It means 'nothing'
Archive for December, 2009
Life Doesn’t Have to be Hard
Dec 17th
Every year I have to renew my visa/work permit, a process that is usually full of frustration, anxiety, and wasted time because Immigration and the Labour Department seem to enjoy daily changes to their respective policies on a whim.
A few months ago the Bangkok Immigration office relocated from their cramped and decrepit building in Suan Plu to the government complex at Chaeng Wattana so I was curious how this would affect their service levels.
The first thing you need to know if you ever need to go there is that it’s fucking far. Factoring in traffic it will take at least an hour to get there from anywhere around Siam. Having said that, I was pleasantly surprised on arrival to discover that they have made a clear and distinct seperation between sections now. The non-business/marriage/etc visa are the only ones that actually go inside now with the rest only sitting out front.
When I arrived there was one person in front of me in the queue and after sitting the person ahead of us asked to swap places in the queue! Score! I was being served within minutes of arriving! You’ll have to forgive my excessive excalamtion usage, but what I’ve just described is something that in the past would never have happened.
One thing that hasn’t changed with Thai Immigration is that whenever you’re renewing/applying your visa you will never, ever, be successful the first visit. Previously that would have meant an entire day wasted sitting in their old office waiting to be served only to be told there was a ‘problem’ with your documents and sent away only to return another day to try again. Fortunately I didn’t have to go back the second time but I heard everything went smoothly.
My point is that this has been the best, least stressful, experience I have ever had with Thai Immigration and while this is my last time renewing my visa (for now) I’m glad to know that should I ever want to return it will be a much simpler process than I’ve previously known.
Gaming Galore
Dec 14th
In my WoW hiatus I’ve been playing Lotro and since I purchased the Mines of Moria expansion but never actually got to see any of it due to my bad habit of deleting toons because I got bored with them I was determined this time.
The good news is that I hit level 50 this week and headed into the gates to Moria only to be presented with a string of quests all not-in-Moria and then given a quest that forced me to level a legendary weapon (something unique to Lotro) before I can consider getting past the Watcher in the Water and finally getting into Moria.
Another thing unique to Lotro is session play which lets you assume the role of an NPC to experience either a part of the story from a different perspective or even life as a chicken (which probably sounds ridiculous but it’s incredibly fun). Anyway, there is a session play quest as part of the quests I’ve done so far that shows the fall of the Mines of Moria. At least it would have if Turbine had the story-telling and technical ability with which to do so. The quest was supposed to be the fall of Moria, but it was actually the unveiling of the (a?) Balrog. It’s also worth mentioning that the Balrog looked bloody horrible, but I’m a bit spoiled after seeing one portayed in the films. Would it have hurt to use a few more polygons though? Anything with wings needs a lot of care!
As far as introductions go, Mines of Moria so far sucks. Developer Tip: Get people into the content as quickly as possible!
Contrast that with the latest WoW patch and it’s night and day. Lotro’s strength has historically been in story telling, but WoW is a serious challenger and with the phasing being improved in the future it will be even better. My guild was doing Ice-Crown Citadel on the weekend and managed to get the first three bosses down. The third boss, which is a battle between the alliance and horde gunships, is just about the most fun I think I’ve ever had in WoW. Now if only they’d let us keep the jump packs…
Moments of Cleverness
Dec 5th
I’ve recently implemented a small change I’m rather proud of to our company website that will automatically display any recipes we have on file that make use of a product you’re viewing. At the moment I’ve only got Texturas recipes so that’s the only thing that will show them, but in time more recipes will mean it slowly spreads to all products.
While I’m on the topic of Texturas, they are an amazing product that I never knew about which allows you to some quite creative things with food that as a food consumer I always took for granted. No more though!
Anyway, the display of recipes is all done using the magic and power of the Views module for Drupal. Quite amazing really and perhaps I will come back to this post when my brother isn’t waiting for me in WoW to detail exactly how I did it.
Recent Comments