TotallyOz

(CNN) -- Actress Dixie Carter, best known for her role as Julia Sugarbaker on the TV show "Designing Women," has died, her agent said Saturday. She was 70. No other details were provided. Carter was drawn to roles portraying steely Southern women. One of her more recent roles included a guest appearance on the show "Desperate Housewives," for which she was nominated for an Emmy in 2007. "This has been a terrible blow to our family," her husband, the actor Hal Holbrook, told "Entertainment Tonight." "We would appreciate everyone understanding that this is a private family tragedy." Carter and Holbrook met while filming the CBS-TV movie, "The Killing of Randy Webster." Carter was born in 1939 in McLemoresville, Tennessee. In addition to her role as feisty Julia Sugarbaker, she's been on other television series including "Family Law" and "Diff'rent Strokes." For the rest of the story: 'Designing Women' star Dixie Carter dies - CNN.com

I knew him really well and thought he was a great guy and always fun to talk to and hang out with. This is way too young to die. My heart goes out to his friends and family.

This is a great thing you are doing. I wish I was in the USA to attend. I know you guys will have a wonderful time.

The Grocery Store at Central Festival on Beach Road is quite nice. It is a bit more expensive than others in the area but if convenient, it has a nice selection of fruits, meats, Farang food, handmade items etc. I asked and they said they didn't deliver but not sure if the lady understood me. This is located on the very bottom of the shopping center. If you enter on Beach Road, take the outside escalator down and it is right there.

I love my Iphone and use it in Thailand everyday not only to make calls but to get e-mails, surf, play games, etc. There is a new version of the OS coming out. I wonder how long it will take for the Thai guys to crack this one? And we begin. Steve Jobs is on stage. He's giving a few updates First, iPad. He's showing his favorite reviews, from Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal, and Baig at USA Today. Today, Apple has sold about 450,000 iPads. He says Best Buy is out of stock, Apple stores selling them as fast as they can get them in. Users downloaded 250,000 iBooks titles the first day, now more than 600,000 to date. Users have downloaded more than 3.5 million iPad apps. He says people are loving the product – shows a photo of a little girl hugging one in an Apple store. Now on to the App Store. More than 3,500 iPad apps in the store. He's showing a bunch of apps now, including Major League Baseball, various games, Etrade and IMDB. He's showing a bunch of news apps now, including Time magazine, our sister pub, and the New York Times and Popular Science. Jobs gives special attention to Netflix. There are now more than 185,000 apps in the app store. Now he's talking about how Apple has won the JD Power award for smartphones the last three years. Now he's calling out Net Applications' numbers on browser use, pointing out that the iPhone has 64% of the mobile browsing market as far as use. Apple has sold 50 million iPhones and 85 million iPhones and iPod touches. Now, on to OS 4. Developer preview comes out today, official version ships in summer. 1,500 new APIs. Developers will have access to calendar, in-app SMS, full map overlays, full access to still and video camera, and more. There are more than 100 new user features, including creating playlists, tap to focus on video, gift apps, spell check, Bluetooth keyboards, file & delete mail search, places in photos, 5x digital zoom and home screen wallpaper. Apple is going to focus on seven "tentpole" features today. The first is multitasking. (Finally!) We weren't the first to this party, but we're going to be the best, Jobs says – similar to cut and paste. It's really easy to do multitasking in a way that drains battery life. It's also easy to do it in a way that sucks the performance from your foreground app. Apple has figured out how to do it and avoid those things. That's what took us a little longer, he says, but I think we nailed it. Now, a demo. He's launching mail, looking at a message. Touches a link in the message and goes to the browser. Now he wants to get back to mail. He double-clicks the home button, and the window rises and shows the apps that are running. Now he goes to eBay, checks his auction. Now he goes to play Tap Tap Revenge. Now he goes back to the website and mail, then goes back to the game. It always takes him back to where he was in any app. (Lots of applause here.) So that is our multitasking UI, he says; and it's really wonderful. (Still a lot of questions about exactly how this works.) Steve Jobs sounds better than he has in a long time, by the way. Scott Forstall is coming out to give us some more detail on Apple's multitasking implementation. He explains that Apple is providing seven multitasking services. First, background audio. He's talking about Pandora as the most popular music streaming app. Until now, if you closed the app to do something else, the music stop. No longer. Pandora founder Tim Westergren is coming up to talk about it. Tim says the iPhone has singlehandedly changed the direction of Pandora, making it mobile and so much more useful. "It was this completely transformative moment for us. … Our growth rate doubled overnight." He says it took his developers one day to make Pandora's iPhone app background aware. He's demoing it, showing that he can skip songs. He can also go to buy a song that's playing from iTunes, even as the song is playing. (As a Pandora iPhone user, I can tell you this is great. Android and Palm have had this for a while.) Now, Skype. You can stay in a call and use other apps. Even if you're not running Skype in the foreground, you can receive Skype calls. David Ponsford from Skype is up to demo. He says Skype has more than half a billion users. (This is a very important feature that will appeal to a lot of business customers.) Even in another app, if someone calls a notification pops up and you can pop over to Skype to answer. While he's on the call, he goes to OpenTable to pick a spot to eat. (I wonder what happens if another call from the main phone app comes in at the same time? He doesn't say.) On to background location. (This is really important for turn-by-turn direction apps and check-in apps like Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla.) Forstall demos a GPS system working while music is playing in the background. Apple came up with a cell tower solution that allows these apps to work without having GPS on all the time – because GPS is a major power drain. Apple came up with a way to wake up location apps and tell them your location as soon as you move. Apple is adding an icon indicator to the top menu bar that shows if any app is tracking your location, and a location services menu that lets the user control what apps can access location, and let you know if any app has tried to locate you. Background notifications are next. Apple has pushed more than 10 billion push notifications in less than a year since the feature came out. Now Apple is adding a new feature called "local notifications" that doesn't require I link through Apple's servers. For example, a TV app can notify you when a show is about to start. Next, task completion: Basically, programs can finish uploading something even after you close it. Fast app switching: Quickly move between apps without having to relaunch them. Now he's wrapping up the multitasking talk. Steve Jobs is back. He's going to talk about folders. It's a better way to organize apps. He's going to make a folder with games in it. He pushes his finger on an app, drags one app on top of another and it instantly makes a folder. It automatically names the folder based on the category they came from in the app store. (This is very cool, very useful, and unlike anything Apple's competitors have implemented in their OSes.) You can even put folders in the dock. As an aside, he demoing how you can change the iPhone's wallpaper. You can set the home screen or lock screen, or both to display the wallpaper. (Others have had this feature for a while.) "An incredibly great drag-and-drop UI," he says. Yep. Now Jobs is on to Mail. First he's going to talk about unified inbox. You can have multiple accounts all feeding into one inbox, and you can now use multiple exchange accounts. You can also switch quickly between inboxes if you want to keep them separate. There's mail threading now, too. (This is important. Gmail has made this a must-have feature.) You can now choose to open inbox attachments using a third-party app. (Again, Steve Jobs has a lot of his old stamina back. He's doing longer stretches of the presentation than he has recently.) Now Apple is adding iBooks to the iPhone. It looks much like it does on the iPad. He's showing the Winnie the Pooh book. (Looks good. This is trouble for Amazon.) You can buy a book once and read it on any of your devices. Current page and bookmarks will wirelessly sync. As with the iPad, Winnie the Pooh will come free with the iBooks iPhone app. Scott Forstall is back to talk about enterprise features. There's better encryption in email, and making APIs available to allow app developers to encrypt data in apps. Apple is also improving mobile device management. Now enterprises can easily manage iPhones like they do BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile phones. There will also be wireless app distribution, allowing companies to wirelessly push apps to devices. Also multiple exchange accounts now supported, VPN and more. Now on to Game Center. He's showing Apple has more than 10x more games than PSP and Nintendo. This will allow you to find people to play games with, and compare your progress on leaderboards. It will be available "later this year," he says. This is huge. Steve Jobs is back. The final big feature is iAd. Mobile advertising built in to OS 4. He's explaining what this is. "We think most of this mobile advertising really sucks," he says, "and we thought we could make some contributions." He says that on a mobile device "search is not where it's at. … They're spending all their time in apps." (Google just got slapped.) The average iPhone user spends 30 minutes a day using apps. An ad every three minutes would be 10 ads per device per day. Apple will soon have 100 million devices, which roughs out to 1 billion ad impressions per day, he says. "We want to change the quality of the advertising." The ads on the web today are not capable of delivering emotion, Jobs says, which is why most ad dollars still flow to TV. Apple wants to be more interactive than TV ads, but deliver just as much emotion. He also wants to bring ads that keep you in the app. The result is that people don't click on ads, because they don't want to be yanked out of apps. "We have figured out how to do interactive and video content without ever taking you out of your app," he says, which will make people more willing to look at ads. "Apple is going to sell and host the ads," he says, "and give developers an industry standard 60% of the revenue." (Now it's all-out war with Google … and Microsoft for that matter. I wouldn't be surprised if competitors try to raise legal concerns here.) He's demoing a Toy Story ad Apple built in HTML5. You can navigate within the ad as if it were a standalone app, even put video in there. There's even a game in the ad. And the ad includes free wallpaper and a map that shows nearby theaters where the movie is playing. There's also a game that you can buy from within the ad. "Have you ever seen an ad like this?" Jobs asks. He pauses. "Anything even close?" (Nice to see him this comfortable on stage again. He's cracking wise and everything.) Now he's showing a Nike ad that Apple built. You can look at the history of various shoes, design your own shoe, find stores that carry them, view video. Now showing a Target ad that does a lot of the same stuff – design your own dorm room, buy the stuff. "It's that simple. And again, I can return to my app anytime I want. … We think this is going to be pretty exciting." (The 60/40 revenue split here in iAd is really interesting. Apple stands to make a LOT of money here, and a lot of enemies.) OS 4 ships this summer for 3GS and iPod touch 3rd generation – those will be able to do everything. 3G and iPod touch 2G won't do multitasking. "The hardware just won't support it," he says. For more: http://brainstormtec...uarters/?hpt=T2

On Thursday Afternoon at the Police Region 2 Child and Women Protection Unit based at Banglamung Police Station, a press conference was held to announce the arrest of an American National accused of producing pornographic images and videos in his Central Pattaya Apartment. Mr. Anthony Paul aged 39 from USA was detained on the strength of an arrest warrant which was prompted by complaints from around 30 Thai Women who claimed the suspect convinced them that he wanted to be their boyfriend and then took videos and pictures of them engaging in unprotected sex without revealing he was producing the material for well known pornographic subscription websites. For the full story: Suspected American Porn Producer arrested by Police in Pattaya | Pattaya One News

UBC Platinum service is not available in VT6. You can subscribe and pay but the channels are not there. They say that they have one Large satellite and that it does not connect all the channels and there is nothing they can do. One can get more channels with a smaller box but they say that is against the rules. Anyone know why they do this?

Thailand's Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has declared a state of emergency in Bangkok amid escalating anti-government protests. In a televised address, Mr Abhisit said the move - which gives sweeping new powers to the security forces to tackle protesters - would help restore order. It comes hours after thousands of "red-shirt" protesters marched on parliament - forcing MPs to flee the building. The protesters want Mr Abhisit to resign and call elections. Thailand has lurched from one crisis to another since 2006 when the government of Thaksin Shinawatra was overthrown. This is the fourth state of emergency in the capital since 2008. 'Stay put' The current bout of red-shirt rallies began on 12 March. The government had vowed not to use force against the red-shirts, and the protesters too had said their demonstrations would not be violent. But Mr Abhisit said in his televised address that the protesters could no longer be considered peaceful after their march on parliament. "Our goal is to restore normalcy," he said. "We need to plan and implement everything to the last detail and with thorough care. The last thing we want is for the situation to spiral out of control." Mr Abhisit said the state of emergency applied in the capital and surrounding areas, but it is not yet clear how the authorities will implement the new laws, the BBC's Rachel Harvey in Bangkok says. Emergency law gives sweeping powers to the security forces and in theory bans public gatherings of more than five people, our correspondent says. But tens of thousands of anti government protesters remain in the commercial heart of Bangkok and show no signs of moving voluntarily. They regard Mr Abhisit's government as illegitimate as it was brought to power with military support. For the entire article go to: BBC News - Thailand PM declares state of emergency in Bangkok

Thank you to Z909 for agreeing to help us moderate the site. We really appreciate his willing to assist and to keep the site going and moving forward. Much thanks Z. GT

In Internet Slang a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an our Forum with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. In the last few days we have had to deal with one individual that we as a moderator team decided that we had to moderate. When we moderate someone that simply means that we make sure that the person's posts are read by one of the moderators before we allow them to be public. After we put the member on moderated status he registered a new name. We moderated that name (number2). Then, he did it again. Again, we moderated the negative post and put that member on Moderated Status (member3). At this point, I knew we were dealing with someone who had way too much time on his hands for us to deal with so we have initiated a new membership rule. The new policy is to require a certain number of posts that are approved by moderators before any person is able to post without moderation. This does not affect any current members who have posted in the past. It only affects new members who have never posted here before. In other words, a new member must post and those posts be approved by a moderator before we remove the moderated status from them. It only takes a few posts to determine a troll and we assure we will be on top of the new member posts. Also, we are asking for help with Moderating. It is a hard job and does not pay well (nothing other than the gratitude of our members). If you are interested in being part of the Moderating Team, please PM me and let me know. GB, TLP and I will discuss those interested. Unlike other boards, we don't require you to send us your passport or other personal information. We only ask that you have been a member here and contributed to the site. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I had a great dinner there tonight and loved the Fish and Chips. It tasted just like they do in England. They were 225 baht. They also had some deserts but they were not as good as the main course. The Pig and Whistle is on Soi 7 between Beach Road and Second Road. It is about 1/2 down the Soi. The service was fine and the atmosphere was nice. The temperature was good and there were no delays in getting our food or the service. I really enjoyed the Fish and Chips Plate. Great taste and reasonable priced.

The sign on the doors say 700,000 for the 2 shops with 2 upstairs rooms. That is less than half of the previous asking price. Anyone interested in a great location, this is one of the best buys in that area.

I kept getting requests from people for this site so I set up a profile. At the beginning of the process it asked for my gmail address to pull contacts. I thought it was OK and I did it. It pulled over 200 people from Thailand. I have never contacted the majority of those people with that e-mail and they had not sent me an e-mail. How does this process work? Where are all these contacts from? Several were from people I knew but at least 200 were not from any I knew. The next step asked me to invite others to HI5 on my e-mail list. Again, this was over 500 contacts. I did not know the majority of them either so I did not allow the second step. Anyone know how they use this app?

For those that use ITunes as your way to listen to music, movies and TV in LOS, I have just tested this new software out for ITunes and was amazed at how wonderful it made my sound sound. Let me say that I don't often buy things for my Mac that are not needed. It is normally perfect the way it is. But, this program really did impress me more than I ever thought and for the shows and programs that were hard to hear at times, the sound now booms out and with amazing clarity. It is a great piece of software! Bongiovi Acoustics

I went to dinner with friends last night and took the road to the Jomtien beach for the first time. They have made great headway on it since my last trip. I did not experience the usual potholes or the backed up traffic. I did notice they have a big lane for parking. Why build the road and then put a parking lane in? Was that the intent all along? Anyone know how long until this is finished?

I have a Thai friend who builds houses for people. He is good at it and I was looking over the last house he build in some photos he brought to show me. It looked lovely. I asked him about how much it cost and he said about 100,000 baht. I was a little surprised at how low this was and wondered for those of you that have build homes for the families of your loved ones how much did you spend?

I want to try some new places to eat in Pattaya while I am here with the BF. What are some places that you recommend? I am not looking for the most expensive or the most talked about but the places you actually enjoy going to on a regular basis. For me, my only regular place is Salt and Pepper in Day Night 2. I love the food and it is very inexpensive and the owners are super nice. For breakfast, I also like Papa David's in Jomtien and when I stay in that area I hit the place every morning. Any other suggestions on non chain type places?

A Buddhist monk and a 51-year-old man in Chiang Mai have been arrested and charged with sexually exploiting children, according to a Department of Special Investigation (DSI) source. The two suspects were identified as Surasak Keawman, a Chiang Mai resident, and Phra Vissanu Tejdhammo of Wat Pa Lan in Muang district. The two were charged with six counts each of child molestation and six counts of depriving a child of parental care. The DSI source said the men were partners in a business that catered to paedophiles. The source alleged that Phra Vissanu drove to hill tribe villages in Chiang Mai and neighbouring provinces dressed as a layman to lure boys. He then brought the boys to Mr Surasak, who sexually seduced them and then forced them to have sex with foreign paedophiles in exchange for money, the DSI source said. The monk kept photos of Mr Surasak having sex with the boys on his mobile phone, according to the source. Police arrested Mr Surasak in his house in Muang district and later nabbed the monk after Mr Surasak told them of his whereabouts. Police found six boys in Mr Surasak's house and other evidence, including lists with the names of male and female teenagers, a baseball bat, an electric prod and condoms. For the rest of the story: Monk, local man nabbed for child abuse It is articles like this that gives us all bad reputations. I am also surprised at the involvement of a monk.

There is a thread on the site that has ventured off subject into the area of Fair Use for posting newspaper articles. I have been reading the thread and stayed out of it until I spoke to my friends in NYC (where I just happen to know a lot of crooks and lawyers). I just finished my conversation with a lawyer in USA. He said that few cases ever appear of Copyright Infringement where someone posts from a newspaper, but that it is possible and more papers are starting to pursue this. His firm deals with this on a regular basis and he said he has never seen a suit from a nNewspaper that would sue a site like ours as we are very small potatoes. That said, he did say that if they choose to sue, while they would not win, it would be very costly to pursue on our side and thus make the outcome irrelevant. He said the appropriate way to make these posts are to take a segment (approximately half of an article or less) and post it with a link that says something like, For the remaining article see: This creates incentive for users to go to the original source. Lastly, he said that if the above is done and there are comments on the content of the article from the original poster, there is no court that would ever see this as infringing on their rights. Naturally, he is referring to the laws in the USA and not Thailand.

I was at Nice Boys again last night and had a great time. This bar has great looking guys on stage. I did not see one boy who looked underage when I was there. The guys are a variety of men and ladyboys. The guys tend to be on the more masculine side. There were more than a few that had nice show stoppers. One guy kept it hard from the time he got on stage till the time he left. That was about 9 songs. How on earth is that possible? I am lucky to get to the chorus. Nice Boys and Crazy Dragon are really doing a great job in Sunee. It does seem that both bars consistently have all over 18 and some very handsome guys!

I got an e-mail from the Sunee Plaza Info guys that they had a major scoop. The only person that ever titled e-mails and threads like that I know of like that is the famously fabulous LMTU. I wonder if he is now the new owner? If so, I wish him luck as he is the best scoop reporter in Thailand. I am just kidding BTW. The Sunee Plaza guys have invited a famous photographer to the area. I have seen his work many times and it is beautiful. That really is a coup more than a scoop. LMTU: Are you listening? They are scooping you! Sunee Plaza guys: Great job.

Thailand

We had eight years of Bush and Cheney, Now you get mad!? You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President. You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy. You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed. You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed. You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us. You didn't get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war. You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq. You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people. You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans. You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden. You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed. You didn't get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown. You didn't get mad when we gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich. You didn't get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark. You finally got mad when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all okay with you, but helping other Americans...oh hell no. http://rosie.com

Ricky Martin just came out as gay. I just can't believe it. Who knew? http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Music/03/29/ricky.martin.gay/index.html?hpt=T2 Ricky Martin says he's 'a fortunate homosexual man'

Evernote is the most amazing program I have seen in a while. I love it. It is a subscription per year service but you get 500 MB per month of upload and unlimited download. What it does is allow you to upload PDF's, photos, notes, text, etc and once sent to Evernote, they dissect it and download it back to your computer. Then, you can search for words and the program finds every instance of that word. For example: I have an IPhone and I got the Evernote for IPhone software and I went to a bar and met someone and they wrote their name on my hand. I took a photo of the number on my hand with their name printed on my hand and uploaded to Evernote. When I got home, I could type in the guy's name and it was there. The software reads the name in handwriting and then categorizes it. The note stays there as long as I don't delete it and the amount of information can be increased by 500M every month. I have successfully upload thousands of pics in the past few months. IMHO this is an amazing program and worth the low fee paid per year! Check out their site and see a demonstration. Welcome to your notable world | Evernote Corporation