autonomous_unit

Agree and I dont blame them one bit.....and it occurs in our own societies as well

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Yup, our societies just tend to use different code phrases so we are not always hearing the reason behind the reason when a Thai person passes an apparently simplistic judgement about other people. I agree that knuckle-dragging parasites exist in most parts of the world... and their income level isn't really the first indicator.

Ask the receiving Thai bank for a transfer advice of credit. Bangkok Bank gives us one for free.

I've had a few largish transfers wired to me from the US from different banks and the breakdown was:

US $5 fee deducted on sending side

THB 500 fee deducted in Thailand

the balance at a given exchange rate with no percentage-based fees (perhaps the $5/500 baht were capped percentage fees? they've happened on transfers of different sizes)

the latest transfer we did right before Songkran got a rate of 39.55 baht/dollar.

The important note seems to be that the SWIFT transfer is "received by" Bangkok Bank Public Company Limited U.S.A. in US dollars rather than having the real sending bank buy Thai baht itself. This arrangement is what yields a good exchange rate, and I suspect you should look for the same sort of scenario in your country of origination.

I have met a GTG who is Uni educated, works for the Government and is a fully qualified Vet with her own clinic......

She said to me once....I could not marry a man who earns less money than I do....says it all about financially independant Thai girls.

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I've heard similar comments and when I dug deeper I found that this is often a code phrase for "I won't stand for a patriarchal ass, filled with false pride, who wants to drink and gamble my security away".

It helps to understand the cultural context where an independent Thai girl is fiercely protective of her newfound independence.

Depends on the car and the car stereo.

Some aftermarket stereos have a line-in (aux) socket on the front, so all you need is a regular 1/8" cable. For others, there is an aux signal in the wiring harness but you need an adapter to tap it out and then you run the cable out of the dash to somewhere convenient.

For some aftermarket and OEM stereos prepared for a remote CD-changer, there are adapters which plug into the CD-changer cable and give you an aux input. They "pretend" they are a changer, so the stereo indicates a CD is playing on the dash, but you get the Ipod (or whatever) audio instead.

Some old stereos have a tape deck and you can use a very low-fi headphone to tape adapter. This sounds much worse than the aux methods.

Similarly, there are FM modulators which can put the Ipod output onto an unused frequency for tuning in on the FM radio in the car. The hip wireless kind sound terrible in practice, and the better quality kind that go in-line on the FM antenna cable to the stereo are still not as good as a proper aux input. Definitely not CD quality.

Googling for ipod, line input, aux, and the brand and model of your car or stereo can probably reveal a surprising amount of info as well as some completely useless pages full of keywords and unrelated product lists.

Just to add to the "not everyone is in the same boat" sentiment... I started dating my wife about seven years ago in the US . We fell madly in love but did not get married for a long time. I guess that part could have happened as well if I'd fallen for another westerner.

I visited Thailand once to see her family about 5 years ago and announce our intentions to marry. We finally married in the US less than 2 years ago and moved to Thailand last year as my second visit. I am not all that well adapted, but she has been struggling too. She spent ages 18-30 in the US; we spent ages 24-30 together there, and I guess she's picked up more "west" from me than I did "east" from her.

I'm not religious and thought it was "just paper" when we did a civil ceremony to appease family and simplify visa issues, but now I have gotten used to it and quite like the symbol... it's a more public record of what we already knew.

You can choose any postscript printer driver on windows, e.g. HP, Apple, IBM, color postscript printers and set it to print to file.

The open source ps2pdf utilities that go with Ghostscript will do an admirable job of converting a postscript file to a nice small PDF. Some people even feel they do a better job than Acrobat. No catch, no shareware arm twisting...

Use google to find it. I use it on Linux all the time, so I cannot really comment on how easy it is to use on Windows (I print the postscript files on windows and copy them to Linux where I do the conversion).

BT transfers are loosely tied to what you UL - so I simply do not beleive that people abuse it by soaking up all the DL bandwidth. The fastest UL capacity is 512 - so if folks have 2.5 or higher DL bought and paid for their restricted UL would limit their DL speeds. Most of the good BT sites require a share ration of 1:1. It is pretty difficult to DL a LOT more than you UL with BT.

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I got the 1024/512 package specifically to get the highest upload speed they offered. I routinely see 512 upload but the effective download is much less than 512, so that mean it is sufficient to add to the congestion with a 1:1 BT share ratio. (Effective by my seat of the pants measure of what can I expect for short transfers and interactive stuff after eliminating the freakish outliers. Once in a while it peaks to 1 Mb/s and once in a while it completely stops.)

The real problem w/ BT, I think, is that it is not very aware of network topology. It would be great if people in Thailand were actually sharing the same files amongst themselves and not redundantly transferring files over the international link, but there isn't anything in BT to really enforce that until the international link gets completely screwed. More traditional (regional) ftp or website mirrors would be better in this regard (as would plain old http downloads that get handled by the ISP proxy cache).

A first step in making BT play nice might just be to restrict its TCP window size and to reduce the packet queueing in the True network so it becomes more sensitive to congestion loss. Unfortunately, I believe Firefoxx when he suggests a lot of BT users are tuning it for maximum bandwidth rather than socially responsible behavior. Maintaining too many peer connections will erase any benefit from playing with window sizes etc.

I am glad to see True is trying to do something to reengineer their networks rather than just sitting with the same terrible, oscillating failures I have seen over the past year or so. It's more art than science so I am not surprised there have been hiccups in the first few weeks of adjustments.

a new ( i think ) setup of few shops selling everything need for computer , include good selection of cd are in the same building ( 4 floor ) of the new lotus / tesco ( open 2 month ago ) in pinklaow , just near rama 8 bridge .

info for people living in this area .

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You mean in the PATA department store (nearer Somdet Phra Pinklao Bridge, really)? Lotus/Tesco is new, but the department store and computer shops are not. The basement used to be PATA's own supermarket and food court, so not much has changed there except the shelves and prices.

Thanks again for your comments. I think I will go with the external

drive, not sure which one yet. I have recently bought a digital camcorder

so I want to store all the video of family and friends etc.

My plan was to only have it connected to my laptop when I would be

transfering the video across to it, then put it in a safe place. This is new

to me, so I don't know if this would be correct

Thanks again

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It all depends on how important your data is, i.e. how much despair you will have when you lose it. Every solution has the risk of data loss, and the safest (and most costly/troublesome) approaches use redundancy to protect you. The super paranoid would keep critical data in more than one format and location, and keep backups to protect against mistakes like deletion of files while drunk or distracted.

In your case, it might make sense to maintain one large drive to conveniently hold all the movies for browsing etc. but keep backups of the movies on the digital camera tape format for archiving in a growing stack of tapes. That way, if the drive fails you have a way to (slowly) rebuild the disk by reading the tapes out again.

Having only one copy on a drive hurts when the drive disappears, whether due to old age, accidental damage, loss, theft, etc. The lifetime of drives is based on some combination of the number of times it is "spun up", the number of hours it is spinning, at what temperatures, as well as storage conditions such as extreme temperature swings, humidity, curious children, etc. Many people think drives are predictable enough so that you can "rotate" data from one drive to another every year or so to always have a nice fresh disk (getting bigger each year for the same price) with everything and one or two older backup disks just in case. This is the kind of thing you can do w/ two USB2 or firewire enclosures so you just keep buying disks every year or two and swapping out an old one. Finding a "SMART tool" program to query the drive for its own health and status can be very helpful when using a method like this. This is done at a larger scale in the industry with whole disk arrays rather than individual disks.

CDs and DVDs do not have unlimited shelf life, and particularly in a place like Thailand. They degrade due to heat and light exposure and also can fail due to strange things like fungus or corrosion attacking the seal and recording layers. The worst part is that they can fail in batches if they were all manufactured in one lot and handled and stored the same way by you. You put it on the shelf with good data on it and months or years later, they cannot be read. Magnetic tape backups can have similar storage problems.

I suspect Firefoxx cannot get through to the BT fans anymore than someone can go to BKK or the US and suggest that people ought to reduce their car trips to improve the traffic problem and reduce pollution. It reminds me of the "libertarians" in Los Angeles who use kerosene lighter fluid for their charcoal barbeque, cheery wood fires on a balmy December night, and two-stroke engine garden equipment while blaming everyone else for the smog...

I only wish the network technology were mature enough to track usage that leads to congestion and implement fair multi-level queueing so my low-bandwidth email and ssh connections were low latency while my infrequent VOIP calls were effective and everyone's BT, ftp, or otherwise bulk transfers would fight it out among themselves for the remaining capacity.

Alternatively, I wish I could choose to pay for better service on some packets to accomplish the same thing, rather than having to change my router to the "true2m" login and back again several times a week.

6-7 miles is out of range for wifi... even 1 mile is out of range, even with a parabolic antenna.  Other common wireless techs also don't reach that far, at most around 1-2km.  You'd need the upcoming winmax for that kind of distance.  Microwave might make it, but it's prohibitively expensive and dependent on the weather.

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I assume you mean while staying within the proper unlicensed band signal strength?

Many people in the US use 802.11b with directional antennea to go several miles line of sight. It's a regular cottage industry of not quite legal "medium haul" wireless. They basically operate SOHO hardware at signal levels meant for an omni-directional antenna and instead put them out a high-gain yagi. I've read about nearly 20 mile links in open country areas with low background noise. The question is when someone will notice interference on the main link path or one of the lobes...

(the American kids kids themselves could have used some improvement though )

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You just didn't meet the right kids...

But seriously, I don't know how to answer the original question. I wouldn't want to be one of the narrow-minded nationalists I've met here, but then there were plenty of those back in the US too! I cannot imagine who I would be without the parents, family, schools, and environs where I grew up in Northern California. They were all very peculiar and signficant so I don't know how they'd get translated to Thai equivalents. I would not want to have swapped places and lived my wife's childhood. People would not have tolerated me and I'd probably be dead now. Plus, I have a hard time imaging how we'd have ended up dating if our childhoods were reversed.

We are facing the other question of raising kids in BKK, so I've thought about that question a lot. Frankly, we moved here out of her obligations rather than our choice... my nightmare would be if we had to choose to all be together in BKK or for me to take kids back to the US. (I detest the idea of sending kids off to boarding schools.)

I agree with The Moog... you guys are mixing up cause and correlation.

Yes, you can get windburn (dehydration of the skin) and we can also get freeze-dried and we can also get thermal burns from intense infra-red and visible light. But a tan comes from a reaction to ultra-violet light. Or falling into a tanning tank at the leather shop, I suppose.

People often mistake the burning feeling for the tanning process, and don't realize how much ultra-violet they get when their skin is feeling cool. That's one reason novice snow skiers get such horrible burns when they drive up to the snow level. Or some people think water intensifies the light (it actually blocks ultra-violet but not enough until you are several feet down... beached whales and porpoises suffer from sunburn when they cannot dive deep as usual). Similarly, dry climate folk do not always appreciate how much ultra-violet light there can be scattered on a hazy or cloudy day when they think they are in "the shade". Remember, if you're outside and you can see your hand without artificial illumination, there is sunlight hitting you.

I had a pair of those "transitions" light-sensitive lenses and was always surprising people by showing how dark they would get in supposedly low-light situations. They react to ultra-violet, and in contrast would not darken in my car no matter how intense the sunlight, since the windshield glass blocked the ultra-violet so well.

I am ok with the missing home part coz I can always visit, my point so poorly put across was do you feel your've missed out on not your family, friends and food and whatever but your years back home?

I think you hit on this in your first post: you cannot be in two places at once, physically, mentally, nor emotionally. So yeah, you miss out on all the other paths you've not chosen... sometimes we tell ourselves it is OK because we'll get back to those paths later. We hope they haven't changed too much, but as you're realizing, it doesn't matter because _we_ have changed.

I think there is a point in life (which you might just be hitting), where you start having a tinge of regret for all the things you cannot go back and do because you'll never be LIKE that again. You can never be as fresh and naive and free as you were as a child---barring serious self-denial or repression. I'm just a few years older than you, and I have them more than once, but even westerners say I think too much for my own good. Of course, there are lots of new ways to see things for the same reason: you're not LIKE that anymore and don't have the same faults of youth.

You suggested that marriage makes things simple. I hate to break it to you, but marriage is one of those big life decisions where you contemplate very big apples/oranges values for yourself. It's where you try to weigh a basket of experiences against Experience. I miss the western US in the sense people posted above of particular comforts and experiences, but also in the sense of not spending my "prime" years where I expected. However, I kind of knew that going into my relationship w/ my wife, so I don't have regrets. Overall, I'd hate to think where I might be now if I'd made different decisions, even though I'd be more comfortable career-wise and in society in general.

...

If simple ADSL modems with a single Ethernet port are not available here, that's fine. Just thought I'd ask....

As far as I know, such beasts are common in the US.

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In my defense, you have to admit that being common in the U.S. doesn't necessarily make something less strange.

I like to forget those things existed. Even my old ISDN adapter had an integrated router and 4-port ethernet switch. I cannot see why anybody would actually want the non-router device...

Perhaps I am cynical, but I think the single-port bridge devices were an attempt by the telecoms to encourage the one-host-per-link policy because of the fact that most users would just follow the installation plan and run software on the PC to do the PPPoE stuff without any questions. Having extra ports would be too enticing and endanger the telecom's goal of selling service to individuals rather than to dwellings. They'd still be charging for each phone connected to the same line, and requiring acoustically coupled modems, if the feds had not stepped in.

BTW, we've been relatively happy with a D-Link DSL-G604T ADSL router w/ ethernet and 802.11g that we got at Pantip and use w/ True service. All our problems have been True rather than D-Link's fault.

I was in BKK a few days after Songkran in 2001 (having been in Yala on the holiday), walking on the street near The Mall I think, and one lady ran up and slapped a handprint of colored talc on my shoulder and then smiled sheepishly when I jerked my head around and looked confused.

Yala was a different matter where we got soaked in a car. Of course, that was because my future sister-in-law kept rolling down the window to squirt passers-by with a big gun and I only thought it was fair to be slow about putting the window back up. Who needs water snipers.

I'd recommend skipping that and just getting a used pentium2 and loading freebsd, knoppix or similar operating system on it. Cheaper, and less chance of ruining your xbox.

Go to linux.org or freebsd.org for selections of downloadable software. Avoid redhat linux.

cv

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I second that. From what I heard from crazy scientists who have experimented on these, the Xbox isn't really capable enough to be a useful general purpose computer. It doesn't have enough RAM and the CPU isn't really all that hot. What makes it good for games is the integrated balance of capabilities with graphics accelerator and I/O ports. I had an old DEC Alpha that was similarly "cool" but really turned out to be quite slow for use as a Linux workstation, compared to the newly cheap PC hardware arriving on the market every few months.

By all means do it for the fun of hacking, but when you actually want a Linux computer just slap together a cheap and fast PC and run a standard distribution.

As Astral said, you won't find one. But you wouldn't really want one either...

A plain modem that has an ethernet port would be a very strange beast, where the computer or other router on the ethernet segment would have to know how to do PPPoE (over ethernet) and the modem would act as bridge to send the ethernet frames onto the ADSL link.

It is much simpler to use a modem with integrated router so that the device itself handles PPPoE login and then provides normal TCP/IP routing for the computer(s) and router(s) on the LAN.

These days, the hardware platform is a modem, embedded processor, and ethernet port. Whether it is a router or not is just some extra software loaded by the vendor.

La Fin Du Mond= End of the World

Its a fantastic beer. Same brewery as Terrible, Maudite, Trois Pistoles, Blanch de Chambly, Raftman. All fantastic beers. Around the 9% mark. Same vain as the Belguim Ales.

Delirum Tremins another great beer.

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Yes, those are nice light beers.

That one I mentioned, Old Viscosity (subtitle: not your Dad's wimpy 30 weight), was a barley wine I suppose at 12%, but it had a finish much like Spaten Optimator which is to say it didn't smell sickenly of molasses despite being a slower drink. You need cool weather to take something like that and enjoy it.

I'm bad with names, so I cannot list a number of great beers I have had only once or twice. Here are some I remember, and I wouldn't want to pick exactly ten.

A few perfect pours which may never repeat:

• Portland Bobbydazzler (on tap in Oregon c. 1999)
  
• Maibock at Tied House (on tap Mt. View California c. 1998)
  
• Old Viscosity, Port Brewing Co. (bottled, California 2004)
  

Locals I will go back to. They're good in their own ways:

• The hefeweissen
  
• and dunkel at Tawandang (BKK)
  
• Anchor Steam
  
• and Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Ale (San Francisco)
  

Some old faithfuls whether on tap or bottled:

• Erdinger Hefeweissen
  
• and Dunkel
  
• Spaten Optimator
  
• Road Dog Ale
  
• Arrogant Bastard Ale
  
• Delirium Tremens
  

What happened to all the fat american jokes?   

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The Euros ate them?

I guess I'd want my wife to go w/ John Cage's 4'33"

Life apparently started with a single cell that divided into two identical parts. This division was triggered by DNA

The difficulty with DNA is eventhough all cells contain DNA not all cells display the same characteristics. A skin cell has a different function than a nerve cell although they both contain the same DNA. It will take a while before science fully understand these things.

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Heh, that's the problem. Ravisher wants to know, "who put the first cell there?" This is his wristwatch on the beach. Compared to the genesis of the first cell, it is much easier to accept all sorts of amazing evolutionary changes over time... How does one get from oxygen, CO2, water, methane, hydrogen sulfide, and all those other wonderful geological compounds to actually having DNA being copied by RNA within the controlled environment of a cell?

The day science can explain or replicate that is the day I stop being an agnostic. Probably.

...  Does anyone know if there is a temperature limit above which it is dangerous to run or do vigorous exercise?  These days it has been 35 to 39 deg C during the day.  I would still like to go for a little jog once in a while to get some fresh air, but am concerned that there might be some medical risk.

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Of course, it would take a doctor to be sure if you in particular have an unusual risk factor. But, for the most part, the only risk is dehydration and accompanying electrolyte imbalance from profuse sweating. I've noticed a few times in BKK during the hot season, I started feeling a bit "blah" despite drinking water, and getting a bottle of gatorade into me made a miraculous difference. But like my father, I have always been one of those guys who would sweat profusely and get salt visibly building up on my skin or clothes in real heat. I'd take at least a liter of water for an hour or two of hiking at 37+ degrees, or 3-4 liters per day for strenuous backpacking at even 30 degrees. Many people dehydrate themselves unintentionally.

As long as you are sweating and it is evaporating, your body should keep important things like your brain at a safe temperature. A hat to keep the sun off can help a lot there. People in ill health or not conditioned for the level of exertion (and heat dissipation) may suffer heat exhaustion or worse---heat stroke. You should know the signs for these and watch your fluids, starting slowly when adjusting to a new climate. The super danger sign is when sweating stops, the skin warms up, and the person gets sleepy or has other symptoms of shock. You don't ever want to get that far into the symptoms, as brain damage or death may follow shortly... it is important for others to notice the symptoms because by the time it happens to you, you may be too far gone to react to it properly. I usually start to get a kind of diffuse tension headache when I know I need to get a lot of water into me and possibly get some rest in the shade... that's probably a low-grade heat exhaustion setting in.

I've heard of a relatively rare reaction where you stop sweating and basically go into heat stroke much sooner than usual. I cannot remember what it is called, but apparently the only real treatment is to move to a cooler climate! Talk about a bad day at the beach...

The biggest unanswered question is what kinds of macro-assemblies of molecules were doing this in the span from simple amino acids to complex proteins or multi-molecular structures and finally to something resembling a very simple microorganism. What sets microorganisms apart is that they carry around a little controlled chemistry environment inside of themselves, rather than depending on a perfect and nurturing environment to allow them to function.

This is the one! Do you have a best guess on this? It seems like Universal Laws of Chemistry to begin with... where certain amino acids and proteins develope and make a 'mass' of molecular structure/s. etc. How do these 'masses' become 'organized' almost as if they were 'designing' themselves... and developing their own 'codes'. There are codes, genes arn't there... and genetic codes? What is it that could design and develope them?

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Nope, no idea. That is probably the main thing that keeps me agnostic...