Tarragona

I'm trying to watch the DVD here and I'm getting the sound but no picture. The display says "Root".

The wife suddenly remembered that she put something on earlier and was messing around with the remote and it went like that. I don't know if she could really do any damage like that but I'm having no joy getting the picture back.

Help!!

The bridge is at quite an advanced stage now. For the road itself, they have just recently begun land clearance and the demolition of properties that are in the path.

The alcohol sales thing is one of those old laws that is still on the books that they suddenly decided to enforce. Revolutionary Council Decree # 111 or soemthing like that. It may have made sense at the time??

Only ever lost one package in 15 years. And I wouldn't be surprised if that disappeared in the UK. I used to know a lot of PO employees back home and they told a few stories.

Birds breeding in the garden/compound:

Copsychus saularis      Oriental Magpie Robin

Rhipidura javanica  Pied Fantail

Aegithina tiphia    Common Iora

Acridotheres tristis    Common Myna

Acridotheres grandis White Vented Myna

Passer domesticus House Sparrow

Passer montanus        Eurasian Tree Sparrow

Pyconotus jocosus Red Whiskered Bulbul

Pyconotus blanfordi Streak Eared Bulbul

In the breeding list you have the House Sparrow, but I understood the

House Sparrow is a somewhat rare visitor to Thailand though possibly pushing into the North from Burma. Admittedly, I've let my interests drop over the last couple of years but I'm sure I remember reading that breeding House Sparrows would not be completely unexpected but might cause some excitement when actually discovered.

I don't usually have any problems with it.

Even in a private development you can get taxed in some form. The local tessaban may come around and take note of your business and you pay some kind of fixed business fee. In our village (although thinking about it the right of way and upkeep was turned over to the tessaban by the developer a couple of years ago) they noted how many chairs, hairdryers etc. the hairdresser had. She knew this was coming and hid some of her equipment away until they'd visited.

That is obviously not income tax and I don't know if they send out people to inspect this kind of thing.

In one of the worst classes I took at Bangkok U (and out of 18 classes, only 5 were decent), I couldn't even understand the teacher's English at times and he occasionally couldn't understand mine--I'm a native English speaker with a clear accent!

I know both ABAC and BU quite well and would agree with most of what you say about them. The comment here though sticks out and seems worthy of comment. Apparently the fact that the teacher couldn't always understand you reflects badly on him but the fact that you couldn't always understnad him doesn't. You are a native speaker after all!

This is something that any westerner, especially a native speaker, needs to consider. The internationalization of English is making the concept of the native speaker less valid. That's not to say anything is acceptable but if you come to study in Asia you have to realize that you might not have a 'clear accent'; you might have to get used to other accents - just as you would if you were living in Scotland or Australia. Be patient not superior. Pronunciation will have much greater variation amongst educated speakers (first language or not) than grammar for example.

Anyway, I think that Bangkok U's international program suffers from the level of English of a lot of Thai students who are accepted. Their English isn't good enough and so the course content becomes watered down to compensate. If I was Thai and had to choose between BU's international or Thai programs, I would go for the Thai version as the course content would be more demanding.

I don't believe the story about ABAC students failing and paying 50,000 baht for a BU degree. ABAC failures do move to BU, maybe transfer the credits they have, and then probably find that their English ability is above average at BU. Some of them, of course, also start to work harder. It wouldn't be in BU's interests to give them a degree for 50,000 baht when they can get fees out of them for another 2 or 3 years.

Taking this another step though, there are Thai students who fail/drop out of Bangkok University and then go on to do well at universities like Thai Chamber of Commerce, Dhurakhit Bandit, Sri Pathum etc.

Careful thought is needed. You should go around have a look, sit in on classes in the subjects you are thinking of taking and try and talk to foreigners enrolled in those programs.

I got an Aconatic that said "All Zones" in the Thai blurb but not (I noticed later) in the English. It wouldn't play DVDs from the UK but the Aconatic service center made the necessary adjustments free of charge.

Originally "Bang Makok" (บางมะกอก) from the plum, according to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangkok

This, in Thai, is also interesting about origins of Wat Arun, once known as Wat Makok, possibly Wat Bangmakok, as it was in Tambon Bangmakok.

http://www.watarun.org/historyx.html

My (Thai) wife reckons that this would be a likely scenario:

The family wanting to keep it quiet is understandable. But they would surely all quietly kick ten heaps of <deleted> out of him and then quietly send him packing. No need for outsiders to be involved in that.

I don't need a dog; the wife is very good at snakes. We had a cobra in the kitchen and she got her extra-length broom out and in a couple of minutes had ushered it into a strategically-placed plastic bin bag. (Actually just strategically thrown in that general direction by me.) She then took the bag down to the local swamp and undid it.

We've had all kinds of snakes in and around the house. The worst experience was years ago when our daughter was just 4 or 5 and the wife found her in the kitchen with her hand on a snake - which turned out to be a krait. The only reason we could think of that the snake didn't attack was that she was behind its line of vision. That was the only snake that I've actually known the wife to kill.

All of this in a fairly built-up area of the swamp that is Samut Prakan.

"Empty" doesn't mean no driver, just no passengers.

You don't have to live in a country to have a bank account there. Many people have swiss bank accounts or offshore accounts in the isle of man or jersey, and not actually live there - all you need is a certified copy of your passport to open an account. And both swiss and off-shore accounts can be used with paypal or nochex.

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I don't think it's that easy. My own experience with Paypal was that I set up an account to withdraw to my UK bank account but they blocked it when I had a Thai IP address. That was a couple of years ago and I've never bothered with them since. I don't know what they're like now but I still read a lot of stories by people having problems with them.

A truly international reliable payment gateway does not exist from what I can make out.

My host sister (who studied in P.2) had been learning English for 18 months before even beginning to learn the alphabet!?

Not necessarily a bad thing in itself - if they spent the 18 months getting some vocabulary and everyday spoken language before they started. They probably didn't, but I'd be interested to hear what they were doing in those 18 months, as a lot Thai schools seem to teach a couple of years of "A - Ant - mot" before anything else.

Why use a service, especially in business, which is unreliable ? It's not that difficult to open a bank account in a country that does accept withdrawals from paypal e.g Hong Kong and i'm sure there are other countries as well

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There are obviously a lot of people out there who don't find that a viable option. If you are not actually in one of those countries you can only withdraw to a US bank account.

You'll find numerous threads here:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=66

A rough summary of those threads would seem to suggest that they are not a scam but are not completely reliable, change things on a whim and have poor support. Despite this, it seems as though they may be about the best option for people who want to take payments over the interweb and are not in countries where Paypal allows withdrawls to bank accounts. They seem to have worked well for some people, although they have been known for spamming webboards with good reports. I think you'll find some genuine ones on that forum though.

I haven't got to the point of needing to give them a try but may do in the future.

Sorry. I meant to say something like that before but was a bit pushed for time. The beach is great and the water is very clear. There are also a number of interesting places to visit in the immediate area.

You can buy fish and squid right from the fisherman on the beach too. We'll be going back some time this year..

Try this place at ChaoLao Beach

http://www.go.to/hadtuen

We stayed there last year. I would highly recommend it. There are a number of places to stay in the area.

######, there ain't enough smilies here

Do you feel it's your duty to raise your kids to have 100% thai customs altough you are not thai yourself? Do you believe its the "right" way to behave rather than something which is only right to certain times and places? Sincerely asking coz I'm interested, please no offense.

I never expect my daughter (now 12 years old) to wai me and she doesn't do it. She wais as she should to Thais and I insisted on that when she was younger. It's automatic now of course. When she meets members of my family she'll go for the hug/kiss approach.

Confusion occasionally arises when I pick her up from school and the teacher will tell her to wai 'Papa', first of all because she thinks 'Papa' sounds silly and then she'll give me a slightly uncomfortable kind of wai.

As someone else said, don't judge him too harshly as yet. When you say he is a PR, are you sure he has that legal status or do you just mean that he has been resident here for a long time?

If he's run into trouble and needs the money quickly then maybe you can excuse him screaming his lungs out. Offer to send him the money and then suggest he sends it back to you once the visa is sorted out. Then decide if you should hate him or not.

Hmm. I ran the webroot spy audit and it found a system monitor but I downloaded the trial version of webroot spy sweeper and it didn't detect it.

Got it.

Motherboard Utility CD

Thanks guys.

You're right - it's not the monitor. It's the video controller. I don't really have any idea what I'm looking for there.