dave s

The citation on the award will read "Oh, you angel! You absolute angel!"

"Golden globes" refers to her tit action in the intellectual masterpiece Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy. With the tagline "See Jane Fonda ... do ... her ... thing." When I was in college she came to give a speech on campus, and  the Young Republicans Club put on a showing of Barbarella in her honor -- get the trogdolytic leftists (yup, Spiro Agnew was vice president then) into the right mood for her speech. Ironically, in an auditorium of the campus building named "Angell Hall".

41 minutes ago, lopburi3 said:

Your serious?  We should be programmers to use this forum?  Don't think so.  Forum software seems designed for programmers self gratification rather than attracting users to me.  But understand we do get a bit single track and not greatly impressed with change as we age on.????

I don't like the complication either, and I am a programmer. However, if an old but interesting discussion comes back to life, "getNewComment" is better than going to the end with the ">>" link and paging back slowly and manually to find the first of many responses that you haven't read yet. And if you want to remember something for yourself, like a useful trick a poster has suggested, or a good deal on an item to buy, or a bread machine or air fryer recipe, you can make a bookmark for your own use, with the "findComment" phrase.

And you'll have these odd phrases memorized, after only the first few hundred times you type them. ????

Seriously, I have an amulet that you can wear while using TVF, that will do this all automatically for you. I'll sell you a copy for 20 baht if you are a foreigner (or for only a mere ฿๕๑๑๑๑ if you are Thai).

28 minutes ago, daejung said:

If only GPS, you can use a fake location app, so at to be always located in another place.

If you are an Android developer, the fake location is very useful for testing your app. But it is a blatantly obvious fake, if it always stays the same to your "Thailand Plus And More More More More" mandatory app. What's needed is an app that runs in the background all the time and constantly resets the GPS value, showing you walking back and forth, back and forth from the mainland to Koh Samui. If the government gives you any static about it, just explain that you are an evangelical Christian, and so Jeeeeesus personally taught you to walk on water. Also note that you are a cult follower of Timothy Leary, to explain the monthly detour on a lunar cycle, to a beach on a nearby island.

Just now Google says weather forecast is at the machine http://www.tmd.go.th and radar is at weather.tmd.go.th, but nslookup gives a server failure for both of those machines, that is, the government has not told the Internet name server tree where the name server for TMD is, or there is a name server but it did not respond to a question or sent back a garbage answer.

    > www.tmd.go.th
    *** UnKnown can't find www.tmd.go.th: Server failed
    > weather.tmd.go.th
    *** UnKnown can't find weather.tmd.go.th: Server failed

Without knowing their IP address, nothing can contact these two machines. Both IPv4 A queries and IPv6 AAAA queries fail.

4 minutes ago, metisdead said:

 

To clarify, when viewing the View New Content page:

 

Thanks. There is a "View New Content" link at the bottom of web pages with the URL "https://forum.thaivisa.com/discover/24/"; I assume 24 is the count of how many items have new content.

35 minutes ago, ripstanley said:

If i am interested in a topic I now "follow" it.

There is a pale blue box at the top of a discussion web page with the word "Follow", and a count of how many others are also following the item. How does one un-follow a discussion, to stop being notified about it?

18 minutes ago, ubonjoe said:

If you click the time the last post was done it will take you to it.

On an ordinary discussion page, I see a wide left hand column with people's responses, and a narrow right hand column with ads, and pointers to apparently the currently most active items (not the newest items: for example, "90 day reporting now available online" has hundreds or thousands of responses and pops up and down in spurts -- immigration makes a stupid change that breaks something, it gets discussed for a while, then the item goes quiet until immigration's next stupid mistake). The right hand column, e.g.

    Every thread now goes to page one, not the page of last post read.

    By steelepulse
    Started 50 minutes ago

does not have a "time the last post was done", only a time the first post was done. You used to be able to right click on the article title, whose URL ended in the GET request "?do=getNewComment", and select "open in new window, which would let you pick up reading where you left off, moving down the page to that, and a nice horizontal line appeared between the last response you read and the first unread response  (now as you scroll down through an item, "popular responses" enclosed in a box initially look like the horizontal line, which is confusing). With the change, you could right click, select "copy link address", open a new browser window, paste the address into the URL box, add the GET request, and hit ENTER. It is a massive pain to do this over and over and over again. Or you could open the link which fetches the very first page, go to the very last page with e.g. ">>>",  and start backtracking until you recognize responses you have already seen, still a pain to do. There is a page "https://forum.thaivisa.com/" that appears to show the currently most active item in each general area of the site on the left hand side, e.g.

   Visas and migration to other countries
    Visas for Thailand Nationals, Visas for Foreign Nationals and migration to countries other than Thailand. For example postings about Thais going abroad or how farangs or Thais can enter other Asian or western countries.
    183.7k posts    theoldgit     UK Visit Visa extension
    By theoldgit, 42 minutes ago
 and also the narrower right hand column. Perhaps "time the last post was done" refers to the "42 minutes ago" in this entry.

And again.

Today is National Gateway Time-out Day in Thailand. Anything you try to do in TVF will give you a free 504 error.

9 hours ago, tgw said:

Also, local webmasters that are paid peanuts (because I guess the police bosses here still don't take working on a website seriously) try to cut as many corners as possible and post a lot of text content in Thai languages as images, making machine translation impossible.

There are several "PR" public relations governmental sites, that like to package information as mini-posters. If one site is just copying the artwork provided by another agency, it can insert a link to that image. But if new content is being created, you have to write (and spell check, and fact check, and ...) that content, then convert it into an image, so it is then more work to use a picture.

There are optical character recognition programs that try to convert a picture back into text. But many Thai letters have only tiny differences from other letters, which get lost in the "modern", swooshy fonts the web designer always picks, and so an OCR program produces garbage Thai text out of the picture, which Google Translate then butchers. The 7-11 and Makro cell phone apps are particularly hideous, this way.

https://www.tourismthailand.org/Attraction/wat-suwannakhuha 8°25'43.1"N 98°28'16.9"E "It is located at Mu 2 Tambon Krasom, about 9 kilometres from Phang-nga provincial town on Highway No. 4. At Km. 30, there is a paved road on the right leading for 1 kilometre to the temple ... located on a mountain with a number of caves."

I liked it. The Thai word transliterated as "tham" means "cave", "yai" means "big". It has a huge Buddha statue inside the main cave.

47 minutes ago, Jingthing said:

I do understand surcharges for waste though but even that isn't always fair. Like you take something that looks or sounds good but it turns out it's disgusting. So you're supposed to be forced to eat gross food?

I have not seen any of these places limit the number of trips you can make to the bins with the food. On your first trip, you could just take a tiny morsel, and taste it after you go back and sit down. If it's awful, you don't waste any food and there is more for the folks who like whatever it is; if it's good, you can get more on another trip. Remember what your mom told you when you were little: don't waste food, because children are starving all over China (must be true, the way busloads of zero baht Chinese tourists stampede a buffet).

Snap a picture of the label on the bin, and you can look up what it is when you get home, then next time you'll know the Thai word. Although, I bet this customer learned some new Thai words that night, not the kind you'd find in a language textbook.

I can't believe that this is the very first time a customer has ever, ever taken "too much" of "the wrong things". The management has got to be aware that it happens. Surprising people with a hidden surcharge is just plain dishonest and deceptive.

There are 2 AYCE buffets around my area that have a time limit, and if you stay too long you get charged more. One has a clear sign in the front window spelling this out, the other is deceptive and makes no mention of it anywhere.

I went to Phuket Makro this morning, and the ticket seller had a hand lettered sign in cardboard about B220.

Actually, the "lucky" numbers cost more than B30 extra, because you have to buy an amulet from a reliable monk which will allow you to see the vague outline of the winning number in the bark of a tree by the side of the road.

10 hours ago, Thomas J said:

The same is true for Iphones. 

In U.S.A. the telephone company usually does put the cell phone's telephone number right on the SIM. If you google an informational web page written in U.S.A., it will likely incorrectly tell you to just look in the phone's settings menu. And this does not work in Thailand, because the telco does not store the telephone number locally in the SIM.

On 8/16/2020 at 12:54 AM, fakser said:

Each mobile provider has a code number to dial that will reveal your No.

Check Google for your specific provider.

https://sweet3mango.com/travel/keypress-codes-dtac-ais-truemove/

Note that while a SIM card has non-volatile memory storage slots to hold several pieces of information, most of the Thai telecoms do not fill in the telephone number slot when the card is manufactured. The SIM initially tells a nearby phone company radio tower its own ICCID "serial number", and the IMSI identity number of the phone's owner. The company looks up your telephone number in its database, if and when necessary. So the actual telephone number does not need to be on the SIM card. The SIM's full "serial number" is encrypted into a shorter version, and this shorter number is usually printed in very tiny letters on the SIM card itself.

If the telephone number memory slot on the SIM card is empty, the Android Java telephony API returns a zero length character string, and so any app on your phone will say that the phone number is unknown. The front desk clerk in a dtac store has a little electronic toy that can read and write SIM card values, and these toys are also ... obtainable. So any particular Thai SIM may actually have been personalized to actually contain the phone number in its appropriate slot.

For a dtac SIM, enter "*102*9#" and hit the DIAL button to get the phone number of the active SIM. Works fine in my Samsung A71. Official list of dtac USSD codes (similar to the sweet3mango site noted in response #42 from @fakser):
    https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=th&u=http://www.dtac.co.th/info/new-sim-manual.html&prev=search&pto=aue

Note that here the DIAL button does not start a telephone call, but rather sends a USSD message to the USSD server computer at the telephone company, which looks up your phone number in the database, then responds by sending a plain SMS text message back to your cell phone.

Explanation of what USSD codes are:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Service_Data

What is a SIM card?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_card

The short encoding of a full ICCID is described in:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm
 

https://travel.thaivisa.com/thailand-tough-on-drone-users/

https://drone-traveller.com/drone-laws-thailand/

Search YouTube if you haven't already. There are some really wonderful videos.

Phuket office about 9:30 on August 31: almost no one around, no wait at the drive-in window, handed in just passport, returned with new slip dated November 28. No fine. No red ink stamp like some reports above from MTT office in BKK. Had done 90 day report in February at the time of annual retirement extension, but skipped the May 18 90 day report as immigration was saying at that time.  I hope online reporting will be allowed to work in November.

On 8/26/2020 at 9:58 PM, Peter Denis said:

Hi UJ,

The only reason IOs are now requesting the 12-month statement is to have an overview of ALL transactions done on your bank-account during the 12 months preceding your application so that they can check that you never went under the 800K-400K tress-holds during that period.

And they now want this evidence because some banks consolidate the transactions you made during the previous period when you don't regularly update your passbook.

So it's not so much a single 12-month statement they want to see, but rather evidence of ALL your transactions over the past 12 months.  So with overlapping 3- or 6-months statements the very same evidence will be provided.

 

The problem here seems to be one of printing: your savings passbook may have consolidated transactions, but the bank statement always has all the details. Surely the bank database has all the detailed transactions. The extension requirements are in terms of minimum balances. Suppose the bank letter you need to get contained the following sentences:

    This account had a minimum balance from 360 days ago to 330 days ago of X baht.

    This account had a minimum balance from 330 days ago to 60 days ago of Y baht.

    This account had a minimum balance from 60 days ago until now of Z baht.

Or if you are using the income method:

    The total foreign transfers into this account 12 months ago was X baht.

    The total foreign transfers into this account 11 months ago was Y baht.

    ...

    The total foreign transfers into this account last month was Z baht.

Step back, look at the broader situation, and ask what is actually needed. This is a trivial procedure to add to what the bank clerk can bring up on her screen, and would be a nice addition to what the customer could ask of the bank's electronic app during the year. And you would need to pay for only the bank letter, not waste trees and money printing a huge detailed statement. In other words, an incentive for you to switch banks if your bank doesn't have it, especially if your current bank doesn't track FTTs correctly. Computers are much better at mindless simple arithmetic than people. If the account where you keep your 800K or 400K is also your main bank account, it might have hundreds of transactions over the course of a year, NONE of whose DETAILS are the least bit interesting for extension of stay requirements, and for privacy none of which are any business of the immigration officer to even see. So why should the immigration officer spend a huge amount of time fumbling over them with a calculator -- possibly several times if he keeps making mistakes? 

On 8/18/2020 at 1:59 PM, DrTuner said:

I don't see what difference IE/firefox/chrome does. If you trace the http calls, they are very simple HTTP POSTs. There's very little javascript there, too and no flash or ancient activex that I can see.

1 hour ago, DrTuner said:

I wasn't writing about the SSL details, but the HTTP POST the browser send after filling the html form. It's very simple, open the dev console and take a look. If you can access the page with the form, you should be on https (port 443) already.

But, the SSL details ARE the problem here.

The proper fix here, is for the government to hire competent staff, and not let their certificate expire. AGAIN.

Immigration is telling customers to always use an old browser that does not check, and so does not notice the bad certificate. That works, but is dangerous because some day it may really be a hacker.

Most modern browsers act like the EFF add-on: they promote plain TCP to (usually) TLS. Looking at the web page source with the debugger doesn't help, because the browser is NOT doing what the HTTP of the page says, it is promoting to SSL. And SSL checks the dead certificate, then properly complains. That is confusing some TVF members, because they do not know to click on "Advanced" and "Proceed" and just go on. And that doing so, in this one case, is safe. The error message is scaring people off. And as you very correctly note, the SSL details are probably too much info.