PattayaPete

The word is that the British Embassy is not so accomodating. They will provide the letter but you need to show them proof of your income.

It really is quite easy. Here's what you should do. Go to the Thai embassy in Manila and apply for a Non-Immigrant O visa. Tell them you wish to retire in Thailand and that you have a pension which meets the financial requirements. When you arrive in Bangkok go to the American Embassy and get a proof of income document. All you need to do to get this is swear in front of an embassy official that you have a pension greater than 65,000 baht a month. No proof required. Then go to Thai immigration in Bangkok or Pattaya and apply for a one year extension by reason of retirement.

The New Dynamic: I decided to take more notice of the mix of perambulators on Walking Street on a recent evening foray and there’s no doubt if the happy loving couples (and their pre-pubescent sprogs) and the clusters of north Asian noodles are taken out of the equation, the numbers do tend to look thinner than in recent years. A comment made to me by more than one person has been the ease of obtaining a seat in places such as the Peppermint and Happy ogling dens. Certainly in the past two high seasons it was not unusual for one or both of these dens to have a ‘house full, come back in 15

Accessing and using the Gallery. Access to The Gallery is through the Gallery Link at the top right of this and every page of the forum. The Gallery is a good place to show off your picture taking skills. We all appreciate a good pic, especially of a pretty girl, so please do post your photos in the relevant section. There are 4 main sections as follows. 1 The Stunners Gallery. This gallery is open to all members to view and post. It has been around this forum in one form or another since 2000. Although it is called the Stunners Gallery, it is for posting pics of girls y

You are in Outline mode. Click the blue OPTIONS button near the top right of the first post in this thread and choose Standard under Display Mode.

Tis the Season to be Whining: Apparently a local publication recently suggested tourism to Fun Town was down by about 50 percent, at least for the December 2006 period. Certainly there have been plenty of bar owners complaining about comparatively poor takings for this time of the year, although others are wandering about with broad ‘I’ve-just-swallowed-a-cat’ smiles and bulky wallets. From personal observation only, it’s clear to me Pattaya is busy, it’s just that some parts, formerly areas considered to be a litmus test of bar business health, are not doing the numbers they were. I woul

Click on PM, bottom left of this post. To PM when you don't have a post handy, just click on members, top right of every page, type the members name into the search box and when their details come up click on "Send a Personal Message".

Only the Good: Sad to report on the untimely death of Steve Blumenthal, one of the co-owners of the Tahitian Queen 2 ogling den (Soi BJ, off Walking Street), of a heart attack at just 41 years of age. Steve penned the ‘Out For A Beer’ column in one of Pattaya’s monthly tourist publications, sensibly giving TQ2 a mention in most of his pieces. I didn’t know him very well but he struck me as a nice person, and I’ve certainly never heard anyone talk of him in anything but the kindest terms. Steve, despite his relative youth, had been in Pattaya for longer than even he would probably care to admit

Hi Rhoel I do backup to DVD. I never play the stuff from DVD just keep it backed up there. I tried double layered DVDs for a while but as they cost 300 baht compared to 10 baht for a single layer and I had way to many failures I am back to single layer DVDs. With 2.5 terabytes of disk space I can keep 160 or so HD movies on line. That's enough for now. I do plan to swap to Blue Ray once the price and technology settles down. I was an early adopter of DVD's. My first writer cost 50,000 baht and the disks were 550 baht each. This time with the format war and the disk price for b

I'm getting a server not found error wheen I go to http://www.rhoel.co.uk/IndexImages/rhoel-icon.jpg. The server may be down or it may be something to do with the Taiwan problem. When it displays OK you are probably pulling the image from your cache. Avatars are not displayed to unlogged in people. It's a feature

I know it's crazy but I really wouldn't worry about it. I've had two new cars here. With the first one it took 3 months to get the white plates. I was stopped about three times, usually on the expressway in Bangkok and had to pay a bribe each time of 500 baht. It was all new to me then and I probably could have got away with 200 baht. With the second car it only took 6 weeks to get the plates. I drove all over the country in that 6 weeks and was stopped once for speeding in Isaan. One hundred baht took care of that. Don't expect for laws like this to make sense or anyone to kno

I had a look on the net and found the Sigmatel site. They appear to be in the codec and DAC business rather than the player business. Codecs and DACs are components of an Audio Player. It would appear that your device is made with these components by another company. You need to take a good look at the player, the documentation and the CD that came with it to see who the manufacturer is. They will almost definitly have a web site with the latest drivers that you can download.

While anything is possible, I don't think your plan will work. What you need to do is get a Non-Immigrant Type "O" visa before you arrive. Stated purpose of the visa is to apply for a retirement extension once you are in Thailand. All you need to qualify is 800,000 baht in a Thai bank account and to be over 50 years of age. Then once you get here you go to immigration to apply for a one year extension. The problem here is that you do not have the cash in a Thai bank account. You may be able to talk your way past this by showing the money in an account in your home country.

Off the Drip: The better boozers stretched along the ‘English Patient', otherwise known as Soi Buakhow, seem to be generally doing quite well even though high season has yet to kick in. With a couple of mates in tow I spent a few hours exploring three of the gogos located on and about the soi. The first place we visited was Champagne in Soi LK Metro. It was reasonably busy with quite good music, although it had the standard cheap amber draught (45 baht) while anything else was reaching gouge level. There were about 20 chrome pole huggers cavorting about the place; four or five rated a second

Hi Guys Martin updated the software for the review system recently. Some of the terminology got changed by the update. I started to sort it out but I am away on holiday now so I had to stop. It will be job number 1 when I get back. You can still add a new hotel by clicking on the Upload Products link at the top right of every page. A little obscure, for sure.

Excellent! That really cracked me up.

This site basically has unlimited bandwidth. When members post pics that are hosted elsewhere, they may exceed their bandwidth limits at the hosting site and then the pics will not display here. The message will vary depending on the policy of the other site.

Hi Mary Seems you took a wrong turn and ended up in Denmark as that is where you are posting from. I heard a rumour that you are a 50 year old bald fat guy that gets off on pretending to be a young girl. Whatever floats you boat I suppose.

History Lesson: According to a reader who seems to know what he’s on about, I was mistaken in my previous missive when I wrote about the longest-running boozers on Pattayaland Soi 2. Terry at The Shamrock allegedly holds the record, about 22 years, narrowly ahead of George at the Viking Beachcomber with the Blue Parrot and Cheers next in line. Nonetheless I still stick by my contention that Colin and Stan are the longest-established partnership on the soi, and probably in Pattaya, with 18 years in business together. Medals all round. Off the Drip: The better boozers stretched along the ‘En

I have a creative sfx sound card. Hooking it us is a bit tricky. The easiest way is to use the S/PDIF output. That's a single coaxial cable that runs to the S/PDIF input on your multichannel amp. It can be quite hard to get everything configured correctly. The new soundcards like the sfx are much easier than earlier cards like the audigy but still can be troublesome. The reason I don't connect this way is because it causes problems with stereo output when listening to music and it will not properly decode wmv multi channel audio or SACD or DVD Audio. For that reason I wire each chann

This all getting a bit out of hand. Please remember discussion about other boards is not welcome here and cross posting private communications will get you banned. I can see that mulphy is being picked on for reasons that are not apparent to me. Please cut it out and let's get back to some friendly on topic discussion about Pattaya. This topic is closed.

I use component cables, directly off the video card. As all my videos are downloaded I have no use for a tuner card. I'd like to use hdmi but as yet have not found a reasonable video card with hdmi outputs. I know they are coming. As for H264, yes you do need special codec, a compatible player and a fair bit of processor grunt if the video is of a reasonable size. The easiest way to get them going is to install a copy of PowerDVD 7 which has all the needed bits. I am using nVidia Pure Video to decode all my videos and it works for H264 as well. This may be because I have installed Power

Ahh, that's one megaBIT or 1024/512 if you like. Readily available in most of Pattaya.

Profits? What profits - I am unemployed. That's why I have enough time to play with all this stuff. Seriously though you could get a slightly more modest system up and running for less than 100,000 baht. Not a huge amount compared to the amount of enjoyment you can get from such a system.

I've always been a media junkie. I worked in radio for many years and also had some affiliations with the local TV stations. One of the things I thought I'd miss from farangland when I settled here in Pattaya, was the wide variety of media I could get back home. As it turns out, I now have access to the very best in the world in stunning quality on my almost huge 50 inch plasma screen and state of the art 7.1 audio system. The key to this is the internet. I am convinced that within 10 years all the media outlets we presently use will basically fade away and the internet will become the