Writing anything in the part of a visa application form about a criminal record means instant rejection (unless you're recently convicted wife of ex-pm Thaksin Shinawatra). Perhaps the pile of money they paid to the UK was covering that part of the application form and the authorities didn't see it.
There's a silver lining to Thakin and his wife. They have been the seed of many a protest, like the one that passed my office on its way to the British Embassy this morning (I think they're still there).
I still need to give this site some much needed love. I want to add links to blogs of friends and guildies, but unlike Wordpress such a thing is not straight forward. Complicated things are super easy though! Like the piccy thing I have on the right, you wouldn't believe how easy it was to set that up. The javascript popup thing was simple too!
One major difference between Drupal and many other 'blogging' platforms (Drupal technically isn't a blogging platform) is the commenting system, courtesy of the comment module included with the default download of Drupal (aka Drupal core). As usual you can post comments to the post, but you can also reply to specific comments by clicking the reply button on the particular comment you wish to respond to.
The threaded comments system takes a little getting used to, but it's quite nice and really helps manage the flow of comments. It is possible to have a flat comment structure, but I prefer threaded.
The Thai government has introduced a law that requires beggars to register for the right to beg, which includes a (lack-of) means test. If you can't prove you have no home/job/money/children to support you, no begging permit for you!
The introduction of this law is also designed to combat the ever-growing fleet of western beggars. They are no longer permitted anywhere in Thailand. Thai beggars don't have to compete anymore.
I've begun to get an increasing amount of spam and as the Akismet module for Drupal 6 is still not working I had been manually approving comments until yesterday. A captcha is now required when commenting and the benefit of this is that my comment spam should go down dramatically, while also making it so that comments no longer need to be approved before publishing them.
I might get laughed at by certain people for admitting this, but I've just today setup Windows Home Server as a new addition to our network. I was after a hassle-free backup solution that once setup would manage itself and I'm happy to report that it does exactly that as well as a couple of other things that are probably edge-case-uses for me.
I particularly like the remote access feature as it allows me to retrieve files on the server from anywhere. I haven't actually tried it yet though so I don't know if it works or how good it is however I must give props to the developers for coming up with what is the smoothest remote access setup I have ever seen. It consisted of me clicking a button and everything, including my router and very own domain, being automatically configured for me!
What a far cry from the port forwarding, dynamic DNS and DMZ hell I had to go through for my pc at work in anticipation of my upcoming holiday. I never did manage to get that working properly with a dynamic dns and have ended up using the dyndns.org service just to tell me the public IP address of the office.
While it was easy for me, I can imagine the hell people with routers that refused to play with windows home server would go through with this feature. In my experience software that can automatically configure itself tends to be a right pain in the arse when it has to be done manually. Now if only the rest of the installation had been so wonderful.
The installation not only took forever, it also rebooted an incredible number of time (I lost count), and called itself different things throughout the process - it's clearly the first version and a thrown together one at that. The startup screen still shows Windows Server 2003, not that I have a monitor attached to the server anymore.

or
or
It's a bit of everything
I got a bit of a scare after installation because it hadn't picked up my network adapter so I had to go hunting for one. The motherboard disk of course didn't recognise Windows Home Server and gace me another panicked moment, but luckily there were still drivers on there that I could install manually.
Thankfully it's all setup now so I can just leave it to do its 'thing'.
Avert your eyes from the luggage of doom lest its luminesence be permenantly engrained onto your now dilated pupils!
This, bigger, bag has apparently become mine only because Oui is too lazy to push it around when there is a smaller alternative available (see Bag #2).
I'm a fairly quick shopper in that I go with a purpose and as soon as I see anything that closely matches what I want it's purchased and I'm out of there. This was the case with our luggage too. As soon as I saw the bright orange of these babies I knew it was destiny.
Pictures of them and other holidaying stuff can and will be found in the image gallery I've created for such a purpose - Holiday 2008!
PS I've also added a link in the top right.
Obsession Commencement
The Thai way or the highway
The devil-spawn known as Securom