autonomous_unit

OK, sorry for any confusion. I did not realize the retirement visa had a different duration of stay associated with its entries...

I try to be careful about how much identifying information I reveal in my posts, and I guess the profile just seems like another thing to worry about like that...

Earlier, somebody had a thread about what you get when you search for your real name on the web. I get tens of thousands of hits which are probably all real hits to my professional life and essentially zero hits to personal information about me. I say "probably" since I am not going to check them all, but a random sampling was consistent.

I also had some weird experiences early in my career and in my student days which shaped my paranoia about privacy. I had some students sort of "stalk" me but not to the extent that I took legal action. It was still creepy. It made me regret some earlier participation in usenet where I had not bothered with psuedonyms. People can make weird mental leaps where they suddenly presume to know you very well just from reading your public communication, and without actually corresponding.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody somewhere has identified the autonomous unit, because they already know the writing style or enough operational details to notice the correpondance in posting history... I just don't want to make it easy for the random nut who get a bug up his nether parts.

You wrote, "I will enter the Kingdom a few days before my visa expires and will get 1 year of entry." I am not sure what you are really saying here...

Is this different than a non-immigrant "O" visa for those of us married to Thais? When I had one of those with multiple entries, each entry permitted a 90-day stay, and the last entry had to be made before the visa expired. You would have to leave the country and obtain a new visa on the 90th day after the visa expired (or apply for an extension of permission to stay, of course).

Your statement above makes me think you are claiming you can stay for a year following the last entry, but I am not really sure what you meant by "1 year of entry" so perhaps you really mean the same thing I am saying.

Not a recipe, but... I was cooking down some blueberries once for a dessert sauce and it struck me that the unsweetened sauce would make a great base for a bbq sauce. It was very rich and fragrant and almost smoky tasting after simmering for about 5-10 minutes, and I could just imagine it with some chili powder and black pepper... but then I went on to drizzle the blueberry goo on a pastry and never got around to experimenting.

Are you sure you're not all just sharing a viral infection? There was a cold/flu that went around and usually started with a sore throat before progressing to coughing, body aches, and fever. We had it last month and it took me almost a week to feel strong again. I lost most of a weekend to it because I felt so run down and tried to sleep it off.

There is a Rama 5 Market on the northern side of Nakhon-In Road, between the outer ring road and Ratchapruek Road... just your standard covered outdoor market area with lots of produce, food stalls, and some plant sellers etc.

This is west over the Rama 5 Bridge, just past the large traffic circle. There is a HomePro on Rathapruek just south of the circle, if you are familiar with the area. It has a large sign with the number 5 prominent in the center. This is visible from the opposite side of the road if you were heading over from the bridge.

I also only travel 6-8 times a year and my US departures are always at 6-7am and arrivals around 11pm or midnight. I haven't seen any real difference at all in service on average, getting long and short lines at immigration and a mixture of direct arrivals at gates and buses from satellite gates at both airports.

I prefered Don Muang only because it is much closer to Nonthaburi, so shorter taxi rides.

It's all just culture clash isn't it? Where I come from, you don't smile at strangers unless you've both just witnessed something funny. I mean, we often wouldn't even smile upon meeting friends unless it was an unexpected surprise... But we do normally acknowledge one another with a slight nod or somesuch. So I remember wondering why other foreigners didn't seem to acknowledge me when I first arrived in Bangkok.

I didn't expect it of the Thais, but naively fell into my default cultural expectations when seeing another foreign face. But then I realized, why should I? They may come from any number of other cultures and my way of nodding is as foreign to them as anything else. Maybe they were wondering why my neck had some twitch, while waiting for me to break the ice and smile at them like some sales person!

Just like with Windows, newer Linux distributions tend to be much more resource-demanding than old releases. The problem is that in the end, software is really only tested on systems that contemporary users and developers are using, so nobody notices or cares when something becomes too slow or fat for an old machine.

Both KDE and Gnome desktop environments consume an absurd amount of RAM and CPU power, if you think in absolute scales. But they consume a modest percentage of what is considered "typical" equipment for a PC today, so nobody bothers to tune it up. There are alternative window managers, etc., which use much less RAM. XFCE is a currently reasonable mixture of fast and usable... but this will not make OpenOffice any less of a RAM and CPU hog.

I also use Linux exclusively for my work which was software development at one point, but which is almost exclusively just email and document writing now... my most common "programming" is to write scripts to support my complicated email usage, or build scripts for very complex sogtware design documents written in LaTeX! And my most commonly open programs are my email reader (mutt), xterms, and web browser.

I do once in a while reminisce about the days when I could do all my software development in a graphical environment on Linux with a 386 PC that only had 20MB of RAM and 80MB of disk space. Now, my cell phone has more speed and RAM, and I recall that such a PC cost $1000 and I think it is easier to go out and pay $700 for a 2 GHz Athlon64, 1-2GB of RAM, and more disk than I know what to do with... as usual, I spend more on the monitor because that is the part I actually have to look at every day.

Like tutsiwarrior says, the things you do in the evening have a big impact. I'd find it much easier to sleep early in Thailand, because the sun always sets early (like Autumn where I grew up, and I was usually a night owl in summertime when dusk came at 8pm). However, my wife gets home from work a bit late after commuting, and the end result is that we usually eat dinner later than I would like and end up staying awake too long!

I also find when I travel and have to adjust to jetlag (Thailand is +12-15 hours from US timezones), these things help:

1. forcing myself to "wake with the sun" and get real sun exposure in morning, noon, and late afternoon, using an obnoxious alarm clock to wake up even if sleepy

2. forcing myself to stay in bed and have catnaps at night from at least 11pm-4am if I cannot sleep solidly... a few nights, my only sleep might be broken into 45 minute bouts

3. getting some exercise in the morning (but not before 5am if I am unable to sleep)

4. trying to have my last meal by around 6-7pm each day

5. avoiding television after 9pm because it stimulates the brain too much when it is time to start getting sleepy

6. eat sensible meals, even if appetite is screwed up at first, e.g. real breakfast and lunch and not too large of a dinner

7. drink plenty of water, avoiding caffiene after lunch time

Yes, I think having "spiritual" beliefs will cause you to interpret many things in a spritual way. If I feel tingling on my skin or a temperature change, I start to think about the physical and physiological explanations that are behind it. When I experience something "spooky" I want to deconstruct it like an artist and a scientist, to understand how it came to be and perhaps even how I could reconstruct it for fun... and I have certainly had spooky experiences on a cold foggy night, or in a muffling snowfall in a closed rocky valley, etc.

I would not lump together meditation and spirituality. Meditation on the way your own mind works and the many ways you respond to a physical or social environment can send you to the place where I am at, but not if you are predisposed to pinning everything on external agents. I don't mean to be disparaging (in case the following sounds that way) but homonculus arguments from philosophy 101 ("the little man", wherein someone's explanation of the mind requires an assumption of a smaller intrinsic observer inside the mind) are a useful example here. I think many spiritual interpretations are rooted in the application of this fallacious model as well. Not only can we anthropomorphise external physical processes, but also processes that are better understood (in my opinion) as parts of ourselves.

I think we are born with boundary issues! We struggle to understand the broad uncharted territory that lies between our innermost thoughts and the external world, comprised of parts of our brains, nervous systems, hormones, etc. I think a belief in spirits is an "easy out"... the parts that are hard to comprehend are assigned an identity and thought of as other conscious entities, much like ourselves, because that is something we like to think we understand. Ironically, I think this stems from the very fact that we do not really understand ourselves...

Heh, I used to be tan but am now pale from 3 years in Thailand living among my wife's family... I get burns when I go back to the US on visits and sit in the sun at lunchtime (like I always used to). Nobody would eat lunch in the sun here, because you couldn't drink fast enough to keep up with the sweating.

I am not sure the exact temperature change matters... saunas and snow don't kill people. But the climate change will be a shock. Just use common sense and be aware that you have a risk of dehydrating or getting heat stroke, just as you might on an unusually hot summer day in Europe. When I was acclimating, I found that purchasing "rehydration salts" at the market to mix into a glass of water was often relieving. This is sort of like a "sports drink" but has less sugar... you can get plenty of sugar in your foods.

I remember watching some edutainment program in the US... cannot remember the name as it was on a hotel cable TV and not something I'd seen before.

They talked about some famously haunted caverns in the UK, and one room in particular where many who tour it will sense the presence of someone "watching them" in the dark. What made this interesting was that they found that even non-believers had the experience if they were left in there alone for a while. So they reproduced the visual and audio environment (of this cavernous space) in an immersive virtual reality environment on a computer, and many users had the same experience there.

I'm firmly in the non-believing camp because I have a suspicion that there are many kinds of physiological experiences that we share, but which are no more real than other perceptual illusions which can be replicated scientifically but which have no basis in actual physical effects in the environment. They exist in our brains, in the way we process sensory information. We are deeply flawed and limited as observers, and taking too much stock in our perceptions is a path to believing in many erroneous things.

Part of what makes us have such keen senses, e.g. being able to "sense" someone in a room behind you because of slight changes in the accoustic environment, lighting, or odor, also make us prone to mistakes when confronted with noisy and ambiguous signals. We humans like to find order in disorder. Shapes in the shapeless. It's how we're built.

No, I do not usually speak in essay form unless there is plenty of espresso (or beer) involved and the right companions. Once in a while, it can be fun to live out a Socratic dialogue.

Here, I am constantly trying to use the forum like email or usenet, because I have too many years of practice communicating long, complete arguments and discussion in those forms, with half or full day delays in response. I've never really felt comfortable with instant messaging unless the other party can type very quickly, and we can really have a real-time conversation with short, interleaved phrases.

I cannot stand to sit online and attempt a "conversation" when everything moves at 1/10 the speed of a normal chat. I want to get up and do something in between statements, out of sheer boredom! In fact, sometimes I get frustrated in real life conversations at work because people speak too slowly in the region where my major clients are, as compared to where I grew up. I want to slip them some stimulants just to get things moving a little faster.

I cannot say for sure without seeing documentation for your hardware. Look at the hardware itself, right at the point where you insert the ethernet cable, i.e. it is built into the connector itself. Usually, there will be an LED that lights to indicate the status of that connection on the PC. On my IBM laptop and my Dell PC, the link LED even lights if the computer is "off" (turned off but still attached to the power outlet).

If you have a router, switch, or hub, I'd recommend connecting to that and watching for lights just to familiarize yourself with how your hardware behaves. There is often a continuously lit LED to indicate a 10 or 100 speed link, and it may change color depending on speed. The LED may also blink "randomly" or there may be a second LED that blinks to indicate traffic is passing over the cable.

Most devices would have all lights off when there is no cable present. This is the same way it would look if you connected a straight cable when you needed a cross-over cable (or vice versa). It will act like it is disconnected. I have found this to be a real time-saver when I am trying to troubleshoot problems myself...

Without a crossover cable, one of the computers would have to have a network card that is smart enough to notice that the signals are reversed, and then internally switch itself to reverse which wires it sends and receives data on... this is a feature of the ethernet controller hardware and not the operating system. (That's why my instructions started with verifying that you actually get a link light LED showing when the hardware is connected.)

Ask the US family or friends one more time, and start working on opening a new US bank account?

I go the family route, including having them help me send paper tax returns with their check. I scan and upload the final returns to their house for them to print and tuck in an envelope... I also use their house as my correspondance address and they will similarly scan and upload any important and time-critical letters. All the rest go in a collecting box for when I pass through occasionally.

I don't look forward to the future when I cannot rely on them in this way, judging by how much regular mail disappears on its way to our house in Thailand! I don't use our Thai address on any of my US financial accounts just because of this mail loss problem.

For next year, you ought to be able to find a bank which allows new accounts to be requested over the web or via phone. You'll just need to receive some forms and return a signed copy, whether by some form of postal delivery or electronically.

I liked ThaiGoon's point about silly people everywhere, but he misses the true nature of the western technological apparatus. There are layers of bureaucracy and delegation which channel real assets away from the know-nothing politicians and into the hands of specialists, researchers, and technologically-aware administrators. Non-trivial resources are put in the hands of people who can apply them to research in many areas, some of which fail, some of which are mediocre successes, and a few of which succeed brilliantly. I will not argue about the efficiency of the process, but the fact is that real money does reach the folks who can apply it to develop the state-of-the-art sciences and technology. It seems like one problem Thailand has here is that the loss rates for money siphoned off into know-nothing pockets is still approaching 100%.

From what I have learned of the highly skilled, western-educated Ph.D. students who return to Thailand, they are often shoved into crippling roles in academia or quasi-governmental organizations where they are underpaid, under-appreciated, and not allowed to do real research. They end up having to take second jobs as consultants and such to get any real intellectual stimulation, if their primary job allows it. The end result is that their experience with how first-rate research organizations work in the west is being ignored and left to atrophy.

ThaiGoon, and others in similar situations: please make the most of your freedoms as graduate students and researchers in the west. Get some "curriculum practical training" if you can, before your visa status ends. You may be in for a shock when you return to Thailand. The more clearly you can see the chasm when you return, the more likely you can make some objective decisions about how you might impact things here for the better. Unfortunately, many may choose to just activate the ejection seat and return to the west, or perhaps just give up and disappear into the system here. I think the best hope for Thailand is that a small percentage are able to remain engaged and find the patience to apply the best parts of what they learned.

A final comment, in case I am not making myself clear: I am not in any way advocating that Thailand should try to emulate the west in every regard. But, my exposure to students like ThaiGoon (but 5-10 years further along in the process) has made me realize that the system here does not work well at all. As any engineer or scientists could tell you, looking at systems which do seem to work is a good starting point in deciding how to repair one that does not...

I am not sure what you are really asking... you said both computers have Linux and then said something about Windows. Which do you want to do? You certainly do not need samba to exchange files between two Linux machines. Here is the shortest sequence of steps to transfer some files between typical modern Linux PCs, assuming ssh and sshd have been installed and sshd is active:

1. connect the ethernet ports and validate that you get a "link" indicator, e.g. an LED on the ethernet socket lights up as it would during normal connections to a switch or router

2. configure the OS to use the ethernet ports

a. choose an IP network such as 192.168.1.0

b. choose two address, one per computer such as 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.2

c. as root, configure both computers to enable the interface: "ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.x up "

(where "x" is 1 or 2, different on each machine)

3. verify that the machines can reach each other: ping 192.168.1.x

(where "x" is 1 or 2, referring to the OTHER machine's address)

hit ctl-c when you see some good replies

4. use scp to transfer some files. here is how to copy several files to a destination directory on the other host:

scp file1 file2 ... fileN 192.168.1.x:some/path/to/a/directory/.

(where "x" again is the 1 or 2 address of the OTHER machine)

5. disable the network on each host

ifconfig eth0 down

This requires that you are able to login to the other machine via ssh, and will probably prompt you for the password on the remote host.

The plain old telephone system was designed to carry human voice from end to end, and a single copper pair of wire was more than sufficient for that purpose in a city or small region. Periodically, the analog signal would go through switches and amplifiers to get over long distances, and if you recall any very old long distance calls, there was a noticeable increase in background noises as the analog signal jumped its way across the phone network. Over time, the telecoms began deploying digital systems that converted the human voice to digital data, sent the data over a long distance, and then converted it back to analog. All of these analog and digital systems were designed with an assumption of carrying a defined frequency range that is sufficient to carry the human voice, but insufficient for, say, hi-fidelity music reproduction. They have the advantage that a "perfect" amplifier can be built cheaply to send the signal over long distances without degradation.

Old fashioned modems were designed, perversely, to convert digital data into sounds that could be carried over these voice channels. They suffered from the need to work within the narrow confines of the whole end to end "voice path".

Systems like ISDN and ADSL bring "digital" to the last-mile from the customer premises to the telecom network. This means that the copper wire is now carrying a signal designed to go directly from the customer to the telecom and fully utilize that copper, as opposed to sending just one meager voice conversation in analog, while ignoring most of the signalling capacity of the wire. This is, for example, how you can have ADSL and voice on the same copper. The ADSL signal occupies a wide range of high frequencies outside the range of the narrow band voice signal, and the ADSL "splitter" is just a filter to separate the signals based on their frequencies.

At the same time, systems like ethernet were developed to carry much higher data rates over short distances. The high speed rates that ADSL is just starting to achieve with elaborate, modern signal processing hardware have been available over ethernet since the 1980s, using much simpler electronics! And when you talk about a CAT6 cable and gigabit ethernet, you are talking about a digital signal spread across four pairs of copper with symmetric capacity in both directions, i.e. 2 Gb/s of information is flowing through the cable at peak usage. The best ADSL standards right now are only approaching 100 Mb/s, or roughly 1/20 of the information capacity. However, the ADSL can go over much worse cables and much longer distances.

As for the original question, more ADSL modems are appearing with an ethernet interface to the computer because of simple engineering costs and versatility. Ethernet has become the defacto standard networking interface for PCs, meaning one modem can be designed and sold that will connect to any PC. It also gives you ease of installation for users who can manage a plug or two but probably not a screwdriver. Recall, modems used to be external devices that connected to a serial port...

I think I mentioned this in an earlier thread on chili addiction, but I worked out, through stubborn process of elimination, that I've become sensitized to my favorite spicy stir-fried dishes. Or rather my guts have. My mouth still says, ha! you call that spicy? But my guts staged an intervention and now I have to be very careful.

I tested last night with a plate of chili and basil fried noodles from the market and, yup, the problem persists.

It seems like switching my morning ritual yogurt with bran cereal has helped a little bit, in terms of at least enjoying a spicy bit here and there. But it generally seems like the glory days are behind me now... it's clearly irritation rather than infection/poisoning, judging by all the symptoms and factors that I'd rather not go into here.

Oddly, I can still eat "spicy" foods when I visit the US, e.g. Mexican, Cajun, Indian. I am not sure whether that points to something more than just the Thai chili as the culprit, or whether I somehow have a special inability to judge their heat now compared to other kinds of chili. My mother-in-law helped try to experiment with different recipes, and of course cooks with fresh oil, so I am not sure what else to try. I would not think it is the soy sauce, etc., since those go into the non-spicy dishes too.

PeaceBlondie, not sure if your sarcasm was aimed at my earlier post, or just a coincidence of posts...

I am by no means suggesting that education is useless, but people do use degrees (just like most other identifiable attributes) to an illogical and unwarranted level of exclusion, just like race and other visible markers. Because people in general are terrible at statistical understanding of groups, and constantly try to consider whole groups as equal and then relatively order the groups rather than the individuals.

I think almost any person would benefit from higher education, in terms of becoming a better person than they were without it. That is my value system speaking, in terms of not considering a high opportunity cost for not avoiding higher education. But, it is foolish to consider this to the exclusion of the "starting point" of the individuals. I have met those with just high school diplomas or associates degrees, plus a self-driven interest to learn beyond what school forced, and they can be more interesting and broad people than some who have run through the hoops of bachelor's, master's, and even doctorate education while somehow evading the wonderful benefits of a university environment.

I have also seen people practicing in my technical field (not a field which requires professional licensing) to illustrate that a high-scoring Ph.D. from a "respectable" second tier US university can mean almost nothing for their abilities, compared to undergraduate schooling from a good first-tier school and some real world work experience. Yet those degree holders from the lower rate schools are often the ones who wave the degree around as a badge of honour or admissions ticket to the good life.

Expressions of entitlement seem to lead to resentment and conflict no matter where they appear...

Why no real degrees B.Sc. MSc. ?

It always confuses people to learn that my college issued BA degrees for all its majors including computer science, math, and physics.

But it is always great fun in my career to talk people down from calling me "Professor" to telling them I "just have a BA", because they usually jump to so many conclusions as captured in the threads that lead up to this poll!

Oh, I'm not a professor. "So where did you do your Ph.D. then?" I didn't. "Oh! Well where is your M.Sc. from then?" Never found one of those either. At this point they look befuddled and I usually just have to finish it for them. Maybe they were afraid I had never been to any school, but just stepped straight off some space ship...

So I can appreciate the frustration some people have expressed in the way degrees get used as qualifiers. I've certainly met some highly degreed numbskulls too, but hey that's a population distribution for you.

My friend (British) had this situation after he went on about a year's wandering around the globe (think delayed gap year). On his next entry, they asked him some of those hot-seat questions and basically said if he left the US again he was jeapordizing his status. I believe he said that he went to a US embassy after his next exit (a few weeks later, as per his continuing around the globe itinerary demanded) and did whatever it is one does to surrender the green card.

The next time through the US on his British passport, he said they couldn't be happier to see him. Almost like, oh you chose to give it up! Alright then, you must not be some sneaky dishonest guy... welcome to the USA and please enjoy your visit.

I am certainly no lawyer, but if you know you have moved to Thailand permanently, maybe you should just consider contacting the embassy and abandoning the green card? Holding it until it gets canceled will probably not help you regain it later, versus giving it up voluntarily with your change of living circumstances...

Yes, the debate is really boiling down to whether the prayers are believed to be communicating to a diety or not, isn't it? I do not think all Christians ascribe to such a limited use of the word "prayer" though.

I've found it interesting over the years to hear my mother try to explain her Christian Scientist beliefs to me. It seems like she, once in a while, has the intention to directly ask God for some attention to be sent to some ill friend or other object of prayer. But in many cases our discussions of metaphysical issues have brought her to explain "prayers" as reciting a set of verses etc. for their effects on her mind and body. I do not know how specific this is to her particular belief system, having been raised Christian Scientist but separating from that church as she raised her own kids, but it sounds a lot like other forms of meditation and chanting practices to me...

When I was a little boy, I was taught some standard bedtime prayers for family and friends etc. Even now, I might have a conditioned response of thinking verbally, "Oh God, please let..." in looming emergency, e.g. when I have time to gather my thoughts but am too remote to really have direct power over the situation. But I am firmly agnostic at this point, and aside from the ingrained phrasing, I am not really trying to communicate anything to the diety I do not believe in---it is just some verbal form of situational analysis.

I wonder whether I would have such mental behaviors (maybe addressed to myself or some other more animist audience), had I never been taught prayers! I find it intriguing, because in general my thought processes are very non-verbal and I have to intentionally "shift gears" to engage verbally in work or in social contexts. Conversely, in emergencies where I am directly immersed, I will lapse immediately into non-verbal analysis and planning with no time to stop and verbalise anything.

But hey, sometimes when I bump an object off balance in passing, I will stop and, in that powerless moment before it settles or tumbles, do a jig to try to coax it back into place. I do not believe in my telekinetic powers, but there is a certain satisfaction in exercising hope!