On Friday afternoon, P’Chai came round and asked if I wanted to go to Samui for a couple of days. P’Chai had to go to Samui to build a house for the Loong Chai’s mum, as his dad had died last month. Loong Chai had called P’Chai to say that he was driving down from Bangkok to Samui that evening, and would pick P’Chai up on the way. As Loong Chai’s car was full, and wasn’t suitable for carrying lots of tools etc, P’Chai asked P’Fai to take the tools down in P’Fai’s pick-up truck, and that I could go down with P’Fai. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity of a free weekend in Samui, so I packed up the computer, and we set off at about 9pm Friday evening. Unfortunately, P’Fai took his wife and child, so there wasn’t enough room for Mee to go too.

We arrived at the ferry port at 2am and joined the long queue of trucks parked up waiting for the first morning ferry at 6am. P’Fai’s wife and child slept in the car, and P’Fai and I slept outside on the grass next to the road until about 5am. Loong Chai and his family arrived with P’Chai in Loong Chai’s car at about 3am. We watched as a whole convoy of petrol trucks, and Tesco trucks drove past the queue and filled the first ferry. We got on the 8am ferry and arrived at the Loong Chai’s mum’s fruit orchard by about 10am, as it’s quite near the ferry port in Samui. Despite the lack of sleep, everyone set to work cutting the grass, clearing the dead leaves and wood, and preparing the land to build a small house.

It was cleared within about two hours, so by midday, we were headed to Lamai for a shower. At this point, I split off and did a couple of hours work for a customer, and then went and found Marco, an old friend I missed the last time I went to Samui. Marco took me to show me his new house. He’s renting a nice quiet piece of land, with a modern concrete house already built, for ten years. He’s in the process of extending it and generally re-arranging it to his taste. The house was originally bright pink, and he decided he liked it so he’s left it that way! As he hadn’t moved in yet, but there was a bedroom and bed etc there already, he invited me to stay there while I was in Samui. Thanks, Marco!

I spent Sunday going round the island with Marco and Tom, who taught Marco and I to speak Thai a few years ago. On Monday morning, I went to the garden to see how P’Chai was getting on with building the house. A monk came to bless the land, and the first post to be put in the ground.

When the monk had been taken back to the wat, Loong Chai and his family headed back up to Bangkok for school/work etc. and I got a lift back up to Ban Krut. P’Chai and P’Gea are staying in Samui for 3-4 weeks to finish building the house, and then P’Fai and I will go back down to collect them and the tools, and maybe spend a weekend having a look around Samui visitting some people and places they might be interested in.

Now I’m back home in Ban Krut, and have just finished clearing the e-mail buildup since Saturday afternoon, most of which is spam. I’ve got some fairly decent anti-spam filters in place, but I’d say that over half of my e-mail is still spam. I spent the morning clearing down and reporting the spam and updating the filters so that much of it can’t annoy me a second time. I’ve also dealt with the easier, smaller requests and prioritised the remaining ones. Now, I’m having a coffee, uploading some pictures, and writing a quick blog. In a few minutes, I will finally start work proper. Now I am back from Samui ‘Fantasy Island’, I have real-world customers waiting on my time, and real-world bills and debts to pay.

Seen a lot of discussion on migrating GNOME from CVS to something else, hopefully Subversion for now. If we used one of the more radically different VCS systems (e.g. arch, darcs whatever), it would require all GNOME hackers to spend a few minutes/hours learning about the new version control paradigm. That’s probably not a bad thing. I’ve seen a lot of good reports from people that have passed that learning curve, and hopefully one day I’ll get a chance to learn it too, but for now, switching to subversion would be easy and would mean I can do off-line patches, which alone is worth the effort as far as I’m concerned. For me as a GNOME sysadmin team leader, this represents another chunk of time/work that I need to put aside to make sure things go smoothly etc, and that everything is properly documented/integrated/secured etc (e.g. viewcvs/bonsai). I love it really, I just wish the work commitments weren’t so pressing so I’d have more spare time to get back on top of the outstanding GNOME sysadmin issues that are building up in my ‘outstanding GNOME sysadmin’ mail folder.

Good news is that it’s been raining quite a bit over the last few days, so the water in the well has come up to about three blocks now. Some time this week, I’ll lay the pipes in properly and move the pump from the lake to the well and start using the water in it.