Led Lolly Yellow Lolly

I take back that I said you're a clown

Any customer that can pay the bill is 'valued' You think I'm dense? It's just basic market conditions. We put prices up in our hotel over New Year and we're always full. So what. Dense??? LOL, clown.

Is that like the greedy and infantile happy hour?

Clearly they were just giving you the answer that would make you go away.

You're not paying for the beer, you're paying for the location. Personally I have no gripes with paying 3 x 7Eleven rate for a beer if I'm staying at a nice hotel. They're there to make money, this is something I understand and anyone that turns their nose up at that should simply sleep in their car. . . If I'm in a bar I'll gladly pay more for my beer if the tits and @r$e are up to snuff.

Why pay for it yourself when you can get a bunch of suckers on the internet to indemnify you.

I wouldn't say the insurers 'did the dirty' in the hypothetical scenario I describe. If a traveller gets insurance and then the insured goes juggling loaded and cocked revolvers, I see it as entirely reasonable the insurer considers their shareholders instead.

There is no mention of insurance in the above linked article. I've been trying to think of reasons the insurance wouldn't payout. Using a motorcycle for example, which are often on the list of specifically excluded activities. As that's clearly not the case here, 'free spirited' personality, 'life and soul of the party' suggests that perhaps the insurance company (assuming he had insurance) got hold of the toxicology report from the hospital. Don't get me wrong, I had my wild days, and I came to Thailand while still young enough to enjoy that, I know what they involve. At 44 though, you're pushing your luck.

Travel insurance is cheap, a mere fraction of a percent of the overall cost of travel. Do your family a favour and buy it before boarding. His family will almost certainly read this. Sorry for your loss, 44 is no age to die. . . Send him up the chimney in Thailand. He'll be home for Christmas.

Both nice little motors, I keep a Swift in the boot of my car in case I break down

The entire Thai IP space is indeed a cesspool of bots and malware. I don't have to tell you why of course, Thais think their phone number is an awesome password, where they even bother with a password.

Thais call anything that squirts 'silicone', even if it's acrylic. There are different silicones for different purposes, but most tradesmen use anything for anything. The acrylic caulks generally shrink and crack because they're usually mixed cheap filler products to bulk them out and they're not suitable for this. Silicone will work but you use loads of it to fill the gap, it's awkward and acetic cure silicones will stink for days. . . The correct product is PU foam. You can get it from anywhere. The cheaper ones will work fine, less than a hundred Baht on Lazada.

He almost certainly got those flip flops caught under the pedal. It's the flip flops' fault.

Since your question is not actually rhetorical I'll answer it. . . They block overseas IPs because there is no advantage to them serving content outside Thailand. The disadvantage of them allowing any IP is depletion of server resources, mostly scraper bots and attackers. Blocking of this kind is very common and reasonable. They will be allowing search engine bots through the firewall.

My family and I live in a large hotel. We have a nice bar, a restaurant, I can drink or eat anything I want 24/7. Steak, Vanilla ice cream, coconut ice cream, wash it down with a Singha. . . Fortunately I have good self control and I only drink once, maybe twice a week, but it's easy to see how someone prone to addiction might fall into the alcohol trap in an environment like this. . . This started happening to me a couple of years ago in my late 40s, only a little but it's started. My BMI remains in the 'ideal' range, but my jeans are getting tighter. I started making myself walk the long way to and from work. I also started walking up and down flights of stairs, even though I have no need to walk up and down them. So far it's keeping the spread limited.

Perhaps my wallet is active because I have a True Money Wallet AND my Krungsri credit card linked to the Lazada account. . . but to say farangs can't have the wallet is just plain wrong. It's also wrong to say they force you to spend the balance on Lazada, I have cashed out to my bank account multiple times. It is what it is, and I am what I am i.e. a farang.

There was a time farangs couldn't have True Money Wallets too. That changed, so did Lazada. Referencing a 2 year old out of date topic isn't helpful.

I made nearly 1000 orders on Lazada. Only last week did I have my first issue, an order over 9000 Baht. The seller failed to deliver, although I paid with credit card... Lazada were great IMO. They suspended the seller, then erased them. They refunded my money to Lazada Wallet, it was trivial to cash it out to my bank account. Took less than 12 hours to appear in my account. I'm a farang.

Is this satellite hub in retrograde or antegrade orbit around the mother hub of hubba hubs?

Any hospital, even the local anamai will have anti-venins. I disagree about the risk of being bitten. If you're a city slicker, yes, the risk is vanishingly small. . .. but I can tell you for sure, I'm the highest risk farang in Thailand for snake bites. You'd have to know me to know why. I'm not some jerk amateur herpetologist, I'm just working in a very high risk environment. The snake responsible for most bites are the green Pit Vipers. People tend to look to the ground for snakes, neglecting the risk from trees. Most bites from Thai snakes are survivable, many cause serious illness and permanent damage. . . but If you get bitten by a Blue Krait, you're really in big trouble.

I'll read it when I have time. . . but I figured all this out because years ago we were losing some really costly equipment every year during the rainy season (IT stuff, Cisco, Juniper, $$$$$$$$). Eventually I realised it was lightning travelling between buildings via ground rods, making it's way into ethernet cabling between the buildings. The cost of replacing this stuff every year was crucifying us. . . To fix it I had the choice of bonding the grounds (lots of digging between buildings, lots of money) or replacing everything with fibre optics. I took the latter route. In any case, it doesn't matter, lightning hitting the ground nearby causes massive step potential. Google around and you can find images of cows killed in fields. They were electrocuted by the voltage difference between their feet. . . So you're kludge ground is never safe, for this reason, and other reasons of touch voltage safety... and as I point out in my previous post, your neutral will be grounded somewhere upstream. There are also codes on bonding metallic pipes to ground, but I never had to look into that and I don't know much about it. Plastic is king here.

More than one ground rod will never be safe unless they're bonded together with thick heavy cable. The thick heavy cable locks them at the same potential. Lightning SHOULD travel through the thick heavy cable rather than the internal wiring (if it's straight and direct, lightning has an extremely high frequency/rise profile and can arc across bends in cables). If the lightning gets into the house somehow (e.g. un-bonded rods make that happen), it's trivial for it to jump between ground and neutral connections internally (think about it, LNG connections on circuit boards are just a millimetre or two apart. Even if there's no ground, the lightning will find it's way to ground via the neutral bond further upstream). . . People tend to think about ground connections being for human safety, which is true, but most circuit boards on most equipment have MOVs on them as a last line of defense against surges and they're often arranged in a manner designed to drain surges to the ground connection, but obviously this all falls apart if the ground connection is either not there, or not optimal. Experienced, yes. . . formally qualified, no, so bear that in mind when reading any of my posts.

This is where we stay whenever visiting CM, they have a nice Club Floor which we use. It may not seem like it but the Meridian is well located. Like other hotels that are busy at this time, they have the location and the facilities local business travellers need, why they get the trade. If any tourists are coming to the north for relaxation, they'll surely come before the worst of the smoke season, which is already gathering momentum.

I figured out long ago that when my wife says no, she means yes, and vice versa. I just apply the same logic to indicators and driving. In both cases it's kept me alive so far.