kdvsn

Where do you buy gold bullions? The normal chinese gold shops here sell them, or? I have a few certificates abroad, but how do you handle them here in Thailand. In a safe? In a bank safe?

If you want to buy bullion for investment purposes, probably the easiest way is to buy shares of one the the exchange traded gold funds. They trade just like stock and each share represents 1/10th of an ounce of gold. Examples are the ETF with symbol GLD on the New York Stock exhange and symbol GOLD which trades on the Austrialian stock market. I seem to recall that there was one that trades in London as well. Main advatnage of these is that you don't have to worry about storing the gold and you can buy & sell ETF shares instantly. However buying gold coins or bars instead of shares in an ETF has the advantage of being possible to in your backyard.

Every morning of my life i thank the good lord that i wasn't born American !

They really bit off a bit more than they could chew, didn't they.

With the religous fanatics around the world now collectively hating the religous fanatics in Texas, they now got them exactly where they want them.

Every wanna-be Hitler in every oil-producing monkey republic in every corner of the world now just needs to close their oil taps to send shock waves around the world and bring the worlds largest economy inch by inch closer to the brink of collapse.

With Iran now having nuclear capability, all they're lacking now is the missile technology to send a few nukes over to Wash. N.Y or L.A.

The Yanks would have no chance of retaliating, for fear of destroying too much of Iran's oil-producing facilities.

If i were a Yank, i'd try to get as far away from the nearest big city as possible.

Mike

For at least the past 230 years there have been people predicting the imminent demise of the US and each generation of doomsayers has had just as compelling arguments about why the US will certainly collapse as did the generation before them.

EDGE is available only in Central Bangkok. You can find the map somewhere on dtac's website.

They might only publicize Central Bangkok, but I was getting Edge in places on Samui last week with DTAC, although it is very spotty.

That's useful information. Could you comment as to on which parts of Samui you were able to obtain an Edge connectiion and about whether it was noticably faster than GPRS?

I am looking to invest in gold right now and have closely monitored its rise in price. However, my wife assures me that it usually drops considerably in the weeks after Songkhran. I trust her opinion but the price continues to rise and I'm starting to think that maybe I should just strike now. Can anyone tell me, can I really expect a significant drop over the next few weeks?

Trying to guess what's going to happen to the price of gold over a period of only a few weeks is very risky. A better question that what you think the gold price will be a couple of years from now. If you think that $600/oz will look cheap two or three years from now, then you might want to buy either some bullion or some gold mining stock.

This is what i get at home, i wish it was like that when i am in Thailand.

Whe can only dream about it.

I have doubts about how accurate the test at that pinned link is. Below what I got from my home in the States where I am using cable modem (204.8 Mbs):

The thing is, my cable connection is capped by my cable company at 10 Mbs and the computer that I obtained the above result with is connected to a router within my house by 802.11b wireless which only has a real world throughput of about 5 Mbs from computer to router. What kind of connection did you have when you obtained the above result of 174.43?

A set of tests that seems more realistic in it's results is the one that is hosted on various servers around the US at http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest

Where I can find timetables and prices for this Samui - Chumpon catamaran?

http://www.lomprayah.com

my friend and i flopped exhausted at 'best beach bungalows' (snort) on chaweng at about 8p on friday night. we went out to grab some food and ran into a friend. we had locked our bungalow but stupidly left our valuables inside. even though they were in locked bags, someone broke in while we were gone, cut the locks, and wiped us out. i lost $1500 in cash that i had brought to samui to change into traveller's checks (can't do it on koh phangan), lost my iPod, small baht, and bank cards. they took my friend's bank cards, brand new laptop, and expensive camera. we called the police, who never showed, and called to cancel our bank cards as well. the bank told us that the robbers had already made purchases on the card from a place call 'german sport club' on chaweng. we are going to have to dispute these charges. we did find the shop and go in and talk to the (totally incompetent) staff, and managed to get copies of the forged receipts. we filed reports with both the tourist police and the local police in nathorn on our way back to phangan. neither of us has insurance, so we had very bad luck. but some robbers are going to have a very good songkran! we are both long term thailand travellers who just got complacent, and stupidly felt like our stuff would be fine for a couple of hours.

anyway i still need a notary so please let me know if you know of one.

I can sympathize, I was the victim of a robbery of similar scale last October when staying at the Tradewinds in Chaweng. I was fortunate in that my homeowner's insurance did cover it and though they made me wait 3 months for payment in the end they did give me a fair settlement. My insurance company accepted the police report (handwritten in Thai) as sufficent documentaiton of the incident. Your credit card company will probably eventually do so also.

I too got sloppy and should have known better. I was staying at the Tradewinds for about 3 weeks by the time the robbery happened and had stayed there a number of times before. By that time most of the hotel's staff was aware that I had a laptop computer and expensive photography equipment and that I was in the habbit of going out at night until after midnight. There were also some people outside of the hotel that were aware of these things. Yea, I was a seasoned traveller and knew better, but it seemed like a reasonable upmarket hotel that I was staying at and the hotel's security guard had his desk no futher than 25 feet from my room. Well, the night of the robbery the guard was mysteriously missing from his post and was not on the premises for the balance of the night. In this case someone very cleanly tapped out the cylinder of the door lock and left the door stuck shut when they were done robbing the room. The job that they did on the lock of the door was so cleanly done that at first I thought that the reason that I couldn't get into the room was that I must have misinserted the key in the lock and inadvertantly jammed it. And when in the room, they were very neat, went through every drawer and through the closet space, took everything of value,and closed all the drawers and closet doors ater them. I couldn't get back into the room that night because of the locked being jammed and the hotel's guard being missing and no other hotel employees seemed to be around. I thus didn't even know that I'd been robbed until the morning when the hotel staff managed to get the door opened, and even after then it took a few minutes in the room before I noticed that all my valuables were missing. Ater that, the police did show up and they did seem professional and seemed to be taking a legitmate interest in the case. I'll never be certain who set up the robbery, whether it was someone working at the hotel or somebody at one of the places I was commonly going to at night.

It was only populated by young people coming there to visit diving schools, all the time reading their diving books and at the night looking farang movies on giant screens at some "so called" bars. No one to talk with, drink a couple of beers and have a funny time. Only serious boring young farang.

What should they have been doing? Koh Tao is known for diving, so maybe they were there to learn, hence the diving books?? It is advised NOT to drink the night before diving as it can be dangerous, so maybe they were being sensible to save themselves getting into trouble the next day instead of being hungover & dehidrated?

These kind of articles make me laugh, why do some people feel they have a right to critise how others chose to holiday. They aren't breaking any laws, they aren't fighting or causing trouble, so whats the issue? That they read a lonely planet & eat pad thai? big deal! There are certainly more offense types of holiday makers in LOS than the back packer.

Was was curious about the comment about eating Phad Thai with chopsticks. I do that too, it never occurred to me that it might be objectionable behavior. So I'm left wondering now it's the choice of food or the choice of utensils that's branding me as a Kii Nok.

try emailing ichiwawa.net and seeing where they have wifi spots in samui... i think you can get monthly acess for cheap from them but of course this wouldn't be at your home

ichiwawa.net looks interesting but the prices that they show on their web site sound exhorbinant to me. It says that they are charging 4 baht/minute for up to 100 minutes, 3 baht/minute for up to 500 minutes, and 2 baht/minute for upto 1000 minutes. That seems out of line considering that at a number of cybercafe's in Chaweng they will let you plug in your laptop for 1 baht/min.

I noticed also that this outfit is advertising that they have hotspot coverage on Lamai, Chawng Noi, and North Chaweng: http://login.samuinet.com . Do you happen to know if the are all that their cracked out to be? Their prices work out to less than 0.5 Baht/min even by thier most expensive plan.

Gahhhh.

Another internet thread by me, so sorry

So I just moved here from Bangkok yesterday. I found a wonderful brand new 1 bedroom house in mainam and really liked it. After speaking with the owner she told me that I could get internet in about 2 weeks, possible 3 weeks due to the holidays approching us.

My girlfriend confirmed that the neighboor had DSL so I knew that it was available in this area.

So I go have a visit to the dsl shop outside of Tesco and they tell me 3 weeks to get the phone line, THEN maybe TWO MONTHS for internet because "THe board is full in mae nam"

This is going to be a problem for me. I work on the net so I really cant wait that long. Can anyone confirm that it takes this long?

Also, what about those prepaid cards you can buy once you have a phone line, are those dsl speeds? Seems like it will just be dial up speeds to me but im not sure.

Is that neigbor's house close enough to your house that you might be able to strike a deal with him to connect a wireless access point to his DSL line and share the connection with you? Some of the newer wireless units have a pretty good range.

yes we are adding to our reserves as I speak.. we are at 12,000,000 ounces at the moment.. should be able to get another 250,000 this year from our reserve drilling..

Do you work for Newmont?

I am thinking of buying a laptop when I visit the U.S. (rather than buy one here) next week. I have heard that the same computer would be cheaper in the U.S. than in Thailand.

What could the difference be?

You could try pricing out a PC with the configuration that you want on Dell's US web site at www.dell.com and then price it out again at www.dell.co.th and see what price difference that you get. Dell's not the cheapest supplier but by looking at thier Thai vs US prices may give you a general idea of what major brand PC's cost in the US vs Thailand.

Thanks for the help. I have a copy of Kylix (Kylix 2) I collected a couple of years ago in Bangkok, I have not tried it yet but I will give it a go and see how it works.

If I can't have Delphi (or Kylix) I will have to rewrite everything in C++ or maybe even vanilla C, too much trouble!! I will probably stick with Win2K which I am currently using and put up with Micro$oft.

First I have to get Linux working!!

Colin

I started out with Kylix 2, I think that I was running it on Red Hat 7.1. I supsect that you may have difficulty getting Kylix 2 to run on the 2.6.xx Linux kernels since even with Kylix 3 it takes some playing around. The issue is mostly that while Kylix compiles native Linux execuatables, the IDE runs on an ancient version of WINE. If you happen to vist any discount software shops, you might want to upgrade to Kylix 3.

Kylix is not free and not GPL, and very Delphi programmer oriented, so not interesting for who doesn't need it.

At one time Borland did have a GPL version of Kylix 3 on there web site (it might still be there, I haven't checked). A non-GPL verions of it was included with Delphi 6 Professional.

You're right that Kylix would primarily be for people who have a specific need to use Delphi on Windows. In my case it was a godsend despite it's flaws as it probably extended the commericial usefulness of my Delphi code base by at least 5 years because much of my company is Unix/Linux centric and the availbality of a Linux port of my apps brought a whole new group of users into the fold. Delphi might seem oddball but at the time I started my work the other logical choice of a tool would have been VB, which wouldn't have ported to Linux at all. Now there might be better choices, though Delphi is still pretty slick IMO.

I am about to install Linux on my machine . I am a Delphi programmer (Win 2K) and I will want to use Kylix, the Linux version of Delphi and recompile all my precious Delphi code.

I searched this forum for Kylix but got a nil result.

Does anyone out there use Kylix and if not, why not, poor results or problems?

I use Kylix for software I write for the company that I work for, in fact that's pretty much that's pretty much the only thing that I use Linux for. Borland has ceased supporting it, since Kylix 3 came out in 2002 I don't think that Borland has done anything at all to support Kylix. For that reason you may have trouble getting the IDE to run on the latest Linux distrubtions. I've have an old laptop with Mandrake 9.1 on it, specifically for the purpose of compiling Kylix apps and a destop at home with Mandrake 10.0 that works with Kylix though the IDE has a couple of minor idiosyncrazies. though some people have reported success getting Kylix 3 to run on the latest versions of Suse and Mandriva after certain patches have been applied. An extra unit needs to be added to you project to make the exe's generated by Kylix run on distribututions that have execshield enabled.

Despite the above, Kylix is still seems to be the best way to get Delphi apps to run on Linux. After a lot of work, I've been able to get a 200,000+ line CAD application to run just about the same on Linux as on Windows. Depending upon what's in your code though it might not always be straight-forward to port over to Linux, some of the VCL component don't have the same properties and procedures as their CLX counterparts, some VCL components just don't have a CLX equivalent, and any direct calls that you might have made to the Windows API would obvious have to go. I found ways to work around these things in my projects, but I was quite motivated to do so.

Be aware too that the pascal in Kylix 3 is compatible with Delphi 7. Code contianing any language extensions that were intoduced in Delphi 8, Delphi 2005, or Delhpi 2006 will not compile under Kylix 3.

some good sources of Kylix info:

http://www.kylix-patch.de.vu/

http://crosskylix.untergrund.net/execshield.shtml

http://groups.google.com/groups?as_ugroup=...scoring=d&hl=en

Yes, I was interested in Mutual Funds that invest in Canadian and Asian (Non-Japan) Stocks - Again these would be long term investments... I have seen the foreign denominated CD these sound interesting as short term hedges - I wonder is they have Thai denominations?

They do have Thai Baht CDs that pay 3% annual interest with 3 and 6 month terms. Probably inside Thailand you'd get a higher interest rate than that.

20 to 1? Sounds Dooom and Gloom to me mate. Most likely stick to around 40 or above.

My assuption is that this will happen over 20 years...

If deprecation of the dollar is your main concern and you are into stocks, why not diversify into foreign (meaning non-US) stocks? Likewise, if you're looking for income bearing investments, foreign currency denominated bonds can be purchased through certain US brokers and you can buy FDIC insured foreign denominated CD's in the US from an on-line bank called Everbank.

Last Result:

Download Speed: 4180 kbps (522.5 KB/sec transfer rate)

Upload Speed: 3304 kbps (413 KB/sec transfer rate)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Either those results were obtianed via something other than GPRS over a cell phone or something went wrong when you ran this test. Those speeds are are about 10X the advertised limits of Class 12 GPRS.

Aside from the fact that the company trying to sell this particualar unit is trying to charge a ridiculous price for it, what do you think about the technical merits of using a device like this one to protect expensive electronic equipment (particularly stereo equipment) in Thailand http://www.psaudio.com/products/p300.asp ?

To my limited understanding, it digitally regenerates the AC signal into a clean sine wave having a selectable frequency and voltage. I've noticed that units like these often show up on the used market in the States for a fraction of their retail price, maybe because while they sound like a good idea, in areas that have a relatively good power company it may be hard to demonstrate a tanglible advantage of this device. Just curious whether experts in the field consider the concept behind this sales this device to be legitimate.

Since you are going, for Koh Tao, AIS is the only provider with gprs. Orange has no service and DTAC is voice only.

I was thinking of trying and AIS prepaid card. Apparently those cards can be enabled for GPRS. I previously tried an Orange prepaid card and was able to connnect with GSM (as opposed to GPRS) and while it did work it operated at only 9600 bps.

Bluetooth:

Download Speed: 97 kbps (12.1 KB/sec transfer rate)

Upload Speed: 35 kbps (4.4 KB/sec transfer rate)

TRUE DSL 2500 package:

Download Speed: 412 kbps (51.5 KB/sec transfer rate)

Upload Speed: 374 kbps (46.8 KB/sec transfer rate)

My dsl seems really slow though. Almost the same as the BT

Thanks. Those seem like pretty good speeds for a cell phone connection, I think that I'll try doing the same on my Ericsson T39m phone.

BTW, using the above speed testing web site I can often get 1500 kps download speed using a wired broadband connection at one of the big hotels in Bangkok but it's common to get numbers not much better than your cell phone's GPRS results when connecting from cyber cafe's in Samui.

Finally got it working!

My Dell X1 came with Toshiba bluetooth stack drivers. After some research I found out that these drivers are no good, so I swapped them out with M$ drivers and restarted and thigns are working.

Right now my cell phone is accross the room and I am connected to it via BT and surfing TV through it!

Not really fast but TRUE has been slow as mollasses lately so it seems"normal" to me.

Thanks everyone.

Just out of curioisty, what type of numbers do you get when you run this speed test with therr "New York server:

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest