autonomous_unit

...Would the empoyer have any good reason whatsoever to ask or force the Empoyee into going the B Visa way?

Sunny

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In short, No. It is actually easier for an employer to get a WP for someone on an O visa than it is to get a WP for someone in order to sponsor a B visa (the company has fewer criteria to meet).

Most people get a job offer and apply for a WP and B visa in combination. This is why many people think the two are intertwined in some way. Anyone who encourages you to convert O to B does not understand how the system handles spouses of Thai nationals. (Unfortunately, many people I have encountered here do not seem to grasp the difference between their knowledge of an option and the possible existence of that option. So I have witnessed strong denial of facts later exposed by a bit more digging on my part.)

The most complicated part of having a WP with an O visa is keeping the WP from expiring, rather than the reverse. The WP can only be granted for the period of your stay, which is 90 days on the basic O visa. So you have to leave and reenter (with a valid reentry permit or multi-entry O visa) before that 90 day period is up, and then get the WP extended based on the new 90 day stay.

Applying for an extension of stay works similarly but without the need to cross borders. You become a frequent tourist to government offices instead. When you apply, you still have a WP only valid through your first 90 day entry. As your application is processed, you will get short extensions of stay marked "under consideration". You need to get the WP extended to match each of these until the 1 year extension is approved. There are legal and courier services to do this for you for a small fee, should you not wish to visit the Labor Department yourself each month. There is always a government fee.

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He just feels superior now i guess. Made that smart remark to the girl , wauw 

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Actually, I think this gives us a keen insight into the topic of "repression" that I mentioned earlier... Candyflip, that post from Ned is an example of the kind of socially-endorsed repression that England has exported to all its colonies and territories over time. The logic goes: it could be worse, so suck it up and realize you have no right to feeling anything but guilt and disgrace. It's the way some mothers comfort their young who are older than two years or so. They call it character.

This is hypothesis I just came up with, but perhaps this is the underlying cause of the beer-fueled hooliganism we have seen discussed so often on these boards. And in turn, the most repressed headed for the New World where they could practice true freedom of repression and not even enjoy a drink or two.

There isn' t much "juice" coming from the headphone jack. You need a pair of speakers that has a small amplifier in one of them, it then boosts the sound coming from the laptop's headphone jack.

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Also, the sound quality from the headphone jack is not superb, but whether or not it makes sense to use USB audio depends on how good the speakers (and your ears) are. I suspect nearly all of the little "satellite and subwoofer" PC sound systems are too poor quality to hear the difference, unless your laptop happens to have much worse than average sound hardware. It may be convenient though, particularly if you would like the music playing through one set of speakers while the regular laptop beeps and warning sounds keep going directly through the laptop speakers.

In the US, I bought a USB audio adapter that had fiber-optic digital audio output for about $70. I used that to connect to the input of my receiver, where you would normally plug in a high-end DVD player. There was definitely an improvement in sound quality, to the point where I could hear differences between different MP3 bitrates and ripped CDs (wav files). I was very happy with the change.

I also tested that same device with a very old 200 MHz Pentium laptop. It was too slow and low on RAM to run my usual Linux GUI MP3 player. But, I was able to set it up w/ the USB audio device and a WiFi card so that I could "push" MP3 files to it over wireless and get them to play via a very efficient command-line MP3 player. I never heard it skip once, so I am wondering how a modern PC could ever have timing problems w/ USB audio, as suggested earlier on the thread...

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I thought these Mp3 files would just play automatically when connected to windows media player or Real player.  What is in my laptop that is not in my desktop to make the difference? These files where all downloaded from the Internet via file sharing, Zazaa.

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As I said in my earlier post, it might be as simple as your laptop supporting faster transfer rates. Whether this makes sense or not depends on what these strange sounds are really like. There is no audio signal going from drive to computer, so the drive connection is not hi-fi or lo-fi... But if the computer cannot read the media files fast enough to keep it fed with data while it is decoding audio to the soundcard, all sorts of strange artifacts may occur.

Try benchmarking the file reading speed from the drive to the computer in each case. Copying a big file from external drive to computer w/ a stopwatch to time should be good enough... we're looking for a dramatic 5-10 times difference in speed!

If the PC is much slower, the question then is why. One possibility would be that it has older USB 1.1 hardware, in which case you would want to buy a newer USB2 adapter card to stick in a PCI slot. If there is some other driver/software problem, it would require a Windows techie to sort out. I wonder if there is some easy way to inspect the USB hardware under Windows to see if it supports the USB2 high-speed rates? I remember plugging a USB2 drive into a Windows XP machine one time and getting an explicit warning that a high-speed device was being used in a slower compatibility mode and "click here to troubleshoot". In my case, it was because the computer lacked USB2 ports. Did you see something like that the first time you used the drive in the PC?

I put audio files from my laptop onto an external drive, when I connect to my desktop and want to play the music, it sounds really strange, echo type of effect, yet when i connect the external back to the laptop, it sounds fine.

I have windows XP home on my laptop and Widows XP pro on my desktop.

Plus some video files will not play on the desktop, but will on the laptop, using the external drive, am I missing something really simple?

Any ideas?

Thank's guys.

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I'll bet your laptop has USB2 high speed ports, while your desktop has only USB 1.1 ports. The difference is peak transfers of around 480 Mb/s vs only 11 Mb/s. Even USB 1.1 really should be plenty for MP3 or other compressed audio files, but the access latencies may be too high if your player software does not do reasonable prefetching and buffering. Video would be out of the question except at very low bitrates.

Try copying a large file (10-50 MB) from external to internal drive and timing it on both computers.

It makes those "How do I secure my computer from hackers?" post an inviting target when the IP is shown. There's too many packet kiddies and other cyberscum out there to be posting IPs.

cv

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With my True ADSL resetting my IP address every 12-24 hours (or sooner if I reset the router), I cannot imagine IP identification being useful to track website users. I am impressed that IPv6 has privacy mechanisms in the specification to automatically generate and assign new random addresses for client use.

But aside from anonymity, do people really think IP anonymity gives ANY network host security these days? Most vulnerabilities are exploited randomly rather than as targeted attacks against a particular person.

I have seen too many experiments (both scientific and inadvertent) in the US where unprotected Windows PCs (fresh installs) were placed on a network. The time it takes for addresses to be randomly scanned and attacked is on the order of seconds or minutes from boot!

I was at a technical conference, reading my email on a laptop when a friend walked up with three laptop cases. She had received them from her employer's IT department with fresh installs before her plane flight and needed to configure them for demonstration purposes. She took them out, powered them up, and put each on on the network to begin downloading software she had placed on FTP before leaving home. Five minutes later, a conference network adminstrator came to the show booth, asking whose computers had network addresses X, Y, and Z. All three were her demo laptops, and they had apparently already been compromised and were actively attacking the rest of the machines on the show floor!

After witnessing that, I flatly refuse to use a Windows PC on the Internet, and I am much more paranoid about configuring Linux w/ firewall rules than I once was.

Perhaps you should be looking for a camera that has available one of those ruggedized diving cases for use underwater? Keep it attached at all times, and tell your wife it is a much more expensive camera so she will still treat it as well as the last ones, in spite of its tougher appearance...

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Autonomous unit -- Could you explain more about depression?  Is this has to do with depression or any relation related? I have been to depression therapy for 4 months in Amsterdam last yeat but that was more or less about the weather change. Surely I do have different view of life now.

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First, I'm no expert, so don't hesitate to see a professional if you are not feeling better from all this forum talk! My views on this come from personal experience, witnessing loved ones' experiences, and a general layman's interest in psychology and mental development. I am sure there is much more to know than I ever will...

I mentioned depression because it seems to be a common after-effect of traumatic experiences and grief. As I understand it, depression is not an abnormal part of grief either, as long as it subsides in a reasonable amount of time. The problem is that some people can get stuck there. Many symptoms of post-traumatic stress are also symptoms of depression in general, such as retreating from social activities, generalized anxiety, feeling tired or listless, questioning your own worth or contributions, etc. These kinds of things are no fun at all if left unresolved.

For many people following stress or trauma from an event like loss of loved ones, horrific violence, or the post-disaster aid you did, counseling and discussion can often be enough to work through the memories and feelings. A person who has depressive tendencies may suffer more profoundly from such events and may need more specialized help in order to recover. Hopefully this analogy won't bother anyone, but it is sort of like the effects of a night of drinking on a healthy person or an alcoholic: the normal person might be hungover and steer clear of the booze for a while, but the alcoholic (i.e. depressive person in the analogy) might repeat the drinking (depressive behaviors) to cope with the discomfort. So there is a risk of self-sustaining problems.

If I understood your comment, you suffered from seasonal depression while in Amsterdam (not at all a surprising result if you grew up in the tropics and then had a European winter). From what I know of that, it is much like the depression from traumatic events in that there is a clear cause: the physical and psychological effects of reduced sunlight. Being solar powered myself, I can sympathize with this in an odd way. I actually miss the mild seasonal mood variations I experienced growing up in temperate Northern California, where the summers were blazingly hot and sunny and the winters mild (cold by Thai standards) with nice long shadows.

Of course, grief and stress may not lead to depression at all for some people. For them, anger or specific anxiety or phobias are the effects that must be dealt with, so that aggression or panic do not become unwelcome parts of their lives. I only focus on depression because you asked... The important trick to all these things is to find balance in your reactions and in your life following the traumatic stress. There are many possible healthy balances, but there are also many negative or pathological responses one can make. I believe in the mantra of "moderation in all things"...

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Britmaveric, I have talked to alot of people. Somehow it gets me feel deeper and deeper so I am not sure if talking could help, I feel worse sometimes. Maybe I just wanna forget it. Or maybe I did not talk about it in the right perspective???

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It would probably be good for you to find a counseler to speak with at least a few times more, given that you felt the first one helped. You are right that it matters what perspective you take when speaking about your experience, and that is what a counseler should be trained to assist.

It is important to think about your experience from the perspective of how it has affected you, so you understand why you might now feel sad or anxious. It is not necessarily useful to dwell on the images and destruction, but rather to understand the magnitude of what you experienced and how your feelings are understandable and normal. After grief, we need to be able to shift back into normal life and understand that those terrible things are behind us. It is a fine (but not impossible) balance between denial and abject depression. With denial, we risk becoming numb or stressed from all the piled on and unresolved grief, while with depression we can get stuck reliving the grief to the exclusion of everyday life.

As others said, your courage and willingness to give aid are something to be proud of. In a very real sense, you are sharing the burdens of the survivors. Just like them, you have to learn how to go back to a full and healthy life.

You cannot use the foreign marriage directly, but here's what you can do:

1) Take original marriage certificate to UK embassy to get a sworn statement that you have presented this document and claimed it to be true.

2) Get an exact translation of the certificate into Thai, e.g. lay it out line by line on another page. We did it ourselves with a spreadsheet to mimic the complex layout of our US certificate.

3) Take all of that to Ministry of Foreign Affairs (probably with photo copies too?) to get the translation certified. This takes two days of office time, or you pay double to get it rushed the same day.

4) Take everything, particularly the certified Thai language version of the foreign certificate, to the local Amphur to register the marriage in Thailand. It is fastest to do this where your wife is already registered in a household. But I think you can do this at the Amphur where you live (if you jump through the right number of hoops).

After all of this, you can get a copy of the Thai marriage record just like if you married here first. It probably costs more this way, but you have the satisfaction of having official recognition of your original marriage.

Thanks everyone! I'll give it a shot to rent and drive w/ the Thai DL.

I've seen related topics but cannot recall any specific experiences on this topic...

I plan to do a short trip to the US and wish to rent cars using my 1-year Thai DL. I obtained a translation at the DL office in BKK but could not get an IDP on a 1-year DL. However, DMV websites for both states I plan to visit state that an IDP is not recognized anyway, while licenses from foreign jurisdictions where the driver is resident will be recognized. I don't expect any trouble from the highway troopers even if I am unfortunate enough to speak with them during this trip.

However, I am wondering if any fellow US expats have practical experience renting cars in the US under this scenario. I will be renting at major airports, rather than podunk local rental offices, but I can easily imagine grief from the clerk when they cannot get their head around the combination of my US citizenship, Thai DL, and US billing address on a credit card.

Any advice or sympathy?

[My laptop is using a D-Link pcmcia card that does support 11g.  Both machines indicate they are connected at 54Mbps.  When I transfer a a 48mb file from the desktop to the laptop, it takes about 55 seconds.  If I'm not mistaken, that is about 11Mbps.  Would it be possible for you to do a similar sized file transfer, without security enabled, and let me know the time?  Thanks.

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Do you mean 48 mebibytes, e.g. listing the file says something like "48 MB"? That would be 48 * 1024 * 1024 * 8 bits, or about 7.1 million bits per second.

Regardless, 54 mb/s is the raw signalling rate of the wireless modems at full speed. You will never see that rate due to the overheads of packet framing, inter-frame spacing, and retry due to transmission errors. Additionally, you'd really only expect the 54 mb/s signalling rate under ideal conditions, e.g. strong signal and low noise/interference from other sources.

To make matters worse, you are describing a transfer between two different wireless stations. This is always much slower than using the wireless to transfer to a machine on the wired LAN, because the two stations are sharing the same radio spectrum. Previously, with 11 mb/s 802.11b in a realistic work environment, it was very rare to ever see more than 2-6 mb/s rates at the application level out to the wired world, and lower between wireless stations. So if you are seeing ariound 7 mb/s between two wireless stations, you are definitely benefitting from the 802.11g speeds.

I use the wireless only as a link to the external world over DSL, so the speeds are totally adequate.

If I want speed between local PCs, I plug in the ethernet cable to get 100 mb/s duplex through the D-Link router's built-in LAN switch. If I _really_ want speed for some bulk transfer, I use a crossover cable directly between the machines so they can run at 1000 mb/s without me buying a gigabit switch. (A lot of newer ethernet cards are now 10/100/1000 auto switching)

Carrier task force?? Are they planning an invasion?

In case you are not being intentionally difficult, a carrier group is an extremely capable mobile resource!

The hospital facilities, power generation capability, supplies, and disciplined staff could be very helpful in an aid role. Just a single large aircraft carrier is a floating city in addition to having a large armory. There are also of course more specialized equipment and staff ranging from helicopters/crews, small boats/crews, diving teams, to air traffic radar/controllers who I imagine could help in the relief effort.

I saw an article also saying that a submarine was being dispatched to the area. It is not impossible for a submarine to be moored in a harbor and used to generate electrical power for the local town or city (from its nuclear reactor), although the examples I remember were Soviet subs.

I dare say this face saving measure is all in response to being called on the carpet for the puny initial contribution. It needn't  have taken 5 days for the "American assessment teams on the ground" to realize the extent of devastation.

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Clearly, the US government could have gotten better PR by putting a larger number on the table. However, unless there is evidence that aid did not hit the ground due to lack of funds, it is disengenuous to fixate on the "initial contribution"! In reality, I suspect that logistics and diplomacy is the limiting factor on how much aid can be supplied in the first few days, rather than a lid on the government coffers. The infrastructure of the affected regions is in a shambles, yet most countries would not appreciate it if the US military did indeed "invade" their territory to set up temporary infrastructure. Furthermore, it would not have helped the injured, hungry, and displaced to just air-drop sacks of money.

It hurts to ponder, but I think it is clear that a warning protocol and public education could have saved many. Recall, there was quite a bit of chatter about the quake on this web forum even just minutes after it occurred, including the location and magnitude as reported by the USGS. The info was there, if people knew how to act on it. Of course, even seismologists and oceanographers did not have enough information to predict the tsunami in any accurate way; at best they could say that there is a window of risk over a several hour period... but imagine if everyone had mentioned the possibility to their neighbor and people's attention had been perked up that morning. How many lives could have been changed just by being primed and in the right frame of mind to react?

Hindsight is 20/20, but if I had been visiting one of the islands or coastal towns (and still felt the quake and saw the online discussions) rather than being in Bangkok, I think I would have been scared and dragged "me and mine" inland for the day. Nonetheless, on my own private scale, I suspect I would have felt too unsure to actually go around alarming neighbors and instructing them to do the same, for fear of being thought a paranoid fool.

That's the kind of human nature that a warning system has to transcend. I think you need a formal system to get information spread around on short notice, e.g. "yes, that was a serious quake". At the same time, I think many people need to be already informed with the implications, e.g. "a big quake means a tsunami risk".

I don't think it is wise to have everyone's fate rest on the judgement of one person situated far away... it would be better to prepare the populace to make appropriate decisions themselves.

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The seismological stations in Europe and the USA measured 8.7. In Bangkok the needle stuck at 8.1 on the same scale. Now everybody agrees on 9!

Is there any specialist who can give some insight in these discrepancies?

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I am no specialist, but it is not uncommon for the magnitude of a quake to be revised multiple times. The rating is not as simple as sticking a thermometer into a ham, but rather more like trying to guage the size of a bomb from the sound as heard by different people throughout the world. Data from different listening stations is combined to estimate the amount of energy released (by considering the size, frequency, and duration of shaking). The most accurate rating will take into account ALL data worldwide, while the preliminary ratings are made from smaller samplings.

Does anybody know if it is correct to remove the sim card from a cell phone if it is to be stored for a long period of time? If so, how should I store the card, wrapped in plastic, ect......?

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I wouldn't worry about the SIM at all. Put it wherever is convenient... worst case besides losing it is probably that you need to clean the contacts a little bit when you want to use it next if it was stored somewhere that promotes corrosion. I've never had a problem even in seaside conditions... but do try to keep it away from water, fire, hungry animals or toddlers, high voltage power sources, microwave ovens, etc.

However, I would try to follow the manufacturer's recommendations for storage of the battery! For mine, I think it is suggested to store it discharged in a cool, dry place. May or may not be worth removing the battery from the phone, depending on whether an "exploded" or leaking battery would be worth replacing or whether you would just go for a whole new phone anyway.

Interesting.

The USGS web site has a 4.6 magnitude earthquake just off Java at 06:54 Bangkok time. That seems to far south to register, but who knows.

It was a very deep quake, around 250 Km down.

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They show an 8.5 magnitude quake off the coast of Sumatra, and that is at the right time if I haven't gotten confused about the timezones. Folks down south probably felt a lot more shaking than we did in Bangkok and north!

Very strong, very long tremors in Bangkok just now.  Anyone else feel them?

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Something woke me up at 8am... I didn't feel it so much feel it as hear it in our apartment which is about 1/3 of the way up a tall building in Bangkoknoi. My wife dismissed it as workers in the unit upstairs, and I thought "at 8am on Sunday?" but TiT. :-)

But now that you mention it, I realize the reason I was so unnerved is that it set off my subconscious earthquake detector. (I grew up in California and experienced plenty of real quakes ranging from localized 1.x magnitude swarms to the 7.4 Loma Prieta from a safe distance.) The creaking of the building preceding or during the main shock can be as disturbing as the movement!

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Where was this happening, Gent?

We all know it was a very fortuitous event but "dancing in the streets"?

...been reading too many of those conspiracy tales again...

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That's right, who can forget that the folks who support Bush don't necessarily approve of sinful temptations such as dancing.

But back to the topic at hand, I don't personally worry too much about attacks happening in Bangkok, but I do feel guilty that I missed my sister-in-law's wedding last month because I was too nervous to travel to Yala. I don't know if I was more worried about myself or attracting unwanted attention to my wife and the rest of her family during their celebrations.

I don't know why, but I felt less welcome out in public in Yala a few years ago with my wife's family than I do in Bangkok, and this is before everything went crazy in the world. I barely knew anything about the local history so I do not think I was imagining it.

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Can't think of anything to say about the legit sites that are blocked, except that nothing suprises me here, other than when something goes in a logical manner of course. For my part I have not yet come across a site that has been blocked that I wanted to visit. And since most of the sites that are blocked fill your computer with spyware or viruses I can't complain.

It is possible that they use a BOT to scan for websites to block, and so might well get it wrong at times. Have you thought about contacting the web site owners to tell them.

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Yes, I was thinking that legit sites could easily be blocked by rules that either block the whole domain name in a shared setting, or a whole IP address range. The same thing can happen with over-zealous spam e-mail blocking. One school of thought is that it is better to block the "neighbors" too so that they apply pressure to clean up the neighborhood...

Also, there has been research at Thai universities into automatic "porn detection" software that is based on shapes and "flesh tone coverage" in images. Who knows whether they are using any such techniques now, and blocking sweater ads that reveal indecent amounts of mannequin skin!

Another scam I noticed on an errand with my wife was that the "stand timer" kept counting time at one minute per minute of travel even at speed so you are paying for time and distance. It's a small difference, but over our trip it I guess it added almost 10% to the fare. I didn't feel like hassling it so I didn't mention it to my wife until after we left the cab. However, he apparently was presumptuous about keeping change and annoyed her, so she asked for every single baht of change anyway without knowing about the bum meter.

On the other hand, coming home from Don Muang one night around midnight I forgot about the 50 baht airport surcharge and under-paid the driver (200 baht instead of 250). Perhaps he could tell I was jet-lagged but he didn't make a fuss. I didn't even realize what had happened until the next day when we were chatting about how much the ride had cost this time.

A standard command-line tool for unix, wget, is apparently also available for windows. This tool can do simple things like "wget URL" to download a file to the current directory where you run the command (say, from a batch script), as well as complex things like recursively downloading an entire website and adjusting the links so you can browse it locally on your disk without keeping a network connection.

The main site for the wget tool is http://wget.sunsite.dk/ where you can learn more about the tool.

They have links there to where you can get a windows version, including http://space.tin.it/computer/hherold/

About 6 months ago, I had the firmware on my motorola v66 completely replaced by a guy on the top floor of MBK, removing weird T-Mobile modifications to the WAP/gprs setup and adding the ability to view Thai language SMS messages. It took us a little while to explain that I knew the phone was already unlocked. I was mildly impressed that he did this while retaining all my phonebook entries (I had many stored on the phone, rather than the SIM). I cannot remember how much he charged, but I know I had set my personal limit at around 400 baht since I had only paid about $12 US for the phone in the first place (taxes after the full T-Mobile rebate)...

This probably means he has the full motorola service software package, but you would need to present the phone in order to find out whether he has codes and firmware for that model. We went to one of the counters that looked promising and they ran off and dug up someone from another counter who had the right tools for motorola.

The Work Permit office dropped its rules about Thai employee headcount in late 2002 - since then, they do not even ask about this.  Before this, there was no "gray area" of doubt - they actually stamped in your WP Booklet a section where then wrote out your required quota of employees (my book says 4).

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However, Thai employees can still be a requirement for the work permit if they approve in part based on knowledge-transfer.

I got stamped with a requirement to transfer some computer skills to two Thais with my work permit issued a couple of weeks ago in Bangkok. The lawyer who handled my application said this was relatively common when approving computer or tech experts. On the other hand, they might have done this simply because the org chart did indicate some Thai employees already? I'm not interested in doing a controlled experiment to find out.