gharknes

Platinum is Chinese junk!

and Harley's not far behind it

http://www.goingfaster.com/angst/noharley2.html

6 month drugs crackdown operation announced by the Pattaya Police Chief.

We begin this report with a press conference at Pattaya Police Station led by Police Colonel Nopadon, the acting-Chief of Pattaya Police. He announced the arrest of a man and woman in two separate cases.

A total of 500 Yabba Tablets and 13g of Crystal met-amphetamine known locally as “Ya-Ice” was seized. Khun Pakarapong aged 25 was arrested on Pattaya Third Road in front of the Moom Aroy Restaurant after an informant gave Police information that this male suspect was carrying drugs with intent to sell.

The second case involved the arrest of Khun Prannee aged 44 in the Car Park of the Ruamchork Condominium on the Pratamnak Road in South Pattaya after the successful culmination of an undercover operation.

During the press conference the Colonel announced that Pattaya must see a reduction in drug-related crime and he has initiated a 6 month eradication program which begun in May to combat criminals who engage in narcotic crimes.

This was stressed at a later meeting at the Town-in-Town Hotel in Central Pattaya where the Colonel addressed his officers. We understand that the Undercover Unit have been given strict instructions to concentrate on drug crimes and have been issued with targets which they must meet in the next six months.

Also at this meeting, the local journalist attacked in the recent case which left one Pattaya Police Volunteer dead was given a monetary donation to aid his rehabilitation.

Source: Pattaya City News - Wednesday 7th June 2006

I wonder how Brit missed this one... ?

"crack" down love it

be very very carefull with unearthed mains appliances in Thailand, I have had several incidents with my own stuff, my mains tester glows on nearly every thing I touch it on, I have had several small shocks that where limited because I was not earthed very well........very different story if I had been earthed, you wouldn't be reading this......240 mains is lethal in most cases if you are well earthed, it makes me very very nervous not having that 3rd connection to appliance chassis or metal work.

I wonder do Thais have the same level of expertise for aircraft maintenance as they do for the communication infrastructure, lift servicing etc etc, makes me cringe just thinking about it

If you read the main thread on this subject in "Thailand News Clippings", you will see that a preponderance of 'inside' information suggests that the prime motive behind this crackdown is aimed at curbing farang developers.

Indeed, it would seem that the source of all the trouble was a particularly aggrieved Thai developer in the Hua Hin area who was unable to sell his houses, whereas the local farang developer was selling his like hot cakes. Whether this is true or not, if you read the translation of the memo issued by the Ministry of Interior, it seems clear that developers are the target, not individual land owners. The issue is more the illegality of farang controlled companies setting up business as land developers, which is a prohibited business, rather than any percieved illegality in the ownership of houses through farang controlled companies. As the land office officials have no real way of determining who is a developer and who is an individual owner, and as their jobs may be on the line, all transfers involving farang controlled companies have been frozen. A majority of 'informed' opinion thinks that this freeze will be relaxed after a period of time. They want to get rid of the developers, not the house owners.

In the meantime, it would appear that there is nothing to stop a farang selling his house, by selling the shares in his company to another farang, and indeed there is one developer I have heard about in Pattaya who has separate companies for each house, and he plans to sell his houses in this way. Even a lawyer has said that this would be an acceptable route - but they would, wouldn't they?

Others are advocating 100% Thai nominee shareholders, and then transferring the shares to a farang, after the ownership of the land has been registered at the land office. This could be a highly dubious practice, not least because the land office may not accept the Thai shareholder company in the first place - after all, why would Thais form a companies to buy a house?

There has been a rumour posted in another forum that Thaksin is against this latest crackdown, and that business will be back to normal on Monday. Maybe wishful thinking, we shall see.

In the meantime, I would advise individual house owners, me being one, not to panic, and not to rush out and transfer or sell your house. I think the best plan is to let the dust settle for a few weeks and see the 'lie of the land' (no pun intended ). There will be plenty of time later to transfer the house into the wife's name, or whatever if they start investigating all these thousands of companies - which I personnaly am convinced they won't. (But I could be wrong).

Although this action may have some short to medium term affect on house prices, I for one would be happy if the excesses of the farang land developers are now curbed. We have empty housing estates all over the place full of mainly crap-built houses, and on top of that we even have farang speculators, who were buying and selling at a profit.

I don't think too many of us have settled in Thailand to see this sort of thing going on around us - that's what we hoped to get away from. The worst of them have done very little for the benefit of Thailand, and have probably put back even the slightest chance of farangs being able to legally own even a tiny piece of land, for years, if not decades, by their gross behaviour.

excellent post Mobi..............greedy western developers spoiling it for everyone

greedy just became nightmare..............

want to buy a property to live in.....fine

want to buy land and build lots of properties for extreme profits.....think again, foreign realestate just took a 180

i hope they investigate existing owners and apply the rules retrospect

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?sh...36entry768136

about time, greedy farang has spoiled it for everyone, why on earth would a farang want to own lots of land and property

this is just the start, watch them wipe out existing foreign large property and land owners

Pattaya Fox - why would you want to own lots of land and property ?? you can only live in one house at a time

I think eventually you will be allowed to retire here and maybe invest in retirement home if you meet certain criteria, why should you be allowed anything above that in a foreign country, greed has just turned to pain, watch the cheap property appear on the market now.

Jomtien you are 100% right

this is not about the individual Farang buying land and a house, it's about foreign conpanies/organisations buying the land from Thais and building on it to make profit, it seems that the capitalistic style is getting less popular with the locals, quite understandable if you ask me

just stupid, they don't want tourists that drink

what a lot of children run this country

another point

not only is it difficult to make calls but once connected the voice quality has gone also, they seem have narrowed the bandwidth to an absolute minimum, if find it difficult to understand the other person it is so bad.

must be like the QE2 anchor, 2 million baht ??????

Be honest now. Were you speeding?

I will not comment on a pending case...

Update:

As I haven't heard back from the BiB (as expected....) the secretary called this morning and asked to either provide evidence or send the driving license back to me. They will now send me a print of the picture that also shows the speed and other details.

..to be continued...

paintshop is wonderful

a 12sec 1/4 mile is fast, sub 11sec for a car is very rare unless heavily modified, sub 10sec - 600bhp upwards, standard big bikes can do sub 10sec unmodified

open shockwave player if you have it - if not install it, do file open and point to the file you cannot play in media player, if ok then go to the file hold the shift key down and right click, select "open with" the select shockwave, click the "always open with" box

the link only covers ..Windows Mobile powered... it is not the complete range available or in my opinion the best choice

also note......pocket PC's or PDA's are OK for data usage but are not good phones, the SE 910 is probably the best all rounder and has been for some time

I have one of these and i'm very happy with it

http://www.welectronics.com/gsm/Sony_Ericsson_P910.html

PS internet browsing on a small device will always be a challenge simply because of screen size, the P910 has a full HTML browser, it has memory capability of 2GB at any one time, you can have full length movies mp3's photos etc on the memory card, you can have multiple cards so the memory is limitless

another request for help. when I top up my one2call card with 300Baht, the expiry date moves forward 1 month. since I am leaving the country next week and still have over 1000 Baht on my card valid until July, I would have to input 3 more 300 Baht cards to make sure the minutes are still valid to October when I return.

yes - grab a 1000bht fill card.

is there a way to re activate my account once the minutes are expired?

No one once the number expires - will be thrown back into the available number pool.

just give someone your sim card and a few hundred baht and ask the to use now and again provided u want to keep your number, or just get a new sim when you return

The height of the wave is not the main risk, we think of waves as pointy walls of water that roll onto the beach, a tsunami wave might only be a meter high at the front but it might go back 1000's of meters, that's a lot of water moving very quickly, i hope it never happens

I have seen some beautifull places in Thailand that would have been better suited to tourism than places like Pattaya, apart from the rising crime rate pattaya beaches are a health hazzard, in all the time i have lived here I have never once put so much as a toe in the water in Pattaya or Jomtien, the island is cleaner but it's a boat trip away, although I must say I do like the day out in Koh Larn

forgot to mention

I have also noticed recently that the quality of audio has reduced to an almost intolerable level, it is difficult to talk to the other person even if you can get connected

how can the network phone operators be forced into fixing all theses issues, it's going to reach a stage where the mobile network is unusable .. what then ?

I actually thought it was pretty funny. Put your humour cap on.

Then you're obviously not reading this forum, because this so-called joke has been cracked ad -nauseum, and in any event, I doubt that he said it to be funny.

If he wanted to be funny, he could at least have the wherewithal to say something original.

hey mobi, don't take this the wrong way but you do seem to be constantly critical of people here as opposed to what they write, are you the current holder of the big forum spoon, perhaps the guy himself can explain whether his post was intended funny or not.

also telling the next chap quote "Then you're obviously not reading this forum" of course he's reading this forum...we all are, why would you tell him differently, what is your agenda here, telling people what they should think or what they are thinking, or the way they should be thinking, it seems you have a habit of asserting yourself.............just my observation, not looking for confrontation, maybe it's what you like..confrontation, try not to get so personal with people, your opinion when on topic is most welcome, i enjoy reading most of your posts until you get critical of people, perhaps you can read over what i have said then have a think about it.

An excellent post Mobi. I am a staunch supporter of Camillian Centre Orphanage run in Rayong by Father Giovanni.

However I do not mind donating to a charity a little closer to home in addition. Apart from the obvious trip to the Street Kids Orphanage in Pattaya do you know of a way in which one can donate online, or a payment from my bank directly to theirs?

I assume as with Rayong; clothes, toys, bikes and the like will be eagerly appreciated as well, when I have time to make a visit there also.

Thanks for the offer Chopper.

Please bear with me. The charity is based in the Uk, and as you can see from their annual report they channel their money and help through a number of local causes, all connected with impoverished kids in Pattaya. I do have a local contact number - but I had to send an email to England to get it.

I think this charity is missing out big time by not publicising themselves over here and soliciting local contributions, help etc, from both local resident farangs and visitors/tourists.

Maybe they think that the local farangs wouldn't be interested in helping.

I will see what response we get on this forum before deciding which way to go on this.

It would be nice to call the guy in the Uk and tell him I have been inundated with offers of help, and he needs to set something up over here to channel the offers

Lets see what the next few days brings

In the meantime, you can a better idea of what they're all about on their somewhat limited website.

The link is:

http://www.pattayastreetkids.homestead.com/navig1.html

Click on images, then click on "Pod - the inspiration for this project"

and "Abandoned in Pattaya" - a 3 year old child.

(Downloading of pics is forbidden form this site)

If those pics don't tug at your heart strings you are a hard person indeed.

admirable work, what's your involvement mobi........sorry if i missed it in your posts.

I don't think you quite get it. If news about Pattaya were to include all the murders, bashings and general mayhem among the Thai side of the population we'd be inundated with crime stories. I doubt Pattaya would ever recover.

Ahhhh, but most (if not all) the attention here (Thai Visa) is focused on events involving farangs. That is what makes it seem so bad to those that don't see the big picture. To them, it seems that all the crime and mayhem is directed at/involves farangs. It seems only farangs get whacked, jump from balconies, get busted with drugs and so on.

By showing other stories, these people can maybe get the impression that it isn't all about farangs. The reality is, stories involving farangs are only a small part of the daily/weekly news. Showing a broader range of stories (good and bad) would make people realize that farangs aren't the exclusive target of every criminal in Thailand. They might realize that farangs are no more or less the target of criminals than anyone else.

The way things get reported (or not reported) now, it can make some people think only bad things happen to farangs here, which is far from the truth.

keryyd, the big picture as someone mentioned before would be appauling, yes people here are mostly interested in crime concerning farang, which appears to be growing, i think the overall trend for the area is on the increase

Here in Isaan, AIS to AIS sucks late afternoon onwards.

What worries me is that if one has to make an urgent call or even life threatening. constant drones of 'Network Busy' is hardly consoling.

Its one thing having a phone for leisure puposes to chat to mates but what about serious business.

What can we, as the consumer do about it though?

Is the only option to change networks ? - Out of the frying pan into the fire !

regonal congestion on one network is a different problem to the one above, I can call AIS to AIS 100% without any issue, your problem us purely one of capacity within the AIS network in your area, the problem of inter-network connection is completely different, each network operator allocates a number of gateways that allow incomming or outgoing connections to other networks, they can even be specific as to which network gets XX number of gateways.

i really do think this is a ploy by dtac to draw customers away from AIS, i can see how this would work, i nearly did it myself, this kind of activity would not be allowed in the west.

i think this is a very childish ploy initially by Dtac and now AIS, it almost worked with me, i call dtac number from AIS and it doesn't work, my friend on Dtac can call me no problem, I call AIS support and they say it isn't their problem, they blame dtac, so i get pissed off with AIS and tell them i am going to Dtac because they have no problems..........get the picture ? dtac get a shit load of AIS customers transferring to them because AIS is crap.

I think there is more to this than meets the eye, also this problem started very suddenly, the day after sokran in pattaya, it was like someone threw a switch, one day everything working, next day big problems, i have a couple of friends on dtac and would ring them every day, suddenly i just can't call them and it's been that way ever since...about one month. Networks gradually fail, they don't work 100% one day then fail 100% next day, something sinister is going on.

This is why we need a regulator, to stop this kind of nonsense and poor service