Copyright 2007-2008 Ian Reed - Legless in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm The Legless Blog - By amputee author Ian Reed / John McMiken in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Cover1a.jpg http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm 90 36 Legless in Thailand book legless@reedinter.co.uk (John McMiken) ian@reedinter.co.uk (Ian Reed) en-us http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm Three days ago I told you on here that I had uploaded my new Laos trip webpage to my server, well Google is finding it in it's searches already. Because I work with the search engines everyday, I am aware of their individual idiosyncrasies so really I was not overly surprised, I already expected Google to be the first to find it, but it did surprise me a little with the speed of update. With the posts on this blog I know that Google updates it's cache memory for every 24 hours, which with an active blog, this is really required and Google knows that. So I expect it now from Google with blogs, but it was a little surprising with the speed that they update new webpages too. On both counts Google is far ahead of any other search engine and has now become my standard when I am searching for anything on the web. I wish Google could find one of my friends in Bangkok to help me with my move Cheers for now Legless with Google in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20300308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm During the last year whilst I have been staying on the farm with the parasites, the one thing that they have always taken care of for me whilst pocketing my money, is that they have always kept me in beer. They have always managed to keep me in beer, probably thinking that if I have beer available all of the time then I will not check where the money is going. Well, tonight for the first time in a year, I have run out of beer, so things are definitely getting serious now I really must get out of here just as quickly as I can now, I have had no reply from my friend in Bangkok yet, so maybe I have to try to think of someone else or another method of escape soon. No cheers today Legless without beer in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20290308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm Still trying anything that I can to get out of my present situation, I sent an email today to an old friend in Bangkok and I hope that he will respond quite quickly. What I need to get out of this situation are two things that I do not presently have, I need somewhere else to go to stay and I need transport to go there when I have somewhere to go to. Being legless and on a farm in the middle of nowhere now I need help to arrange these two things and because I intend to move back to Bangkok, I need someone in Bangkok to help me with these. I really need to move quickly if I can, because my pension money for April goes into my bank account on 7 April, so I need to move before that date so that the parasites that I am living with cannot get their hands on any of it. I cannot let the parasites know what I am up to, so I just smile and act normally around them, but my mind is working all the time trying to find a quick way out of this mess now. So this was my reason for attempting to contact someone in bangkok to help. ''Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!'' Time for more beer now. Cheers for now Legless with plans and schemes in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20280308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm I uploaded my Laos webpage today, having finished the first draft of the page and story of my trip to Vientiane. I had to draw two maps using my graphics program for this page to help to explain the places that I talk about in my story. I tried to find the street maps of Vientiane on the internet to help, but I could not find the area that I stayed in and talk about, so I had to draw a small street map from memory and that is why it has taken me so long to finish it. I have put some information, advice and tips for others who are thinking about doing this journey on the webpage, so that other people don't have to learn the hard way like I had to. If you would like to take a look at my Laos webpage then please go to http://www.reedinter.co.uk/leglessinlaos.htm I shall try and improve on the maps later, because they are not absolutely perfect, just drawn from memory as I said before. I did enjoy my short trip to Laos and I am now looking forward to going there again in a few months time and next time I know exactly what to do, what to take and where to go, so it should be more like a short break / holiday next time. I hope those of you who take a look, enjoy the new page about my trip to Laos. Well, it is that time of day now and I have to get my first beer of the day, so I shall end this post now and get legless again. Cheers for now Legless about Laos in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20270308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm Yes, the words in the title of this post today are some of the words from a classic BGs song, but they are still very true. On the internet now words are becoming very important, not just the use of business related keywords, but every word on every webpage and especially on blogs like this one. Having my own websites, doing my own SEO for them and being a writer / author anyway, I probe and research with different words, analyse the results and try to assess how this can help me and my websites. This new importance of words could easily be misused and manipulated by people now just as a means to an end, rather than being of any inherent value and this is a major problem that the search engines now have to solve. They will have to separate the wheat from the chaff and instill confidence in the people that choose to use their search engine facilities. What I have found in my research with this, is that irrespective of any order that words are entered into any search, the search engines just try to match as many words as they can with the sites that they have in their Cache memory / databases and the results are then displayed with the sites that have the most matching words at the top of the list and then working down accordingly. The syntax of the entered words does not seem to play any part in the search engine results and they tend to ignore general connecting words such as a, in, at, the, to, with, etc. To give you an example of this, if someone typed into a search engine the following words: 'I would like a good hotel in Singapore with swimming pool, music and a restaurant with oriental food' the words that the search engines would try to match are: 'hotel, Singapore, good, swimming, music, pool, restaurant, oriental, food' and they would try to match as many of these words as they can, in any order. So when the results pages are displayed, at the top of the page will first be the sponsored results that matches any of these words, followed by the results from the web search itself and because syntax does not play any part in this, then in the results you would probably get things like: 'Hotel Singapore in Florida, the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok or a pool playing room anywhere that has music and sells 'Singapore slings' and food, etc.' Only much further down the lists will you actually start getting the results from hotels in Singapore that the person doing the search really wanted and all because syntax does not play a part in the search engine algorithms, only words. I analyse search engine results so that I can use words in my websites that people can find easily and that are relevant to a search. The webpage of mine that turns up most of the time for many searches is this blog and the reason for that is fairly obvious when you think about it, in a search engine's attempt to match all words entered in any search, just how many words do you think are used on my blog for this month alone? Oh well! Today's post will give the search engines some more of my legless words to play with and it is now time for my first beer of the day anyway. Cheers for now Legless with words in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20250308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm Even though I finished writing my book 'Legless in Thailand' a couple of years ago now, I still read it and refer to it regularly, I also pencil in changes and additions that I would like to make in any future second edition and maybe I will rename the book in a second edition to 'A Legless fool in Thailand' or something similar! I have a lot of time on my hands these days and I use much of this time reflecting over my life and the mistakes that I have made before, and my 'legless book' I use as a reference to remind me of some of the stupid decisions that I came to before, that were mainly the result of emotionally influenced reactions in different situations. I know that it is easy to look back with hindsight objectively at some of the mistakes that you have made and many people have told me to forget the past and not to dwell on it. But, when your whole life has taken a major turn for the worse because of the stupid decisions that you made before, then I think that you should be pragmatic and learn from it. So now when any present or future situations / occurences remind you of the past, then you can use this as a signal to trigger your mind to look more objectively at what is happening at the present time and use your previous experiences to do a more careful analysis of your current situation. Foresight is not a sense that we are over-endowed with, but by being pragmatic and using your previous experiences to help you to predict what could possibly happen in any given future situation, then whatever does occur you already have many different options available in your own personal database (your brain) based upon objective reasoning, analysis and forethought, that you can use and just completely 'switch off' or block any emotions that may attempt to filter through So the above procedure is what I try to do now and consequently I spend a much the time lost deep inside of myself trying to prepare for any possible scenario that may occur. Obviously you cannot prepare for every scenario that could possibly occur, but my outlook and motto for life now is: 'always try to expect the unexpected'. So nothing ever surprises me anymore! Todays post has been quite a deep one and I felt the need to write all of this down for two reasons: 1. The realisation a few weeks ago that in my current situation I have made another mistake that was not expected or planned for, even though I do try to utilise the aforementioned techniques. 2. I have nobody else to talk to about this, so everyone reading this blog has to be bored with it. Cheers for now Legless thoughts in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20240308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm I thought that I should write something in my blog again today after being away for almost a week in Vientiane. I am working on my Laos webpage now, but it is coming along very slowly, I only stayed in Vientiane for three days, but writing about it for my website is going to take me almost as long as the time that I stayed there. I would write brief details about the journey to Laos and also about finally arriving there, but then when I re-read it, somethiing else comes into my head that I should say and I start editing it again, it is the same as when I am working through my book manuscripts. Getting away from my website work now, the overall impression that I got from my Laos trip was very good, Laos seems to have a very laid back atmosphere, it is quiet and has very little traffic and is generally relaxing and peaceful, so if anyone is looking for a peaceful and relaxing place to go for a holiday then I would definitely recommend going to Laos. Trying to write about Laos objectively, I have to try and balance things, there is nowhere in this world that is absolutely perfect, so I have been trying to think about things that annoyed or upset me in Laos and I can only come up with two very minor things. The first one being that probably due to the French influence in the country, Laos traffic drives on the wrong side of the road for me. My second and last complaint that I can come up with, is that the food is very good in Laos and very similar to Thai food, but the cost of eating out is about fifty percent higher than the cost in Thailand. Well after thinking for a very long time, they are the only complaints that I can honestly come up with and I can come up with about fifty to a hundred times more complaints about my own country, England. So basically Laos has made a very good impression upon me and I am now really looking forward to when I have to go there again in about four month's time, alone next time! Cheers for now Legless back in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20220308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm I just returned from my visa trip to Laos yesterday and I have many things to talk about from my trip, it was quite a tiring return journey and I was exhausted yesterday, so I just feel refreshed enough to write on here today. I did a lot of walking in Vientiane and the skin on my amputated leg started to chafe against the prosthesis again, so I had to limit my walks and rest a lot of the time. Going to a country that you have never been to before is an experience in itself, but being legless in that new country was quite a learning curve for me. I learned about the border crossing and visa requirements going into Laos from Thailand, applying for a new Thai visa and the location of the Thai Embassy in Vietiane. I also had to quickly learn about the currency, which at 280 Laos Kip to one Thai Baht takes a lot of getting used to, but I developed a quick way to approximately convert it in my head out of basic necessity. The language was not too difficult because it is basically Thai and the people in general are very warm, friendly, helpful and understanding. I have decided to create a new webpage on my website about my trip to Laos, because there are far too many things to say and explain about just on this blog, so when the new webpage is completed I shall link to it from this blog so that anyone interested can take a look at it. I shall probably entitle it in my usual amputee/legless style now, like: 'Legless in Laos', 'Legless in the Orient', 'Legless in the Far East', 'Legless venture to Vientiane', or something similar. Overall though, it was a very interesting trip and the country and people made a very good impression upon me, I am just sorry that I dont own a camera, digital or otherwise, so that I could share some of the sights with you on here. Laos to me is like the old-fashioned Far East / Orient that I was first attracted to and that made a very pleasant and lasting impression upon me more than thirty years ago. The country is steeped in culture and the people are very pleasant, friendly and interesting in their own natural way, some of the attractive qualities that many other Far Eastern countries lost a very long time ago, in their futile attempt to appear 'developed' to the rest of the world. Well that is all for now, I shall have to start work on the new webpage now and I shall let you know as soon as it is finished. Cheers for now Legless in Vientiane, Laos and now back in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20210308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm I was quiet yesterday because I have been researching on the internet for my trip to Vientiene tomorrow. This is something new for me because I have never been to Laos before. I found many stories on the internet about people's problems at the Laos border post near Nong Khai and everyone seemed to agree about one thing, they all advise that any foreigner crossing into Laos should take US dollars with them and pay in US dollars at the border for the Laos visa which is displayed as $35 or the Laos immigration officials at the border post will try and cheat you if you try and pay with Thai baht and call for 5,000 baht or more.So I am a little fore-warned with this now and I shall take US dollars with me. Today's headline is about cats, because cats are my favourite animals. In the times before my accident many years ago I had a large house and very big garden in Naklua near Pattaya and I had seventeen cats strolling around the grounds. Whenever I sat at my computer, like I am doing now, at least one of the cats would jump up and sit on my lap until I had finished working and then they would follow me around anywhere that I went. Those were very happy days for me, but in the words of the old English saying: 'You don't know what you have got until it has gone!' this is very true for me and not a day goes by now that I don't think of those happy times and wonder why I wanted more than I already had then. I have just one Cat now that I can talk to about my troubles and she is a good listener, so it helps to take me back to the happy times that I knew before. I have to start packing and preparing for my trip tomorrow now, I shall give you a report on Laos when I get back next Friday. Cheers for now Legless and cats in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20150308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm Bananas for breakfast has become a standard thing for me now as I mentioned in a post before. A hot cup of tea, bananas and sometimes a little cake, I find is very refreshing and just enough to start me off well for the day. I am usually writing this blog, eating bananas and sipping my tea, just as I am doing today. Oh! one thing that I forgot in my routine today was to put my music on, so I shall just do that now. That's better! One of my favourite songs is now playing, 'Zombie' by the Cranberries. I have what I consider quite a good collection of songs on my computer that I like, songs by: the Cranberries, the Corrs, Eric Clapton, Scorpion, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Rod Stewart, Ronan Keating and many older songs that I like from the 1980s. Music brings back memories for me, some good and some not so good, oh well! Time now for more tea and bananas! Cheers for now Legless and bananas with music in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20130308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm I was just in the process of doing my usual SEO work today when a new development from Yahoo came to light. Now this blog has gone missing from their search results for the obvious keywords of 'legless blog', I really don't know what Yahoo is playing at this week, but their search results are going crazy. All of the other search engines are still fine, it is only Yahoo that seems to have a problem. Maybe some of the staff at Yahoo are 'legless' this week. Who knows what these search engines get up to sometimes, especially Yahoo now Cheers for now Legless in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%2012a0308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm As per usual I am still playing with scams on the internet on a daily basis and I try to remember the stories they use, so that I can play the scammers around without too much thought. Today though, I am a little confused, one email today was supposedly from a diplomatic courier that had just arrived in London with a consignment for me (supposedly millions of dollars). I thought that I could remember which scam was supposedly sending me money with a courier, so I dug out the email address and sent an email to Africa complaining to him that I was in Thailand not UK, so why had the courier gone to UK? I later received a reply from the guy that his courier has not left yet and was only leaving for Thailand later today, so he didn't understand my message. So obviously I had gotten the scams confused, but I cannot find which scam the supposed courier in UK was supposed to be from. It doesn't really matter anyway because I know that they are scams, I know that there are no real couriers and there certainly isn't any millions of dollars destined for me, but I just got annoyed with myself for losing track of the scams that I am supposed to be playing with at the moment. Both of the emails today sent me attached photos of the consignments, which I have placed below for you to see. I am just collecting all of the emails and photos for a future book that I have planned about these scammers, in my scam vault at the moment I have a collection of about 2,500 scams. Well there is one remedy for this confusion today, more beer! Cheers for now Legless with millions in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20120308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm Again doing my usual SEO and keyword routine today, I was going through my list of keywords and obviously one of them is 'Ian Reed', my real name, just in case anyone is searching for my sites by name. It is just a formality, because normally I appear on the first pages of all of the search engines, but I just like to check each day. Well today I got a surprise because I can't find my page on Yahoo, a webpage that has been on the SERPs for months has now disappeared, it has not just slipped in ranking, it has totally disappeared from Yahoo. Yahoo has obviously changed something in their algorithm in the last 24 hours that has somehow caused my name and page not to register, other Ian Reeds are on there, so I am taking this personally. All of the other search engines still find me okay, it is just yahoo that has gone strange on me. I don't know why Yahoo has suddenly dropped me, maybe they just don't like the new photo that I put on my personal page Oh well! Who knows what these search engines get up to sometimes Cheers for now Ian Reed - Legless in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20110308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm Doing my usual SEO work for my websites yesterday, I put in the keywords 'legless unity' and came up number one on all of the search engines. This is no big surprise to me, because I coined the phrase 'legless unity' when I opened this blog and showed my support for Heather Mills. So again, sitting back with a beer later and thinking about my keywords and results, an amusing thought came into my head and I just had to write it down on here. The very old English saying of 'united we stand', I thought that this would be a great motto for a whole bunch of legless amputees like myself and I burst out laughing to myself just thinking about a bunch of one-legged people holding on to each other, with this motto above their heads, it amused me so much that I had to have a few more beers to calm down "United we stand and divided we all fall down for sure !!" Cheers for now Legless unity for more beer in Thailand and the World http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20100308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm Sunday next week, I have to leave to get a visa again, but this time I cannot go back to Penang. The regulations here have changed 'again' and now you cannot go to the same Thai Embassy more than two times consecutively, or with the second visa you get a full-page red stamp in your passport that states 'No more visas may be issued in Penang or xxxxxxx'. So my easiest and cheapest alternative is to go to Vientienne, Laos. The problem with this for me, is that I have never been there before, so I don't know where to stay or how much the Hotels or guest houses are. I also don't know the local currency, exchange rates, or the location of the Thai embassy, or any agents that can help to do the visa for you. So this next trip is going to be an absolutely new learning curve for me and at the top of my list of 'things to do' when I get there, is to find somewhere to stay and then to find where I can buy cheap beer and check what type of beer is available there. More about this subject when the legless farang returns from Laos in about two weeks time. Cheers for now Legless farang in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20090308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm I state on the intro. to this blog that the main reason for me starting this 'Legless Blog' was because of the treatment of Heather Mills in the media and that is still true, but only partially true. Working on the internet most of the time, I had seen some of the hype about 'blogs' and how 'social media' was starting to have a big influence on the web and would eventually control the web, but being more involved with my own websites and trying to promote my book on the web, I just scanned over a few posts about it, shrugged it off and then continued with my normal work. It was very much later when I kept seeing all of the links on the search engines to various blogs on the internet, that I started to take a closer look at this. I was still quite skeptical about blogs at the time, but when I read some of them and saw that many of them were criticising Heather Mills, I decided to create a blog of my own and give her a little support in what I classify as 'legless unity'. I also saw how many of these blogs seemed to be very highly ranked by the search engines, so a combination of both of these factors is the reason why I decided to create this blog. I had problems with the search engines acknowledging me when I first started this blog, even though I had linked to it from my own fairly high-ranking websites, but after a relatively short while, this blog eventually started to creep up in the search results. Being a writer now anyway, I could see that all of the words used in any blog post registers with the search engines and is used in their search for the 'keywords' input for any search. It was only then, that I saw how the power of the word was very important and that is why blogs rate so highly, because there are far more words used in any blog than there are on a normal website and this gives blogs the 'advantage' to more accurately match up with virtually any 'keywords' input. With this knowledge and knowing that the search engines algorithms are now being more tuned towards 'content' rather than just 'keywords', the blog now becomes a very powerful tool on the internet indeed. The old saying used to be, that 'The pen is mightier than the sword', well these days 'the keyboard is definitely the king', but it still depends upon the calibre of the operator in both instances. Cheers for now The Legless Blog King in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20070308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm I am now actively involved with modifying my websites, but I still have to continue with my SEO work on a daily basis or my search engine rankings will fall, the SEO work takes up about six hours per day and I have a set routine that I run through. I find it much easier to work at night time, there are no distractions and I can think more clearly then. So I have now gotten myself into a routine where I just start to feel tired and my work for the night is just about complete at the time that the sun comes up here and everyone else here are just waking up and starting their day. This has become my daily routine now and I am virtually living in my own time zone and it suits me. The only problem that I have with it, is that this year the weather here in Thailand seems to have changed completely, the evenings now are very cold and because where I am staying there are no walls, when the winds pass through they really accentuate the chill factor, so I have to wear a jumper and some gloves whilst I am working now and it is still quite cold at dawn when I go to bed, so I have to wrap up well in my blankets to get warm enough to sleep properly. It gets very warm during the day and when I wake up, usually around lunchtime, I have already thrown all of my blankets off me. The one thing that helps me in this routine is the beer, I have a fridge next to my desk so that I can continually top-up easily whilst I am working, this helps me to fight the cold too that's my excuse, Cheers! Cheers for now Legless time zone in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20060308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm My URL icon upgrades to my pages has forced me to take a look at my websites objectively again, something that I have not done for a very long time now. I have been so involved with my search engine SEO work, that I have not been modifying and taking care of my websites as I should have been doing. Now I see that all of my webpages need a complete revamp, so today I started with my Ex Post Facto true short stories index page and now I have to follow up and go through all of the pages on my websites and modify them, so I have my work cut out for me for a very long time now. The modifications that I want to do, mainly involves graphic design of the backgrounds and that takes time come up with some new ideas and then hours of work for each graphic concerned. I have the time to do it at the moment, but in ten days time, I have to do my usual Thai visa trip, so I have to start planning that now too. So much for being legless and semi-retired. Cheers for now Legless with graphic design in Thailand http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20040308 http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm I haven't posted anything on here for a few days, because I was so interested in creating icons for my URLs that I haven't had the time. One of the things that I really enjoy about my computer work is graphic design, before I used to design websites for people and even company logos for some businesses , but it is something that I haven't done for a long time, before I became legless. So the last few days I have been happily creating icons for all of my webpages and deciding which icon works well for each page. So this has kept me busy doing something that I enjoy, going through all of the pages on my websites, creating the logo and writing the html code to display them. All of my icons worked well and they display if you click a bookmark on any of the pages. I have many webpages and I have put a few of the icons above for you to see. So that is why I have been busy, I have just finished now and can get back to my blog again. Cheers for now Legless in Thailand with icons http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Blog.htm%20030308