Thaivisa.com have been advised that from February 1 2008, the Royal Thai Consulate-General in Penang, will only issue Tourist Visas to those in possession of an air ticket departing from Thailand to an international destination not local in the same region. (i.e. not Vietnam, Malaysia or similar.)
It is believed that the reason for the tightening of the rules is to reduce the number of foreigners using tourist visas to stay long term in Thailand, and not for tourism purposes for which this visa is intended, therefore abusing the system.
Our source is from a reliable person, who normally provides us with accurate information, and we have no reason to doubt the accuracy of this information. The new ticket rule is not officially confirmed as yet. [via Thaivisa.com]
- Pattaya Rag Quiz sponsored by Club Blu (soft opens tomorrow, Feb 1)
I will post questions most days from my Jan 19 post until Jan 31. You should e-mail your answers to me at firstname.lastname@example.org . You can e-mail me each time there are questions are you can mail me one time with all answers before midnight (Thai time) Jan 31. The questions will be sequentially numbered so you will know if you've missed any. Include in the mail the name you want to be known by if you win. I don't want to use a mail address to identify the winner. The winner will be announced on Feb 1.
The prize for the most correct answers is a free 'barf' in Club Blu so it will be of most interest to residents and regular visitors to Thailand. Here's the final question:
Q20. What famous song title can you find in the picture? Clue. It's not, "Man United are a bunch of wet arseholes".
Note: Barf covers the barfine only and not ST/LT fees. Also, it's up to you to get your choice to say "yes".
- Tough Year Ahead For Operators. Hotel and tour operators foresee a tough time this year from several uncontrollable factors, including a global economic slowdown reducing tourist arrivals as the number of hotel rooms increases.
The Thai Hotels Association (THA) said big new hotels featuring more than 30,000 rooms were being developed nationwide and would open between now and 2010. Of these, about 12,000 rooms are scheduled to become available this year.
The THA's eastern region said advanced hotel bookings for Pattaya during this year's first quarter had already dropped, because foreigners had postponed their trips to Thailand, especially tourists from Japan and other Asian nations.
The strong Baht has been cited as one cause for the drop. International tourists, especially Japanese, are avoiding Thailand due to the 50-per-cent increase in travelling costs caused by the weakening yen against the stronger Baht. [via The Nation]
- An Englishman and his partner got the shock of their lives when they were visited by the police and arrested for involvement in making and distributing pornography via the Internet. A Press conference was held on the 30th January at Pattaya Police Station in the Operation Center for Suppression Special Crime and Transnational Crime, that after a surveillance operation on the couple, 55 year old Londoner, Mr. Tony Shaffer and his Thai wife, Sudjai, aged 37, had been arrested at their home in Banglamung for advertising an Internet home sex service and producing pornographic material which they also distributed via their own website on the Internet. [via Pattaya People]
- Almost 60% of people questioned by the Abac Poll believe the new government under Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej will be in office less than two years. The poll, conducted by Assumption University, assessed opinions of 3,506 people living in 27 provinces between January 20-30.
"People believe that the government won't be able to complete its term because it is a coalition that includes several small parties," said Noppadon Kanikar, director of Abac research centre. "This may cause conflicts between allies." [via Bangkok Post]
- Belgian drugs, chemicals and plastics maker Solvay (SOLB.BR: Quote, Profile, Research) plans to build a 6.07 billion baht ($184 million) chemical plant in Thailand, the state-run Board of Investment said on Thursday. The BOI board had approved investment incentives for the plant, which would produce epichlorohydrin, a feedstock for epoxy resins, on the Map Ta Phut industrial estate in the eastern province of Rayong, the agency said in a statement. Epoxy resins are used widely in the electronics, automotive, aerospace and windmill sectors. [via Reuters]
- Shell smashed all-time British company profit records today, posting 2007 earnings of $27.5billion (£13.9billion), and immediately ran into a storm with union leaders, who are demanding the Government hits the oil giant with a windfall tax.
Shell's profit surge - it is now making a staggering $75million (£38million) a day - on the back of a booming oil price that touched $100 a barrel this winter, was labelled as "obscene" by Tony Woodley of Unite, the UK's largest trade union, as Britons struggle with soaring energy costs.
"Shell shareholders are doing very nicely while the rest of us are paying the price and struggling," said Woodley. [via HuffPo]
- Download All Your Blogs with Blogger Backup
Unlike WordPress, there’s no export feature in Blogger that can help you download or backup your blog entries and comments left by readers.
There are however some third-party options and the best among them all is Blogger Backup. This Windows utility that saves your entire Blogger posts to the disk and can easily restore them in case you accidentally delete your blog or some of the posts.
You login with your Blogger / Google account and select one of the blogs that you want to archive locally. You can either save all your blog posts to one file or let the software create new file per blog entry. It can also backup reader comments.
If you ever want to recover blog posts that are in the local backup folder but deleted from the actual blog, just hit the "Restore Posts" button, select the entries and they’ll be back online in almost no time.
Blogger Backup follows the incremental backup style so if you run the software again after a week, only blog posts and comments published during this seven day period will be downloaded locally, not the entire blog.
Though we covered Blogger Backup some time back, that version did not play very well with the new Blogger but this new release fixes all the previous problems and is extremely fast. Highly recommended. [via Digital Inspiration]
- Portable Scribus - a powerful, free (portable) desktop publishing tool. You really do have to love open-source. Open-source software is free and can often replace costly commercial apps, which is the case with Scribus, an open-source desktop publishing and page layout application that puts professional-looking documents within the reach of non-professionals like me, and maybe you. I’ve chosen to feature the portable version of Scribus because it is a lot simpler to download and install than its full-sized cousin. It works within the Portable Apps suite, featured in an earlier post on this blog.
Portable Scribus, like Scribus, is a fantastic tool for creating all kinds of great-looking documents: everything from magazine pages to newsletters, invitations, brochures, calendars, you name it. Learning how to use Scribus is made easy by virtue of the simple tutorials available and the large community of Scribus users who freely give their tips and advice.
Typical word-processing applications like Microsoft Word have a very limited ability to combine and manipulate a variety of page elements like text and graphics. If all you need is a simple document with an uninteresting layout, then Scribus is overkill. But if you want your document to look like it was designed and created professionally, word-processors will let you down. That’s when you need an application with the power of Scribus. As the illustration above demonstrates, Scribus has what it takes to put true desktop publishing within your grasp without the huge cost of its commercial brethren.
One of the coolest things about using Scribus is the boatload of user-designed templates
that are available for you to download, like the one below. You can also upload and share your own.
When you download the compressed Zip file, simply extract the downloaded folder to your thumb/flash drive within the Portable Apps directory. Note: You should install Ghostscript before installing Scribus. Ghostscript 8.60+ or newer is recommended. This is important for EPS,PS import and print preview. [via Online Tech Tips]
- A Nuts set of Gemma Atkinson pics. Works for me
- Keeley Week - Day 3
- Kevin Keegan signs Dennis Wise
- Ted Kennedy's come out in support of Obama and this political cartoonist hits the nail on the head with a brilliantly cruel cartoon. Ted Kennedy will never be allowed to forget his mistake at Chappaq...., Chipaw...., Chapa..... err, Martha's Vineyard.
- A nun was sitting with her Mother Superior chatting.
"Mother Superior, I used some horrible language this week and feel absolutely terrible about it."
"When did you use this awful language?" asked the elder.
"Well, I was golfing and hit an incredible drive that was going to go 280 yards, but it struck a phone line over the fairway and straight down to the ground after only 100 yards."
"And that's when you swore?"
"No, Mother," says the nun. After that, a squirrel ran out of the bushes and grabbed my ball in its mouth and began to run away."
"And THAT'S when you swore?" asked the Mother Superior.
"Well, no," says the nun. "You see, as the squirrel was running, an eagle came down out of the sky, grabbed the squirrel in his talons and began to fly away!"
"Is THAT when you swore?" asked the amazed elder nun.
"No. As the eagle carried the squirrel away in its claws, it flew near the green and the squirrel dropped my ball."
"Did you swear THEN?" asked Mother Superior impatiently.
"No, because the ball fell on a big rock, bounced over the sand trap, rolled onto the green and stopped about six inches from the hole." The two nuns were silent for a moment.
Mother Superior sighed, "You missed the fucking putt, didn't you?"