Shiver

Lack of remaining family in Uk, and no local pub (old an old peoples home now), That plus weather and low 'happiness index' in my neck of the woods (North West), now having a  passive income from internet I can think of several places I'd rather be. than UK.

Most friends I'm still in contact with shop mainly at Aldi or Lidl for food, and buy 'just in time' rather than paying for shelf life.

11 years ago I had a decent job income and could buy most toys I wanted or holiday when I chose.  That was about GBP 3K/pm take home for 21 hours a week (which I'd knock out in 2 days anyhow) working from home to my own timetable.  Inflation double now, and prices have gone both up and down to reflect peoples new positions, but I'd say GBP 200 per week would be reasonable, and half that if the goal was just 'existence'.  I spend considerably more than that here of course, but mostly by choice.  100 baht a day would suffice here ignoring the modest rent - not that I'd choose that if I had any say in the matter.  I seem to be around 35K per month here without andyrestrictions, including all needs and some wants of GF. - that means no car, and a good restaurant a couple of times per week.  The rest is home cooked or street food.

It's cheaper in number of participants, just like the students here.

On 1/28/2017 at 10:09 AM, ericthai said:

Really?? i guess you dont know Thai girls that well. they are always calling their family and friends and posting on social media especially when with a guy on a trip so they can show off they are on a trip.

Grandpa don't use  Line/Whatsapp/Facebook.

If the girl needs money she'll find you quicker than NSA could find your GPS coorinates, but if going well then it's just photos in the bank and soap tv on the phone via local WiFi.

Although we can assume the worst, we can also hope for the best (eg. got offered a two week holiday elsewhere).  It's not that unusual for them not to make contact with their family for quite some time.  They likely wouldn't know someone is worrying about them.

I feel like speculating.

I think the officer had a lapse of concentration and wrote what looked like 1 instead of a 2 hundred.  The guy thought he was he was on a lucky roll, and rather than pay what he would already know should be 200,decided he'd pay at the office.  Office saw the error saying that should be 200, and when he wouldn't climb down they said "Look, if you're going to be like that then we can add all the things on that we already let slide, so it's now 500.  Stick or Twist?

Just yesterday a friend on his pushbike went past some traffic on the inside to avoid the queue, then realised he'd lost his wallet and went back the way he came (except this time in the opposite direction to the rules.  A policeman attending to traffic management stopped him, pulled out the guys wallet and handed it over too him (100% of content intact).  Guy offered the officer some money as a thank you, and the officer said that was not necessary, and sent him on his way.

So there's a good story and a bad.  We all know the police are corrupt, but at street level I prefer the corruption than having to go to the office and breaking my schedule.  It's just the big stuff that 'important people' (monied) blatantly get away with that really narks me.

Anyhow, personally I can't read many Thais writing when they use numeric 0-9.  A 7 with a line through it can easily become a 4 for example .  It reads like a doctors script to decrypt, whilst their written language is invariably very tidy.  What's that about?

I was just about to say pretty much the same.  There are so many ways to hide stuff in a computer (either in plain view or encryption).

It would take anyone even close to expert 1/2 hour and upwards, to do some very basic checks and scans and maybe brute force some poor protection (Excel is well known for being weak enough for the average cpu to get past in seconds).  If it was a Person of Interest then they'd be held in detention while they did their forensics.
 

I mean you could have the header of a Jpeg image and content that looks normal while there's room to place a lot of information in there.  Does everyone have 'a Beautiful Mind' and the instincts of Sherlock that the shadow of a pier post of a holiday shot  by the sea is actually a sun dial time for a secret meeting? or a door number in the background is a PIN number clue? (off the top of my head) - There are millions of ways.  They're probably still looking for hacksaw blades in birthday cakes and page cut outs inside a book to hide the diamonds Lol.

I just fell off my chair.  Forum posts that are positive should have a health warning.  Sure caught me off guard :) 

I like it when I see a place that advertises prices before you are in there.  It show impartiality.

5 hours ago, stevemac said:

I find the same mix as back home in uk, some who'll rip you off at every opportunity and some who would give really generously. If they can't give anything else they'll give their time. When I had my housewarming they provided all of the food except the expensive meat and fish, plus their time and effort. All the seating, shelter, singers dancers and dj were paid for by different people in the village.
The saying you reap what you sow comes to mind.
Been in the same village for over 10 years now.

Sent from my SM-G920F using Thaivisa Connect mobile app
 

'Not been my own experience.  For contrast a major family member passed on a couple of months ago and a I put a sum of money in an envelope.  Unrelated directly the way I asked, (to obfuscate on purpose) I asked my GF what the total contributions were from the couple of hundred people in the village that were in attendance with their Blend 285, gambling, food and the  usual other resources (eg. huge sweat equity from people (aside from those cooking cleaning and contributing in non financial ways but were critical to make it all happen).  I asked about the Life Assurance (that I pay/paid for the grandparents ) which may not be a lot to us if we're in good financial shape, but significant to them in that they can die without leaving a problem with others.  It turns out that these ''vultures' as I call the majority of the extended family with the exception of a couple of heroes/heroins/selfless/all giving/ minority close friends and family who I have all the time in the world for even if they don't have a satang to their name but are true in heart...the others paid less than what I gave, so one modest farang paid more than several hundred free loaders, that is to say that my single fairly modest contribution was more than 50% of total (and I hardly know any of those couple of hundred others. I just have empathy for the way I could feel my GF was dealing with it even if I couldn't be direct assistance I could help in other ways).  I've told my GF I will never ever go to a Thai funeral again and these are my reasons.  For sure she's completely not happy with that, but she doesn't get to choose....it's that "Alpha assertion time" that you'd really rather not do, but when peas are above sticks, something has to give.

As a result I'm not exactly popular right now with my S/O despite being the best performer in enhancing her life ever since adulthood when I met her, but I ain't for turning, and she can accept it and maybe one day understand it, but if she feels she can do better than me then the world is out there for her (crucifying to me, but I would prevail).  I think she understands though it will be a while to absorb the simple concept (I sure hope she thinks that way as I really really really don't want to lose her, but if it turns out she is arsenic and not Vit C then the choice is painful and crystal clear.  

Others will likely contribute their stories (and I have many more positive experiences than the one above that I'd like to communicate to provide some balance).  This is just one take.  If we get a few dozen more stories then we may hit the minimum of 'statistical significance' from which to draw some ideas for everyone else to design their futures.

5 hours ago, smotherb said:

Well, if they open their eyes they will probably be dual-priced wherever else they go for vacation. Two- or even multi-tier pricing is common throughout the developing world.  It seems locals the world over think that way, "Why should the rich foreigner not pay extra for his goods?"

Not saying I agree with the reasoning, but I'm fairly convinced that you're bang on the money with your assessment.

2 minutes ago, 7by7 said:

 

When my wife and step daughter first arrived in the UK we, of course, visited all the usual attractions; some government owned, some private.

 

Of course some, such as many museums, are free; but where we had to pay, such as the Tower of London, my wife was amazed that I had to pay the same admission price as her.

 

She said "It's your country, your culture. Why do you have to pay the same as me, a foreigner?"

That's kind of bitter-sweet.  "I want you all to go to your window now and shout at the top of your voice I'm A Human Being Goddammit, and I'm not going to take it anymore".

How about a T-Shirt that says "I have a horribly infectious disease".  If you dual price me I'll hug you and give you a bit wet Kiss on the lips as a show of affection.

So... ex sue me.

On 1/13/2017 at 6:27 PM, Pib said:

 

Bangkok Bank ibanking does have CSV export/download.

 

Useful to know.  I do have ibualang for my BKK account but have never seen that.  I'll have to test and see how far back it goes, as I'm not the best at keeping my bankbook up to date and there are huge holes where I didn't update it frequently enough.

I used to work in a role that involved huge storage capacity, and the issue is how much you can keep online and what you need to archive off elsewhere.  In my day it was optical disks in 'jukeboxes', today it's probably a massive array of thumbnail or smaller worm memory devices, I don't know.  Not sure what they're using now, but it's not like you could put that amount of data on a few terabytes of a RAID device, 

Technology is improving in a curve that some would call Logarithmic, some Parabolic, but you get the idea - it's certainly not linear.  And neither is the amount of information coming into existence per second.  The information will be available, even if not immediately online (probably 6 years worth legally, or more if they are able - especially for things like 25 year mortgages).

It would be nice if they had a CSV export function though, so people that like a full history can build up their entire history by concatenating recent data that has a commit function (as they would do in incremental backups) to do incremental historical data.

19 hours ago, LivinLOS said:

 

Kodi is not a linux computer.. Kodi is a application framework that can sit on many different OS's. 

 

Openelec is a flavor of embedded linux, designed to provide just enough resources to run kodi.. Yes you can run other linux distros, and then kodi on them, but they take greater resources and the Pi 3 isnt exactly a powerhouse. 

 

TeeVee.io is simply selling openelec + kodi distributions pre customized. 

Ambiguity on my part.  I wasn't suggesting Kodi is a computer, but that a Rasberry PI is a computer capable of running full Linux (via memory stick/card boot up).  The instance that is pre-installed is designed to operate as a smart TV, but you can do anything you like with it, same as any other Linux computer (specs for RAM/Storage/CPU are not up to much, but it is there).

When you power on Teevee you get a screen full of options (google apps, different movie players, games, weather forecast etc), I just happen to use kodi a lot.

About the only thing you wouldn't be able to do is run Windows due to its resource hogging bloat.

On 1/5/2017 at 7:09 PM, LivinLOS said:

 

 

Not sure what you intend to run ?? Openelec and Kodi ?? 

 

I find the Pi a bit limited compared to android boxes.. 

I just use Kodi, although technically it is a Linux computer (re-skinned and trimmed to be a smart TV type function, but with a Browser, Netflix and a lot of other stuff) if one were to buy bluetooth wire free keyboard (has WiFi , as well as an RJ45 port if you prefer hard network wiring).  I don't use it for that, I just like to watch RT news or TED.com recordings.  I'll look into Openelec as I'm not familiar with that.  No reason why you can't boot it to Ubuntu or something from one of the many USB ports.

The brand name of the one I bought online is on 'www.TeeVee.io"

If it is in reference to larger (public) vehicles catching more airtime than private transport, then I believe it would be smarter to put a limit on how many hours between sleep a driver should do.  There is only so much that M-150 can do for a driver.

Driving licenses coupled to proof of competence training as mentioned above would help more.

I'm with True, and like many others here, I don't think it is worth the house space the small box takes up. TV is useless to a foreigner, (and useless to Thais also, but they like Mr Bean type programming).

I got a Rasberry PI type box (no ongoing contract), and next month when my 12 month contract with True has been honoured, I'm just going to get the best possible internet my budget will support.  That would sort the TV out as well as finally getting internet that is more than about 15% of their claimed performance.

Maybe he was drafted in on a secret mission to try to reverse engineer that Thainess actually is?

...or maybe he just enjoys being a big fish in a small pond.

Can't see why hemp oil should be illegal (eg. for cooking), or even oil with CBD.  The THC from Marijuana strains I can understand them wanting to control (though I do think it would reduce road fatalities as nobody would be driving more than 10 Km/h.

All they're talking about here is industrial hemp, not recreational.

[Edit:]  I saw another article (I think on Thai visa) where they said it would be legal but the seeds weren't.  Now I'm thinking that means the Gov't will supply the seeds and they buy back the crop.

I you're not intending to get married, then it is of little consequence.  She could file for divorce on the grounds of abandonment as suggested earlier in the thread then just wait - no anxiousness/dramas.

6 hours ago, A1Str8 said:

If I follow the traffic rules and laws, I get a manly portion of rice. If I don't and I happen to lose my license, 3 bucks will sort it out. 

I am already liking this. 

They take 200 baht for a minor indiscretion, then 100 baht more to close the deal.

(when I say minor it could be a life threatening decision, but you don't take a bike to a truck fight).

For 100Kg, I think they'd be better off putting the rice in shotguns and install good manners that way.  It'll sting more without a helmet, and hurt the paintwork of those without seatbelts, and no ID on the shot that can be traced back to the gun operator.

Broken rice is about 14 baht/Kg if buying by the metric ton.

3 hours ago, papa al said:

14kms = 9 miles.

No wonder it is pristine.

Oops! bad typo, KKms would be what I intended (14 thousand), but somehow it just doesn't look right.

Hang on....  So for public road transport, the most serious offenders are mini buses, then large buses, then chartered buses, so aside from taxis which are generally city bound rather than intercity, they're saying buses have accidents.

Informative.

Can we have one for multiple occupant scooters, pot holes, M150 truck drivers asleep at the wheel due to over work and no time for maintenance, or dogs with hip fractures asleep in the middle of the road?  It would still only be telling us what we all know already, but at least it would be a statistic rather than just saying "this zig zag chart says that statistics are going up".

Will you be carrying a Rubik's cube when you land?

Just so we know...

I have 14kms (not miles but Kilometers,  on a 5/yo and  told it was dirt value wise.  I still  see much less than pristine selling for more though (all I did was service at 2x claimed interval and it is sweet as a nut).

Keep it out of village and ti'll be fine.  I have a storage firm nearby should the need arise (Udon that is, but nothing to do with me).  Deapite its age it near pristine.