autonomous_unit

Actually, there are also Thailand-based scholarship programs that send many students to western countries every year. I do not have real statistics but I personally knew of "scores" of such students through my wife... a score she went over with in the same year and also younger/older sets she met in the US. These scholarships are awarded based on student performance, so you get a broader range of economic classes than one might guess from this thread.

My wife's family heard about me for several years before I finally traveled to Thailand to meet them, and my wife had already told them of our intention to marry, so my visit included the formality of getting approval and negotiating with her parents. I do not know how much internal strife might have occurred before my visit; I was happy that they received me openly and tried to make the best of the new family adventure, rather than forcing her to decide between me or them. My first visit included staying in various extended family homes as we traveled from Bangkok to her parents'.

We've been together almost ten years, married for five, and living in Thailand for the past four. Even now, my wife struggles with being in between her Thai culture and the west. Not just because of me versus her family, but because of her education and work experiences in both countries. Some days, I have to remind myself that the cross-cultural stresses are not my fault! My mother-in-law usually lives with us in Bangkok and it's actually all her fault...

I think the most important quality for the couple to survive is whether they value their individuality and their partner enough while balancing all of these other demands of cross-cultural life. The mixed Thai/Western relationships that we've seen fall apart among this study-abroad crowd tend to be ones where one or both parties are more attached to their preexisting culture and lifestyle than they are to their relationship. Compromises have to be made daily for the rest of your lives, if you want to have a cross-cultural relationship. Nobody will be happy if they cling to preconceived notions of how their life should unfold, because neither person will fully satisfy the stereotypical role of a spouse from the opposite culture.

And, with UBC DS-TV, setting a preference of "1. English 2. Thai" will cause confusion for programs broadcast in other languages... usually, but not always, it seems that they just put the other non-Thai audio as if it were English, so you will get Japanese, Korean, French, etc. but it is not always 100% consistent about it. The funniest thing we've seen is a program broadcast with two noticeably different Thai soundtracks/dubs.

I don't know enough about the DS-TV standard or its limitations, but it seems like pretty poor use of MPEG streams to not properly label the alternate audio tracks.

The house is empty;

rustling leaves are pining

for humidity.

You might want to look at some OSS programs like "wget" or "curl" which are scriptable command-line tools often used to retrieve a web page but also support authenticated logins and form posting. They support FTP, HTTP, etc.

You'll have to figure out the right mechanism to re-login, but then you should be able to automate it from a simple script.

The question is how to detect when it is down... can you just ping an external host and determine it is logged out because the pings fail? Or do you actually have to fetch a web page and determine that it was redirected to the login? Either way, you ought to be able to automate this too (with some ugly hacks to recognize the redirect content).

I don't know about Windows ports of these, but wget and curl are light enough to run inside a Linux-based router. They probably are available via CygWin or similar.

When you say it won't work as a modem, what do you mean? You connected it via USB cable and the Mac didn't notice it at all? Does the phone indicate that it is charging when you connect it to the Mac?

Check in the Settings menu for a sub-menu for USB settings. Some Motorolas have this and you can change it between two modes such as "Storage" or "Data Fax". Try changing it and reconnecting the cable to the Mac...

The Motorola phones use the standard modem communications device class for USB so they work under Linux with a standard USB modem driver (no special Motorola drivers required). I never installed any Motorola software at all. I would have expected similar on the Mac.

We have TOT 1Mb/s ADSL in Nonthaburi and I often see around 20-30 KB/s during the daytime to the US. At certain off-peak hours it might shoot up to 80-90 KB/s. This is primarily for ssh/scp traffic.

It seems to be traffic shaping, as another interactive shell connection will be responsive (enough) even while another transfer is getting stuck at 30 KB/s, and I am able to use a VOIP telephone or SIP client that is streaming to the US. I am glad to see this change, as compared to the unworkable performance I used to get from True during the peak hours, where jitter and loss were so high as to prevent VOIP and SIP from working.

All of the recent Motorola phones I've used with GPRS/EDGE on a laptop have simultaneously charged their batteries off the mini-USB cable connection I use for data. In fact, this is my only way to charge the phone on most trips, since I carry the laptop and its power brick and don't see the need for the extra phone charger clutter in my bag.

If you don't need much speed, plain GPRS is fine for basic web browsing and email, and cheaper. EDGE helps when browsing with lots of image content. A Motorola V360 acts as a pretty reasonable EDGE modem, but I am not sure of the price today. It was pretty affordable back when we bought one, compared to other EDGE offerings available at the time.

I don't see why anybody buys an air card or special USB modem instead of a plain jane phone. I just make sure my primary phone is capable enough, and never needed to buy a second modem.

Edit: I've found DTAC a good deal for infrequent internet use. You can call them up and enable "unlimited GPRS" for a single day or a single week and it is debited from your pre-paid balance. They have EDGE where I've tried around Bangkok, at least. Since I also usually use wireless/ADSL I only need to do this once in a blue moon but I need it to fully replace my usual workload at those times, so the per-kilobyte pricing would cost too much on most other plans. I don't know the current pricing as I haven't used this in about a year, but it used to be something like 250 THB/week or less than 100 THB/day if I remember correctly.

Thanks for the answers. So, it sounds like they do an OK repeat business for Thais and it's not just a trap for suckers...

I did think about the fact that the steak would probably have been OK if served on a regular plate, but I guess we'll probably try the burger side again next time we pass... I prefer a thick chunk of rare beef seared and just barely warmed in the middle, so even in the US I find it a bit hit or miss for me to really be pleased with restaurant steaks.

I had never seen a sizzling platter presentation of what was supposed to be a rare steak, so I had to ask... it's not exactly properly resting the meat before serving, is it?

We made the mistake of following a relative's recommendation and stopping at Chok Chai Farm steakhouse on highway 2 between Korat and Bangkok... I wish I would have seen the negative reference buried in another thread here, so I thought I'd make it a top-level topic of its own!

While the cut of meat they gave me did not look like what I expect of a prime rib, it did appear to have started as a pretty decent grade of fatty meat. However, they have a serving gimmick of plating it on a sizzling cast iron platter (like steak fajitas or something), so in the few minutes it took me to cut into it, my rare steak actually fried in its own juices until a chewy well done. I did eat one bite of tender, rare meat (the first bite) but the rest was over-cooked and you could quite clearly see that it was cooking all the way through, bottom to top, when you cut into it... it was also over-salted but that complaint is far secondary to the way it was served/cooked.

It made me wonder, are they just a tourist trap or do Thais actually come away satisfied with these shoe-leather steaks?

In any event, if you actually feel the need to stop there, steer clear of the steakhouse and just try one of the burgers from the adjacent lunch-counter area. The burger my wife bought was not so bad, but they are not on the menu in the steakhouse...

You should look at the credit card coverage VERY carefully. Often it is only for damage to the rental vehicle and possibly accident coverage for yourself for personal injury. You of course need liability coverage for damage to other people's vehicles and/or injury to others.

In my experience, you can decline the "loss damage waiver" which is redundant with most credit cards, but you need to purchase what the rental agencies call "supplemental liability coverage", which acts as your primary coverage if you do not have another source of coverage. Beware the limits though, as this is basically the legal minimum in most places rather than a suitable amount for your risk exposure. Much of the domestic USA advice will say to decline supplemental liability coverage, because they assume you have liability insurance with "your own car" that covers you when driving a rental somewhere else in the USA. Ignore this irrelevant advice, even if the people insist that they heard it was the wise thing to do!

And, drive very very carefully so you don't have to test any of these arrangements.

Submaniac, I was going to say what you said earlier, but with another perspective. Maybe it would be worth asking your farang friend if you can find a way to bring it up comfortably... maybe you're just getting in the line of fire of the usual side looks or outright stares that we can get outside the main tourist areas. I used to get kind of stressed out about what people were thinking when they stared at my wife and I, but over time I had more outings by myself in these same places and realized the locals give me looks whether she's around or not...

Just like it was when we used to live in the US, I think it costs about the same on average for us to dine in (counting grocery costs) or eat out at basic restaurants, excluding the "fancy" places we'd go when we felt like doing something unusual. That is, considering a similar diet in either case. Don't try comparing some freeze-dried noodles from the store versus a lobster dinner out on the town...

I don't think living in Bangkok really requires more food expenditures but it provides more opportunities if your heart desires a high-spending lifestyle. As others in this thread, I think my main extra food expenses would be coffees, beers, and some other western treats. But I work from my home office and find the craving isn't high enough to go out and get such things during the week.

I think my wife's work commute would be about 200 baht/day by taxi, but she usually joins a car-pool on the way home, so it's often half that. You can get most of the way across town for 100 baht at the right times, or just barely across the river during rush hour.

I just wanted to add that I also bought a Q6600 from Jedi downstairs back in October 2007 and it looks like it was a G0 stepping, based on the packaging saying SLACR and the x86info on Linux showing stepping 11, whereas I think the stepping for the previous B3 core was 7. (Took a bit of googling to find out that they are all either B3 or G0 and 7 or 11, and I'm guessing that 11 is newer than 7).

OK, thanks. Particularly to the couple who decoded my question best! :-)

I already have two dishes and they work fine with separate receivers, except dropping out intermittently during the rainy season. Each receiver showed full "255" signal strength last time I checked them. I have been considering dumping one of the receivers (one gets just the local Thai channels for extended family and hardly sees any use) and was wondering if it was worth trying to keep two dishes active to double the surface area for those rainy days.

The idea would have been to put an electrical junction on the roof equidistant between the two dishes and run the output of that down the single cable to the room with the remaining receiver... I was afraid there would be subtle phase issues, as Khutan pointed out. Not being an RF engineer, I don't have intuition for what the error margins are and whether they are significant for two ostensibly identical dishes and a basic bit of cable cutting and terminating by me...

The responses do raise another idea though... would a signal splitter on a regular UBC dish allow two receivers to work most of the time? The biggest reason our second receiver gets little use is that it turns out nobody likes to sit in that second room for very long to watch the smaller TV. Maybe I should move both receivers to the same room, so one is always available for local channels while the other becomes dedicated to my MythTV installation I mentioned in another thread this week (for recording/time-shifting the western programs)... but I don't want to tear the place up to route another cable down to the same room again...

Long story short, our house has two UBC satellite dishes with wiring off to two different rooms. The dishes are actually very close to each other, since that patch of roof has the best sight-lines to the sky.

Would it be viable and inexpensive to wire the two dishes onto one cable (with some sort of passive junction up at the roof location) so that a stronger signal could be sent down to one room (on a single cable) to reduce the effects of rain fade etc.? Or is the DSTV signal sensitive enough to signal path that this would not increase signal quality but rather cause distortion or cancellation?

I wish more people would benchmark their own system before claiming that USB speed is anything but laughable... I have also rarely seen better than 12-18 MB/s. It is meaningless to talk about the "theoretical" 480 Mb/s when actual usage gets nowhere close. Copy several full DVD images of data and time it. This should be an optimal case with large files.

On most systems I've seen, USB disk access is dog slow compared to an IDE or SATA connection. From what I've read, the problem is partly due to the USB storage protocol and partly due to the current software driver implementations. In either case, it hasn't improved any in the past few years so I wouldn't expect it to suddenly get better now...

So an answer really depends on how you intend to use it. USB is great for infrequent light usage, but if you were hoping to do lots of significant access (such as mirroring whole drives or moving many large media files while you sit tapping your fingers impatiently), an eSATA drive would be much better. A modern eSATA controller port will also let you access multiple hard drives in a single enclosure (if the enclosure implements port-multiplier functions), so it's not really a dead-end single drive solution either.

Years ago (before eSATA was popular) I gave up on having an external drive enclosure to use with my laptop. I found it was cheaper to build a whole PC with multiple disks and implement a Linux file server than to just put together a standalone RAID enclosure. I think this is still true today, until eSATA RAID enclosures get cheaper. Over gigabit ethernet, I can get far faster data transfers to the file server than I've ever seen over USB---up to 90 MB/s for direct access and 30-40 MB/s for disk-to-disk copies (since my laptop drive is the limiting factor). And for light usage, I can just go over the wireless LAN... I only drag out the ethernet cable when I am preparing to do some large transfers. I find that I also start running more tasks on the server itself, because it is faster than my laptop!

How did the simple art of watching TV get so complicated? It sounds like you need to be some sort of mad scientist who dashes about, screwdriver in hand, mumbling to yourself formulas, and working late into the night in your secret basement laboratory.

Now we have computers to watch TV for us. Within a few years they'll be able to analyze the shows and tell us how good they were or give us the plot synopsis for the next day's water cooler talk. Get with the program, or get replaced! Only robots will watch TV in the future.

Oh, and my wife says I'm not mad yet, but still a few rungs down the ladder at just eccentric scientist. But to be honest, it might be true that I was more entertained by configuring the MythTV computer, including the struggles to make it work right, than I am by watching the recordings now...

Yes, I recently assembled a MythTV computer video recording system and finally got it working with an USB MCE remote control device with IR blaster, so it can select the channel on the UBC box automatically and record by schedule. It doesn't completely erase the feeling of spending too much for poor service, but I have found that there are enough movies and shows on over the course of a week to record and give me a few hours of material to watch if and when I want it. I hadn't previously noticed that there are a few OK movies here and there in the middle of the night or middle of the day when I don't normally use the TV...

Just being able to fast-forward through some of those long advertisement sessions is reason enough to do it!

I like MythTV, being an old-time Linux and open source software user. I would assume there are similar solutions for Windows users though which might be easier to manage for a less technical user?

My next trick will be to teach my family members to use it. At the moment, they've mostly just balked at using the main TV in the living room because they know I have some project going on and might get upset if they disrupt the UBC box in conflict with the attached computer.

I just go to the Bank of Thailand website http://www.bot.or.th and use their exchange rate page to download the daily rates for the entire year. I account with an immediate THB->USD conversion for the date of each transaction.

There are roughly these stages of PC compatible computer in increasing size (and decreasing price premium):

1. a notebook/laptop computer.

2. a mini PC built using laptop components (Mac Mini is one example). These usually have no expansion slots unless they've retained the PC-Card slots from a notebook platform. I would expect the internal components to have similar reliability between laptops and these mini PCs since they use the same mobile processors, chipsets, hard drives, and cooling solutions.

3. the "small form factor" PC as exemplified by Shuttle XPC units. These often have about 2 expansion slots, usually some mixture of PCI and PCI-express. I've carried a Shuttle XPC in a small "roll aboard" suitcase when travelling to a remote office, but I've never tried to carry a monitor and keyboard as well! These have the advantage of being faster, with standard desktop CPUs and memory. Some have integrated motherboard graphics and most take a standard graphics card (whether as primary display or to upgrade from the onboard solution). They tend to be limited as far as power supply load, so a very fast/hot graphics card and two hard drives might suffer reliability problems.

4. any micro-ATX motherboard and smallest case you can find. These have about 4 expansion slots, usually some mixture of PCI and PCI-express. There are some relatively small cases for micro-ATX, including ones with special low-profile PCI slots which would only allow low-profile PCI cards to be installed. Within Thailand, I imagine you'd have to hunt extensively to find a reasonably small case.

5. full-blown ATX motherboards

So, if you're looking to keep a low budget and external LCD+keyboard, you might want to start by hunting for some cases and then locate an appropriate motherboard to fit? There are a wide range of cases if you scour the back corners of Pantip, etc.

Or, just shop for a cheap laptop and enjoy its portability while it lasts. Then, decide whether to add an external LCD or keyboard to extend its life (having the same portability you would have had with a small PC), or decide it's cheaper to just buy a new budget laptop and scrap the old one.

What Lopburi3 said means, no, you do not HAVE to change your visa status. If you still have your job and work permit, you are still qualified to get extensions of stay based on that regardless of your marital status.

Once you get married, and when convenient, it may be useful for you to do your next extension based on "support of Thai wife" as this gives you more time to find a new job, should you leave your current one. The 40k THB/month requirement is for family income, so the sum of your income and your wife's just needs to meet that in order to continue getting this type of extension of stay. Unless your wife gets a raise, it sounds like you'd still need to get a new job to renew your extension in that case... because you will be married, it will also be slightly easier for an employer to qualify to offer you a work permit than it was when you were single.

Of course, we've all heard stories or encountered officials who have novel interpretations of the rules. So, I wouldn't put it past some official telling you that you HAVE to change your basis for extension. But in reality, you should be able to get your extension of stay on any basis for which you qualify. And once you've been getting extensions of stay, the "visa status" is that you have an extension of stay as written in your application (and really your re-entry permit is your "visa" should you travel abroad); the type of non-immigrant visa you had prior to the extension of stay is not really important.

Edit: oops, seems I was typing at the same time as Maestro (just typing much longer :-) )

Yes, I missed the part where the OP didn't already have the O visa... I just assumed he was looking for an extension of stay, having already entered on an O visa.

What does work for sure, in case you have to leave the country to set things right, is to get an O visa from the LA consulate by presenting your LA county marriage certificate and wife's passport/ID info. They know what an CA marriage certificate looks like, and do not need translations or other special handling. It's too bad you didn't just apply for an O visa while you were there the first time!

What I posted previously about re-registering a marriage is sufficient to apply for extension of stay based on marriage, in case you prefer that to the other authentication process you spoke of. Either way should work; re-register and present the Amphur doc at Suan Phlu, or get the LA county certificate authenticated and present that at SUan Phlu...

I think you're putting yourself into an awkward category, and pleading for extra attention and potential problems, by trying to somehow convert from tourist visas to an O visa in Thailand!

I used the dental clinic at Chao Praya Hospital recently for a general cleaning and a minor filling. It is near Central Pinklao.

I think they're at least half decent and expect to return there for my next cleaning etc. I was taken by surprise, but eventually pleased, when she went from cleaning to drilling and filling without a moment's hesitation nor any painkillers. I didn't feel a thing, but this was unexpected for me, compared to the usual elaborate discussions and gratuitous face-melting shots given by US dentists.

Four years ago, we took our LA county marriage certificate and wrote our own Thai translation of it (copying the exact layout with boxes containing Thai translations of the labels and the English spelling of names as on the original). Then my wife took it to the MFA and got it certified as a translation. Note, MFA is certifying the translation and not the authenticity, so no crazy stack of US government signatures is required.

This was sufficient for us to then go to the local Amphur office and re-register our marriage in Thailand, which got recorded with the date of marriage in California and we signed it again. This way, you're not attesting to anything false and being re-married, but just registering the fact that you are married. Because we're there attesting to our marriage, there is never a question of getting a the original certificate authenticated. The translation stamp from MFA is sufficient to make the officials trust the translation, and our signatures are sufficient to register the marriage locally.

Then, we paid the small fee and got a copy of the Amphur office record, which we use instead of trying to present any US documents to prove marriage when needed for various government or private paper chases.

I guess anything is possible, but I don't see why this process would no longer be valid today.

After we were living in Los Angeles for several years, I started using the spoon in Thai restaurants when it was provided in that style... but, thinking back I cannot remember when this change occurred or why. Before that, I think my wife often used a fork in US Thai restaurants when dining with me, but I think she'd use a spoon when in a big group of Thai student friends.

Then, when we moved to Bangkok I spent a few months in some stubborn reactionary mode, using a fork at home in spite of the difficulties I had scooping the loose, small bits of food my mother-in-law cooked. I eventually switched back to a spoon and noticed that this sure was a lot easier.

Now when I visit the US, I feel a bit ambivalent in Thai restaurants. I've not encountered outright stares, but apparently it is more unusual for me to be eating with a spoon in some mid-western Thai restaurant than it was in Los Angeles. Sometimes I want to just blend in, but my local friends will make a fuss and try to get me a spoon, or make an elaborate announcement to the waiter about how I live in Thailand. I guess it's big excitement for them to go eating Thai food with Someone Who Lives In Thailand, so I try not to fuss about it too much...