Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is quite beautiful. I found an MP3 of it somewhere on mp3.com a couple of years ago. According to the ID3 tag it’s by the SRachmaninoff artist. I have no idea if they’re still around, though.

I’ve been trying to find the 1992 edition of William Kuo’s Teaching Grammar of Thai, with no luck. I wrote Berkeley (the publisher) and they said it’s been out of print for several years and they haven’t a clue where copies might be found. Well, I suppose I must resign myself to using the 1982 edition the BYU library has, unless I can miraculously find a copy at some used bookstore somewhere in this country… I ordered Mary Haas’s Thai dictionary (1964 edition, which seems to be the best) a few days ago.

My Thai dictionary just arrived. It’s pretty cool — it used to be a Berkeley library copy. I’ll find much more use out of it once I know some Thai, though.

I learned six more Thai consonants and four more vowels. And reviewed the stuff I learned yesterday. It’s coming along quite well. I can read the letters with almost perfect accuracy, and I remember how to write them most of the time. I’m starting to find myself in the midst of the low/middle/high class rankings and how they affect syllable tone and all that fun stuff. Right now it seems like an awful lot to remember, but I’m sure I’ll get more familiar with it and before long it’ll be second nature. In fact, I’ve already picked up which sounds a syllable can end with (k, p, t, m, n, ng, w, y, and any of the vowels). And I didn’t even try to learn it. That’s good. The language is going quite well so far, better than I hoped.

Turns out someone (Zachary Landau) was already working on a Linux Distributed Proofreaders client. He hasn’t touched the project since March, though, so he’s letting me try my hand at it. It’ll be a good summer project.