Archive for December, 2009

Haven’t been blogging much lately but have been updating my Facebook status fairly regularly. Feel free to add me there if you give a shit what I’ve been up to If I don’t know you add a note that you are a blog reader or I may not accept you (get a lot of poker spammers trying to add me).

facebook.com/franceschine

So ya, Facebook is now the #2 site in the World behind Google, according to Alexa. Some people have been referring to it as ‘the other internet’ – I read that 25% of all pageviews in the USA are now on Facebook.com. Pretty insane growth. I’ve had an account since 2004 and in that time have probably used the website once a week or less – usually just replying to messages or friend requests. But in the last few months I’ve gotten hooked. A few of the major reasons:

-A ton of people I do not communicate with online (or regularly) are on Facebook now, and use it a lot – primarily older family members
-Status updates were an awesome feature for them to add – I much prefer using them to Twitter, though I haven’t played with Twitter much yet
-iPhone+Facebook=The nuts. The iPhone app is far better than using Facebook.com, i can take and upload a photo as a status update in less than a minute – and read messages, check status updates etc all with a super sleek user interface + no ads anywhere-and very fast.

In other news I’ve been in Thailand now for nearly six months straight without leaving the country. My longest run, by far, ever. I got an ED (education) visa for attending a Thai language school. I was told I could go to the school or not go and either way I’d be able to keep renewing my visa every three months without the need to leave the country – as every other visa requires you to leave the country every three months and return – this is very awesome. So after two months of attending my school I realized I wasn’t learning anything and the school sucks – so I stopped going. The school said I could keep renewing the visa for 10 years – and when I went to renew it last time they did not check my Thai, so I figured I’d have no issues.

Then this week I read on ThaiVisa.com that they are now cracking down and testing people from their second renewal (the one I have coming up). The questions people are reporting being asked were fairly basic and I think I’ll be able to pass the first test if I go to class a few times in the next month and ask some questions – but this is concerning. If they aren’t stupid (and you can never give the Thai’s credit for not being stupid) they will increase the difficulty of testing from the 2nd to 3rd to 15th renewal etc. Which means I’m going to now have to start going to classes again regularly – at my god awful school.

My other option is to look into another type of Visa – the investment visa pops out at me as a good possibility, though I read I need the US Embassy to certify I have a clean criminal record to qualify for this…yawn…

Other than my visa issues life is good. After my great European debacle earlier this year things have smoothed out nicely. Life gets a bit boring at times in Thailand but I never have any problems. Life is good.

Can’t promise I’ll blog again for awhile so again if you want add me on Facebook and you can catch my regular status updates – if anybody knows how to have those updates automatically post as Wordpress blog posts let me know, I’ll set that up…

Ciao