autonomous_unit

I'm probably close to being off topic for this forum, but the OP asked for replies from lucid dreamers...

I often have them, and cannot remember when in childhood I first realized it. I guess it was around kindergarten age, when I stopped being frightened by "nightmares". However, I would not claim to know what percentage are lucid... I've often suspected that I am a biased observer who would mostly remember the lucid ones... as a kid, I used to enjoy controlling these dreams to fly around and otherwise do unnatural things that only made sense in a dream. Now, I tend to follow more mundane scenarios and sort of drift into a third-person view of steering a character through the dream "simulation" of real life. It's really not much different than daydreaming for me, except it is happening during sleep.

During stressful periods in my life (work deadlines etc.) I have recurring "spy movie" dreams which I suppose are about the same psychological state as playing a "laser tag" game, but with better special effects. I also have recurring dreams where I try to continue my real-life work on computers, and like the mirror experience I find the visual simulation distorted and abstract; I can never read the text clearly on the screen, though I can sometimes ignore that and "know" what is being displayed anyway. (I think dreams are usually abstract and will fall apart if you try to focus too much on the sensory details.)

I am not sure what Yooyung is on about regarding heightened awareness. I'm aware that it is a dream, but I'm not convinced that this brings any better awareness of myself, i.e. the self that is observing and aware of the dream state. That requires a completely different kind of introspection which I find no easier nor more difficult in a dream than in waking life.

It could be your ears, your Sony (or its speakers), the music you are trying to play, or even your room...

I have an old Yamaha A/V receiver and I could definitely hear the difference when I did some elaborate listening tests about 5 years ago. However, now in my current Thai-style room with too many hard surfaces (tile and glass), the acoustics are not so good and I have trouble telling the difference between the inputs for good CD audio material. But, with headphones I can still hear the differences between good and bad source material, so I don't think it is that my ears have gone bad...

Also, the digital output allows the option of DTS or Dolby Digital pass-through in most cases, so if you are playing DVDs with the right software you can get 5.1 surround sent to the audio system to be decoded there. That's a nice functional difference.

Upcountry, some of us are in the same boat as you, and as far as I know we all play by the same rules as any other Thai-foreigner couple.

As Maestro says, you just need to show 40k month family income (it could be your wife's from her sponsoring organization).

This may not be Shuttle specific or anything...

If you suspect the BIOS settings are somehow corrupted, try going into its setup screen and using the 'default settings' option to reset everything and reboot. One thing to check: does it seem to remember the time when you reboot? If not, perhaps the CMOS battery is dead and this could lead to odd behaviors. It is relatively simply to open up the machine and find the CMOS battery on the motherboard to buy a replacement. They usually look like a little lithium "watch" battery, i.e. a thin flat metal disc in a plastic holder.

To further diagnose the drive, does the system have a "boot menu" where you can ask it to boot a specific drive? Sometimes you have to press a key like F12 to reach the boot menu... it should say something when you first power on such as "press <some key> for Boot Menu". If so, try this and make sure that the hard drive is listed as a bootable device, and then try booting it. What sort of error does it give?

Possible problems might include: 1) the boot sector has been corrupted on the hard drive somehow 2) the partition table has been modified and no partition is marked "bootable"

3) there is something preventing the BIOS from seeing the drive at boot time.

I believe what people are saying about the percentages not changing much after a few years. I'm going into my fourth year here with essentially zero Thai speaking ability, and I do not see any reason that will change much. At this point, I think I've adopted the feeling that I'm itinerant, whether our stay here will last another one, two, or ten years. I'm not trying to put down roots.

When I first arrived it was with the sense that I had to dig in and make a living, after relocating here with my wife due to her obligations. So I did what I knew best, which was to set up shop doing consulting in my area of expertise for the clients I knew in the west. So, my work is in English by phone and Internet. I have no local clients. My wife operates our company with me, and she deals with the Thai-language bureaucratic stuff. Things were very busy, to the point where I realized the stress and lifestyle would be my ruin. I've had to consciously reduce my work just to find time to have a sensible fitness regimen again. So, I've had very little immersion or pressure to learn Thai, and in fact I would have to take more time off to have any time to focus on something like learning a language.

As it is, my work mostly exhausts my intellectual energies... I don't even find the time to read English books for recreation anymore. To be honest, I don't have any particular urge to learn Thai versus pursuing any other academic interest that might be interesting if I found the time. I'm sure this perspective sounds a bit alien to those on this thread who seem to have the opposite experience in Thailand. I don't have an abundance of time or energy to spend integrating. It's very far down the list of priorities for me.

However, I will say that even with my limited exposure, I am starting to recognize more words and parse a little more meaning out of Thai conversations I overhear. Perhaps if I stay here long enough, some conversion will happen in my mind where enough of this background learning has accumulated to ignite. I still remember teaching myself to read English as a child, and how staring at the gibberish-filled pages of my families' books and magazines eventually turned a corner into pages of communication...

We are further south and west of there and are definitely still in Nonthaburi... it reaches further south on this side of the river.

I think everyone else has said it. It's a suburb. If you need to be in the city much, you really need to think about the commute. My wife has to just barely get over the river for work, and her commute can be anywhere between 20-90 minutes depending on the day or exact time of departure in the morning, as the bridges get backed up. I don't think I could stand that myself.

I work from my home office, and I find that my attitude has shifted to thinking of the Bangkok city center as a far off place only to be visited with advance planning and a commitment of most of a day... in fact, I don't think I've been over the river in the two months since I last took a taxi home from Suvarnabhumi!

By the way, for my usual 5am and midnight travel times, I find the taxi ride to/from Suvarnabhumi is 40-60 minutes depending on weather. Not as bad as I feared when the airport switch occurred, but not as convenient as Don Muang either...

am i the only who thinks everything from thai german food company tastes exactly the same?

Ha, no you are not! I can only gather from the positive comments in this thread that some people actually prefer hotdogs masquerading as sausages.

Oh, what I would do for some proper smoked sausage or cold cuts...

I never thought about it much. I guess I do not touch-type, i.e. I never took classes and a typing instructor would probably try to kill me if they observed my methods. However, I just tried a quick 30 second test transcribing some prose and got about 60 wpm with few errors (which I corrected at that rate).

I learned my typing in school writing essays and lots of computer programming. I also have somewhat large hands, and I think I type mostly with my middle and ring fingers as they seem to have the best reach and angle to most alphabet keys. However, I use pinkies and thumb to reach to every corner, and my muscle memory includes all the weird shift-keys, punctation, and control-key combinations that get used in programming and command-line Unix work. I'm pretty sure I also have muscle memory for a catalog of old, strange keyboard layouts found on different text terminals at school...

I was always frightened and impressed by a guy who shared my office in college. He seemed to approach the keyboard like a church organist, heaving and rolling his shoulders into it, and if you watched closely he really seemed to be chording out many words at once. If most of us are old-fashioned dot-matrix printers, scanning characters into the screen one letter at a time, he was a line printer, belting out sentences as fast as the screen could scroll!

Our pump started running continuously one day. I finally figured out that it was pumping water in a loop, from the tank towards the house and then back around the street bypass circuit into the tank again, because a check-valve had failed. In fact, the water meter could be seen to quiver and even spin backwards at times as the pump tried to pressurize the street pipes too!

This happened because our system has the tank and pump in parallel with a direct line from the street, both joining back together before the house. The check-valve is supposed to prevent water flow from the pressurized side back to the street. With this arrangement, the water is supplied directly from the street unless its pressure drops below the pump's threshold, at which point the pump boosts the pressure using the tank as its water source.

Despite my original misgivings, this system seems to work quite well and the pump often doesn't turn on unless a shower or sink is going full blast.

first, make sure SSH works:

host1% ssh host2

host2% ...

host2% exit

Connection to 192.168.x.x closed.

host1%

if you were able to login to host2, then you can try a file transfer with 'scp':

host1% scp local-file-1... local-file-N host2:.

this will copy the files to your home directory on host2. You can also do the reverse direction:

host1% scp host2:file1 .

this will copy the file ~/file1 on host2 into the current directory (".") on host1. You can do things like rename the files while copying them, or recursively copying directories.

See the manpage for scp for more information ("man scp"). A nicer tool is 'rsync' which uses SSH to connect to the other host, with very similar syntax as above. However, it is more powerful and can do fancier things like noticing that the other host already has a copy and skipping it. See "man rsync" for more details.

For just one cable, you should be able to go to some Pantip-like shop in Chiang Mai and order a custom cable. You want to get cat5, cat5e, or cat6 cable cut to length and the connectors crimped on. (Cat5 cable is the basic minimum for 100baseT ethernet, and the others are higher grades that can carry signals better and with less interference over longer distances. I used cat6 cable at my house but that is because I bought a little gigabit switch at Pantip, and, being ten times faster, gigabit requires better cables.)

From my experience at Pantip in BKK, bulk cable is pretty cheap here. I ended up buying several hundred meters and having it pulled throughout our house by the workers who were doing other interior work such as installing/relocating some lights and power outlets. The connectors and/or wall plates cost more than the wire in my experience with a bunch of cable runs. I ended up using a sack of cat6 grade connectors and a crimping tool that I picked up at a bargain while visiting the U.S.

Actually, the 100 meter limit for ethernet is for a "collision domain" which was the entire set of all hosts in an old-fashioned hub layout. It has to do with the propagation delay of the electrical signal from one transceiver to another, and if this delay is too long the collision-detection feature of ethernet would misbehave. So you could not have 100 meters per connection but 100 meters total between "most distant" hosts with a hub.

With modern switches, the collision domain would be one cable because the switch does packet forwarding rather than electrically bridging the various wires. Also, with full-duplex connections, I think collision detection is not used and it could be OK to exceed 100 meters. Whether you have any problems here would depend on the quality of your cable, as far as signal loss and interference are concerned. I think this is out of spec though, so you probably don't want to exceed 100 meters per full-duplex wire.

I bought a 20" 1600x1200 LCD from Dell Thailand as part of a new desktop computer about 9 months ago.

Dell Thailand sales seem to be based in a phone center in Malaysia, but they have local toll-free numbers in Thailand. Check www.dell.co.th and look for the contact info for "smaller than 200 persons" organizations. The Dell Malaysia website pricing seemed consistent with the price quote we got, in case you want to browse anonymously first.

They can fax you or email you a quote. We ordered by phone, wired the purchase price to a Dell account, and it was delivered to our house. By the way, we had a problem with the computer, and after one phone call a guy was at our door with a new replacement part within a day or two. So, I am not sure why people have suggested Dell is not serving customers here anymore.

...

i see what you are saying about the wife driving, but i'm thinking mostly she help on the long boring roads like highway 5 from LA to norcal. just point the car in the right direction and go straight for 6 hours.

thx steve

I see what you mean, but still, please teach her the basics of driving on I-5 through the Central Valley, i.e. the passing lane is for passing and high-beams are not appropriate when you can see tail lights or headlights of other vehicles (if you'll be driving over night)!

And if she's been driving only on slower roads here, something about following distances at 120 km/h might be useful too... Also, come to think of it, you might want to warn her that the horn is for inciting road rage in LA, and not for playing motorized marco-polo.

But most importantly, don't forget to put the air on recirculate before you get to Harris Ranch...

Two years ago when I arrived in LA, California I tried to rent a car using my Thai license. The rental car company refused to rent me a car because they could not read what I said was a drivers license. Their words: "How do I even know its a drivers license". I had a California license so not a problem but they did not know that when refused rental. I just wanted to know if it could be done.

It depends on the rental company. When I rented with Hertz the first time using my Thai license (at Chicago O'Hare), they pulled out a giant book of foreign licenses and compared mine to a color reproduction of a Thai license in the book. After that, there has been no trouble so I guess they annotated my file as having been verified...

I've heard it said that cops have a similar reference book in their cars to check foreign licenses, but I've never had that experience...

California recognizes the Thai license and does not require (or even recognize) a translated international license, at least when I checked up on it a couple of years ago. Check the DMV site yourself at www.dmv.ca.gov, that's what I did. The laws, of course, vary by state so you might want to check each state you plan to drive in. I drive rental cars in the US in CA and IL periodically, using my Thai license.

As for insurance, be sure it is liability insurance you get covered by your credit card, i.e. damage or injury to other parties. This is separate from collision/loss coverage on the rental car or your property. In my case, I found that I have to purchase liability coverage but can waive the collision damage for the car.

Finally, I don't mean to presume too much, but do you trust your wife's driving skills to operate safely in the US in the short term? Aside from the switch to left-hand drive combined with jetlag: The police are much less likely to ignore improper use of signals, lack of lane discipline, etc. and other drivers are not going to share the typical Thai driving mentality of focusing mostly on cars in front and assuming everyone else will avoid crashing into you from behind... just something to think about, depending on how long your trip is and what kind of traffic you'll be in...

Based on our cultures, we have different things on our mind that we think are worth talking about, and we also have different rhythms to our conversations. I've often noticed that the Thais I am exposed to tend to speak in much shorter, overlapping bursts with each other. Like they're taking turns saying one phrase or sentence at a time, whereas I'm used to people speaking for paragraphs before taking turns. Maybe "talking too much" means "not letting me get a word in edgewise"? Someone can speak relatively little during a day, but irritate by not allowing pauses for others to speak at the culturally anticipated points in a conversation...

This stupidity? I guess you mean whatever you did to corrupt the system? Hey, if it makes you feel better, I remember in my early days discovering what a recursive delete as root could do when you accidentally included .. in the argument list! It was interesting to watch my computer go senile as /lib and /usr/lib were slowly deleted out from under the X session.

As for what to do, I'd suggest listening to Richard's advice about trying to recover the LVM state. Whether you use a rescue CD or a new Linux install (with the old disk on an external adapter), you need to recover the LVM volumes so you can try to attack the filesystem itself.

As for future approaches... the best thing to do is use a separate /home volume because sometimes these "stupid mistakes" would corrupt the / system and you can just replace it and preserve your existing /home volume. It also makes it a little easier to manage backups/dumps of just /home, but that's a minor difference.

I don't use LVM just because I'm old fashioned and have never seen a need for it. I use regular partitions and Software RAID in all sorts of strange configurations. If your corruption is just from fsck'ing a live filesystem, I don't see why the LVM layer would be corrupted. Unless you tried to fsck the partition containing the LVM system, rather than fsck'ing a filesystem in a logical volume?? That would be a VERY bad idea, and I'm surprised if fsck would even agree to go forward without a basically intact filesystem underneath.

Ouch. I'm sorry to say that in 15 years of using Linux, I've found that very few people know how to recover badly damaged filesystems. Those who do learned it by trying to recover their own after a mistake like this, and then they vowed to follow better backup strategies and never face doing it again! I was lucky enough to learn their backup attitude before I ever had a disk go wrong.

You cannot mount /dev/hda2 because you were using LVM. The PC partitions do not contain filesystems but rather the entire LVM space which is further divided into logical volumes. So, you face the double problem of recovering the LVM metadata if the LVM layer is not auto-detecting properly, before you can even begin to address the corrupted ext3 data.

Did your install have a separate /home volume or just / with everything in it? (I don't know what the default behavior of Fedora is, as I always do a custom layout without LVM...)

Actually, there was a recent study of hard drive failure rates in datacenters and it found that there was no increase in failure based on temperature of the drives!

While grossly overheating may indeed cause a problem, I wouldn't worry about temperatures in the 30-50 C range in Thailand. More worrying would be that the temperature is going up unexpectedly on a particular drive. Also, it is not surprising if the temperature goes up when the ambient air temperature is higher...

A much bigger source of hard drive failures would be vibration/physical shock or marginal power supplies.

Of course the original estimates are based on some questionable assumptions about the power efficiency of an average CRT monitor.

An LCD monitor does not use less power to display black pixels, but rather the screen heats up a bit more while absorbing all the light that the backlight is pumping out, instead of letting it shine out into the room...

You definitely can get a Thai license quickly based on having the US license. My wife did the same as ballbreaker's and she never had a Thai license before moving to the US for school... unless things have changed, they just require some forms to be filled out, recent photographs, and give you basic vision and reflex tests. There is no written rules test nor driving test in this case.

Often when I visit Thai restaurants while visiting the U.S., I find myself having to "authenticate" with the wait staff as someone who, indeed, lives in Thailand and regularly eats Thai food. That's the only way I can get Thai-style levels of chili instead of weak Americanized food.

So the other day I found I had come full circle here in Bangkok, when my wife had to spend a minute or two debating (in rapid Thai) with the wait staff at a Black Canyon coffee shop so they would give me what I ordered: espresso over ice. We had to agree he wasn't responsible for how it tastes.

Apparently I am not capable of choosing my own food in any country!

My wife has been happy with her thinkpad X40 for the past few years. My only warning is that hers used a 1.8" hard drive instead of the usual 2.5" laptop drives. One failed and had to be replaced in the first 12 months. I don't know if that is still true of the latest X-series models. When I used an X22, it used a regular 2.5" drive I think.

As mentioned above, they are slower... I definitely notice the difference between her X40 and my T41. I used an X22 extensively in a previous job with lots of travel, but eventually switched to the T-series because I found I wanted more screen pixels for all the document writing I was doing while on the road. I just feel too cramped on XGA screens when doing more than some email or casual web browsing.

The original poster might find it difficult switching from a 17" to a 12" laptop just from the loss of screen pixels. I'd give it a try, maybe operating the current laptop at reduced resolution for a week to see what it's like. (And if you do, turn off the "screen scaling" so you get a smaller XGA-sized screen in the middle of your huge LCD, so you better approximate a real 12" laptop.)

The original post asked about "third parties"... what does he really mean by privacy and third party? Is he worried about his neighbor or boss seeing what he would write on a forum? Or the police? Or is he worried about some crank or nutcase on the forum tracking him down to give him a beating because of what he wrote?

If you are in an unprotected wifi hotspot, any other local users could potentially monitor all your forum traffic that is not being encrypted with HTTPS. Even then, they could potentially see which sites you visit. The operator of the wifi hotspot could do even more, depending on how careful you are about using HTTPS (some people won't notice when an HTTPS proxy interposes itself and uses a different certificate than the true destination site). There are very amusing web proxies out there for honeypots and other hotspots to do things like make all the browser images blurry, upside-down, or backwards. This is digging into the traffic at the same level as being able to monitor what someone is writing or reading...

For a site like Thaivisa where traffic is not encrypted, there are potential spots for third party snooping all along the internet path from your PC to the forum web servers. And it is probably foolish to think the forum servers are all that secure, unless you personally trust ALL of the admins and their hosting providers. Of course, I cannot see why you would really care unless you are paranoid... the question to ask yourself is why would anybody go through the bother of trying to intercept your traffic? Does their motivation and available means outweight the effort and cost?

Nobody is secure from a truly determined attack. Paranoia is believing, in spite of the odds, that such an attack is eminent.