There is one Thai overseas who is single-handedly flying her country’s flag for her brothers and sisters. She is a 1.5-meter tall bundle of platform-boot-wearing character. She is currently the 13/8 favourite, according to Ladbrokes, to win the UK’s ninth series of Big Brother.

I don’t want to say that Kathreya “Kat” Kasisopa is weird or anything, but she is perhaps a few cookies short of a jar — literally. Big Brother UK’s first Thai housemate has a kind of obsession with cookies, as she demonstrates here in this rather terrifying dialog with Big Brother.

I feel exhausted just from watching her speak. I haven’t been following Big Brother in great detail, but I’ve been keeping up with Kat’s antics from time to time. Here she is getting lost in the Big Brother house — a feat no mere mortal could achieve. This may explain her desire to be reincarnated as Pokemon. Is she real?

There are more clips of Kat on YouTube than I could ever sit through. She is something of a phenomenon in the UK. I find her a bit awkward to watch, but evidently she has captured the hearts of the UK’s television-watching general public.

Thais: are you proud? Brits: can you watch for more than five minutes without starting to twitch nervously?

Is the era of the Thailand backpacker over? The editor of Luxury Travel Magazine recently said that Thailand is now the destination of choice for people searching boutique hotels and upmarket spas. People have been saying this for a while, calling it the end of backpacking.

Newley wrote an interesting article last year in the NY Times. The title of his article, which is about Khaosan Road, is “A Hippie Haven Goes Upscale”, which I think says it all.

The lede of the article goes like this:

In the 2000 film “The Beach,” Leonardo DiCaprio's character travels to Thailand, and, like countless backpackers before him, stays in a dingy guesthouse on Bangkok's legendary Khao San Road. But if the movie were shot today, Mr. DiCaprio would encounter not only rough-and-ready tattoo parlors and street vendors selling cheap banana pancakes, but also up-market amenities: a spa offering body wraps and salt scrubs, for instance, and, inevitably, a Starbucks.

Although this upmarket side is creeping in, it’s in a constant battle with the hippie side of life. I don’t know if it’s Thailand that is changing or the way people travel.

When I first arrived in Thailand, whenever I traveled, be it to Lopburi or Koh Chang, I’d always travel by bus or train and stay in the cheapest places. Having work commitments doesn’t allow me that “luxury” so much any more as the only traveling I do is by motorbike around Phuket. If I were to be carefree and back in Bangkok, I think I’d still travel on a shoestring.

I don’t think backpacking is dying. Friends of mine still come to Thailand on their way to and from half a dozen countries, with limited budgets and backpacks in tow. What is perhaps changing is the type of people Thailand appeals to.

The last time I walked down Khaosan Road was about a month ago. I didn’t feel as if the place had changed much in the three years since I first arrived. I was still able to buy a tray of pad Thai from a street vendor as I was the day I first stepped on that street.

There’s no denying that development has perhaps tainted the hippie trail in Thailand. It is becoming a little more difficult to find those real budget digs and restaurants on the islands, but it’s not so much that you can’t travel the entire country without spending a whole lot of dollar; you just have to look a little harder for the real bargains.

Who knows, in 20 years they may be no such thing as “backpacking”.

Bloggers occasionally find themselves in hot water for stealing other people’s content. The hot topic at the moment with regards to blogs is the way the Associated Press has been dealing with people using its content. What exactly is “fair use”?

For anyone who doesn’t know, the Associated Press (AP) is a major news organization owned by 1,500 daily newspapers. AP went after the Drudge Retort, a social news website similar to Digg. The reason? Linking to AP content with short quotations between 39 and 79 words long. We’re not talking whole stories, but excerpts — with links to the original AP articles.

In an unusual move, AP sent a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven offending items. The fallout was major news, with Tech Crunch, a blog with 791,000 daily RSS subscribers and countless more readers, denouncing AP’s actions and “banning” all AP material from the Tech Crunch blog. The pressure from major blogs led to AP backing down, calling its approach a little “heavy-handed”.

The problem with AP’s actions is that there are countless sites, such as Digg, Stumbleupon and so on, that do the exact same thing the Drudge Retort was called out for. AP then issued a statement saying that it will go after blogs using AP content “when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste”. AP then had a meeting and decided to back down once more, this time deciding that it would not be going after blogs. Impulsive much?

Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of AP, said, “Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see. It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”

An AP rep said, “The use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few sentences only. This is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of ‘fair use’. AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes ‘hot news’ misappropriation.”

Have you ever seen the website Digg? It’s massive. Thousands of its articles use the headline and lede. If AP puts its foot down here, there will be a serious backlash and people will just stop using AP content. Bloggers will use other news sources. AP really doesn’t understand how the Internet works.

The New York Times has also come under fire for defending AP. NY Times, of course, partly owns AP. Then there’s the Media Bloggers Association, who apparently represent all bloggers. Never heard of them? Neither have I. Neither has anyone. But that hasn’t stopped them being chosen to negotiate with AP guidelines for the use of AP content on blogs. Never mind the business links the Media Bloggers Association has with AP.

AP has gone way down in my estimation.

NY Times, Tech Crunch, Andy Beard

There was a tsunami drill held in each of the six Andaman provinces today. There are 79 warning towers across the Andaman region, with 19 of those located in Phuket. The sirens sounded and the drill was conducted in a similar manner to the previous tsunami drills.

I sometimes wonder how effective these drills are. They are well orchestrated and publicized and in the end they become little more than some sort of show for the cameras, with students running through the streets, smiles beaming, having a great time. However, such drills do raise awareness.

The tourists, however, sometimes just shrug and get back to their sunbathing. In Patong today, it seemed that most tourists were keen to ignore the drill. I have heard a few people saying that it isn’t a matter of if, but when, there will be another tsunami. Will Phuket and the other Andaman regions be ready for such a scenario? It’s possible, but we really can’t be sure how effective the tsunami-warning system is.

If you’ve seen some of the pictures from after the tsunami – of the dead bodies and dismembered limbs strewn all around – then you’ll appreciate the importance of these tsunami drills. The world was shocked by the tsunami in 2004, but some tourists couldn’t be bothered to take 10 minutes from their busy schedules to join in today.

Gripes aside, I think Phuket and the Andaman provinces are making progress in reaching the stage where people are prepared for another tsunami, but there is still work to be done.

There was a tsunami drill about one year ago, similar to the one today. Some of the sirens were too quiet while others were inaudible. There was another good show for the media, but away from the cameras, there were problems.

It has yet to come out what problems there were with today’s drill, but no doubt more will be known tomorrow. The sirens in Patong have never been the problem; it’s elsewhere there were concerns.

Did anyone hear the sirens this morning?

One of the most common questions I’m asked about Phuket is how the Phuket weather is. People seem genuinely concerned that the weather in Phuket could potentially ruin a trip to the island. Rest assured that the Phuket weather is far more forgiving than in Bangkok.

Whereas in Bangkok you expect the whole city to come to a standstill during the heavy rain, in Phuket, the rain comes in short sharp bursts that you barely notice. The whole monsoon-season aspect of Phuket weather is totally blown out of proportion.

Yes, it does rain a lot during some months, but it’s not as if it doesn’t ease up at regular intervals. At it’s worst, Phuket weather will be incredibly wet in sporadic bursts of an hour or so, but as soon as it stops raining, everything dries up pretty fast.

The best time to visit Phuket is definitely during low season. It’ll rain from time to time, but you’ll still be able to enjoy your trip. Phuket weather is hot all the year round, too, so the rain is usually refreshing.

I like the weather in Phuket far more than in Bangkok, mostly because when it rains the streets don’t tend to flood so much.