People have started coming to Phuket in droves. It was as if someone flicked a switch and all these people suddenly appeared. The high season is well underway.

I first noticed something was up when a large number of foreigners materialised where I live on Yaowarat Rd, but these people aren’t tourists – they are teachers. I don’t know how I feel about this invasion of foreigners. I kind of liked my area of town because it was quiet and fairly peaceful, but I can’t leave my apartment without bumping into hordes of teachers carrying bundles of paper and looking for somewhere to eat lunch.

They move in packs, too, which is disconcerting. Term has either started or is imminent. In Patong, the usual throngs of people have begun arriving. It’s great for Phuket because this will be the first full-blown high season since the tsunami. It’s estimated that up to six million people are going to pass through Phuket in the next few months.

As usual, there will be a few undesirables. Last night a group of yobs threw a bottle and smashed a glass panel at a bar in Patong. The manager very coolly told them to pay 4,000 baht and walk away. The yobs, being yobs, caused a scene and the police were called. They ended up paying 4,000 baht to the bar and 2,000 baht to the police. It was priceless.

I can tell it’s high season because a number of friends from the UK have embarked on trips that will inevitably include stays in Thailand. Khaosan Rd will be unbearable at the moment.

I enjoy high season because you get to witness all manner of extraordinary goings on in the areas frequented by tourists. Those tourists can be a funny bunch. Everyone must have seen tourists doing offbeat things at some point, right? Drunks tourists = chaos.

I was bemused when I read this story in the Bangkok Post earlier this week. It’s certainly one of the more ambitious ideas to come out of Bangkok for some time. Remember that Bangkok is a city that floods almost every time it rains. Concerned about global warming, a local disaster-prevention group and some former members of Thai Rak Thai are pushing for a 100-billion-baht, 80-kilometer-long wall to be built around Bangkok.

The theory behind this is that there is a chance that sea levels will rise sufficiently in the next 10 or 20 years to pose a threat to Bangkok.

The wall would take up to eight years to build. It’s miraculous enough that Bangkok has a Skytrain and an MRT system, but an 80-kilometer-wall? What are the chances of it ever being completed? If I remember correctly, when they built the Skytrain, enormous concrete pillars were accidentally put in the wrongs places.

The Bangkok 50 group, made up of former members of Thai Rak Thai, are the guys promoting this scheme. They now plan to get 50,000 signatures backing the project. I’m sure that this project would make a lot of people very wealthy, but perhaps it’s just too big.

The wall would surround Samut Sakhon, Chachoengsao and Bangkok.

Perhaps it’s a good idea, but it’s 100-billion-baht gamble as to whether a.) the wall would ever be built and b.) the wall would ever be needed.

If you’re in Patong this Friday, head straight to Seduction on Soi Bangla where Brandon Block will be DJing. Lil Louie Vega is booked for December 11 and Judge Jules will play January 16. Derrick May was all set to come but it looks like that gig has been postponed.

Meanwhile, at Club Lime on December 1, the day after Brandon Block, Jo Mills will be spinning. The week after it’s Octo from Bangkok.

To the best of my knowledge, Phuket has never had this many well-known DJs passing through in such a short space of time.

Gonna be a busy weekend.

Oh, and tonight I’m playing drum ‘n’ bass at Club Lime with Pichy from Bangkok.

Yesterday, unlike last year, I actually didn’t go out and float a krathong. Instead, I stayed home and watched Hostel 2 – what a waste of time that was. After all the reviews I’d read, I was expecting something shocking – something truly grotesque that would churn my stomach. All I got was boredom and a feeling that I’d wasted my money on an awful movie.

I thought the first Hostel movie was great. Despite what the critics said, it really encapsulated that feeling of helplessness you discover when you find yourself in a strange, unknown place. The movie was dark and mysterious. In spite of its flaws, it really chilled me.

Hostel 2, however, was just overkill. It ruined all the suspense and fear of the original with limited dialogue, idiotic characters and excessive exploration of territory that would have needed a better director and writer to really get into. There was even a clumsy reference to Thailand. Each death scene was dull and uninspiring, to the point where I didn’t care who lived and who died.

The whole movie was just awkward and pointless. I think the horror genre in the West is dead. I started watching Saw 4 today and that was even worse. Everything has just become excessive. The Asians seem to have horror movies nailed far better than the Americans. There’s no psychology in anything that comes out of Hollywood any more.

It’s a great shame because I used to be a big fan of horror movies, even though I’m totally squeamish. Has anyone seen any decent horror films recently?

I checked Google Analytics for the first time in a while to see how this blog is doing and things have improved a lot recently. I’m now close to 1,000 unique hits a day, 75% of which comes from search engines. That’s good news considering in August traffic plummeted to about 100 uniques a day thanks to me using a robots.txt file that killed my search-engine traffic.

The Google Page Rank update came recently and this blog held its PR4. To most of you that won’t mean much and is a rather tedious fact, but it was a surprise to me nonetheless. I’m expecting my Page Rank to take a hit in the near future, but I’m not particularly bothered about that because the only traffic I really care about is from RSS subscribers, which are almost at the 200 mark now.

These increases in visitors have come at the same time as me deciding to post less here. It was killing me to update this blog every day and so I made a decision to update every few days instead. My theory behind this was that if I waited a few days, I might have something more worthwhile to say. While this hasn’t always been the case, I am sleeping a bit more than I was before.

You may have noticed that I moved the Adsense blocks today. The positions they were in before were totally sucking and my earnings dropped to about a tenth of what they have been in the past. Sooksiam, I hope this meets your approval.

Although I don’t make excessive amounts of money from this blog, through all my work online and for other blogs and websites, I actually make more money per month than my salary. I worked out that if I quit my job and worked from home, I could make close to 200,000 baht a month. Before any of you shoot that figure down, send me an email and I’ll tell about all the web work I do and how that figure is possible.

While the money is tempting, at this stage in my life, I enjoy my job too much and think I would be making a mistake by working from home. Would you do it?