TallGuyJohninBKK

Except to those who are still dying from COVID and ending up hospitalized with it.... and their friends, families, etc. For the past week in Thailand, June 18-24: --1,653 new hospitalizations due to COVID --36 deaths due to COVID --265 patients currently hospitalized in serious condition due to COVID --164 COVID hospitalized patients unable to breathe and thus currently requiring intubation Thus far in 2023, 27,645 total hospitalizations due to COVID, and 659 COVID deaths. https://ddc.moph.go.th/covid19-dashboard/ In short, no, the current levels of COVID deaths and hospitalizations are not as high as they were earlier in the pandemic. But that also doesn't mean the health risks and burdens associated with the pandemic have entirely disappeared, because as the chart above clearly shows, they have not. By comparison to the latest weekly numbers above, the comparable figures for Thailand at the beginning of this past April were 3 COVID deaths and 167 COVID hospitalizations. So current COVID hospitalizations and deaths in Thailand right now are running about TEN times higher than at the beginning of April.

And is too often the case with Thai news reports, absolutely no mention of the custody status or location of the key suspects.... Who from this report, seem to have been previously arrested on related charges. And no explanation of why the police are only executing search warrants now.... as opposed to when the couple were originally arrested.

WSA guarantees that the only price you'll pay is their flat weight-based rates... So if someone at Thai Customs is having a bad hair day, that's between Customs and WSA...and doesn't involve me the end customer. Also, unlike the other shippers mentioned above, WSA isn't sending individual packages, AFAIK. They're aggregating packages from different of their customers into large shipping containers, and sending them by air or ship en masse. I suspect, those get a different kind of Customs oversight vs the individual packages sent directly via USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc.

I had no problem finishing 12 oz of prime rib... and a slice of chocolate ice cream cake to boot! But then, I'm a TALL guy! ???? Need my sustenance.... especially after having been gone from U.S. dining for the prior FOUR years!!!!

The only thing that's ridiculous is your comment above... 1. No one was talking about "hanging out in ridiculously over-priced steak houses." My comment above was about a discounted rate for home delivery of their food. 2. The FoodPanda prices being charged for their steaks are not overpriced, considering that the same kind and size of imported ribeye steak is going to sell for 350b or more in the supermarket, just for the beef alone. Whereas the full meal cooked and delivered price was averaging out at around 700 baht per steak entree. Then add in a large baked Russet potato, which isn't even available for sale in most supermarkets in Thailand. 3. And then when it comes to the alternative of cooking at home... How many folks have a fire grill for properly cooking steaks (as opposed to a gas stove or frying pan) in their condo or apartment?

One of the nice things about reshipping with WeShippingUSA is, whether by sea or air, you no longer have to care or worry what duties or taxes Thai Customs might assess against your package or how they might classify (or misclassify) it. The price you pay, and the only price you pay, is their strictly weight-based flat rates for air and sea shipping. I have no idea what goes on between them and Thai Customs, and I happily no longer need to care, as that doesn't impact the price I pay nor have any risk of the package getting hung up in Customs. FWIW, with WSU, the customer also doesn't fill out any customs info at any point in the process. WSU opens the package and takes a photo/photos of the contents... But what they do with that and how it gets reported to Customs, again, becomes irrelevant for the end customer. The only thing I need to provide WSU for each package is to send them the original package tracking number to their Facebook Messenger account. And then do a Thai bank transfer to pay for the shipment when it's ready to be delivered here in Thailand.

Planet Express has a no sales tax address in Oregon, as do various other reshippers. But at least in the case of PE, their shipping rates out of Oregon, at least for their economy airmail, are higher than they would be if the customer ordered to and they reshipped out of their main location in Southern California. (Because for international shipments, they end up having to send the item back from Oregon to Los Angeles to be sent abroad.) So whether the Oregon no sales tax issue is a benefit or not, in their case, depends on the valuation of the package. For lower value items, it won't make economic sense because the sales tax amount would be small and outweighed by the higher shipping rates. But it might be a benefit for higher value / lower weight packages.

Let me know if there's ever any actual proof that President Biden gained any direct financial benefit from his son's business activities. Thus far NONE. Or, let me know if there's ever any actual proof that President Biden, or his prior iterations as a public official, ever altered any government policy or decision (other than what it already would have been) to benefit his son's business activities. Thus fare NONE. Otherwise, Fox can take their ongoing political misinformation and propaganda campaign and shove it! From the same outfit that just agreed to pay $787 million to settle their knowingly false claims over the 2020 presidential election.

I was surprised to see, apparently there's no Villa Markets anywhere in the north including Chiang Mai...as best as I can find. If he doesnt find a better option, the OP also could contact the Villa Market main branch at Sukhumvit Soi 33 in BKK, and I believe they'll accept online orders that they'll ship anywhere in Thailand for non-perishable items. Might be another 125b or so for delivery based on my mockup of a single package. https://shop.villamarket.com/search?keyword=Cream of Wheat

No... not necessarily so... For many years, I used Shipito and more recently Planet Express to send Amazon and other packages here, lately running about $12 per pound (about $25 per kilo) using their economy airmail (least expensive) shipping method. But starting last fall, my Planet Express packages regularly started never arriving here to my address in BKK, even though I'd gone years without ever missing a package from them. So something changed, dunno what, because the tracking on that method basically ends once the package has arrived into Thailand. So no way to nail down or address just where things were going wrong. But my point is, in the wake of that, I ended up finding and now for some months using a Thai service called WeShippingUSA, which offers both air and sea shipments to Thailand, with the weight based prices you pay including all/any taxes and customs duty, meaning you always know the final, real price upfront simply by calculating the actual weight. I've been regularly using their sea shipping service for some months now, which runs 300 baht ($9 USD) per kilo of package weight, and typically takes about 2 months from U.S. departure to home delivery here, usually by EMS mail as a small added cost. Every package I've ordered has arrived intact and without anything going missing or arriving damaged, etc etc. https://www.facebook.com/WeShippingUSA/ Because I no longer have to worry about staying under the $50 valuation limit for Thai Customs' small package duty exemption policy, I've been ordering larger and more expensive items than I used to in the past, where those kinds of packages would often attract unpredictable add-on costs of extra VAT and/or customs duty. WeShippingUSA has been working out a great economical option for US to Thailand shipments, especially if you can think to order ahead and plan for the extra time involved in sea shipping.

Just as a beef-related aside, there's an Argentinian steakhouse near EmQuartier in Bangkok called El Toro that offers some pretty expensive Churrascaria (a kind of all you want meats buffet sliced to order). However, they also have a pretty broad menu of both U.S. and Australian steaks available as standard dinners. And right now and for some time now, meals ordered from them via FoodPanda by PandaPro members get an extra 20% off their regular FP delivery prices, which seem to be less than their regular dine-in prices. In short, the wife and I recently ordered 250g steaks from them, mine a New Zealand ribeye and the wife's an Australian sirloin, that both were excellent. Hers came with rice and fried onions as sides. Mine came with a full-sized baked potato with butter and sour cream. We ordered a third steak as an extra, and our total bill for the three steak meals came to under 2,000 baht total, which was great. https://eltoroasia.com/ That averages out to about $20 U.S. per steak dinner at 250 grams / about 9 ounces. By comparison, on my recent U.S. trip, I had a 12 ounce prime rib dinner from Stuart Anderson's Black Angus that ran about $34 U.S. (PS, in the photo below, I asked for them to cook it "blackened" on the exterior with Cajun spices.) Between the two, although I very much like prime rib, I'd say the New Zealand ribeye from El Toro was a better steak.

How did the SS's there compare to the one in BKK in terms of taste and the food offerings themselves...? I had thought about trying a SS in the U.S. for the first time during a recent trip back, just to have a basis for comparison to BKK.... but didn't get around to it, with other dining priorities winning out... including a chili burger from an OK imitation of the original Tommy's burgers in L.A.

As an American, I too have often found that general Thai ground beef often seems to have some kind of funky odd taste to it that I don't care for. That said, there also are various places here that use either Thai French beef or their own custom grounds of other Thai beef that to my taste have been very good and without the funky odd taste found elsewhere. Curiously, I was looking earlier today just to make sure that Carl's Jr. had totally exited Thailand, which they indeed have. And one of the reasons the Thai franchisee gave for their exit was the requirement by the master franchise holder that the Thai operation had to use imported beef, which was more expensive than locally available options. That said, I believe the Thai branches of Burger King claim to use ground beef imported from Australia. I've never found the taste of their beef patties to be antything special, but at least, it doesn't seem to have any odd taste like some Thai offerings do.

The burger I had a Shake Shack at CW in BKK ranks nowhere close to any of the best burgers I've had in Bangkok or in the U.S. IMHO, it was an OK but otherwise unexceptional offering. Will Shake Shack end up fizzling out the way fellow U.S. import ventures IHOP, Outback Steakhouse, Tony Roma's, and Carl's Jr. did? Or will it end up struggling on like Taco Bell and Krispy Kreme have? Shake Shack announced pretty ambitious expansion plans for Thailand in the years ahead. But frankly, for numerous reasons, I just don't see that as very likely.

On the map, it looks well more than 100 meters, especially to get to the center of the complex, as opposed to one edge... But I haven't been there myself as yet since the Yellow Line station opened.

That's an unfortunate situation to the extent it exists... When I read about the new Yellow Line and the fact that one of its stations was in the vicinity of Seacon Square and Paradise Park, I was hopeful that those places would finally have a good public transit connection. Just how far off is the station there? On Google Maps, it looks like the King Rama IX Park Station is kind of halfway between Seacon Square to the north and Paradise Park to the south, but some walking distance either way to get to either of them. I wonder if they basically decided to split the difference between the two in terms of locating the station...instead of building two nearby stations or choosing one over the other. My wife used to have the same issue with the Airport Rail Link Line and its Hua Mak station. She used to work in the area, but they built the ARL station there pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and not proximate to any major road in the area. So once you exited the train there, you pretty much only had access to whatever taxis had decided to come and park/stay at that station... and no easy access to any nearby bus routes or even regular taxis traveling on major roads in the area. In contrast, one thing I really like about the original BTS Green Line in central Bangkok is a lot of its stations have direct, easy connections to many of the big places people tend to go... like Siam Paragon, Central Chidlom, Terminal 21, EmQuartier, Victory Monument, etc etc... You don't have to hike a mile to get to those endpoint destinations.

Can you elaborate on just what you mean by "blocked"? Does the yellow line station have a constructed exit connecting to The Mall Bangkapi, but it's just not open yet... (and presumably could be opened with some added work). Or, are you saying a connecting exit hasn't actually been constructed?

I'm not sure if that's a so-called Low Level Format that really permanently erases the data in a way that makes it unrecoverable. But either way, he's also doing that while running the OS on his PC, meaning the disk he's wiping isn't the one currently being used to run the PC.... In his example, he's already removed the disk he's wiping from his operating PC. So it's not the case example of the kind I was asking about in the thread, where you want to prepare an old PC/laptop for discard or donation in a way that wipes its operating hard disk so that all content is unrecoverable.

OK.. think I've finally successfully worked things out now (without resorting to power tools!) ... by using the free Darik's Boot and Nuke software, which gives me the ability to boot my old laptops from a USB drive or a CD/DVD drive outside of Windows, and thus SECURELY nuke, without any ability to recover, the entire hard disk including the existing Windows installs there. https://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/ Download the .iso file on a regular working PC, and then select the file in Windows file explorer, right click with the mouse, and choose "burn disk image" from the context menu to create a bootable source on either a blank CD/DVD or a blank USB drive that you'll then use to boot the device you want to wipe the disk on. Had a bit of a complication as first, as it turned out the internal, built-in CD-ROM drives on both OLD laptops were no longer working properly... So I had to use an external USB CD/DVD drive that I had handy, and set that as the primary boot device in the laptops' BIOS, and then re-boot the laptops using the DBAN program running off the external drive. DBAN launched and ran just fine. The menu is pretty simple and clear. I chose the default 3 passes DoD short wiping method. And on my first OLD laptop with an old slow processor, it's going to take about 2-1/2 hours to totally and securely wipe the laptop's built in 160 GB hard disk. The more detailed instructions on setting up and using DBAN are toward the end of the following article linked below: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/secure-erase-ssd-or-hard-drive

"I was getting ready to donate my old Windows 10 PC so I used the built-in Windows reset feature and I clicked "Remove everything," which deletes all of your files and leaves you with a factory default install of the OS. After the reset process completed, my personal files were erased as was all the software I had installed. However, after I installed and ran , a utility that finds and undeletes files, I located all my old files. To prove my point, I recovered a file called mypasswords2.txt that had lived in the Documents folder and I was able to read everything inside of it." https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/secure-erase-ssd-or-hard-drive

One thing I discovered about this "free" Easeus software is that if you want to nuke a Windows install off a PC OR the PC you're dealing with doesn't have a properly working version of Windows, the free version does NOT support creating a bootable version of their software via USB or CD/DVD. Only their paid version will create a bootable disk.

The only issue with GV for folks who have already set it up the first time using a linked U.S. mobile number is that some US financial institutions don't support sending their OTP / SMS codes to GV numbers...only to traditional mobile numbers. But other than that, it's a charm!

Looking for some advice here... I've got a couple of very old PC laptops that I plan to toss out, because they have various problems, etc etc. They currently have Windows 10 installed, and I've already used Windows to reset and clean reinstall the OS on both, which does as least a surface wiping of my own prior personal files on the machines. However, it's my understanding that that kind of disk wiping is just a surface treatment, and could be reversed by someone who might have the laptops in the future, if they wanted to go to the effort. I know it's probably overkill, but I'd really prefer to make sure all my prior content on the laptops is really and permanently erased. Just don't know how to accomplish that! Oddly, it seems Windows won't allow you to reformat a hard disk partition that already has the Windows OS installed on it. And AFAICT, you also can't uninstall Windows 10 from a machine where it's already installed.... What I'm looking for is something like the total disk reformat that you can do with external disks in Windows where you choose not just the quickie reformat, but the complete and full-blown reformat. How???

Per the Thai Ministry of Public Health and Bangkok medical services: 1. CentralWorld - every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. June 2-4, 9-11, 16-18, 23-25 and 30, Noon to 6 pm 5th floor, Atrium Zone Moderna (Bivalent) vaccine is available to people 12 years of age and older as a booster dose. 2. Central Pinklao - every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. June 2-4, 9-11, 16-18, 23-25 and 30, Noon to 6 pm 5th floor in front of Fitness First Moderna (Bivalent) Vaccine is available to people 12 years of age and older as a booster dose. 3. Lotus's Minburi - every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. June 2-4 and 9-11, Noon to 6 pm 3rd floor, Lotus Minburi Moderna (Bivalent) and Pfizer vaccines, orange and purple lids, available to people aged 5 and over. (children under 7 years of age must bring their birth certificate) 4. 69 BMA public health service centers in Bangkok - Wednesdays and Fridays, except public holidays. Walk-in service or pre-register through the QueQ app. Time 9 am to 3 pm Moderna Vaccine (Bivalent), Pfizer red, orange, purple cap, AstraZeneca Immunotherapy ready (LAAB) is available to those aged 6 months and older (children under 7 years old must bring their birth certificate). For more information, call 02 203 2883. Monday - Sunday from 8 am - 4 pm https://www.facebook.com/informationcovid19/posts/pfbid0L7rseUtyLVmhBTyMt2J4KN8B7muVrnBf9npRDVUeH4i6qkd9ptf7bxQFQmwvxEnEl

The first Thailand outpost of the U.S. burger chain Shake Shack opened at Bangkok's CentralWorld about a month ago, to much fanfare and long lines, as often occurs with many newbie import dining options offered here (Krispy Kreme and Taco Bell being past examples of the same). But I wasn't gonna go and stand in line for an hour or two to order a hamburger in Bangkok. So the wife and I waited until today to head on over to CentralWorld to try Shake Shack here for the first time, and were pleasantly surprised to find that the long lines were gone by now, at least on this Sunday afternoon. The Shake Shack location at CentralWorld is on the ground floor at the far back end of the mall, in the general area where the former Japanese department store/grocery store used to be. Although I'm a big fan of burgers, I've been here long enough to have never eaten at a Shake Shack in the United States, so I can't compare the Bangkok offering with those back in the U.S. But I have eaten hamburgers from most if not all of the well-known burger places in Bangkok at one time or another, and with that as background, I came away from our first visit to Shake Shack here not displeased, but also not particularly excited or impressed. Their main menu item is the Shack Burger for 230b as shown above. Not a bad burger at all. The bun was quite soft. The beef pattie itself was modest in size (they don't indicate the weight in grams) and tasted OK (with no funky Thai ground beef aftertaste). But it came with only few toppings, a slice of cheese, two small tomato slices and one lonely leaf of lettuce. Nothing wrong with it in particular, though personally I would have liked a bigger pattie (they do have a double pattie option for a higher price, 340b I think) and some onions or pickles and or some crisp, more robust lettuce. But none of the latter was on offer. They had crinkle cut fries on offer for 110b per order, again, nothing special or much different than what you might cook at home from a grocery store freezer bag. The wife and I also each ordered one of their milk shakes for 190b each, mine coffee and hers chocolate, and for me, those were the best parts of the meal. Smooth and creamy, not too thick and not too thin, OK to drink thru a straw, nice taste and flavor. I'd come back for the shakes, but the wife and I agreed, not likely we'd be rushing to come back for the burgers or fries. All in all, I had a hard time figuring out why Thais lined up out the door for this place when it first opened at the end of March. And I guess not surprisingly, most of the customers around us Sunday during our visit were either Thais or other Asians, with just a few farangs spotted. But for my farang burger palate, I continue to like the Prime Burger and Easy Burger offerings in Bangkok as superior choices to the burgers we had from Shake Shack today, not only for the burgers themselves, but also for the much wider and diverse range of burger offerings that the other two local burger purveyors offer on their menus. I've got a trip back to the U.S. coming up soon, so perhaps I'll make a point to check out a Shake Shack back in the states to see how it compares with the one here. Or perhaps even more likely, I'll make a point of stopping by a local In-N-Out Burger to give them a try as an alternative, since it's been a few years since I've had a Double Double burger there.