The time has arrived.

My plane departs in six hours.

Enough Haiku, yes?

“December 2011″

From Glimpses of Thailand, posted by Pat Hastings III on 1/04/2012 (49 items)

Generated by Facebook Photo Fetcher

Well… in case you were wondering, I’m still alive.

I suppose I could give a day-by-day synopsis of the last 2 weeks, but to be honest, when I read those kinds of blog posts I normally get bored rather quickly.

So here are the highlights.

I’ve…

• …officially been in Thailand for 2 weeks + 2 hours.
• …attended an extremely ornate traditional Thai wedding.
• …visited all kinds of factories, farms, and temples (alone and with others).
• …beheld an incredible fireworks display that broke the Guinness Book of Records.
• …enjoyed the biggest holiday of the year which celebrated the King of Thailand’s 84th birthday.
• …seen tons of family including my grandma who’s as spunky as ever (even more than last year).
• …slowly been uploading pictures to Facebook as I find the time. You can see the public album here.
• …traveled primarily across Central Thailand so far, including: (A) Bangkok, (B) U-Thong, (C) Suphan Buri, (D) Ayutthaya, (E) Saraburi, and (F) Pattaya.

See the full-screen map

Last note: My Uncle Charlie died here in Thailand a couple of days ago rather unexpectedly. I had the chance to spend time with him just before he passed away. His funeral will be on Thursday, the day after my parents and sister arrive in Thailand.

Please pray for the extended family here and that we would be able to use this time to share our faith effectively.

2 Weeks Down. Still 4 More to Go!

Thailand - Suay Mak!

…I’ll be on my way…

back to Thailand

Thailand!

Last Day of Work...

…at Castle Media Group.

It’s been good, but life must go on. I fly out to Thailand in 10 days, and I move to Lubbock in January for my new job with the Texas Home School Coalition.

Well, you may have noticed over the weekend that my posting schedule has slowed down.

The next 9 days will be really busy for me – mainly a combination of finishing my work with Castle Media Group (November 23rd), wrapping up my school semester (December 2nd), and preparing for my flight to Thailand (December 3rd).

In the meantime, I was fortunate enough tonight to join the beta of a new WordPress translation plugin that adds support for 4 new languages to the site.

French

German

Spanish

Thai

If you can read any of the above 4 languages then just click on the relevant flag at the top of the page and tell me what you think of the translation.

Yesterday’s post about uber computer viruses has inspired my inner-geek.

As of yesterday morning some of my code now resides in (potentially) 19,000 websites across the globe.

Details

There’s a WordPress plugin called WooCommerce that was released out of beta a few months ago. I found a bug in it, submitted a path on GitHub and yesterday morning the latest version of the plugin (including my patch) was released into the wild.

WooCommerce Patch on GitHub

My Patch

…on GitHub

Where?

If you download the plugin you’ll see my code here:

woocommerce/admin/writepanels/writepanel-product_data.php

WooCommerce Code

Contributors

I’m a legit contributor now!

>> extra nerd points <<

WooCommerce Contributors

WooCommerce

…is a powerful e-commerce plugin for WordPress that I’ve been using at work for the last several weeks. Hands-down it surpasses all of the other WordPress commerce plugin solutions that I’ve come across the last 3 years.

Experience

A couple months ago we began developing a e-commerce site for a client. At the time the most popular plugin on the market was WP e-Commerce (abbreviated as WPEC – I’m only linking to warn you not to use them).

After beginning development on the site with WPEC I began to realize that it frankly stank. The plugin was buggy (especially the permalinks), the code obtuse, the documentation miserable, and their plugin support was virtually non-existent.

By the time WooCommerce was launched in late September, I was already looking for new e-commerce solutions. After making the decision to switch it took us 2 full days of coding to convert the site from WPEC to WooCommerce.

Excellence

We’ve now been using WooCommerce for the last 20 days and I’ve never looked back.

The code is cleaner and very robust, the documentation is fantastic, and the plugin is well-supported.

This is how plugins should be made.

This blog has been hijacked by Paul’s sister Christina to bring you this important announcement:

Paul is 22!!!!!

If you think Paul is cool, incredible, tech-savvy, and smart, well…you’re right. Paul is a lot like cheese–he gets better with age. To commemorate this momentous, thrilling, almost-scary occasion, I wrote more words about Paul here and made an infographic about one of Paul’s favorite subjects: himself.

Just got back from skydiving this morning! Can’t believe I just did that!

The wind, the rush, the height… Man! It was just crazy awesome!

>>>>> :insert more exclamation marks: <<<<<

I already bought my ticket for next year.

Some Skydiving Girls

Yes. That's me.

The Skydiving Crew

From left to right: Cassandra Voss (spectator/photgrapher), Christi Voss, Bethany Malone, Kristina Fowl, Rachel Malone, yours truly, and Sarah Tipton

Kudos to the 6 gals who went. Yall did awesome.

For those suffering from envy…

Do it. Choose tandem. We flew with Skydive San Marcos.

9:30 AM.

For real.

Buzz Lightyear - "Falling With Style"

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!