Fitness Centers 3rd, behind property and auto firms for complaints

Looks like the high pressure sales tactics finally attracted enough attention:

CPB secretary-general Niroth Chadhroenprakob said that finalising fitness centre contracts this year was its priority. During the first 10 months of last year, 297 complaints were filed about fitness club services not meeting commitments by sales representatives.

"Fitness centres rank third in complaints received last year. From November 2008 to March 2009, over 100 complaints were received with similar problems at eight centres,'' he said.

In the last fiscal year ending Sept 30, 626 complaints were filed against property firms. In second place were automobile and motorcycle firms, which faced 485 complaints related to unfair hire-purchase contracts.

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Blog hosting offer:139 Baht / year

As I have some extra hosting space, and hosting bills were due, thought I would throw this out there to my loyal readers. It's not exactly going to make me rich, but it seems like many people want to have a blog, and this is the perfect package to host your own Wordpress, Drupal or Blogger.

139 Baht per year gets you:

• 250 Mb of space
  
• 10,000 MB of bandwith
  
• 4 Add-On Domains
• 4 Parked Domains
• Unlimited Sub Domains
• Unlimited POP3 Accounts
• 4 MySQL Databases
• Unlimited FTP Accounts
• CGI, FastCGI
• PHP 5, Perl, Ruby On Rails, Python
• SSH, SSI
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• FrontPage
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• Site Builder*, Chillisoft ASP*
• Web Mail, E-mail Alias, Auto Responders, Mailing Lists, Catch Alls,Spam Assassin
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• And all the other good stuff you'd expect from shared linux hosting from a top 10 web host
  

Sign up here. Also if you join this month, 20% discount using the code: '20per' Payment with PayPal. Or post a reply and I'll give you my Thai bank account.

Funny Korean political cartoon

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Is this the way Korea sees the problems here?

Sondhi and car photos after the hit attempt

Batman sighting at the Red Shirt protests

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Tony Cheng of Al Jazera thinks he works for Fox News

Come on. Being a tad over-dramatic don't you think Tony? See his alarmist article here.

"The people of Bangkok wake to a city scarred with the wounds of war."

"These huge uncontrollable missiles smashed everything in their path from trees to an electricity pylon, which snapped and sent sparks on to the battle raging below."

"But the scars that now cross the face of Bangkok will take years to heal."

"Mayhem erupts"

If you read this article you'd think Tony was covering Iraq or Afghanistan. Not the same day most of the city was celebrating the Thai new year and I was out having a family dinner. What Tony fails to mention is that most of Bangkok went about their business and ignored this scuffle. Hardly a day of mayhem.

Siamese Cojoined Crocodiles

Slashdot coverage of ProtectTheKing.net

ProtectTheKing.net makes Slashdot:

"In a move that would make the old eastern German Stasi green with envy, the Thai government has modernized a system that allows citizens to snitch on fellow citizens. 'Internet users are being urged to show their loyalty to the king by contributing to a new website called protecttheking.net, which has been set up by a parliamentary committee. On the site's front page it is described as a means for Thai people to show their loyalty to the king by protecting him from what it calls misunderstandings about him. It calls on all citizens to inform on anyone suspected of insulting or criticising the monarchy.' An large unknown population of political prisoners are currently being held for 3 to 15 years in Thai prisons for being interpreted as insulting the monarchy."

Suggestion: Build a Park

Does Bangkok need another mall? The big empty lot next to Gaysorn Plaza would be perfect for a park.

SF World Cinema Fail

SF World Cinema Fail captured by Thanh-BKK. One thing to have a virus scan, another to be infected by a worm.

DTAC Pushmail :How To

Want Blackberry like functionality on your average phone? Check out DTAC's PushMail at dtac.co.th/pushmail or smart-sync.com. First month is free, then it's 30 baht per month.

Pretty easy .. here's how I did it for my Nokia 6300.

1. Get to wap.dtac.co.th on your phone's browser. (didn't work on opera mini)
   
2. Find the pushmail sign up.
3. Tell it which webmail (gmail, hotmail, yahoo) or pop3 act you will use.
4. Create pushmail username and password and enter your webmail username and pass.
5. Click register.

Yes, that did say give your email and password to them. As I am clearly not giving them my main email password, I created another Gmail account just for this purpose. Then I created a rule in my main Gmail account to forward messages based on a rule, that I want pushed to my mobile, to my specialy created email account.

You will be alerted of any emails via a Service Message. Kinda like an SMS, but goes in your service message inbox. The service message contains the subject of the mail you are receiving as well as the link to open the email in your phone's browser. If you open it, you'll but subject to the GPRS charges. The software scans your inbox every 15 minutes - so not quite as immediate as an sms.