autonomous_unit

Mouse, not to dimish the suggestion to "go legal" but I think the only reason they want things like passport, work permit, etc. for things like internet subscriptions or phones is because they lack a credit rating and debt collection system to deal with all the "tourists" who set up camp and then skip out of Thailand without paying their bills.

Why would you buy new furniture to ship? I can understand some appliances due to lack of local selection (if you are bringing 220V), but you can get nice materials and custom work for cheap here, such as teak tables and many varieties of granite/marble for counter tops.

Wow, and here I thought we overpacked with one roughly 4 foot cube (64 cubic feet)!

CobraSnakeNecktie guy, the rules for residency and taxes are not the same as for immigration. The US IRS determines qualification for income exclusion based on "physical presence" or "bona fide residence" tests for all US citizens (and permanent residents, i.e. green-card holders). Neither of these require permanent residency status in a foreign country!

The source of earned income is also defined as where the work is performed and NOT who pays or where they pay. When a US citizen does legal work in Thailand and meets one of the above qualifying tests, they can exclude earned income from US income tax, but they have to pay Thai tax. If they were to travel to the US on business, they could not exclude the "portion" of income earned while present at a work site in the US. Even if all of this is paid via the same transaction, it is treated differently under IRS rules based on where the worker is located at the time work is done. For work performed on travel in the US, one can claim a foreign tax credit to avoid paying double income tax (since Thailand also taxing on that part).

As described earlier, the gray area is that Thailand doesn't seem to have the processes in place for someone to file a tax return and pay their taxes for Thai earnings if they do not have a work permit, even though it seems that taxes would be due (the same conditions under which the US citizen would be excluding the same income from US tax). This leads me to my next comment...

Girlx, you should read the IRS publications for US citizens living abroad. Part of the "tests" used to determine qualification for the foreign earned income exlcusion deal with the issue of whether you are paying taxes to the foreign country where you are spending your time.

I have not studied all the nuances and corner cases that do not apply to me, but I remember having the impression that these rules do not leave a gray area. You either pay US taxes, foreign taxes, or both with some tax-credit ability to avoid double income tax (but not necessarily to avoid double social security tax etc.). Given that the forms to claim the exclusion are your assertion of status, I would be careful about claiming something that doesn't apply and thereby falling afoul of the IRS... I would double and triple-check that the qualifcation rules do not get blocked by the lack of Thai income tax filing.

BTW, you can download all publications and forms from the www.irs.gov website in PDF format. I would suggest reading "i1040.pdf", "i2555.pdf", "p17.pdf", and "p54.pdf" (this is the one I mentioned above: for US citizens living abroad). You may not read them all cover-to-cover but I think it is useful to download and browse them. They usually have descriptive section titles and useful references to other documents for more complex topics. The files beginning with the letter "p" are publications while the ones beginning with "i" are instructions for the form with the same numbering.

What's all this talk of tabasco? I thought we were talking about chili!

Unless you have a source for the habenero flavor from tobasco, I think it is just salty vinegar... though I have to admit their chipotle flavor goes nicely on ham or eggs, even if it doesn't have any kick to it.

Actually, I have also reached the point where my guts have staged an intervention. My mouth still likes it going in, but somewhere along the way my body doesn't want to have anything to do with it anymore. I am hoping that a longer chili vacation can set things right.

Please let us know your results, i.e. whether these Linux programs work well with the locally available UPS brands...

We met in the US and remained there while my wife finished her doctorate. We had the absolute minimum civil marriage ceremony in a judge's chambers and never gave either of our families a wedding or reception. I am not the autonomous unit by chance...

I am not certain whether there would have been one of those symbolic sin sots if we had done a wedding party in Thailand. I suspect my mother-in-law would have felt too much peer pressure to just ignore it. Of my wife's Thai friends from a similar background (overseas scholars who married foreigners), I think the only ones who did sin sot did it for fun as part of a full-scale Thai wedding day and it was returned to the couple.

I did travel to meet her parents before we married, and the topics of conversation (via translation) were relatively simple:

1. Q: "what is your religion?" A: "none" Response: "good!" (look of relief that I wasn't out to "convert" their daughter like on T.V.)

2. Q: "is it true westerners do not care about their parents?" A: more involved explanation of retirement funds, social security, etc. and how my parents sought to put me into the world to be self-sufficient rather than to support them. Response: thoughtful consideration that such a system also makes sense and does not mean we do not care about our parents.

3. Q: "have you eaten?" A: irrelevant. Response: food thrust upon me. OK, maybe this topic came up more than once...

As far as I know, it is not addictive in the medical sense but it is easy to become attached to it like other forms of masochism.

It also has a detrimental effect on the sense of taste, in my experience. I periodically have gotten to the point where everything seems bland and then stopped eating chili-laced foods for several weeks to see how the flavors of everything else would slowly rebound. At the time, it seems disturbing and I consider remaining off the (chili) sauce, but it seems I eventually gravitate back to it and repeat the cycle...

As mentioned above, the insulation differs. If you will be installing it in an interior space connected to living areas, a good electric one will kick out much less heat into the room during roasting. (A gas one has to be ventilated.)

I was deep in culture shock when we planned our kitchen, so I got a Siemens built-in oven for about 27k THB that had the more basic controls but still more cooking modes than I typically use (convection, broil with or without convection, select top and/or bottom heating elements, etc.) Note, ours was listed at 2.75 kW connected load and required a 12 amp 220V circuit.

I have been very happy with its performance although I have ended up using it less frequently than I originally expected, just because the climate here makes me not want baked goods so much. We finally gave it some exercise these holiday weeks with roasting, baking pies and cookies, etc. It reaches full temperature very quickly in my experience.

...

So, technically, it would be easy to manually alter these paths with temporary peering agreements and have full internet connectivity again. It's very likely that the more advanced ISPs in Asia are already doing this - they won't wait for some cable to be repaired!

Unfortunately, reestablishing connectivity is not enough if the faults have reduced the aggregate link capacity too much. For example, I can ping and even connect with TCP to some hosts in the US now over my TOT ADSL, but the higher level session protocols such as SSH, IMAPS, etc. are timing out before they make sufficient progress. While the round-trip ping times are lower than I experienced with GPRS in the past, the packet loss rates are too high.

Peering arrangements and differentiated service (pay more, get more capacity) will also be important in the new re-routed network.

I had a lot of stability issues with the G604T and upgraded to firmware to a more recent version intended for the G624T. It works much better for me now and a lot of the port forwarding bugs are solved as well. I doubt it would fix your problem but it might be worth a shot. ...

Thanks for bringing this to my attention! I gave myself a new firmware for Christmas and it resolved not only my unhappy wireless but it also resolved several other firewall/NAT and stability issues!

The inductance and resistance he speaks of are important. The Earth is not all at one potential! You can often sink a few ground stakes and measure a voltage across them. Soil itself can be an inductor, capacitor, or battery because of the various mineral components, moisture levels, acidity, etc.

You really have to choose the boundaries of your system and then consider all the paths within the circuit, i.e. a house. That is why isolation is so important with paths that go in and out of the system, e.g. a telephone line or even a shield on some RF line that goes from one structure to another may close an earth loop and draw a dangerous amount of current.

An annoying thing for me was that one officer decided to change the criteria under which I would be extended, as if to emphasize that it was her choice and not mine. So, she decided to use my employment rather than existing funds and then demanded additional tax documents from my employer beyond the ones we had already brought (just in case). I think it might have gotten worse because my wife said, "what's the point of that"... this meant we not only didn't have copies but we didn't have originals and we had to come back another day, which turned out to be one of those traffic-clogged taxi trips from hel_l.

I've also had an officer be friendly and get up to make a copy for us! But others seem intent on finding a way to declare your application incomplete. I have a feeling you just cannot win.

There is actually a slower DSL standard that tolerates bad lines... I seem to recall it is 114 kb/s for some reason, and I had it once in the US about 5 years ago. But, I guess they do not have this available or they would have thought to try it. Did they try 128 kb/s?

As far as I can tell, they set the new measures because they believed there was an impending speculator attack. They saw an unusual and severe rise in foreign capital inflow, and decided this was bad for Thailand. We all know the economy isn't that large by world standards, and could easily be pushed around by speculators with large pockets. Is it wrong for the BoT to try to manage the economy to the benefit of the country, rather than the benefit of foreign investors? Is it wrong for them to say, "we do not want currency speculators in our market"?

I think it is interesting to consider this question, independently of how well or how poorly the BoT executed on their intentions. I suspect that this forum is very divided on the underlying principle, much less on policy matters for trying to follow the principles...

Old wanderer, you sound like my dad.

Definitely, sell off everything you can. Think of it this way---if you will never use it again then it actually has no value to you, no matter how much you paid for it. Get some cash for it that you can put to better use. Also, even if you sell nice stuff at a "loss", isn't it better if someone can make use of it rather than just letting it slowly rot away on a shelf?

We sold our cars, furniture, major appliances, etc. We gave away computers, hobby stuff, small kitchen appliances, and anything else we couldn't sell in the last month or two. We shipped some books and extra clothing, assorted kitchen items (non-powered) and the few hifi things I mentioned. Sometimes I wish our shipment had disappeared just so I wouldn't have to think about it.

In the end, our lifestyle adjusted rapidly to the reduced wardrobe and essentials we brought in our luggage (not nearly reaching maximum baggage allowance). When the shipment arrived, we got a relative to store it for almost a year before we even broke open the boxes. It was nice to get the kitchen stuff back into use, since we had avoided buying redundant stuff on arrival. But the rest remains mostly in boxes, shuffled from one storage room to another. (Maybe a medium closet's worth of stuff now.)

I would suggest that you look very carefully into the situation with the motorcycles. The import duty is probably a killer. I don't think the welder or milling machine are feasible, particularly as that is way beyond the power requirements people were talking about in this thread!

You have to start by answering what you use the LAN for. I had a LAN even when my only internet connection was GPRS, because I actually had reasons to have computers talk to each other, share a printer and scanner, etc. If the only purpose of the LAN is to share the internet, I think wireless is a pretty sensible solution for any small single-family home. But, when you start needing more performance or having range and reliability issues with the cheap wireless, it might be worth considering...

The cost and benefit for me included a geeky personal desire for flexibility, reliability, and performance. A wired 100 Mb/s LAN has vastly more bandwidth than a wireless LAN, since the different communication paths do not interfere with each other (like having separate phone lines versus a party line). I assumed we might have video and audio streaming, file-serving, etc. between rooms if we live in this place long enough and everything keeps getting cheaper and more high-tech. I even splurged on cat6 cable (a small part of overall cost) so that I could upgrade to a gigabit switch if I wanted.

It's been a while, but I seem to recall the general wiring fee the guys used was 800 THB for a new box (location). This included multiple wires to the box, since the labor was really clearing the path and installing the box and I had supplied the wire separately. For us, interior painting was already going to occur so I did not have to consider additional cost for that.

The reliability issue with phone wires comes from poor connections or cracked wires. A proper ethernet installation will have one contiguous cable from one end to the other, and then a good solid crimp connector. Leaving extra wire at the ends (pushed back into the wall) allows you to cut off the tip and re-terminate it if it somehow corrodes. The main risk, as I mentioned, is that the workers damage the nice new cable; whether ripping up the insulation, stretching it so hard that a conductor cracks, or just bending/kinking it too much to cause a crack. You cannot just twist the ends back together with a splice to try to replace a section, so the whole run is junk if any part of it gets damaged.

I also took my chances and used plenum cable without PVC conduit, so my worst disaster will be if and when rodents get in there and start chewing through the wires in the roof space...

Wide? Array? Radio? No, just a wired LAN... my point really was that it may be cheaper to just properly install wires than to try to use wireless for fixed PCs, because labor is so cheap here. (Where "properly" is paying some guy to tear up the walls and then patch and repaint them, knowing that when he breaks the wires you get to keep both pieces.) Of course, I am assuming you are living somewhere relatively permanent, based on your described layout of 3 floors and multiple structures.

You said the buildings were 100 m apart... what is in between? It is probably a lot more expensive to do a non-wireless connection there, if it is even possible from an access rights point of view... you might be able to get away with good cat5e/cat6 cable in a buried conduit, but it would be a lot more comforting to use fibre optic for electrical isolation of the structures and the lack of distance limitations. Of course, that also means more equipment at the endpoints... PCs with fibre optic ethernet adapters at the very least, rather than cheap copper ethernet routers/switches.

Yes I agree with all the advice... I would never have brought any equipment if it hadn't been essentially "free" to toss it into the shipment along with our books and other heavy items that came over by sea. It was also old enough that I really wouldn't care if it did give up its magic smoke, as long as nobody gets hurt in the process.

As for the accidents, I suppose anything is possible but my family is technically inclined and my mother-in-law knows to ask me rather than to change anything to do with my "toys". Nobody else will even power on the system except me... they just use the locally purchased TV and its internal speakers.

Edit: Oh, I should add for the original poster, the typical construction and decorating materials used in Thailand are a serious accoustic problem.

I would not even bother bringing any true hifi equipment if I had not thought about how it would sound in a concrete and glass box with ceramic floors. Houses here are just chock full of echoes and resonance.

With the heat and humidity, I am not interesting in thick rugs and/or wall coverings that could help the problem (don't want the instant musty room), so I have mostly resigned myself to terrible sound.

Because we were shipping stuff anyway, I threw in some decent but aging hifi equipment. We bought a small 400W step-down transformer in "Ban Mor", an area where lots of loudspeakers and such are sold. It only cost about $15 USD as I recall, but it was a while ago. They had larger but I didn't expect to actually be drawing too much power.

Because the receiver seems to have an internal DC power supply, the 50 Hz power does not seem to cause any trouble. The down side is that the transformer vibrates when switched on, and it gets warm. It has an internal power switch so I just turn off the transformer and leave the hifi dead when not in use.

Aside from appliances like refrigerators and washers, is it really that common for modern devices to care about the AC frequency? I would expect anything time-sensitive to be using switching, regulated DC supplies, quartz oscillators, etc.

If you aren't going to be wandering around with laptops, something to consider:

We had some remodelling done and it was affordable to have the workers string some ethernet cable for me. They quoted their standard "per point" labor charge for wiring telephone or cable T.V. We bought a hundred meters of "plenum rated" ethernet cable at Panthip last year and told them where we wanted the endpoints to be, so they did not supply materials. They ran it through the ceiling space (gypsum hanging beneath the concrete structure), digging into the walls to run it down to new outlet boxes. I think they used an existing utility riser (figure out where your water pipes go between floors) to get cables between upstairs and downstairs.

I sketched a "star" topology with lots of wires running from specific wall locations all to one location in a cabinet, where I could put the router/switch. I had them add power and phone outlets in that cabinet as well (for the router). I just had them run the ethernet wire, and I bought a crimper and sack of RJ-45 hardware to terminate everything myself. I had extra wires pulled just in case, and actually have unused wires to every room even though I only have a 4-port ADSL router right now.

I will note that they didn't really know what they were doing, and one or two of the cables were torn up pretty badly. I think they pulled it across some sharp metal in the ceiling, and I may just have to write them off. I not sure if they have any shorts or breaks in them, but I saw some places where the outer casing was pretty scraped up. But the ones I have tried so far are working. I did make sure my wife emphasized that they had to run contiguous wire between each endpoint, e.g. that they could not do it in sections and splice it together with chewing gum and hope, as Thai workers are so fond of doing with telephone cable.

I've noticed that many newer motherboards include a nice time-domain reflectometry diagnostic in the BIOS for use with the onboard 10/100/1000 ethernet controller (maybe specific to NVIDIA chipsets?). You can connect up the PC and use this to gauge how many meters away there is a break or short in a wire. I took this into consideration when doing this work, because I know it can drive you insane to try to diagnose faulty wires. If I find a wire that does not test out OK with this method, I'll just abandon it as a life experience and try another one.

What is the price difference for these "N" access points? If you already have B/G network cards, would it be cheaper to just get more than one "G" access point and put them in separate rooms/floors to expand coverage? I realize you'd have to string some extra ethernet cable to do it right, and this might be difficult depending on the building...

To the original poster, one odd thing I've noticed is that the same D-Link DSL-G604T router has been on sale here since I bought one in 2004. Back then they cost nearly 7k THB and now they are only about 2.5k THB. The wireless part of ours recently died after over two years of constant use. The router and configuration program runs and will try to operate the wireless, but there doesn't seem to be signal anymore and my belief is that the radio chip is dead; I already tried reconnecting the antenna, even taking the thing apart to look for broken conductors, insects and corrosion with no luck.

I am not sure if it is just dumb luck or whether it overheated or something... however, the main use for us is the ADSL router function and I can use wired ethernet, so I haven't thought about a replacement yet.

...and for the first time in my life i feel truly at home here.

Every time someone says that, I wish they would go on to explain how or why this is the case... like the topic started out here, "what do you like about Thailand" rather than "how much do you like Thailand". Honestly, I wish I knew the secret behind this statement. I am not teasing...

Personally, I have found that "home" is where my wife is, so while I am here and call this home, I would leave in a flash and never look back if she needed to move somewhere else again. Oddly enough, when travelling without her, the only things that give me the "home" feeling are not people nor culture. It is little details like the sunlight hitting something at just the right angle or a certain crisp feeling in the air. Geographic nostalgia. Sentimental stuff that reminds of childhood in mid-northern latitudes. Thailand has none of those triggers for me, and it leaves me sort of blank as a result.

If the problem is not bad hardware really a screwed up MBR or Windows OS on the hard disk, consider what I say below... if you install windows from a CD you'll notice that it reboots at some point in the process and starts using the hard disk. Therefore, it obviously has some logic to chain-boot the "new" hard disk image and continue the install. This logic might be confused by whatever state the hard drive currently is in?

Note: this is definitely destructive and will more or less make your disk look "like new from the factory": To force a reinstall, you could try booting a Linux install/rescue CD and using its fdisk command to delete the partitions or even better running "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=10" to completely zero out the first sectors on the disk, including MBR and partition table. Then install from the boot CD as for any new computer. If this fails, I'd suspect that there is some sort of "anti-virus lock" in the BIOS that is preventing write access to the partition table or MBR...

do you actually think Thai women prefer younger men then??

My wife did! I'm nearly 6 months younger.