autonomous_unit

For those curious about the geeky side of this, the data call sends the modem data over the digital wireless link instead of the normal digitized audio, and it is a modem at the wireless telecom provider that actually forms the accoustic modem connection w/ the remote modem at the ISP which goes out over the higher bandwidth plain old telephone system. It is 9600 bps because that is the underlying data rate for normal GSM wireless.

You have to enable the data calls w/ the telecom provider because of this involvement of a modem on their end. If you somehow tried to run an accoustic modem through the GSM voice compression algorithm, you'd get a much worse data rate. Now where did I leave that accoustically coupled modem?

Yes, I agree we won't know until an inquiry is complete (if ever).

This is more like a meeting of Young Conservatives than an chat Forum.

Given the Police already admitted they shot someone who wasn't even vaguely a terrorist, why don't you go tingtong and debate it now (ooh you devils!) rather than prudently 'waiting for an inquiry'.

Its not as if your voluminous punditry is read by anyone

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Heh, not too often I get called a conservative... as I said, I sometimes feel right-wing for a Californian, and I should have clarified that as a real or Northern Californian since those southerners can be pretty stiff.

Anyway, despite your apparently not reading my posts that you respond to, my goal isn't really to aggravate anyone or see how many posts I can generate. Perhaps I should break up my voluminous comments into one-sentence posts? At this rate, it will be another year or two before I hit this magical 500 and see what kooky punditry there is in bedlam.

A long list of UPS (APC and others) with a wide range of VA ratings here:

http://www.shop4thai.com/en/category/?cat=139

If you get the UPS with serial port you do not have to buy anything for your linux computer except maybet the serial cable (about 100B). Network management card you mentioned is just a standard network card in/on your PC. The UPS should come with a CD to configure the managment and the Linux kernel can be recompiled to support it.

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Thanks for the URL. For the network management, I mean the APC accessory AP9617 which is an add-on board to install in the "smart slot" of the UPS to give it a web/ssh/SNMP interface over ethernet. I have used a similar interface on an APC power distribution device (not UPS) before at work, and it seems most of the newer Smart UPS models have the available slot.

A quick search I did on some US websites indicates that this might indeed cost more than the UPS but it would solve one of my installation problems of not having a PC anywhere near one UPS.

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In all of these situations it is expected of us ordinary citizens that we respect this control. Not doing so has many legal consequences. In this case the consequences have been fatal. How much this was justified will only become evident under the coming inquiry.

However it is over exaggeration if you conclude that when given the order by a policeman to stop in an intense terrorist security operation, it is a gross infringement on your civil liberties. And that there will be no serious consequences should you run.

Seen in this context, the resulting death of the suspect, whether fully justified or not, displays more the tensions created by the obscene terrorists atrocities, than the implication that Britain is becoming a police state.

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Yes, I agree we won't know until an inquiry is complete (if ever). I also don't mean that being stopped is a gross infringement of liberties. What I am commenting on is the very challenging problem of balancing all of these issues on an almost literal knife's edge. I think there are a host of effective investigative and security measures that can be done, as well as a number of infringing ones with diminishing returns. For example, I think the US would be better served by increasing customs/shipping checks and having visible security in public spaces, rather than having too many new secret search warrant powers.

The only practical comment I can agree with in this particular event is why wasn't he stopped before he even entered the station... but the bigger question is what official policies or unofficial (but quite real) moods are at play here, and do we like the results. If we do not reflect on this, we run the risk of doing the bad guys' work for them.

I hope the UK doesn't have to go through the same transformation as the US has after 9/11, but perhaps it is an inevitable aspect of human nature. It is, unfortunately, a numbers game and rational policies must address it as such rather than operating from the emotional point of one individual.

I have wondered through these developments whether the UK is just settling into the mindset that much of the US has dipped into over the past 4 years. Many of the recent comments on this board and in the news are an eery echo of what I remember in the US at the time. (This is related to TV because Thailand is of course having its own trials with the southern unrest, with similar extensions of police/state power, etc.)

If so, I fear for our friends and the effects of a heightened police-state where people have an emotional context wherein this guy's death is justified and guilt-free. It reminds me of air passengers who were suffocated on US flights by fellow passengers who sat on them, crushed them, etc. because the person was acting bizarre. It turned out they were mentally ill but had no association w/ terrorists. Nobody wanted to ponder the point that this was a wrong that had occurred.

Growing up, I often was made to feel like "right-wing" compared to my California environment, but I am troubled by the near permanent (10 year!) extension of the Patriot Act in the US that was accepted recently by the House of Representatives. I cannot help but ask myself, aren't these limitations of rights exactly what the terrorist movement is trying to trigger? As our current leaders say, the fundies don't like our open and tolerant societies. But, they're letting us build the culture of fear and distrust ourselves...

Thanks, all. I think a datacenter or house-wide UPS is a bit more than I am looking for. Are the APC units widely available? I did not see any in our local department store, and I did not yet realize I should be looking for one the last time I went to Pantip.

What is the typical BKK selling price for one of those desktop/tower Smart UPS models, if you know? Say, for ones in the 600-1000 VA range? Do I understand correctly that the volt-amp rating is the maximum load of the device and is rougly 1.5 times the wattage of the load? Why don't they list the energy capacity, e.g. VA-H or watt-hour so you can judge how long it will run? I don't expect to put a very high load on it, but as I mentioned above I would like a reasonable run-time on battery. I want to get a low-power Athlon64 and a typical LCD display but I might put 3 or 4 hard drives in it...

I did some digging around on the APC site and on google, and it seems the two ways Linux can handle these is via the serial port or via the network when the network management option card is installed. Any idea how much these cards cost, if they are available in BKK? It occurs to me it might be easier to put the DSL router on a separate UPS that will not be very close to the PC but obviously could plug into the router w/ one of these cards... I have no idea if that is cost-effective though!

Hi Som Tam,

My grandmother used to have a remedy for eye problems. She used to fill a egg cup full of coke a cola and tilt her head back with egg cup pressed to her eye. She would leave it there for 2 minutes.

Hope this helps. 

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Ouch! And when you're done etching your cornea with carbolic acid, try the final solution for swimmers: fill your goggles (or eye cup, or egg cup, as the case may be) with fresh pastuerized milk and do the same thing Jeffrey describes above. Milk sooths.

Apologies if this is a repeat topic, but the forum search engine considers "UPS" to be too short of a search term. I am only vaguely familiar with UPSs available in the US and consider "APC" to be a dependable brand. Does anyone have guidelines to choosing a UPS here that will be reliable and trouble-free?

I am looking to protect a linux PC that hasn't been bought yet as well as to keep a DSL router up through the short outages we seem to see around BKK. It might be nice to be able to keep the PC running for several hours in a worst-case situation, but that is not critical as I expect to keep an old laptop around that can run on its own battery if the router stays up...

So, being able to have the linux PC detect that the power is out and automatically shutdown would be very useful. I am not sure if that (driver support) varies by brand or is pretty bog-standard these days.

I am also interested in UPSs that will condition the power, in case this varies by brand or model. I guess I have been lucky so far with plugging things directly into the mains power, if the crazy electric stories on this board are actually true around BKK too!

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Thai cookery must rate as one of the most sophisticated and subtle in the world. Like the French, the all Thais take their food really seriously. It is not just a matter of Chillies (introduced by Europeans).

Spicy is word misused a lot here; it means flavoured or fragranced with spice; pungent, aromatic; piquant. NOT simply hot! - Although that appears to be what most people here seem to mean.

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Yes, that's my problem... I'm a simple boy who wants food to knock my socks off and not be subtle. The kind who would violate his father's carefully grilled beef with hot sauce... The only French food I've ever really enjoyed were some of the rustic stews that had a richness though I wouldn't go so far as to call it spicy. Likewise, I only really seem to like the fragrant Thai foods which are a frustratingly small part of the menu here as far as I have seen so far.

It doesn't help that I love spiciness like in Indian food and also have a taste for chilis that can exceed the limits of parts after the tasting...

I think this problem is happening everywhere people are crammed together... I remember reading the same thing about the water table in the midwest of the US, though they are more worried about running out of water and sinkholes than becoming the next Atlantis.

Cities like Amsterdam and New Orleans already are below sea level... do you think BKK can pull it together and install seawalls and pumps to cope? Or maybe the Thai style would be to abandon the ground floors and live stilt-like above, with elevated roads and the surface turned back to canals.

I was amazed to hear that the "foundation" posts that are driven into the ground here for even small houses are 20-30 meters long (coming from an area in California where foundation posts would be a few feet deep). Somehow, I think the city will manage no matter what happens. I can picture new pilings driven in to reinforce the posts and then building extra floors, while the ground floor walls are knocked out.

I think these problems at True must be local neighborhood oversubscription or something!

Our 1024/512 service in Bangkoknoi (Pinklao area) is doing better these days than it was in the past year in terms of consistency. I still see the odd blip where ping times shoot up to several seconds to the US for an hour or two, and I assume that is some significant configuration error or overload in the True or CAT backbone circuits. The rest of the time, I see 240-300 ms pings to different parts of the US.

I can now usually do VOIP calls over the regular flat-rate service w/ just a bit of occasional garbling, whereas a few months ago I had to always switch to the metered "bandwidth on demand" service in order to get a connection to stay up at all.

I regularly see 300-500 Kb/s download rates to BKK from a computer in the US that I think is capped at 640 kb/s upload. I frequently get closer to 1 Mb/s when I download large files from real servers, but that does fluctuate more with the time of day. In the upload direction, it seems I can usually get close to 500 kb/s from here to the US.

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While I'm still waiting for the CIA to get back to me with the results of the face-recognition, fingerprints on the cup and DNA samples, my general impression was that she's not really a serious threat to farang-thai society. ...

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Oh, sure, you're probably in on it!

... I think she misses her family more than Thailand.

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My wife thought she missed Thailand while we were in the US, but upon returning it is clear she really just missed a few food items and her family. Now I get to hear how all sorts of Thai things drive her nuts!

By the way, Los Angeles is said to have the biggest Thai population in the US. I can definitely attest to there being more trappings of Thailand there, such as temples, Thai grocers, and nearly authentic Thai food (just with US produce) than I have seen anywhere else in the US.

We mostly cooked stir-fry in California and we mostly do that here, but what is missing is the occasional western dish or other more elaborate item that requires an oven or more kitchen facilities than we have in our current rental. Hopefully this will change sooner or later... we've started accumulating spices to try to make a few of the Indian dishes we made before. If I could find tortillas and good tortilla chips, I'd be making burritos and salsa to satisfy one craving!

I like the more intense ingredients like basil, kiefer lime, ginger, garlic, young pepper, and chilis, but there is often a parallel menu. My wife and her family (whenever they stop by) enjoy a much wider range of Thai foods than I do... I don't care for seafood, coconut milk, nor what to me is the bland and salty midsection of Thai and Chinese cooking. I was the odd one out with foods as a child too, so I don't see peer pressure as likely to make me really "go native" here.

The only "western" food I've had here in my first year is pizza at a mall, maybe once a month. At home, I like to keep some essentials like cheese, crackers, bread, and peanut butter along w/ the more Thai-style snacks. We also get the Thai "fast food" noodles and stir fries from the local alley shops more often than is probably wise.

Whenever I go back to the US now, I find myself going for green salads, soups, and sandwiches on my own to make up some shortfall! Otherwise, it is just going with the desires of the people I am going out with. I have noticed that my appetite has adjusted to a more Thai style in terms of proportions and a propensity to snacking. The restaurant meals I was served in the Chicago area recently were frightening even though I am not a small person.

OK, what's the local pricing/suppliers for Cat-5e then? I haven't done any of this at a practical level in many years, and was under the impression that gigabit over copper required Cat-6 for any reasonable length (beyond a few meters within a single rack, etc.)...

My goal is to wire something that may start with 100baseT but no doubt will be upgraded to 1000baseT, or whatever else becomes commoditized soon, long before I want to go replacing the cabling...

[i felt impressed when first moving to Thailand 5 years ago that thais could deal with the traffic, etc. Now I realise that they are just oblivious to everything that goes on around them. The idea is that other people must look out for them. Friends and neighbours often take me to the airport and when they take a wrong turning I say "didn't you see the sign". Normal reply "you haven't got time to read signs when you're trying to get somewhere quickly"

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Quality does vary among different Thai drivers , but I would say their attention is focused in a much narrower strip in front of them... I've been in a number of cars (taxi and private) that have made crazy lane changes and hard stops without being smashed to bits from behind. In the US, you would almost be guaranteed to be spanked with 4000 lbs of steel, and might even have blame pinned officially on you for cutting someone off or making an unwarranted stop or reckless driving. Obviously, they are paying attention to not running into things in front of them too often... the US has right-of-way, while BKK seems to have right-of-space.

What truly frightens me is when my brother-in-law gets on the cell phone and his speed and directional controls literally fall apart... he'll drop from 80 to 40 kp/h and start drifting off to the left as if he is subconsciously trying to protect the world from his poor concentration, but he'll just keep swerving along that way until the call is over!

Can anyone tell me the going rate for relatively short rolls of Cat-6 cable in BKK? Somewhere around 25 or 50 meters would do, or larger sizes if it is not too much more expensive than Cat-5.

Are there any particularly good places to buy it? Or just the usual Pantip prowling?

mugopp - If you currently have a good working computer, laptop or desktop, I would personally suggest waiting a bit, as there are some major changes coming later this year which are expected to put considerable downward pressure on the pricing of current machines.

cheers

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Bear in mind, this is a statement that can be made during almost any quarter in the past 25 years of the PC. :-)

A rational strategy is to space your purchases far enough out so that you can buy the current middle of the road bargain at a good value to support you to the next upgrade cycle, and ignore what is happening at the top-end. At least for non-specialized use, this is true. Otherwise, when those great new things come along to depress pricing of today's items, you'll forget it was today's items you intended to buy and you'll pay through the nose for all that new stuff! Plodding along consistenly and without worrying about all the little market fluctuations will probably have you ending up with an equivalent computing experience...

Or, if you want the latest and greatest, admit that you have a fetish and just live with the costs.

I found large sizes in the Emporium. Brand is Regal.

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I also got lucky at the Emporium this time last year; I just showed the guy my big feet and he dug around until he found a couple styles that might fit me. I wear US size 12 or so, depending on the brand. He found a nice pair of Luigi Batani dress slip-ons that have become my favorite shoes here when I am not in Teva sandals. It might be more difficult if you have your heart set on one style instead of going in, "I need shoes, what do you have in my size?"

If a phone was stolen in Thailand that was set up for international roaming from another country, but may or may not have been reported stolen; and eventually that same number was reassigned in the original country.....

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Assuming you are talking about GSM phones, the number is not really the identifying characteristic of the subscriber or prepaid account... calls are not billed to a phone number but to the account of the provider associated with a particular SIM (subscriber information module). The phone number, e.g. country code + area code + number is just a routing number to allow others to direct calls to you.

When GSM cell phones are stolen or cloned, it is the SIM that they are abusing. Once the SIM is no longer associated with an active account w/ the provider, it is useless as networks will no longer accept it for roaming nor allow it to place calls. SIMs are not normally reused; that is why you just cancel an account and toss the old SIM in the trash.

Can the movies include musical soundtracks and close-up views of books?

Otherwise, prefer for what? I'd rather have music for recreation/relaxation because I can make up my own words and thoughts. But I'd need books for work or educating kids, I think...

I guess I've been computing for too much of my life... why would someone want to reverse dates and show the numbers from least-significant to most-significant (DD-MM-YYYY) instead of the way quoted above? What is peculiar about dates? I've never seen someone report time as seconds:minutes:hours, prices as satang.baht, etc.

Wait, would today be 16-06-2005 or 61-60-5002?

Thanks for all the construction thoughts!

Thanks for all the construction thoughts!

Thanks for all the construction thoughts!

Thanks for all the construction thoughts!

Thanks for all the construction thoughts!

I cannot say that I think any of these movies corrupted me, or even that they could have! I do remember being depressed a bit by The Day After... because it was broadcast on TV in the US when I was in grade school and we were still living under the shadow of the supposed world war 3. We had "duck and cover" drills for earthquakes but if I remember correctly there were still some fading posters around from the civil defense, pretend-your-hands-can-block-gamma-rays days. Everyone knew we were probably within the blast radius of whatever was permanently aimed at the local naval weapons station.

I think I was already jaded and understanding most movie violence as a darker social commentary when I was 8 or 10. I remember movies like Rambo and Commando being ultra violent, but while there was a certain level of "coolness" to the heros it didn't lead my generation to glorify violence or think less of death. Maybe there is ambivalence. We liked to play the antihero, to be be Darth Vader to the end, as much as to be Luke or Han.

I guess if I was "corrupted" it was by irreverent comedies like Monty Python, M.A.S.H., Animal House, etc. and my favorite low-budget Scifi film Darkstar with a suicidally depressed planet-killing bomb. I always did question authority...

But the incessant news media probably has more impact than the matinee. I think the generation slightly younger than me (generation Y?) in the US have more hawkish attitudes because they really do not remember the Cold War nor the sorrows of Vietnam War vets, and instead their first view was the video-game CNN coverage of smart bombs in the Gulf War.

3.  Attnetion to privacy.  Thais will put windows opposite windows of adjoing houses, some projects you can look "through" the alignment of windows in many houses in a row.  Pay attention to wall, window and glass block orientation to maximize privacy and take advantage of sight lines!  With no zoning restrictions enforced on any lot, it is easy to build you house anywhere on the lot where you can take adavantage of maximum light, sun, view and privacy.  My windows on my one neighbors side and the street are "above eyeline" so I get the light, but still have the privacy.  What good are windows if the window covering is drawn all the time for privacy.

9.  Thai doors are installed to swing out.  Sliding glass windows are installed on the outside and screens put on the inside.  Then, bars are placed over the outside of the window for "security", because the sliding glass windows can be removed if placed on the outside, not if placed on the inside track.  Screens are kept cleaner on the inside, but for one who hates screens, they belong on the outside track in my view.  No bars on my windowns as they can't be removed from the outside. My double front doors open inward.  All easily doable at the time of construction.

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These two points sure hit home. We're looking at trying to make a prebuilt house a home, and struggling with the creative gardening required to undo the silly windows facing neighbors windows. In one bedroom w/ bathroom, you can open the door and see your infinite reflection in mirror and the opposing house's bathroom mirror!

Does anyone have experience refitting sliding doors and windows to be the right (e.g. non-Thai) way around? I hadn't thought about it being easier to force open, but what galls me is the idea that you have to open the screen (the bug guard) in order to operate the windows. Is it a handicap to enforce fair play with mosquitos in the evening?

Upon close inspection, it seems they installed proper sliding door frames backwards and actually cut extra notches in the doors to make the doors fit backwards on the extruded tracks (because the guide track is not exactly center in the larger groove within which the door slides). I am not 100% sure the doors will operate perfectly if reversed again, but I am also unsure of the possibility of removing and refitting the frames/tracks without damaging the opening in the wall in a way that requires reconstruction. I wouldn't even know how to approach a contractor to get this done... it would be like asking the cook to add vegetables to what they consider a meat dish.