What's New
- Monday, September 27, 2004. On this day: BBC, Wikipedia, HowTo
- Another night in Bangkok
I wasn’t even in the country a week before being medically evacuated to Bangkok. Last Tuesday I slipped and fell and hurt my left knee. I didn’t think it was anything serious at first because I could walk fine. Later in the day though, it started to hurt to bend it and it got very swollen, to the point that I couldn’t bend my leg at all. By the end of the day, I couldn’t put any weight on my left leg at all. I thought it was just because of the swelling and iced my knee. The next morning I still couldn’t walk on it so I went to the Australian Clinic. Dr. Ben told me I’d ruptured the ligament (my ACL) in my knee and the swelling was due to blood collecting inside my knee. He drained about 90ml of blood from my knee and put a temporary splint on my leg but that was all he could do. So then he booked me a flight to Bangkok to be checked out further. It all happened pretty quickly. Dr. Ben made it seem like it was some kind of big emergency to get me to Bangkok as soon as possible but all they did in Bangkok was X-ray my knee and put a better splint on it. I spent the night in the hospital and then flew back to Vientiane the next afternoon. On the down side, my career as a professional athlete is over and my nice official 2 month visa has been used up (because it was only a single-entry visa) and now I’m on a 15-day tourist visa. On the plus side, I managed to score a sponge bath from 2 Thai nurses.
# Posted 2:46 AM (1) comments
- Saturday, September 18, 2004. On this day: BBC, Wikipedia, HowTo
- One night in Bangkok
Arrived at last. Took me 5 days in total to get to Vientiane (left Monday evening and got to Vientiane Friday afternoon).
The heat is really going to take awhile to get used to. It almost feels like a wall when you walk outside and the air is thick from all the humidity.
Bangkok is unbelievably intense. Just walking down the street there are so many more things to see, hear, and smell. It’s very crowded too and sometimes can feel a little bit claustrophobic.
After spending the night in Bangkok Hamid and I left on the overnight train to Nong Khai (on the Thai-Lao border) where Khamla from the CUSO Lao office met us and drove us to Vientiane.
Other than that, I’ve mostly just been trying to get over the jet lag and get used to the heat.
# Posted 1:22 AM (0) comments
- Friday, September 10, 2004. On this day: BBC, Wikipedia, HowTo
- Subject to change
I've been getting pretty used to things being subject to change with my CUSO position. I know the job description is pretty much just a guideline of what I might end up doing. My departure date has pretty much been a moving target as well.
I thought it was finalised when they said I'd be leaving on the 14th but as of yesterday, I'm leaving on the 13th instead. There were some problems with booking my flight I guess and they had to have me leave a day earlier. I now am supposed to fly Halifax to Ottawa, spend the night in Ottawa, Ottawa to Chicago early in the morning (7:45, ugh), Chicago to Tokyo, Tokyo to Bangkok. This means I'll be leaving on the evening of the 13th and I don't arrive in Bangkok until the evening of the 15th (local time). I'm going to be pretty wrecked I think.
The good thing is that I'm pretty much ready to go so losing the day wasn't as big a deal as it could have been. My volunteer work will suffer a bit but that was going to be a problem anyways because some of the people I need to work with are on vacation this week. I've managed to pretty much finish the documentation though and I will be able to wrap that up before I leave so that's good.
# Posted 1:20 PM (1) comments
- Friday, September 03, 2004. On this day: BBC, Wikipedia, HowTo
- New site is live!
Looking back through my blog I started working on the re-design for my site on April 15, 2003. Now almost a year and a half later it's finally to a point where I could take it from my "development" box at home and load it onto my domain.
The fact it took over a year isn't as much a reflection of how much work was involved but more a reflection to how much I procrastinated on working on the site at times. Having a definite deadline of wanting to get this done before I leave for Laos really helped push me to get this done.
There's still some more work I'd like to complete such as fleshing out the image search and updating some of the pages but it's to the point where i can do all of that work "live". I felt it made more sense to get everything up on my domain well before the deadline so I'd have the time to fix any problems. Overall, everything went really smoothly though. I had a few small problems with some files that had absolute paths set but they were fixed pretty quickly. The only other issue I ran into was getting my new database loaded on but a little work with my hosting's support has that fixed up and now I have a better way for managing the database as well. So overall I'm really happy with how this has played out.
# Posted 11:54 AM (0) comments
- Thursday, September 02, 2004. On this day: BBC, Wikipedia, HowTo
- Tying up loose ends
Well I'm due to leave in less than 2 weeks now which is really freaky. Still seems like there's a lot to get done before then.
I'm really pleased to say that the re-design of my site is more or less completed. There's still some small things left to clean up but overall it all works now so it's not as big of a deal. Last night I managed to get the image searching fully working which was a major task that I'd been putting off for ages. Right now it only searches by country or by roll but I can add in extra search functionality very easily. Plus, getting the country searches was the biggest one I wanted to get done so my links to pictures of various countries on the photo page would work. The only thing I have left to do is split the search results over more than 1 page so you're not forced to download hundreds of images at once. I'm pretty sure I've figured out how to do it though which is the big thing.
Due to disk space concerns I've decided to do away with the 1200x800 versions of my photos. Removing them should really cut down on my storage use. My hosting has finally started holding me to the 100mb of disk space and charges me for any extra disk usage so I had to get the site back under 100mb.
The bigger loose end in terms of my site would be updating all of the content. At first I thought this would really be a mammoth task but I've realised it's not as bad as I thought. Most of the pages are pretty static (like the articles in the photo and tech sections). The main area that needs updating is the personal area and that's only a few pages.
The other thing I'd like to do with the site is put up some of my Photoshop work. I'm debating if I want to create a whole seperate "Art" section for this or if I want to just put it under photo. Not really a big deal either way but it's something I need to think about.
Site work aside, there's lots of other stuff I still need to get done too. I still have a couple items left to pick up and I finish my shots next week. I'm almost done with my fund raising which is good but I'm still behind in finishing up my volunteer work. I got really into working on my site and it sort of took away from my enthusiasm for working on my volunteer work. Hopefully now that the site is pretty much up to date I'll be able to get back into the volunteer work and finish it off.
# Posted 10:03 AM (2) comments
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