Freelancers ~ Pattaya Rag

The best looking girls around town often work as freelancers and appear late at night in places like Lucifers, Tony's, The Marine or Insomnia. Freelancers shouldn't be confused with go-go/bar girls who hit the same venues after 2.00am. The theory is the good looking freelancers can get a 'date' in these venues without having the aggro of hanging around a bar or go-go all night. They have a sort of elite status amongst the pay for play (p4p) bar girls because they appear to be self employed, they are normally the best lookers and they can pretend that they are not really bar girls. Young guys around town like freelancing girls cause they are generally the most attractive and the guys can pretend to themselves that they've 'pulled' a straight girl and not a p4p bar girl/hooker.

Freelancers don't have the security of a bar salary so on the surface they appear to survive on what they pick up freelancing. In reality, this is rarely the case. The majority of freelancers have day jobs which can be in hair salons, restaurants and department stores but are more likely to be in massage parlours, karaokes and bars. The bottom line is a fair chance they have already been 'exercising' before you catch up with them on the freelance circuit.

Case in point. Several years ago, I had a favourite in one of the Sabai massage parlours who was a real beauty. She had the lot, face, figure and enough spoken English to keep it interesting. She would start work at the parlour around 5.00pm and leave around 9.00pm after she'd had 2 or 3 baths. I often saw her later in the evenings on the freelance circuit where she just didn't want to know. She'd probably earned a couple of thousand baht at the massage parlour so her evenings were for her pleasure in the form of farang toy boys or karaoke Thai boys. If she picked up any money from in the evenings from a farang it was a bonus but for the right guy, she didn't even charge to create the impression that she was a 'good girl', a.k.a. good girlfriend material. She eventually found a husband this way and to this day he won't have a clue (and hopefully doesn't care) what sort of mileage she has on the clock !!!!!!

For old Pattaya hands, there are a couple of additional issues when dealing with freelancers. If something goes wrong, how do you find them? With a bar girl you can always track her down through the bar but with a freelancer, where do you go? Also you don't know if freelancers bother with medical check up's either personally or through their day time job.

The bottom line is freelancers are 100% p4p and imho you need to exercise more caution not less when dealing with them. Better safe than sorry even in the LOS.

Sierra Tangos

Lost my TOT ADSL internet connection at midnight, Saturday and it still hadn't come back up by 3.00am. All very frustrating but let's hope whatever maintenance was being performed improves TOT's performance going forward.

A concert will be held on Friday 5 October at the Bali-Hai port area in South Pattaya. The concert is designed to celebrate the 80th birthday of His Majesty the King and will be conducted by Pattaya City Hall in conjunction with TITV. The performers are a number of popular Thai bands and tickets will be just 19 baht and all proceeds will be given to the Thai Red Cross Society.

David Copperfield's World Of Wonder Live In Bangkok, Thursday, November 8, to Saturday, November 10 - The well known illusionist will have 2 performances on Thursday and Friday and 3 performances on Saturday at Impact Arena, Muangthong Thani, Chaeng Wattana Road, Bangkok. Tickets range from 500 to 3,500 baht. For more information and tickets, visit www.thaiticketmajor.com.

I may have stumbled across a better text editor than Notepad++! - PSPAD has a built-in FTP connection manager which lets you browse a remote FTP, open files, edit them, and then save the changes. All of that is done from within PSPAD. Another neat feature is the more advanced syntax highlighting that it includes. For example, when you’re in an HTML file and you place your cursor in the middle of a tag, the matching open/close tag is highlighted. Here’s a list of other things that PSPAD has to offer:
- Manage projects
- FTP client - edit files directly from the web (stores login information, too)
- Text difference with color-coded differences highlighted
- Syntax highlighting according to file type
- Auto correction
- Intelligent internal HTML preview using IE and Mozilla
- Integrated TiDy library for formatting and checking HTML code, conversion to CSS, XML, XHTML
- Reformat and compress HTML code, tag character case change
- ASCII chart with HTML entities
- Code explorer for Pascal, C/C++, INI, HTML, XML, PHP and more in development
- Spell checker
- Matching bracket highlighting
There are also some PSPad extensions available to add more features, syntax highlighting for obscure languages, and many other things. Even if you are content with Notepad++ or another text editor I think you should give this a whirl…remember, it doesn’t cost a dime! [via Cybernet]

TV Schedule Of Major Sporting Events - link to the TV schedule for major sporting events such as the IRB Rugby World Cup, English Premier League, F1 Grand Prix, Cricket and Euro 2008 qualifiers.