Gsxrnz

A client of one of my businesses at home regularly visits Thailand to conduct "business". He exports product out of Thailand.

He visits suppliers and agents all the time and I assist him.

Neither of us have work permits or B visas.

Regardless of the rules, the chances of either of us getting done are exponentially less than the odds of winning the Thai Lottery Jackpot.

If you have a calculator that goes to 30 decimal places you could probably calculate those odds.

Gave mine a drink of petrol yesterday.

Nice gas cap assembly - hope you don't get the bung swiped or the petrol syphoned.

You might want to consider having an internal chain/lock assembly (as in old school style chain) retro fitted as a deterrant to would be souveneir collectors.

Lots of bars around Patts will serve alcohol thinly disguised as coffee on voting days etc. But drinking beer out of a coffee cup is just wrong on so many levels.

Or some just pay whatever they have to and it's pretty much business as usual.

Advance voting this Saturday I believe, which will be interesting (booze wise) as the Pattaya Music Festival runs right through till Sunday.

The big question is......will she be happy working as cashier/reception doing 10-12 hours a day with maybe three days off a month and penalised for being sick, for the grand sum of circa 8,000 baht?

Would expire 90 days later - 24 June, which is a Tuesday. If it fell on a weekend, you go a day or two early.

Or the next working day is OK without penalty if a weekend or holiday, but you don't get any "free" days - they backdate to the actual due date.

"...but you don't get any "free" days - they backdate to the actual due date."

I think you’re confusing extensions of stay with 90 day reports.

​At Jomtien I always get 90 days from the day I report whether I come in a few days earlier or later than the indicated date stamped on my last report. They set the stamps in the morning and use them throughout the day and wouldn't bother to change the stamp for each different individual case. It is, after all, meant to be 90 days from your last report. So if you go in a few days later, you'll get a few "free days" if you want to call them that.

On the other hand with extensions of stay, they calculate the new extension individually starting from when your current one expires, so there's no loss of days when you get a new extension even if you come in 30 to 45 days early. If you’re doing annual extensions of stay, your next extension will always fall on the same month/date year after year.

No, I'm not confused about my experience at all. I've done 16 ninety day reports under different scenarios at Chonbiri Immigration.

Gone in a day or two/three early, I've "lost" those days and the next date reporting date is ninety days from the day I visited.

Go in on the exact due date, got 90 days.

Go in up to seven days late and the renewal date is ninety days from my previous expiry date - no "free" days. Same applies to weekends and holidays. I can recall twice where the reporting day was a Weekend and went in on a Monday and Tuesday - no free days.

They rotated their little stampy things as necessary.

If you're getting "free" days as you describe, it's certainly not been my experience thus far.

I'd be interested in other opinions on this, knowing that every office and every employee can loosely interpret the rules, let's hear what others have experienced.

Would expire 90 days later - 24 June, which is a Tuesday. If it fell on a weekend, you go a day or two early.

Or the next working day is OK without penalty if a weekend or holiday, but you don't get any "free" days - they backdate to the actual due date.

Yawn - sounds pretty much like all the pre-1999 (Y2K) hype.

"HURRY ! Buy our product NOW or airplanes will start falling from the skies, pacemakers will explode in you chest and we'll all be back in the Stone Age come 1 Jan 2000 ! Hurry and buy our guaranteed upgrade before it's too late !"

So much frikken BS hype that people like myself (and others in uniform) spent New Years Eve 1999 manning emergency response centers "just in case". Some software companies made a bundle selling useless upgrades for a problem the computing industry knew existed literally from the day the first PCs and OSs were sold (banks knew about the "00" date issue as far back as 1975 when they were amortizing 25 year mortgages).

Now what we have is MS in a bind because nobody likes their "new and improved" OS and, surprise-surprise, hardly ANYONE wants their computer to look/act like their frikken phone. The only way they can get people to buy the new system (so they can try to recoup all those wasted development costs) is to stop supporting older, more popular versions of their software.

It is unlikely that just because MS stops supporting the software on 8 Apr that hackers are lining up with hacks that for some reason will suddenly work that same day. And I'll bet a lot of companies are balking at upgrading to Windows 7 when 8 is out and 9 is coming soon. But that's a part of the whole marketing plan. Just like it is with PCs themselves.

Not long after I bought my first 286 they came out with a 386 chip. It was all the "rage" and soon all new software and games would only work on that chip, not the "slightly" older 286. I resisted upgrading mainly because I'd just read an article mentioning that the 486 "Pentium" chip was already in mass production, and "they" had a 586 chip ready to go once the sales of 486 chip equipped machines started to sag.

And that lit a very large light bulb. They had the more advanced tech ready to go, but deliberately held it back until sales of the older tech had slowed down to a certain degree, indicating that the majority of the consumers had upgraded to that level already. Then they bring out the newer chip so everyone is forced to upgrade again, sometimes barely months after just having upgraded previously !

MS is pretty much doing the same. Bring out a new OS when they see the sales of previous versions is slowing down. Write the OS so that most older programs are no longer compatible (meaning software developers have to redo their programs to be compatible, which means you have to buy the new OS in order to keep running the upgraded versions of software you already have and was working fine before). If Win 9 is shipping now, then they probably have Win 10 queued up in the production lines and Win 11 is probably getting it's pre-production QA checks and final polishing.

If financial institutes are reluctant to upgrade to newer versions of Windows, MS has no one to blame but itself, for continuously releasing such buggy versions of it's software that they require constant patching and upgrades to keep them going. Banks do not want to have to be upgrading the software in their huge ATM chains every week (or more often) and risking their machines crashing frequently (which would of course drive customers to use other bank's ATMs). Not to mention that every frikken new version of the OS that comes out would require them to buy 10s of thousands of new licences.

Unfortunately, until someone comes out with a better system (no, not Linux), one that is better in every way than windoze and easy for people to switch over to, we are stuck with what we have.

Ah.....those were the days. I still remember when I asked the computer shop to upgrade my new 386 to 1 meg of memory from the standard 640k. The guy asked my why the hell I wanted a "super computer" with so much RAM.

The monthly "honest taxi driver" news article is late this month.

You'll need to loosen off the upper and lower triple tree clamps on your forks and reset to square. Tighten the bolts in a sequential pattern on a gradual rotation cycle. As you get tension on the bolts, bounce the suspension between each cycle to ensure straightness.

The bars mounts themselves may be twisted in which case loosen and reset to square the clamps. Once you're satisfied the forks are in alignment and the bar centre itself is in alignment (irrespective if the bar ends are in the "right" place), square up the bar ends by removing the grips and inserting a steel rod/bar to push/pull as appropriate for straightness.

The more interesting question is why it is so important to limit the stay of "tourists" in a country that offers absolutely no welfare benefits for these "tourists"?

I asked my boss today what he thought of somehow limiting the spending of the companys customers, perhaps by limiting the amount of consecutive orders the customers can place, or perhaps ensure that inbetween orders to our company, they also place orders with competing companies. I am still waiting for his reply, but hope my idea will finally make him consider that promotion I have waited for so long.

Your boss would simply increase his prices to compensate for reduced custom - simple!

The bus ride to the croc farm was probably 2,000% more dangerous than sitting on the croc.

When you ride a bike of any kind, it's not a matter of "if" you're gonna have a prang, it's "when".

Also, the bastard that hits you is the one you never see coming and it doesn't matter how defensive you are - Murpy's Law.

Friend of mine was standing beside his parked bike outside a 7/11 putting his helmet on. Somchai on a scooter loses control passing a truck, wipes out three parked bikes and leaves my mate with cracked ribs, broken shoulder, and facial injuries. Go figure.

I'm on Sophon in Jomtien - no problems and everything is the same (crap) speed that it usually is.

I am no doctor...but based on my recent experience I would strongly suggest getting vaccinated. The chickenpox virus (Herpes Zoster) never leaves your system once contracted, but stays incubated in your nerve ganglia. If your immune system becomes compromised later in your life it can reinstate itself as Shingles. I came down with Pneumonia last August and then before I could recover came down with Facial Shingles as my immune system had been compromised by the sickness and the meds (prednisone), something I would never, ever wish anyone to experience.

As a side note, there is an immunization for Shingles also....sure wish I would have had one!

Ditto your thoughts on facial shingles . Got me on the left side of the face (apparently that is a common trait of the disease, only goes for one side) about 10 years ago and took the doctors in a NZ hospital 4 days to figure out what it was. In the meantime they pumped me full of IV antibiotics thinking it was some sort of weird infection, they even did a CT scan. And then a worldly old doctor wandered past and asked the nurse why they were pumping me full of antbiotics when I clearly had shingles - a viral infection.

He dressed down the young diagnosing doctor and told me sorry, just have to suffer through for 10 more days or so as nothing can be done. It took 14 days before I looked enough unlike Elephant Man to go out in public.

I was later tiold by him that if I ever sense any sort of tingling on my face or nose, accompanied by small weeping blisters, that it was the shingles returning and if I can get anti viral medication within 48 hours then the shingles will either be stopped or severely reduced in its action.

I've never had it since - but I know what to look for. So OP, if it's possible you may have had CP and sense any tingling on your face (started on my nose), get to a doctor.

The variety of table potato grown here is called Spunta. Not sure, but I think it originated in China. You're not going to get the classic varieties that we get in our respective Faranglands. I don't think the temperatures and general growing conditions are suited to them - even up north.

It would be nice to find some King Edwards, Ilam Hardy, Jersey Benne or Russet Burbank....but it ain't gonna happen.

The local spuds are a bit on the sweet side but are great when mashed - just add a little milk and don't add any butter. Sour cream and salt dulls down the sweetness of a roasted spud for me.

It's a euphemism for whatever "your" particular angle on the "typical" Thai male is.

So it can be used favourably or derogaritively depending on the context used. In NZ or Oz we might say either "some prick", or "good bastard" meaning your typical bloke that did something either very bad or bery good.

Yeah, it means "John Smith" but whoever actually uses that phrase in real life.....except a genuine John Smith?

It doesn't matter where you eat in Thailand - The biggest restaurant or the smallest street stall, the hygiene conditions the food is prepared in and the supply chain of the food from farm to restaurant is abysmal (sorry for the understatement).

But, you have to eat, so take the usual precautions and at least try and buy/eat at the cleanest "looking" places. It doesn't really help, but you will feel as though you're at least trying.

Um....was at a big mall recently considering a big brand burger. Was inspecting the menu and salivating over a whopper burger (that's a giveaway) when I noticed Somchai in the food assembly area with his thumb up his nose. He then promptly gathered a bun, slapped on a pattie etc. and then the top bun. All with no gloves.

Even training provided by the big brands didn't stop his thumb getting up his nose, so I would second guess that the priority at his last toilet visit was popping a pimple and greasing his hair - as opposed to washing his hands.

i sold a house for 2 million in cash to a young policeman

Can I please have my 400 Baht back?