront we discovered that we are nestled at the quiet northern end of the beach,where as the rest of the resorts seem to be a cluster of ramshackle beachshacks with koh phanghan style bar settings - lots of young Europeans.

With our stomachs rumbling for our first bite of thai cuisine, we headed to the resort’s restaurant. Set into the giant boulders overlooking the beachfront, we followed the candlelit pathway to our table and floor pillows. Over a mocktailand singha beer we ordered what seemed like the most delicious thai food we have experienced - shrimp on limegrass skewers followed by chilli whole sea bass, red chicken curry with fragrant jasmine rice wrapped in banana leaves.

After watching the disappointng fall to the Brits, on the big screen we did the walk of shame back through some raucous crowds to our bungalow retreat.

The king size bed covered with mosquito net, thai cushions provided a comfortable place for a sound sleep on our first night in Paradise!

Well today was about getting to our destination and it started fairly early from the random deserted serviced apartments that housed us for 5 hours after our flight into Bankok late Friday evening. The place was as deserted this morning as it was when we arrived in the middle of the night at 1:30. Quick continental breakfast then back to the new airport for the domestic flight on Bangkok airlines to Koh Samui.

The flight we had booked was delayed but we made it in time for the earlier 9:30 one so before we knew it we were disembarking in the new Koh Samui airport. We were very impressed with the new airport. I particualrly enjoyed the aquarium behind the men urinal.

We were smoothly shipped from the airport to the fast cat terminal, albiet over some fairly bumpy roads, to find that the next boat was at 1pm, giving us an hour and a half to kill. The cat left about 15 minutes late once the people from our delayed flight had arrrived and we were on the way to the island.

About 24 hours after we left Tokyo, Akasaka on the bus, we arrived into the port at Koh Tao then finally after a short truck ride, to the Koh Tao Cabanas!

Swim, walk on the beach and my first Singha and life is perfect!

This is a word of warning to anyone based overseas who is considering the purchase of a new PC with Windows Vista Home Premium installed.

You will not be able to switch to English or any language other than the one that you purchase! This luxury is for owners of Windows Ultimate (or Enterprise) only.

Your options as I see them are

1. Upgrade to Ultimate when you purchase your PC (it seems that Home Premium is commonly the default OS)
2. Purchase another copy of Vista in the language you desire
3. Remove Vista and install XP if you already have a licensed version
4. Buy a Mac where multi-lingual support is standard

Personally, I am comfortable enough working in Japanese to persevere for the time being to determine if the added effort is worth it for the ‘Vista’ experience but I am very disappointed that Microsoft deems multilingual support something that I must shell out an additional $200 for. Given the increasing mobility of the global workforce, there is going to be an ever increasing demand for software that is independent of language barriers and I can only hope that Microsoft see the light on this issue before they miss the boat.

Great article by Paul Graham about the accumulation of stuff..

http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

After considerable deliberation, I ordered my new Dell XPS M1330 last night from a Japanese speaking sales assistant called Cho Sei. It came down to a decision between the MacBook and the Dell. The RRP of the MacBook and similarly specced Dell came out about 30,000yen in Apple’s favour but after speaking to Cho Sei, Dell came in with an impressive counter offer which won me over.

The other factor in this decision was of course the OS, and Windows Vista is not doing Dell any favours in that competition at the moment.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/08/18.html

http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/08/more-raves-for-vista.html

I will give it a go and then ‘downgrade’ to XP if it all becomes too painful.

Stepped out this beautiful Autumn afternoon to the sound of the neighbourhold birds and the freshness of an approaching Winter, to visit the massive park area in Shinjuku that is Shinjuku Gyoen.

It must have been 8 years since I was there last but it is still as well manicured as I remembered. We ripped though the basment of Isetan (huge department store) and loaded up with food and a sweet Belgium beer then set off in search of the park. My navi system couldn’t get a lock on all twelve satelites so we did a little extra walking before finding the Shinjuku entrance. I say that as there are about 4 entrances and they are a long way apart.

200yen an adult for the pleasure of soaking up the sun on the manicured Gyoen grass. I had also forgotten about the 4:30pm closing time but a lovely way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

I finally found some time to bundle together the changes I have been making sporadically to the album and release them here. These are addtions I made while I was travelling to make it easier to manage the album while on the road and more recently, to integrate some RSS support.

Download here.

Change log:

• added image resize functionality to the admin. This allows you to resize a directory of images according to the size and image quality settings that you choose.
• added RSS feed for comments. The feed will list comments accross the whole album or for individual images
• added RSS feed for images. This feed currently spits out a directory list, allowing users to subscribe to see whenever new folders are added

The following files are affected:
- config.php
- pictures.php
- popup.php
- index.php
- admin/index.php
- admin/imageresize.php (new)