AyG

It's been 12 months since the last hike in tax on alcohol, so time for another one. According to newspaper reports, this hike could be draconian. Current taxes are 100 Baht/litre of pure alcohol for beer and wine or 60% of value, and 400 Baht/litre or 50% of value for spirits. This is going to go up to 2000 Baht/litre pure alcohol for both beer and spirits, or, for the percentage method, the tax will now be based upon retail price, rather than ex-factory price as it currently.

http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/

Sorry, that website's absolute <deleted>. It doesn't do a proper tracert - every route shown is via yougetsignal.com, and bears no relationship to the actual route used in real life.

To do it properly go to a command prompt/DOS shell/terminal session (or whatever it's called in your particular operating system), then type tracert or traceroute (depends on operating system) followed by the target website address. E.g.

>tracert www.google.com

Mary Haas's dictionary gives the classifier as อย่าง for อดิเรก mentioning that อดิเรก is a short form of งานอดิเรก.

Interestingly, the SEAlang corpus gives an example where งานอดิเรก acts its own classifier. ...ในฤดูกาล 1991 92งานอดิเรก : ดูหนัง ฟังเพลง แอนนา...

This is perfectly normal. Google has something called "Google Global Cache". Google keeps local copies of its web pages at selected ISPs so that the pages can be served "in country", rather than having to go all the way across the ocean (unless, of course, the page contents have changed, in which case the request is passed on to Google central). This saves on international bandwidth costs for the ISP and improves response times for the user. Google Global Cache is described further at https://peering.google.com/about/faq.html

According to the classifier dictionary at http://thai-notes.com (direct link http://thai-notes.com/tools/classifiers.shtml) the classifier for งาน is งาน. That would suggest that งาน is the classifier for งานอดิเรก since อดิเรก is simply qualifying งาน.

Asavanant is excellent (http://www.asavanant.com/). Email them and they should be able to give you an indication of price. (They also have a price list on display in the surgery, but I can't remember the prices.)

I'd second South Korea. Took a group of Thai MBA students there a few years ago. I absolutely hated the experience. Bitterly cold. Horrible food. Over-heated hotel rooms. The students, however, loved it. They really enjoyed a few hours at a theme park in the snow, snowball fights outside a countryside restaurant where we stopped, and trudging through an island theme park in the snow (Winter Sonata, a Korean soap popular in Thailand at the time, had been filmed there). And to address the diabolical food, they came pre-armed with vast quantities of chilli sauce, fresh chillies and fish sauce. If only I'd packed a jar of Branston Pickle I might have had a more pleasurable experience. We also took the students to a ski resort. It was amazing just how quickly some of them took to it. Several of them were soon happily skiing down the slopes from the top whilst I still struggled just to stand up for more than a moments.

Immigration at South Korea was a bit tough for the students. Half a dozen of them were hauled aside for intense interrogation, which upset some of them. If memory serves me right, the ones selected for interrogation were all women (probably considered potential prostitutes). However, in the end all were let into the country. I doubt that a couple travelling together would have the same problem.

Google Translate uses a statistical process to make translations; it has no built-in grammatical rules to determine gender. This is not only a problem with Thai, but with other languages such as Italian and Spanish. (Even with gender-unambiguous sentences such as "She is a professor", Google will use the male word for professor in Italian, not female.)

In short, I very much doubt you'll find a solution for this issue.

The MSN Telegroup price for the new Nexus, 32 GB, WiFi only, at 1,900 Baht is indeed pretty good. It's the same price as IT City is still selling the old Nexus 32 GB (but with 3G).

Shipping a 32 GB, WiFi only device from the States, by my calculation, would cost 10,500 Baht (including UPS shipping and tax) - only 400 Baht saved. Not a lot.

Both prices look great compared with the UK price of 12-15,000 Baht for the same model.

The LTE version (4G-enabled) hasn't been released yet in the States, so there's going to be a further wait for that to arrive in Thailand. (And if they are grey market imports, there may be issues because it looks as if the version in the States is going to be tethered to Verizon/T-Mobile/AT&T.)

1) Syllables ending in /p/, /t/ or /k/ very rarely have tone marks, and they're optional in the main class of these that do.

2) Tone marks are generally optional in loanwords from English.

3) Pali/Sanskrit words, with rare exceptions, don't have tone marks.

(i) How can tonemarks be "optional"? They're either not required (i.e. the word spelled without tonemarks produces the correct tone), or they are needed to modify the tone.

(ii) The current standard is that new loanwords from English will not have tonemarks (even though the spelling may not reflect Thai pronunciation). However, older ones will. Tonemarks are not optional; there is an official, correct form for each loanword.

Never even heard of Lamb Short Ribs, what kind of cut is that?

In the UK they're known as "fore ribs" - they are the ribs attached to the sternum (breast bone) and the free-floating ribs in front of them (towards the head end).

I'm not sure that Wine Connection or the likes of Villa/Foodland can be considered seriously high end. In my opinion, the wine store in the supermarket basement of Siam Paragon can. (The wine store in Emporium is suitably eye-wateringly expensive, but rather small, so the selection is limited.)

Downgrading Transmission wasn't successful. The older packages I tried all installed the latest version of the daemon, so that was inconclusive.

I eventually installed Deluge as an alternative to Transmission, and am getting exactly the same behaviour: after uploading about 2 GB of data the port is closed. I reckon that's pretty conclusive evidence that TOT is monitoring data transfers and blocking certain ports once a download threshold is passed.

All I need to work out now is how to overcome this TOT blocking. (Switching to another provider unfortunately isn't an option - only TOT provides ADSL in my moobaan - not that any other provider is likely to be much better.)

In the end I found that a metal pot scourer did a good job, with a bit of water as lubricant and to wash the debris away. Took a lot of elbow grease, but the glass is now as good as new.

(I didn't want to use a chemical solvent since this might damage the silicone which seals the glass to the walls and floor.)

The bees are being bothered by the light from the restaurant; normally bees don't fly after dusk.

Marmalade will do no good - they simply won't go for it. (Good for killing wasps, though - I've used it myself to protect my bees because wasps like ripping the heads off bees.) Bees will go for dilute honey or sugar syrup solutions, but you'd have to put the solution in the light, so that's just going to attract more bees to the restaurant.

Not sure why the bees should move on in September. Usually bees stay put in one place of years - until there's a problem with the location. They send off occasional swarms to reduce overcrowding and to start new colonies, but each time typically about half the bees remain behind.

As others have said, a beekeeper is the way to go.

When I try to load something the page just doesn't load, it goes to the browser's default failed page.

What does the default failed page say? (If you're using Chrome you'll need to click on the "More" button to get the full error message.)

Bandwidth between Thailand and the rest of the world is very limited thanks to a lack of investment by CAT, the monopoly supplier. Kids come home from school, adults from work, and start using the Internet and all the available international bandwidth is stretched to beyond breaking point.

It's highly unlikely that a router would suddenly start blocking sites. Much more likely to be further upstream, e.g. MICT.

What happens when you try to go to a blocked site? Does the browser simply hang, then eventually timeout? Those are the classic symptoms for MICT blocking.

At last i can rest assured that my next trip up North will not result in carnage.

Maybe Thailand should look to India for inspiration on how to run a railway system albiet inherited from the British.

CCC

Monday's newspaper headline: India: at least 37 killed as express train ploughs through railway station

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/india-killed-express-train-crash

I rather suspect that more people have died on the Indian railways this week than have so died in Thailand in the last year. Not sure that India is a great role model in this respect.

Of course you can get a visa for owning a condo. It must be bought from new and cost more than 10 million Baht. It's a non-immigrant B visa of the type commonly known as an "investment visa".

Don't forget that if you want to use the Non-O visa based on investment for buying a condo, The condo has to be bought via a government excepted real estate agency.

So you can not buy a condo from a friend and apply for the investment visa or extension.

You might want to check your facts. It's a non-Imm B visa that you get, not O. And you don't buy it through a real estate agency, but direct from the developer, which is why I wrote "must be bought from new".

Of course you can get a visa for owning a condo. It must be bought from new and cost more than 10 million Baht. It's a non-immigrant B visa of the type commonly known as an "investment visa".

It's so common there's a name for illnesses picked up in hospital: iatrogenic diseases. They affect about 10% of in patients. In the United States such diseases kill about 225,000 patients per year. But really, what is one to expect? Hospitals are full of sick people.

How much did it cost ?

Bangkok Hospital package price list at http://www.bangkokhospital.com/packages/Plastic-Surgery-Packages-2013/

ปฏิบัติ to carry out, execute, implement - somewhat more formal than ทำ.

Samples sentences (from http://thai-notes.com)

นักเรียนต้องรู้จักปฏิบัติหน้าที่ของตนเอง

ลูกทุกคนต้องปฏิบัติต่อบิดามารดาเพื่อทดแทนบุญคุณ

พนักงานต้องปฏิบัติตามกฎระเบียบของบริษัทที่ได้กำหนดไว้