Pre-Departure

The last two days have been quite busy with lectures, exam reviews, dinner, parting comments among other things. A couple of highlights on which to comment before I pack up the computer for the trip home. I was introduced to the game of Woodball. From the translated description I first thought that it was croquet, but it turns out to be a hybrid of croquet and golf. What I would call a wicket is called the "goal," or the "gate." A very fun aspect of of the gate is that the two posts are shaped like beer bottles and the "door" is shaped like a wine glass. The ball must pass completely beyond the door for the hole to be completed. The women in the picture with the mallet is the coach for the woodball association. At the conclusion of class on Thursday, I was taken by a group of students to a restaurant near the river. The outdoor environment was very pleasant and the thai food was fabulous. Much of Friday involved closing activites. The group was very gracious and I was given a beautiful jar. I was told that there is a traditional story which accompanies these decorative jars that when travelers reached their homes and opened the jar a women appeared from inside. I will let you know what Chyrise thinks if the legend becomes reality. We took a lot of pictures. Some I will share in my big wrap up of the trip in another post.
One interesting observation was the female bathroom attendants in the men's bathrooms. A couple of times I had to go back to the door to double check I was in the right place. None of the locals (male and female) seemed to be phased at all. Other photos are D.K. my official liaison from the SAT and Dr. Picheet the interpreter. Hope you have enjoyed the updates from the other side of the world. It has been quite amazing to have live chatted with Barry, Kayte, Sydney, Samantha, Piper, and Chyrise while staying some 12,000 miles away with a 12 hour time differential.

Stayed up until 9:00 PM!

So I made it out of the hotel yesterday after the class sessions. First I got a short tour of many of the venues at the Sport Authority of Thailand Compound, much of which was built for the 1998 Asian Games. I was told that Thailand schools are out on holiday right now. Not a bad idea as the temperature has been hovering around 100 degrees. I thought the pool would have had more takers.
I have included photos of the National Stadium (seats 62,000, but I was told that they typically put 100,000 people in it for national team soccer matches and even more for concerts. I guess the Fire Marshall has really good seats :-) Speaking of really good seats I have also included a photo of the Royal Box which currently belongs to the 9th King of Thailand.
After the SAT facility tour, I was taken to the major Mall which is the hub of most of the tourist shopping in Bangkok. Interesting, but not my strong suit. I heard about a dozen different languages being spoken as people were hard a work bargaining. But for me it was mostly 6 floors of stuff, great deals no doubt, but a little too congested for me. I did manage to get some postcards to help build Sydney's collection.
Also, ate dinner for the first time in three days. Both breakfast and lunch have been massive here. Coupled with being very tired about 6 PM, I have had no motivation to eat again in the evening. This leads to being really hungry early in the morning and the cycle all starts again at the breakfast buffet. Last night I hit the sports pub after returning from shopping.
Discussion today focused on teaching methodology and primarily feedback and reinforcement. After explaining the difference between punishment and negative reinforcement and then the differences between positive and negative approaches to coaching, the questions came fast and furious. The China and Korean systems (primarily negative) were hotly debated. We didn't get through all of the slides, but it was no matter as the dialog was excellent.
Final observation for the evening. I am fascinated by Fashion TV. It is one of the few TV channels that is in English here, but it is basically 24/7 of tall skinny people walking to techno music. The fact that someone thought that this was enough to make a television station is a bit sublime.

2009 ICSC Opening Ceremony

Monday 16 February marked the opening of the Sport Authority of Thailand's 2009 class for the International Certificate in Sport Coaching Program. Since I am the first instructor for the new cohort, I was privileged to by involved in the Opening ceremonies. The cohort is made of 42 coaches and sport association officials from about 30 different sports ranging from the widely known basketball, volleyball, and soccer, to the more obscure netball and sports climbing, to the primarily southeast Asian sports of Sepak Takraw, and Pencak Silat. The primary speaker was Mar. Jaturaporn Na Nakorn who is the Deputy Governor for Sports Promotion for the Sports Authority of Thailand (seated on my left in the photo (if it manages to upload). I was also welcomed by the the Director of the Sports Authority (she is seated on my right). First sessions seemed to go pretty well. I am blessed with a very gifted translator, Picheet (seated next to the Deputy Governor in the blue shirt). He is a local faculty member, who spent some time in Ann Arbor Michigan when his father was doing his graduate studies, then returned to earn his own masters degree at DePaul in Chicago. Picheet's doctorate is from Victoria University in Australia. I thought that this was going to be a long week as there was very little participation from the group during the first morning session. Picheet said that the cohorts normally did not warm-up until the third or fourth course (which will be taught by other faculty sometime in April). So we came back and did a good old PCA ice breaker and we were off and running after that (see the other photo if it loaded). Yesterday we talked about developing a coaching philosophy primarily. It is interesting just how much influence the Chinese system has here considering that it is a system built on having an enormous number of people as potential athletes and massive governmental intervention which basically can not be incorporated in just about any other country and yet that was the center of the open discussion before lunch. Today we talk mostly about motivation.
The mornings are relatively easy, but after lunch my body realizes that it is the middle of the night and by 2:00 PM local, it wants to be asleep. Of course that is balanced by being wide awake at 4:00 AM local. The upside on the early morning alertness is I have been able to have several very enjoyable Face Book Chats with many people back in the states.
Food has been good. I have been eating way more fresh fruit then I have in a long time and have started each morning with a couple of glasses of guave juice. Hard to turn down the green juice :-)

The poor internet connection however has been a source of frustration.
I have also learned that I can handle most of the spicy food that they are providing for the cohort as long as I don't consume the actual chiles that are included on some dishes. Today I am planning on actually venturing out this evening following the last afternoon session.
Thanks to all that are following along and to those who have e-mailed, and chatted facebook or skype) and please feel free to leave a comment here on the blog as well.

If Alabama is the 4th compass point,...

then where am I now?

The where is Bangkok. After figuring out that my cell phone is of limited use here and that the free wireless in the hotel is slow at best. I am figuring that the best way for people to keep up with me while in Asia is to use the blog. Here are a few of the important bits of the travel day(s).
It is nice to ride on "big" planes again. After lots of time spent on Regional Jets, it was kind of neat to be on the new Boeing 777. Both the leg from Atlanta to Seoul and the leg from Seoul to Bangkok where on these new jumbo jets. Even in economy class the leg room was sufficient. The service was very good. It has been a long time since I have been served a meal on an airplane (despite all of the miles I logged over the last four years or so), but all of the offerings were quite good. The downside is that with the new jets, the legs can be longer than they used to be. If you were wondering about the Atlanta to Seoul leg, that was direct, ok non-stop is the more accurate term. Direct is a bit of misnomer. Thanks to the individual video displays it is possible to watch a virtual flight path. Our route took us up I-75 then up past Chicago, Wisconsin, Duluth. You are probably starting to get the picture, we went North, very north. I set a new record for being north when we finally banked a bit west over the Northwest Territories of Canada. At that point it appeared that the flight plan was to fly north, wait for the world to rotate underneath us and then head south into Korea. We finally started making some headway west across the top of Alaska, across the Being Sea and then hugged the Pacific coastline of Russia. We swung east again as we past Vladiovastock, so that we were clear of North Korean airspace. A little turn south and finally our path took us almost dead west across the Korean pennisula into the Seoul/Incheon Airport. All told 15 hours and 27 minutes from take-off to touch down. I have been doing the 12 hour drive from Daphne to Noblesville fairly reguarly lately, but none of the drives wore me out like that flight. Five more air hours later I was on the ground in Bangkok. For those that are wondering. I left my apartment in Daphne at 3:00 AM Central Standard on Friday morning. I arrived at my hotel at the equivalent of 10:00 AM on Saturday morning.
My accomodations at the Radsion are quite nice. It is hot here (supposed to reach 100 F today), very hazy. I don't have anything special scheduled for today, although I do have some prep for the course to do sometime today.
The photo is the view out of my window early this morning. The interesting part is there is such a mix of hgh-rise and squat tenaments, and industry all so closely packed together.
I will be updating frequently while I am hear so stay tuned and please feel free to leave comments. Just click on the the small link that says "Comments" at the bottom of the post.

Full Moon in February

Since I haven't spent many of the last few weekends in the 4th compass point, there has been lots going on, but I haven't been here to write about it. But tonight I was inspired on the way home from 6:00 PM mass at the Shrine of the Holy Cross. For those of you where it is still cold, I apologize for the next line - It is tee shirt weather here. So that was the first part. If this weather occurred anywhere north of I-40 it would be called "Spring" and the Groundhog would be out of a job. Add to that the full moon, wispy clouds, and spanish moss hanging in the trees and it looks exactly like the way the walls and ceilings are painted for the Pirates of Caribbean Ride at Disneyland. Temperature is about the same as well. So for those of you that have to walk on the sidewalks because there is snow everywhere else on the ground, sorry. It ain't like that here. The extra good fortune with the weather is that it is providing a bit of a lead-up for my trip to Thailand at the end of the week. The weather there is in the 90s, so atleast I don't have to go from the 30s to the 90s on the way out. I am giving Indiana plently of notice that I don't want to do that on the way back either when I head up there on the 24th.
In case no one else has talked about it in your parts. Samantha was excellent in "Dearly Beloved" a couple of weeks agon. The entire caset and crew put on a very fine show.
Other Noblesville news is that Matt (Guerin Catholic's swimmer) is poised for a successful run through the State Swimming "Tournament" (this is the official name). Sectionals in a couple of weeks and then (hopefully) the State Championship Meet the following week. I am planning to be in attendence to assist the assistant coach at the State Meet. People argue whether it takes a village to raise a child, but there is now doublt that it takes one to have a swim team at Guerin :-)

Also, I have plunged further into the Web 2.0 world and got on Face Book. It is very easy to see how it could come to consume a person. I also now know how to Skype and have a web cam that allows for helping with algebra homework from 700 miles away. The upside is that I have had fun contact with the folk in Indiana, that would have been very difficult without it. Stay tuned

Birthday Greeting

Sending out Birthday Greetings to both my sister Cai and my mother Marion (MeMe to anyone who has known here since the mid-1980s) seemed like an appropriate reason to get back to posting to the blog. Lot so other stuff to talk about, but I will save that for later. A little back story on the video. I created it using the 3D animation software called ALICE 2.0. If you have read (or listened to as was my case) to the book "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch or watch the clips on Youtube of the actual lecture, you will recognize ALICE from his chapter on leaving a lasting legacy. Dr. Pausch and his team were at the center of developing this programming software that allows regular folks (like me) to program in 3D pretty much by dragging and dropping small snipets of pre-written code. The main thing is that by simplifying the programming, as was the intention, ALICE makes it possible to do fun storytelling without (most of) the tedious code writing. I didn't get to do too much in terms of the wandering around in the world, but I hope everyone enjoys it. I wanted to have some pigs perform as well, but none of the great folks in the ALICE community has developed a pig so far. Developing objects is a whole different story from the programming and something that is way, way beyond my skill set. Since they had done peguins, I knew the launch date would need to January 4th, but the idea actually started in advance of Cai's December 29th birthday. As with most thing technological, making stuff is one thing and sharing it with people is somthing else again. Therefore, I apologize for the small size, but there were several steps to get the penguins into my blog and I haven't been able to figure out how to resize the player beyond what it is. If you want to get a copy of the original let me know and we'll figure out to get a bigger version to you
So here is my tiny gift, not the clip per see, but your brief introdiction to ALICE. Happy Birthday Cai and Mom

Short Shots

Don't really have one single item for tonight so it is time to throw out a few small items.

The weekend had a couple of highlights. Finally got my haircut. I also had one of those metaphysical abnormalities, where I had at one point in time (a) all the dishes were clean, (b) all of the clothes were washed and put away (except for the ones I had on), and (c) I had a full refrigerator. If you throw in that the carpet was vacuumed, all I needed was a freshly cleaned bathroom and the world probably would have come to an end.

Played a little bit of golf on Saturday. The game is still trying to decide if it wants me back in its life. If it wants me to quit, the weather is going to have to be a lot worse than it is down here. I can tolerate a lot of abuse on the golf course with the beautiful weather we had over the weekend.

For the first time in a few weeks, I didn't go anywhere to listen to music. There was also a light turn-out at my normal Friday night hang out, so the cue for Karaoke was short. I thought I would re-visit the stage. Partly because the planned Duet on Halloween is now attracting a lot of attention, so I thought it would be best to get back up under the lights and hold the mic again before the big night next week. It turns out that my half-octave vocal range has found a bit of a home in "contemporary country." Despite having to follow a guy with a really good rock 'n' roll voice doing AC/DC, I got a pretty good reception with my rendition of Dierks Bently "What was I Thinking?" It is a fun song. most of the patrons, gave me a "we've all had a night like that" type response. Apparently it is hard to go wrong if the song has an Alabama reference in it. If you are curious you can check out the original video (not of me, of Dierks) by clicking the title (hit the back button to return to the blog when you are done) and try to wrap you head around me singing this song. I apologize in advance for that mental image. The video is a homage to the movie "Momento."

My computer at work decided to stop cooperating first thing Monday morning, so I have been a bit disoriented at work with out it. I got it back late this afternoon. Tomorrow begins the long road to getting back to my customized settings.
Congratulations to Guerin Catholic Girls' Soccer Team. What a great run. Keep it up!