Today, I spent the morning fixing the pump. Fixed it (finally) by putting a decent (metal, not plastic) one-way valve at the bottom of the inlet pipe that goes down into the well. The weight of 7m of water in a 1 inch tube on the cheapo rubber seals in the plastic valves was forcing the water that had been sucked up to leak back down (there was also a tiny leak in the thread on the inlet port, which wouldn’t have helped). We’ve now filled up all our water containers and things are generally a lot cleaner today ;) There was even enough spare to water the grass and plants as it hasn’t rained for a couple of days. Bought a decent new mosquito net from a travelling salesman for a few quid (he appeared Indian/Malaysian, his Thai wasn’t that clear) to replace our old hole-ridden one, of which to enter would present no great challenge to a mosquito of average intelligence.

Then, later in the day than expected, we went in to Bang Saphan to get stuff ready for my work permit (re)application. A couple of passport-style photos of me in a jacket and tie, and a medical check at one of the clinics in the high street (I paid 40 baht, signed a pre-printed form and that was it - they didn’t even take my pulse!). I left the folder full of paperwork for the application with my accountant, who is going to check over it all and get back to me tomorrow. If all goes well, I should be able to make the application myself at the Labour office in Prachuab Kirikhan on Tuesday. Getting the work permit shouldn’t be a problem, as I had one before. My only concern is if Immigration refuse me a 1yr visa extension from one of their list of ridiculous technicalities. My situation could get pretty ugly if that happens. Thailand is a nice place to live and work and all that, but I don’t think I live here under the condition that I’m not allowed to remain in the country for longer than 90 days at a time, and that I have to keep re-applying for a working visa in Malaysia (and a work permit etc) every time. I’d rather be mugged in broad daylight.

Got back from Bang Saphan too late to help P’Bot lift his boat out of the water (he said there were lots of people anyway). Instead, P’Lek from over the road collared me. Her well (only a couple of meters deep) had dried up, and she’d asked some local workmen to come an dig a few more meters down. As nobody turned up for 3 days, and she had no water to wash with, she climbed in and dug about another metre herself! She came to ask me if I had an extra metre of 1" PVC pipe so she could extend the inlet pipe to reach the new bottom of the well. I quickly fixed that, and ran a new power cable to her water pump after a coconut palm fell on the old one and yanked it clean off. Two water systems fixed in one day - I should be a plumber!

Mee made a lovely Penang beef curry, and I then had a shower (yay!) and retired to the computer for the evening. I responded to all my outstanding customer e-mails. All’s well. However, it’s now 2am.

Tomorrow, I have to hook into a Windows XP machine which is suffering from spurious network slowless and connection timeouts, which I suspect is caused by some kind of Path MTU discovery failure. As they use a switch, I can’t ’tcpdump’ from the Linux server on that network segment, as it doesn’t see the traffic between the WinXP machine and their ADSL router. I have found WinPCap and WinDump which I will need to install and learn how to use. My plan is to capture a snapshot of the traffic from an example POP3 connection from both the client and the server, analyse and compare the traffic sent/received by each end, which should hopefully lead to identifying the cause of the problem.