Toy Boy

I feel much the same way about Britain.

I agree with what Basil B said. I sold my car in the UK in October to Webuyanycar.com. Not a great price, but they were very nice to deal with. The guy let me keep the car right up until the day before I flew back to Thailand. He explained the DVLA side of things very well. You send the slip from your V5 (what we used to call the 'log book') to them with the new owner's details. Within 4 weeks you will receive a letter confirming that you are no longer the car's owner. If you don't do this then you will be held responsible for any traffic misdemeanours or violations committed by the new owner. God knows what will happen if he totals a Porsche or something like that while the car is still in your name. You get the Road Tax refund at the same time by filling in a V14 form and sending it with the slip from the V5. Only the registered owner can do that, not the new one. I'd guess that as long as the new owner hasn't gone crazy, you should be OK, but IMHO you need to sort it out ASAP or you will still carry the liability even while you are in LOS. If he HAS gone berserk, then you might be in deep trouble. I'd say sort it out now, I would have problems sleeping if I was in your situation, to be honest. It's an open-ended liability on your part until you inform the DVLA.

Given the state of the places that most bar girls live in (and probably grew up in), trying to impress them with a fancy expensive room is a waste of money. Some folk might not care about cash, while others may feel more secure in "high-end" accommodation. Whatever, it's your money and it's up to you how you spend it. I recently had a friend from Houston who earns a mint with Schlumberger come to visit me. This was his fourth trip, and previously he'd stayed in the side streets off Walking, places like the Top Thai hotel in Soi White Rose. This time he wanted to stay in a guest house near the condo where I live in Jomtien, so I booked him into the Comeback Inn, run by an English guy called Phil. It's 500 Baht a night for a very nice room, and he was quite happy there. This guy is probably earning not far short of $200K/year, plus his American live-in works as well, yet he sees no point in chucking money away on overpriced 5-star hotels that disdain mongers.

There are two on Jomtien Beach Road, too. One by the entrance to Jomtien Palm Beach Hotel, and the other by Soi 5. I've watched the various antics, and traffic generally tries to avoid any pedestrians trying to cross, but mostly it doesn't stop at the lights. One of these days there will probably be a nasty accident, sad to say.

I have a 1-2-Call SIM card and have to top up every 30 days with 100 Baht to keep it alive. Like a lot of farangs, I don't use the phone that much, so I went to Telewiz in TukCom and they changed the scheme so that I got double the time for a top-up, but my local phone calls then cost twice as much. That seemed OK but at some point it decided to change itself back to the old plan. I can't be bothered with it any more, so I just top up 100 Baht every 30 days and then transfer 100 Baht to my teelac's 1-2-Call SIM using the *140 service whenever I see the credit getting excessive. The gals really do seem to appreciate getting phone credit as much as getting cold cash.

It's not just drunken bikers - all those assholes driving gigantic SUV's while pissed are far, far worse. Remember a few months back that incident by the Dolphin Roundabout when a drunken Canadian (I think it was, anyway) in an SUV totalled a Baht Bus, killing at least one passenger? Some years back I used to drink in Otto's Bar on Walking Street (opposite NLD1). He's a very nice Swiss-German who has lived here and run a bar forever. One night he's driving his small motorbike back home to Naklua, and a drunken Thai in an SUV didn't stop at an intersection when he should have and creamed poor Otto. He was in Bumrungrad for months having his spine pieced back together, and to this day can't walk properly. IMHO, the secret to driving a bike in Pattaya and staying alive and unscathed is to drive 100% defensively. Americans may understand what I am on about more so than Brits. I did 2 days of defensive driving courses when I worked in West Africa, and although at the time we all thought it was just stating the obvious (yes, we were arrogant young men!), nowadays I still remember those lessons and try to apply them every time I get on my bike. One lesson was never to drive when under the influence, so I don't. Simple enough, really.

Many generics are dirt cheap in SEA compared with the prescription charge in the UK. I take Atenolol, Allopurinol, Colchicine, and Diclofenac (Voltarol), and they all cost pennies. You can get Voltarol over the counter in the UK now, I think? I'd guess that it's still more expensive than buying it here.

Today really seems like the weather has changed to the cool, dry season. Humidity is low, there's a cool breeze from the north, and the maximum temperature today was 29°C, plus it was very hazy. It feels completely different. The water in the condo swimming pool has also plunged several degrees overnight. There will still be occasional showers but, just in time for Loy Krathong, the Thai winter seems to have arrived. Good points: no need for aircon to sleep. Bad points: most of the girls will soon have colds, and will end up passing them on to us.

A lot of the "clever" things on a web page work via stand-alone scripts. But these can hog resources on your PC (e.g. the Nation website is very bad for this), and can also contain malware and phish for your security data. NoScript turns them all off by default, and then it is up to you to tell it to turn them back on. For a site you trust and that has never caused you any CPU hogging problems (like, say, pattayatalk.com), just click on the options button (at the bottom-right of my screen, you may have selected to have it placed differently) and then click on "Allow pattayatalk.com". After that it will look and work the same as always. You can do this for all the sites you know and trust, but on newspaper sites, for example, that sometimes load videos by default, you can leave that script blocked so that it doesn't waste any of your bandwidth. In YouTube, of course, you will want to allow the videos, so just click on "Allow youtube.com". Now if you are ever directed to a site with malicious scripts running, you are fully protected against it. Just be careful what scripts you allow. If you want to know a bit more about the subject, have a read of: Cross-site scripting It takes a little while to get used to it, but it is necessary protection. People who think it is unnecessary are deluding themselves. One of these days they will end up in tears posting about how their bank account details were somehow stolen from their PC's. "Honest, guvnor, I had AVG anti-virus and Spybot running, it CAN'T have been my PC!"

I recently found out about NoScript for Firefox - it's as essential as an anti-virus program. Some of the attacks may be malicious XSS scripts rather than mere viruses. If you're a firefox user, get it : HERE