AyG

How about you post the recipe you used? That might give some clue as to why it didn't turn out as you'd hoped.

It's best for people new to Thai cookery not to make their own paste. It takes one element of risk out of the equation. (Making good curry pastes is hard, not only physically, but in getting the balance right. The raw ingredients will vary greatly. For example, sometimes the lemongrass will be fresher and more pungent, so less of it is needed. The dried chillies might be spicier or less spicy than those used for the original recipe.)

Most importantly, you need to balance the taste of the various elements. Good recipes will always have a single sentence towards the end describing the balance of the curry. Taking David Thompson's description for what you call a red curry (kaeng phet)

"The curry should be rich from the coconut cream, slightly sweet and salty, with only a suggestion of the dried spices - and fragrant from the lime leaves, chillies and basil at the end."

So, if it's not rich, add a little more coconut cream. If it's not sweet enough, add a little more palm sugar and taste again. Generally I find commercial curry pastes to be rather salty, so I always add less fish sauce than the recipe specifies, then add more at the end after tasting to get the balance right.

EVA standards in premium economy have definitely slipped over the last few years with lots of signs of cost cutting (along with a very steep price hike), which is why I've stopped using them. On my last flight with them there was no alcoholic drink before the first meal, and the goody bag was no more.

My last flight for about the same price was business class with Sri Lankan. There's a long layover in Colombo on the return leg, but they put you up in an hotel room air side where you can get a night's sleep. The food in the business class lounge in Colombo is generally excellent. If you're not in a hurry it's a good option in my opinion.

What a good idea....that has given me an option I hadn't thought of

I am only going to see family/friends..... the last time I went home I got to Heathrow and thought "why am I here?"

Also am staying with family/friends.... I know that visitors are like fish ...."after three days they start to stink"

One question....were you booked "Business" to get an hotel room?

Thanks for your reply

I was booked Business. My understanding is that if you have a layover of greater than a certain number of hours (not sure of the exact number - 8 or 10 I think) you'll get an hotel room whatever the class. However, if it's Economy class the room will probably be outside the airport, and you may have a long (provided) bus ride to get there. If it's Business or better, the room will be at the airport.

Definitely buy wonton wrappers. They need a fair bit of skill to make well yourself. Don't have to be frozen - you can buy them fresh chilled.

For a shumai filling, this is a recipe I've used and liked (makes 10+, according to size):

250g minced pork

125g chopped prawns

4 chopped water chestnuts (fresh is best, but tinned is OK) (optional)

1 finely chopped spring onion

a small knob of ginger, grated

1 1/2 Tbs light soy

1 Tbsp Shiaoshing (or dry sherry)

1 tsp of sesame oil

1/2 an egg white, beaten (not frothy)

1 1/2 Tbs cornflour

large pinch of white pepper

Mix it all together. Form small balls. Wrap wrappers around, then steam until cooked.

What do you mean by "dumplings"?

Is it char siu bao (the bready buns filled with red cooked pork)?

Or is it the balls of meat/prawns wrapped in a thin pasta sheet such as hargao and shumai?

1) MayBank (former KimEng) uses Eximbank bank. To transfer USD out of Vietnam you would need to submit transfer order personally

2) VNDirect offers either to use either 2.1) their bank account to transfer money in and out online or 2.2) any other commercial bank (they don't recommend any)

So

1) is practically inconvenient for those living outside of Vietnam

What do you think about 2.1)? It looks less safe to use broker's account than my own account: It may be harder to prove that's my money

I think there may be a misunderstanding. It's not the broker's own account. To open a securities trading account you also have to open a special type of bank account, used only for trading activities and paying related taxes, known as a "Capital Contribution" account with a bank. From the VNBank website "Foreign customers are not allowed to fund or obtain cash directly at VNDIRECT. Customers have to transfer money through a dedicated bank account." (Source: https://www.vndirect.com.vn/portal/tro-giup/hoi-dap-giao-dich-tien.shtml ).

More information on account opening at http://vninvestment.wordpress.com/brokerages/opening-vietnam-trading-account/

You may find the following link of relevance http://www.anz.com/resources/f/4/f432aa804a9aec808253fa415e15c706/REM-MATRIX-Personal-EN.pdf?MOD=AJPERES

If you really want to quote the OP just copy and paste into a quote window (the speech balloon on the edit toolbar).

Which is not available in BBCode mode.

The quote also won't attribute the original poster.

This is a (lacking) feature that has also been bugging me for some time. The solution isn't ideal.

Just one more thought on the night time situation: what bedding does she have? It's been quite cold over the last few weeks. Is it a nice thick pillow to keep her warm?

Not just for first-time dog owners, but someone sent me this link earlier today. It's very moving.

http://www.reshareworthy.com/20-facts-for-dog-lovers/

As mentioned, we put Kanoon in her play pen downstairs at night and we obviously go and sleep upstairs. Now for the past two nights she has been crying and barking in the early hours of the morning.

Is this just one of those things that will subside once she fully gets used to her new environment? Or could it be something more?

Of course, she could be letting us know she wants to go to the toilet and this morning at 3am I let her outside after she had been barking and she did relieve herself.

What was the weather like at the time? Our street dog, Whisky, is terrified of thunder and doesn't like heavy rain. He'll come upstairs andpaw at the bedroom door and cry outside until we let him in when the weather's like that.

And if it is a "toilet issue", are you taking away your dog's water? Since he was a small puppy we took Whisky's water away at 8 p.m.. He might then pee around 10 p.m., but after that he's good for the night.

I'm also curious about the phrase "she had been barking". What kind of barking was it? Barking is actually surprisingly expressive. You might want to have a look at http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/interpreting-your-dogs-barking.navId-380874.html which is the best summary of dog barks that I know of.

I've just noticed that the Singapore Stock Exchange has a Vietnam ETF - DBX VIETNAM.

It's also listed in London, Hong Kong and a couple of other places.

็Really? I thought the police only bothered to act when you paid them a little (or big) something under the table. This is a clear example of someone with a grudge.

It also underlines the Thai authorities shortsightedness. A Chinese couple coming here wants to deal with the arrangements in their own language, and with someone who understands their own standards, expectations and traditions. A Thai-only business simply won't be able to do that. The net effect is that Chinese couples will simply get wed elsewhere. The knock on effect is fewer hotel bookings, extravagant ceremonies and meals. Thai laws requiring the employment of four locals for every foreigner make this sort of business pretty much impossible for a foreigner to set up and run profitably.

You're confusing operating illegally and providing service in a certain language. Nothing is stopping them from opening and operating e legal wedding studio with chinese language services.

No, I'm not. The barriers against a foreigner operating a legal wedding studio or similar are ridiculously high. From memory, two million Baht registered capital required. Four Thai employees for every foreign employee.

How is one going to find four Thai employees who speak the required Chinese language fluently and are sensitive the the clients' needs to employ even one Chinese member of staff? (After all, arranging a wedding requires an enormous amount of cultural sensitivity - it's the couple's big day - the biggest day of their lives.)

I don't condone operating illegally, but I do condemn the powers-that-be's narrow-minded attitude to businesses that provide a service to foreign tourists that can't be provided by Thai people. It's very similar to the situation with tour guides. It's legally impossible to employ Korean, Japanese, Russian people to provide guide services, even though the number of Thai national tour guides fluent in these languages is very limited. When it comes to Basque, Georgian, Ainu, Swahili, Navajo, Welsh or Quechua, is there even a single tour guide in Thailand competent in any of these languages?

Edit: I forget to mention that any such company must be majority-owned by Thai people. If they're stooges, then one runs the risk that in the future the company may be ruled illegitimate and one loses all one's invested.

When there is a complaint made, the police are obliged to act.

็Really? I thought the police only bothered to act when you paid them a little (or big) something under the table. This is a clear example of someone with a grudge.

It also underlines the Thai authorities shortsightedness. A Chinese couple coming here wants to deal with the arrangements in their own language, and with someone who understands their own standards, expectations and traditions. A Thai-only business simply won't be able to do that. The net effect is that Chinese couples will simply get wed elsewhere. The knock on effect is fewer hotel bookings, extravagant ceremonies and meals. Thai laws requiring the employment of four locals for every foreigner make this sort of business pretty much impossible for a foreigner to set up and run profitably.

I saw it in Villa on Ramkhamhaeng earlier in the week.

Following AyG's lead, I checked the list in Lexitron 2.6 - once I managed to get it working adequately on Linux.

Off topic, but you could have saved yourself the trouble. http://thai-notes.com/tools/predictionary.shtml uses the Lexitron database and also converts the rather dodgy IPA of Lexitron into the more standard Haas/AUA version. That's what I used. Unfortunately, Lexitron's IPA is only about 70% complete.

It seems I was misinformed.

According to Lexitron too เทิ่ง is long. From the same source:

เลิกลั่ก - short

เลินเล่อ - long

I understand that เงิน is the only word in the Thai language which has this as a short vowel. Otherwise it is always long.

Just one point to look out for: what is the withholding tax rate on dividend income for US securities? With Saxo it's 30%, but with TD it's only 15%.

That depends by your country of legal residence and its tax treaty with the US (if one exists). Your US broker must follow it.

Who mentioned a US broker?

Some international brokers take the trouble to deal with the petty, moronic regulations of Uncle Sam. Others can't be bothered. This makes the difference between 30% withholding tax and 15%.

If it is dividend from an US security, even an non-US broker is responsible for complaing with the US law that you call "petty moronic". Failure to do could have their intermediary status revoked. They are also responsible to forward the correct W8-BEN form and the withholding tax to be applied correctly. You as a client have the right to be taxed correctly.

Personally I don't see why I should be paying tax to America when I'm helping it by investing in its country. Unlike US residents, I get no personal benefit from the tax deducted. Whatever happened to "No taxation without representation"?

I also don't understand the need for two different rates of tax according to whether you've completed a W8-BEN form or not. It would be simpler for everybody if there were a single flat rate and no paperwork.

Carrier Grade NAT (which is what we're talking about) has to deal with an enormous amount of complexity dealing with session status and state recognition. Not all installations get every aspect of it right, which is why there can be problems with VPNs (as the OP has apparently found) and with other peer-to-peer applications.

Just one point to look out for: what is the withholding tax rate on dividend income for US securities? With Saxo it's 30%, but with TD it's only 15%.

That depends by your country of legal residence and its tax treaty with the US (if one exists). Your US broker must follow it.

Who mentioned a US broker?

Some international brokers take the trouble to deal with the petty, moronic regulations of Uncle Sam. Others can't be bothered. This makes the difference between 30% withholding tax and 15%.

The IP packet header includes the source and target addresses.

The source address allows the NAT device to work out which internal IP address the packet needs to be sent to.

The ability to limit ports per subscriber is purely an implementation issue. The NAT devices uses up a certain amount of memory for each translation table entry. The device may simply not have enough physical memory to support "greedy" subscribers. There's certainly no 65k hard limit.

NAT is sharing IP address by simply sharing 65k ports available per IP address

thus ports available per customer can be very limited

in your case you probably hit the limit or it may be something not directly related to NAT.

I'm no expert, but even to me this seems wrong.

The core of the technology is a table which maps an external IP address and port number with an internal IP address and port number. An inbound request is then relayed to the appropriate recipient by using the mapping table (and vice versa); multiple external IP addresses can share the same port number and still be routed correctly.

From a CISCO document:

"Theoretically, there is no limit on the number of mappings that the NAT table can hold. Practically, memory and CPU or the boundaries of the available addresses or ports place a limit on the number of entries."

So, to assert "ports available per customer can be very limited" is a nonsense.

Do you mean tapenade (a paste from southern France made with the flesh of black olives)? Or do you mean a paste made from the olive stones? Or a mixed paste from black olives and from nuts?

Googling the topic title is not helpful.

There's a temple on the northern outskirts of Bangkok which has enormous, Transformer-style models outside. Puts Ayutthaya's efforts to shame.