Led Lolly Yellow Lolly

I sometimes have a low axillary temperature reading. Don't worry (assuming a doctor says don't worry). I once took my wife to hospital over her hypotension, I've never once seen her go above 90/60, most of the time below that. She was dizzy from time to time, but the doctor said some people are just like that, don't worry. I sure wish my BP was as low as hers.

6 hours ago, Pilotman said:

Covid 19 and associated return Visa issues,  make leaving Thailand, to plan to return  later, problematic at best , especially for those of us of advanced years, I have actually reconciled myself to maybe never leaving Thailand again, at least not for a number of years. Considering all the advantages of living here, I am happy with that future, provided my kids can come and visit occasionally. I don't expect to see them in person  any time in the next one to two years, which is sad, but WhatsApp helps a lot. Most of my friends here are equally happy to contemplate never leaving.  I wonder how wide spread that feeling in among longer term expats? 

I'm very fortunate that I live and work here with my wife and kids. I'm really, REALLY lucky actually. Covid hasn't really affected my life at all, I have more in my intray than ever. My current TM.6 card has been stapled into my passport for 7 years. I can whinge and moan somewhere else, or I can whinge and moan here. Here seems fine for whinging and moaning. I'll whinge and moan here.

On 5/1/2019 at 4:51 PM, frodo77 said:

You are basing it just on your own experience. I have been speaking with several people and my comment is not based just on my own experience.

I've been dealing with CR immigration for 20+ years. It's not so long ago there was no immigration office in Chiang Rai city, it was Mae Sai or bust, so counter-intuitively you might consider the A Bor Jor office to be a satellite office of Mae Sai (actually I think that might really be the case but I don't know (or care)). About your post, while I have generally found immigration here to be a pleasure to deal with in comparison to other provinces (if you can ignore the fact that the permission to stay extension process is like peeling your own skin off), I've not been to the A Bor Jor office for a few years now after a particularly unpleasant experience. Maybe she was having a bad day, or on her period, but I swore I'd never go there again, and that's when I started doing my reporting by post, or online, just to avoid the place and the people. I always go to Mae Sai now for my annual extensions, just like I did back in the day before the CR City office existed. Bear in mind, you might go to one or the other office and be dealing with the same IOs (staff cover, training etc). Both offices equidistant for me in any case, so I couldn't care less. Wherever you go, one year they'll make you fill in the form in black ink, the next they'll make you fill it all in again in blue, because the rules, or the hormones, changed. Suck it up.

Just to add to the comments above, the best place to find detailed information about an IP for most casual users is https://whois.domaintools.com or if you want something basic or in in Thailand https://myip.shaw.co.th/th/ noting that with the plethora of IP revealing websites often get it wrong due to relying on different IP database sources. Google have been trying to develop their own country/IP database which a number of websites use, and it's garbage. For example, when I use my Singapore IP space, these websites tell me I'm in Canada, sometimes The Philippines. The Maxmind GeoIP database is the one to use.

Note that in almost all cases, the city location given for an IP can be ignored, it's nearly always wrong. The IP I use right now says I'm in Chiang Rai, but sometimes the same connection says I'm in Songkhla, or Bangkok, or whatever. The only accurate city level information is on USA IP data, most if not all others can only be relied upon for country level geolocation, and even then there are some exceptions, as noted above. Often datacentres will buy IP space from another country and use it in an inappropriate location, why you have to take location information from VPN IPs with a grain of salt.

There was a time when people in the UK couldn't watch the BBC iPlayer if they had a connection from AOL. The ISP were so arrogant they transited the customers through USA IP space, causing the iPlayer to geoblock, even though the customers really were in the UK.

Just as a matter of curiosity, when you say 'house MOVs', what are (were?) you using and where?

About the light fittings, I get through tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of Baht per year replacing light fittings due to lightning. None of the brands, even Philips (ordinarily the most reliable brand IME) can't withstand nearby strikes. I wish I'd taken pictures of the floodlighting that got hit in October last year, they literally exploded. Internally, some of the old CFL luminaires we still had came apart sending glass showering down into reception and the toilets. I've had some luck protecting the more expensive light fittings with 3 MOVs per fitting in a delta between L, N and E but some transients are so massive nothing can really help you. We are very exposed and cover a large area of land, so we have worse luck than most. Lightning protection is a pet topic for me.

CAT always put asset tags/ID on anything they supply. Sometimes they want them back, sometimes they don't. I have a very expensive VoIP gateway sitting in a drawer for five years waiting for them to come collect it. The other providers don't care in my experience. It's usually cheap garbage. Anything they supply with a connection goes straight into a box and filed in the 'useless khrap' cupboard anyway as we use our own custom built pfSense gates. I think there are something like 20 or 30 old routers and GPON units uncollected at this time.

Static IPs are, and have always been, prohibitively expensive in Thailand. The best option at this time is from ToT, we have a block of 5 IPs on one of their business packages, something like 3000 Baht per month.

If you want or need to host at home, there are ways of doing so without static IP. I realise you said you don't want to use VPS because you need the server at home, but what you can do it masquerade the static IP that comes with your VPS through a secure tunnel (OpenVPN for example) to your house, even if you're behind a carrier grade NAT. This requires networking expertise, but if you don't have that expertise, you should reconsider your plans.

Contrary to popular assumptions, single mode fibre optic cores are so thin and flexible they can be tied in knots without breaking as long as it's kept in it's jacketing. There is also little detectable difference in attenuation if a 20 km fibre run is coiled up on it's drum, or pulled out straight. As for the above picture, I would personally criticise the installer for leaving the connections vulnerable to dust and grime penetration.

On 8/25/2020 at 2:06 PM, Crossy said:

IP65 would also give better mechanical protection, the bare LED strips are easily damaged (think cleaning operations).

The problem with a lot of the waterproof strips is the silicone/rubber compound used to encase the LEDs turns an ugly yellow, sometimes in just a few weeks. The quality of the light output therefore degrades very quickly. Amber/brown lighting is not pleasant.

The points system is for citizenship. I'm not aware of any points system for PR, other than one they may or may not use internally. Note that I'm not very familiar with the PR process, other than I know I qualify after a cursory glance. I've only studied citizenship in depth.

You heard wrong about not having kids, although they may consider it as part of their formation of the big picture of your application, and rightfully so. The system is geared towards those that work and pay taxes (not rightfully so IMO, I believe citizenship should be granted based on family ties, no other factors if that is the case but call me a hippy). Don't be guided by what you hear. Develop your strategies based on official information, these are life changing decisions (this is my point about applying for PR first even if you might not need to, it may be a good strategy if your points are borderline for citizenship). The internet is awash with nonsense information about this topic, particularly with regards to citizenship. The Thai Citizenship Act is freely available from official sources.

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Yes you can, but you'd have to be bloody stupid to apply for PR when you were entitled to apply for citizenship.

I've been looking at Citizenship for a long time now. I qualify, but for one reason or another I didn't get around to it. However, due to getting tired of the annual visits to immigration I started looking at it again recently, particularly in light of the fact it's a points based system and I'll start losing points when I hit 50 years of age. Even though it seems ar$e about tit to apply for PR when you can skip and go straight for citizenship, I've identified a couple of reasons to do so. Firstly, once you've submitted the PR application, visa extensions are just automatic during the waiting period i.e. no more hassles there, for many that's a big plus. Secondly, when it comes to citizenship application later, you score big points for being a PR holder, even if you don't need them, it can make up for point losses elsewhere.

Note also that PR fees for those applying in humanitarian category i.e. family, are significantly lower, under 100,000 I believe

6 minutes ago, Heppinger said:

  I describe Thai culture as family socialism, one in all in and no one left behind, and i wouldn't have it any other way.   

Ditto. I complain and whine like hell, as is my duty as a cranky old phvck, but I know, I'll never get left behind, no matter what. 

1 minute ago, Heppinger said:

why did you move back to Thailand with your family? sincere question

Business interests. I got sucked into the family business, like a black hole, only one way. I also have my own IT consultancy here. 

34 minutes ago, SteveK said:

Whatever foreigners believe, they should just remember that ultimately this is Thailand and not their country. Trying to be a militant social justice warrior won't achieve anything except maybe denial of your next visa application. 

Hmm well yes and no. My wife and stepdaughter are both naturalised British citizens. Before that came to be, I personally my daughter to question everything she was told by her British teachers, anyone on the street, anyone in civil service, in stark contrast to what she'd experienced in the first few years of life. Now, it wasn't her country of course, but would her questioning of what she was told have been less legitimate had her British stepfather not encouraged her to do so? Or, is she more entitled now after being registered British? Now we came back to Thailand, I am the only one in my entire family that doesn't have 2 passports. Even so, the rules, regulations and general bureaucracy directly affect not only my life, but the lives of my Thai wife and kids. Should I delegate the complaints to them it's only the effects on their lives that matter?

"Militant social justice warrior". . . come on man, really?

Like many early TV adopters, I realised too late that it is not a place to give up your anonymity. So, I nuked and moved on. Any more questions about my legitimacy can be addressed via PM.

I'm late into this topic but as others stated the weld is much more reliable than a bolt and clamp. In Thailand the weld kids are known locally as 'one shots' (You only get one chance). Personally I'll make them do it again if it's done so badly, no matter how inconvenient. It's the prescribed method when the connection is to be buried, but I hate buried ground rods, really hate it. The out of sound out of mind attitude prevails here, but it makes inspection impossible.

We had lightning rods installed on one of our tall buildings, connected to 4 triangles of 3xground rods at each corner of the building. He buried the one shots welds, which hid the fact they were done so badly. I dug them up to check, made him do them all again. Of course, they'll curse the kvnt farang, but really, I couldn't care less. I have my standards.

I don't want to be the Linux Geek in the room, but I am what I am. Best antivirus you can buy is Linux, and it's free.

Just to be an annoying pedant, internal/private IPs are blacklisted by default in that they are not supposed to be routeable on the open internet, as you allude to. So, you are correct in that they are not blacklisted as bad IPs, but they are in effect blacklisted anyways.

We host our own mailserver, we tried getting ToT to set up a PTR record for the static IP block they give us but it was an exercise in futility. The solution as I said above was to route our outbound mail via our rack in Singapore, where we have control over PTR records. . .

I check our mail delivery against this service every week, just to keep an eye on things. If our score is anything less than 10/10 it becomes a priority issue. . .

https://www.mail-tester.com/

There are other ways of checking of course but this is the most convenient for most people.

. . . to add to the above, a commercial VPN is not really the answer, because the IP you get is shared, and also 'dirty'. Google captchas also know that these are datacentre IP space, so will challenge you as a result more often than not. The way we deal with it is to route all our mail through our Singapore IP space, where we have clean IPs that are carefully maintained for cleanliness. We have no deliverability issues as a result.

FYI nearly all dynamically assigned IPs in Thailand are blacklisted on the various mail delivery blacklists. The reasons are many, but the main reason is Thais are complete dip$!ts with computer security. Their computers, invariably unpatched unlicensed Windows, are riddled with malware and completely zombified, sending out spam etc etc. You get a new IP every day, or thereabouts, you get an IP that was issued previously to a zombie. Thais also just use their phone number as a password. You might as well just use 12345 as a password. More malware comes from the Thai IP space than anywhere else in the world.