autonomous_unit

Yes, you can buy AIS or DTAC pre-paid SIMs at many shops throughout the larger malls with as much fanfare as buying a sixpack of beer. The airtime rates are also comparable or better than the typical subscription rates. Subscription is better if you need to use the phone for GPRS internet service and lots of it.

As mentioned above, make sure your phone is unlocked and if not, maybe ask around upstairs at MBK in the cell phone graveyard.

I wish it were as easy and affordable to get pre-paid service in the States! I wasted almost an hour at smaller electronics shops before hiking over to an official T-Mobile store to get a bare SIM rather than the refill cards or a bundled SIM and phone.

...in light of the supposition that most if not all suicides are

committed by people trying to escape problems they

feel they cannot face or overcome. This seems to me

an exceedingly rational act. So how can they be viewed

as mentally ill ??

This may be off topic but I have more developed ideas about mental illness and suicide than about Buddhism!

I would say your position is based on a false dichotomy where mentally ill equals irrational. There are a wide range of mental illnesses with different predominant traits. And of course in trying to briefly summarize so much, I risk distortion as well.

In the context of traditionally held "mood" disorders such as depression and mania, most people would view a person as rational but just not filled with normal motivations and emotional balance. But most lay people view schizophrenics as irrational, while I would say they can be quite rational while lacking a normal set of ground facts or beliefs from which to reason. Whether this lack of grounding manifests as delusions or full-on hallucinations, it leads sufferers to pursue trains of thought that result in very odd behavior. It is quite illuminating, though not comforting, to be able to discuss motives with a schizophrenic who is having an episode yet is calm and trusting enough to try to communicate!

So I would say that your hypothetical suicidal person is applying logic as a rational person might, but the flaw is in the base facts from which they infer death as a viable solution rather than in the rules they apply to get from fact to decision. Some people might say that it is irrational to hold beliefs such as "my problems are insurmountable" and "my death is not a (bigger) problem".

I think people do not like to think about these issues at length because they lead to uncomfortable places: maybe all criminals are in some sense ill. Is illness just deviation from a norm? How much deviation? Where do you draw the line (if you can)? What is an appropriate (moral, ethical, and/or practical) reaction for society to take to these deviations? Does illness excuse any behavior or even suggest an alternate response?

I'm using an SMC Barricade

802.11b/g + 4 ethernet ports.

Bought it at Pantip (with no filters) for 6,500 baht a few months ago. (so your 6,800 seems a little high). And the same router is definitely available cheaper in the UK.

FYI, the Barricade can be had at Pantip for 6000 baht now if you find the right place and haggle a little (I let my Thai in-laws do it). You should be able to find a D-Link DSL-G604T for under 6500 now, as I did. It's a nice little package with the same features as the Barricade. They probably have the same embedded computers I grabbed the latest firmware from the UK branch of the dlink.com website since this product is not currently sold in the US; the original firmware had several obvious problems with configuring the wireless security via the web interface.

For the perplexed on this thread: yes routers and modems are different but these products we're talking about have both integrated in one little appliance. So you plug it into your DSL phone jack, a power outlet, and a computer via twisted-pair or wireless ethernet. I'm not sure it is cost effective as compared to buying separate modem, router, and wireless access point but it sure is more elegant if you are worried about space or jumbles of wires.

Does anyone agree with my previous post?

...

I still think any same sex couple who want to adopt are being incredibly selfish.

I think this question of raising children is off topic too, but illustrates the problem. People argue about hot-button issues like this not because of the direct impact of the question at hand (which, as pointed out in this thread is really the legal rights and obligations for gay couples), but rather because of their other unspoken assumptions and agendas. This question is particularly nasty because of the polarizing assumptions about what is "the enemy's" agenda. I don't think the antagonists here are against the legal (civil) framework for long-term couples, but they are dead-set against any "endorsement" of gay life no matter the form.

I think trying to prevent gays from raising children because "children would feel abnormal among peers" is a civil rights issue. Community norms are not always right, and often I think our legal systems are necessary to protect people in situations where emotion clouds rationality. By your measure, it should be selfish to have mixed-race children because they too would feel abnormal in many communities. How about alcoholics, single parents, and the uneducated or poor? Should they not be allowed to raise children since the kids might be ostracized? What about mentally ill parents?

What this thread has to do with Thailand is unclear to me. I would have expected more libertarian beliefs among the expat community here, so I guess these political barometer readings are useful to me as a newcomer to the Thailand expat scene.

I often switch hands with the rake and shovel. I think Thais could give a $#%!.

Shovel is right! I periodically try to eat the Thai way, but quickly give up. I'll never understand how people can comfortably eat with these large spoons!

Unless I think to open my mouth as wide as I would for a dental exam, the spoon crashes into some part of my lips and the food ends up all over my shirt or the table. I think farangs dropping/wasting food makes people cringe here, so I try not to repeat that experiment too often.

What I want to know is the trick Thais use to inhale meat and leave a little bone on their spoon. I pass because I do not know how to work it with neither my fingers nor a table knife.

I assume I must register the phone with D-TAC or AIS and sign up for a monthly subscription - right?

Which one would be better? Does Orange also have this service? I will probably use GPRS quite a lot, mainly to send and receive email. I am in Chiang Mai, if it matters.

You can use GPRS with DTAC pre-paid cards, and I would assume the same for the AIS ones. The rate is 0.1 baht/KB (~100 baht/MB), if I remember correctly.

If you will be using it a lot as I am, you can get a flat-rate GPRS add-on service to a subscription based AIS voice plan. I think it is 500 baht/month additional. The voice minutes end up being more expensive but this is offset by my GPRS use. At the metered rate above, my monthly GPRS usage would probably reach 20,000 baht from email, web browsing, and the infrequent large download...

I agree I think it is terrible, and yes I know it goes on in Australia, particularly in universities.

Don't get me wrong, I think this sort of behavious is objectionable I have never done it, and I never would. It is an abuse of position, and in some ways could be considered rape....

It definitely happens in US universities as well. Having observed some very manipulatuve students try to seduce teaching staff, I don't think it is always as sinister or one-sided as you describe. However, it is enough of a problem in practice that an ethics topic is devoted to it in the teaching staff orientation at most public schools.

As a teaching assistant (student employee helping a professor run classes and exams) at a well known university, I had two students (one of each sex!) try to seduce me during office hours in the same semester. Because of their mediocre performance in the class, I am relatively certain they were looking for grading favors and not simply dazzled by my academic mystique. These kids were at most two years younger than I was.

At the same university, it was well known that several of the professors were married to former students, and that at least one of them had started the courtship while being the student's thesis advisor. Whether that was appropriate or not was a great polarizing topic to bring up in a cafe when conversation lagged...

I think I subconsciously avoid eye contact with unknown farang here despite doing the opposite in the US. I tried to think figure out why, once I noticed it... I think there are two conflicting feelings for me. Firstly, I want to integrate and not feel that I am grasping at any "lifeline", no matter how futile that aim might be in Thailand, and making contact with farang strangers can feel like grasping. For similar reasons, while traveling in Europe, I think I tend to ignore those I have identified as fellow Americans.

Secondly, I get tired of all the Thais staring at me (in BKK, where I am relatively certain they've seen a farang before) so my empathetic response is to give other farangs some space. Who needs yet another pair of eyes following them around?

The latter point is related to how I feel sometimes when hiking or backpacking even in the US. Sometimes it's fun to chat up others I meet on the trail, but often kindred spirits will discretely ignore each other to preserve the illusion of being alone in the wilderness. I think this might be similar to what KevinN was describing...

One time I was very appreciative of an American foreign exchange student who helped me get some lunch in a back alley of Kyoto, so I understand that no approach works ideally at all times!

"Mexican"? Would that be "Spanish", to the rest of us?

I've heard more than one Spaniard refer to "Mexican" in much the same way some Brits think American is what is spoken in the US.

These guy's are not your typical military men who go out bar brawling and talking crap.

Heh. They must relax their inhibitions at home, from what I saw a few times in Coronado and I.B....

You can get a static IP address for free by going to no-ip.com they will update your IP to what-ever you set it as, and that will be you fixed address.

I have been using this for IP phone connections for ages, never had a problem.

Sorry, but this is not a correct description of no-ip.com's services. They provide a domain name service and some minimal forwarding services for people whose IP address changes periodically (when they reboot or the DHCP lease is revoked by their ISP). You have a public address that is not fixed, and no-ip gives you a human-friendly domain name that always maps to your current IP address.

ChiangMaiThai's problem is not dynamic addresses but rather private addressing behind a NAT system. At any given time, there is no IP address to which the remote caller's voice program can send data. He shares an address with god knows how many other customers of the same ISP, and giving them all a human-friendly name will not help the voice data get to his PC.

Sorry ChiangMaiThai, but as you have discovered there is no easy solution. Your best bet is probably to find a different ISP.

Thanks, all. This question is still a bit theoretical for us, but we will probably be putting theory to practice in the next few years! Have you made an assumption that your kids will want to make their lives here or there? Or do you think its equal odds either way?

Because my wife went abroad starting with university, I am aware of some deficiencies in Thai schools for which I would want to compensate in case the kids want to study abroad. One problem is structured, rote learning; students are at a real disadvantage going to a western university if they do not learn to think beyond (nor question) the course work and teacher-provided material. A related problem is the face-saving and social hierarchy which does not prepare one for group dynamics or leadership in the US!

Less pragmatic are the subtle issues of culture. For example, I wonder if it is possible for a kid growing up in Thailand, with all the corruption and rule-bending discussed on these forums, to really appreciate or take for granted the sense of individual freedom, fairness, and responsibility that I got in the US? How much comes from the family and how much comes from the larger environment of childhood?

Also, it seems to me that educating kids to function better in the western environment in many regards may further diminish their ability to fit happily into the Thai culture. My wife even feels that she doesn't understand people here, having spending ages 18-30 in the US...

We have to make many life-affecting cultural decisions for our kids before they are old enough to have any say in the matter. Does this bother anyone, or should we just be happy to face these choices rather than to be blindly following the patterns assumed in one culture shared by both parents?

Me too,I have an account with Bangkok Bank and was not asked for a work permit?

My case as well. I opened one at a branch near the Central Bangna department store.

I ended up with a non-interest bearing account w/ an ATM card and I cannot rememeber right now if that was due to the lack of a work permit or just that I was in a hurry (I wanted a place to squirt a wire-transfer from overseas the next day). I assume farangs are allowed interest-bearing accounts here?

For those expats married to Thais who have or will be in Thailand during child-rearing years... here's a topic that would go great with beer in hand.

Do you have strong opinions as to whether children should be raised and educated in Thailand versus your original country? If so, is your preference different depending on the age of the children, e.g. some years better spent here and some years better spent there?

Are your choices based on where you want (or need) to be for lifestyle, career, family, etc. or based on what you think will better prepare your children for their adult lives?

Assuming that you chose to come to Thailand as an adult, do you feel comfortable making that choice for your children (through the environment you provide them) or do you think they can be brought up with the opportunity and perspective to make their own choice when they are old enough?

Or do you reject my entire line of questioning as tipping towards determinism?

Every year, hundreds (or is it thousands?) of Thais are sent abroad to study at strong universities around the world. These kids are chosen based on national exams, not social class, unless perhaps you count the indirect effects that made them better students. While abroad, they believe very strongly in their ability to make a difference and in the fairness of a world that gave them such an opportunity. Once home, they face a challenging reality with many frustrating cultural facets as discussed daily on this forum... they too sometimes feel like foreigners here.

My wife was abroad continously for undergraduate and postgraduate work, and I met many of her friends who were on similar billets. I could easily have used the words "innocent" and "sheltered" to describe their outlook relative to my American perspective. Every one I met ranks among the most idealistic and optimistic folks I know (not counting teenagers and college freshmen :-) ), and every one admitted that they had already, by the time we met, lost as much of these traits due to their worldly experiences.

What I find fascinating is that they are not naive or gullible people. They are survivors and acheivers, yet they have only a hint of the jaded cynicism that I and my Generation X peers acquired at home.

I have to disagree with the previous posts on principle. A proxy is not necessarily a cache (what they are alluding to by "old content" is the caching effects of proxies operated by ISPs or IT departments to save bandwidth for many users rather than to speed up the experience for one). I am very happy with my own non-caching proxy on another continent. It blocks most ads so they are not downloaded over the slow link between here and there, and data sent between the continents is compressed. I forward my browser's requests through SSH to the remote host which is running privoxy.

Unfortunately, I guess this is one of those problems where if you have to ask, you might not be ready for the answer... the value comes in operating your own proxy on a remote host that is under your (or a friend's) control. A nice Unix shell account w/ SSH access would suffice.

In general web pages (but not images) are horribly bloated and can be compressed a large amount! Pages can load many times faster, but there is a downside if you frequent sites that have complex framesets or other situations where many small documents have to be loaded in order to render one displayed page... in those cases the extra latencies through the proxy can really slow you down.

Of course, you can really speed up browsing by turning off the loading of images in your browser preferences before working with the really distant sites. For well designed sites it even works. :-)

If you find this annoying, try smoking some Joints or dropping some ACID whilst in your apartment, i can guarantee that you will find the candy wrappers entertaining.....

Right, but with my luck I would just start seeing wrappers and bugs creeping around the edges of everything...

I haven't gotten around to driving yet, so some more pedestrian annoyances:

1. Thais drive on the left, but on foot they seem to reverse to passing on the right. Is this fatalism or denial to want to have your back to traffic as you walk along the curb?

2. The humidity. I'm fine-tuned for a dry climate and after 20 minutes walking on a nice day like today I look like the victim of a delayed Songkran blessing (or the walking dead, depending on which shirt I'm wearing).

3. Low ceilings in supermarkets. I expect to duck under odd items along busy sidewalks but it is hard to look for items on the shelves inside while simultaneously running my head through a slalom of light fixtures, pipes, and jagged bolts.

4. Watching a candy wrapper blow in one window of our apartment, swirl around the room, and shoot out another window.

Using that McAfee link I got 19 kb/s (2.4 kB/s) right now on AIS. I have seen 5-6 kB/s from the US in the past week. Today I am seeing consistent 800ms pings to Los Angeles with low loss rates. I have tried DTAC (prepaid) from the same location and it always seemed slower. My experience is that it is always higher bandwidth than CSD dialup (which is always 9600 for me) and the latencies are comparable although yesterday the ping times doubled.

It is painful but workable to type over a remote text terminal (via ssh). For checking email I often do this because I'm mostly hitting single key commands and watching the page refresh with new email content. I can speed it up with a small terminal window, or wait for big windows to repaint if I'm feeling too lazy to hit page up/page down. This allows me to purge messages and large attachments while not waiting to download them all over GPRS... (I have friends who frequently send big PDF files, MS Word documents, digicam photos, etc. to whole lists of people, most of whom will ignore it).

On the other hand, if I want to write any significant replies I fire up a local IMAP client so I don't have to try to compose a response with so much latency. My local client will only pull down headers at first, rather than whole messages, so I can selectively go back for the few items to which I want to reply.

I use a borrowed web proxy in the US to block ads and forward that over a compressed connection. The compression really seems to make most sites load faster even though I'm pulling it through the US instead of directly. Web pages are stuffed full of fluffy junk if you ever go look at the source files...

Needless to say, I will be happy when my ADSL is eventually installed and this becomes a backup method instead of my primary method!

Call your local travel agent.

If you don't have one, try Diamond Star Travel in Hollywood (near Thai Town). They've always found us reasonable rates on Thai Air.

I don't have their number handy but look them up; they've been around for years. They might be listed under Star International as well... I can't remember.

AIS has been fine most of the time for me in Bangkoknoi, but just prior to seeing your post I started seeing serious dropouts that hung some of my connections. If it is happening all over the city, it is probably their gateway network rather than the local cell congestion they are talking about.

I did notice frequent problems last week when I left my phone in "automatic" network selection mode; I actually think I was getting booted off to a DTAC tower briefly and losing the GPRS association. Setting it to manual and then selecting AIS seemed to solve this.

Please note that neither Fox News or CNN are local news. If you want to see local news, you need to read the dailies or local TV stations sites from various cities.

TH

Not to mention that any news paints a terribly distorted view of a population or community! Market pressures lead the style to be shaped for a median public that does not exist.

Also, the points made about the sheer size of the US cannot be emphasized enough. Different states have large differences in cultural norm, political leanings, etc. As a native Californian up until my move here, I am always amused at how parts of the US like to refer to us as another country or an unwelcome guest. (Some people still do even after they moved there for the good life). In fact, our economy is one of the largest in the world---ranked right around that of France if I remember correctly, so maybe we are another country.

But what is just as amusing in these country-bashing threads is that they all ignore the wide variations in culture and life that reach right down to the street level. California is not the US. Northern California is not Southern California. Berkeley is not Northern California. Telegraph Avenue is not Berkeley.

We spend a little time getting to know Thailand and speak about the different cities and regions and special somethings and we sense... humanity. But we speak about other places and politics and suddenly it's all bogeymen and cartoon cutouts.

...

Also, you say that you are waiting for real public IP addresses to become available, but isn't that what you get with TRUE and Samart and KSC among others?

Sure, TRUE will give us a public address right after TOT finishes looking under rocks and actually provides an unassigned wire into our building from the central office. BKK isn't the panacea either it would seem.

I completely understand the frustration. The problem is that the world should have upgraded to IPv6 long ago instead of using NAT to limp along without enough IPv4 addresses to go around. However, too many pundits can still use their web browsers to post messages about how NAT works just fine and stop rocking the boat...

By the way, one convoluted solution for you might be to try to find a VPN provider somewhere out there who will give you a public address. This could be a company or a good geek friend with a fast and reliable broadband connection (with multiple public addresses of course). The acid test is whether they support the current "IPsec tunneling NAT-traversal mode". You would have to run a VPN client from your PC and then use a PC-based vonage solution (do they offer those?) unless you either want to shell out for a SOHO router with built-in VPN client support or get truly bent and use your PC as a VPN router for the hardware phone adapter that you've got.

Of course, given the problems so far, I wouldn't start buying services like that unless they will let you do a free trial first.

The short answer is that without a change in CAT's network, the only thing you can really do is form outbound TCP connections, which happens to be the normal behavior of your web browser. If voiceglo forms a TCP connection to a voiceglo server when you start it, and all further call information flows over this connection, then I can understand how that works despite the NAT obstacles. This is similar to how instant-messenger clients work for everyone over NAT, e.g. when I "sign on" to MSN I basically keep a connection open and messages all flow through the MSN servers. There are serious drawbacks to trying to shove real-time audio data (like a telephone conversation) down a TCP connection; I assume this may exhibit a quality problem that has motivated you to want a different solution...

I'm not really familiar with these different internet phone providers or what technologies they are using. I suspect some of them may be using strange proprietary solutions, particularly the ones you say are working right now with your NAT problem.

The two well respected voice over internet protocols, namely SIP and the H.323 protocol suite, both use something called RTP or the real-time transport procotol to avoid these performance problems with TCP. Unfortunately NAT, as is usually deployed to reuse IP addresses at an ISP, really destroys the functionality of the Internet to support these more general applications. There are many people around the world who are trying to figure out how to resolve this problem, but after my own hair-pulling I have decided to wait for a real public IP address before attempting any of these nice internet applications in BKK.

I cannot say I really know whether CAT _could_ help you if they wanted to... only someone knowledgeable in their systems could make that judgement. Also, I am not sure how to motivate them to or whether you would want to try. Remember that few telecom providers are really interested in helping you deploy a solution that takes away from their own business (long-distance voice communications)! You would probably need a friendly individual in the organization, rather than hoping the organizational policies are set to help you.

When I use my 1-2-Call mobile to call UK they charge an extortionate rate of at least Baht 70 per minute.

Pre-paid "Story Asia" phonecards (ex-UK) work out around Baht 30 per minute from a mobile.

http://www.uk66.com/Merchant2/agent.mv?AG=...=GDY&P=StAsia20

Are there any cheaper pre-paid calling cards in Thailand which can be used with local mobile phones?

For the past month or so it has been about 9 baht/minute calling to the US on DTAC prepaid cards and AIS "gsm advance" subscriptions. Apparently this is due to a CAT long-distance promotion and I'm not sure how much longer it will last. An AIS representative suggested at least another month or two. Also not sure how much the toll to the UK would differ...