smccolley

There are so many worse countries for cars. You can buy them and run them hard here. 

For a truly bad place to have a car, try the Maldives. The only island with more than a handful of cars is Male. There it takes about 20 minutes to drive around the entire island, and most roads are only wide enough for scooters. My friends went to the university island and there is only 1 car on it! You can never get out of first gear anywhere because of traffic. No idea how much cars cost, but the president has a couple nice mercedes. Not sure why since he takes a boat to work like everyone else...

Now - what were you saying about Thailand?

Why not take the kids to a morgue, show them 2-3 bodies that had motorcycle head injuries and tell them "This will be you or your parents if you don't wear helmets!"

I'll be the kids won't get on another bike until they get a helmet - and one for the parents!

Sort of thing happens all the time when I work in Mumbai.  My solution is to use a driver, then train him that the first stop is a beer store. After that the only question is - is this a 1, 2 or 3 beer drive back...

My last driver commented one night as I was drinking beer, smoking and jamming on some tunes that when I ride in his car it is a bar car, his other passengers use it as a mobile office.

One thing to consider folks. It is well known that fast food makes you fat. For a recent example look at Mexico. They drank so many soft drinks because they were cheap. An surprise surprise they were getting fat and developing diabetes! The government raised the price significantly and the consumption went down correspondingly. That is not a bad thing.

So if you make fast food expensive, less people will eat it and less people will get fat! I don't see that as a bad thing at all.

I have been getting an extension of stay for marriage at Jomtien office every year for at least 8 years. They have never once talked to the neighbors...

Up in my wife's village there is a 30-something farmer who, during the day, seems normal enough. He works as hard as any of them. But when it gets dark he starts drinking and begins speaking in an unknown language. He seems to really want to talk to me in particular, but he does it to everyone. Any reply you make is met with a knowing smile and more gibberish. The town folks say he has been like that for many years....

50 minutes ago, pgrahmm said:

 

 

All have been read the first time....If it's been awhile since getting to the bookstore I'll grab one for  second reading....

 

Right now on a David Baldacci....The Collectors.....

My wife has her's numbered/in order, & cataloged on shelves....

 

Mine live on the floor in the gym/karaoke room....

When I moved here I left over 5000 volumes - hard and soft backed - and now rely on the Kindle. I still have around 17,000 Kindle books to go through, that is about 50 years at my pace...

Just read all the Jack Reacher books (11 or 12 of them). Working on all of Harry Harrison's books - his Stainless Steel Rat series is great mind candy. Ian M Banks is the next in line, he is great. Always recommend Wilbur Smith - everything he wrote about Western-African interactions is gold! Dick Francis is another author on steeplechase racing detectives I could not live without! Gregory McGuire did a huge series on Oz, a must read!James Blish series on world space travel is worth a read or two. I have recently gone through the Game of Thrones series - twice - and it was worth it. All the classic sci-fi authors deserve a look, Asimov, Burroughs, Clark, Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard - those I have read at least twice. Steven R. Donaldson for more fantasy.  Andy McNabb or Vince Flynn for shootem-ups.  All Tom Clancy's novels on the Jack Ryan Series are great... I could go on and on. I travel a lot and try to read every day, I can usually get through 250-300 books a year, mostly mind candy since work is tough and I need a break... 

I think a better question for the poll would be - does your Thai partner play the lottery? I think the result would be closer to 100%

43 minutes ago, chrissables said:

You are criticizing the motorbike rider? Speed and helmet, when the pickup caused his death?

As in every country, a motorcycle has to be extra vigilant. This is no different from what the MSF (Motorcycle Safety Foundation sponsored by the AMA) taught us in every single class in the US. Does it really matter if the motorcyclist was not at fault?? He is quite dead RIP.

Anyone on a motorbike of any size in any country has to use extra caution, because cars always seem to appear in front of us.

I used to get the norbest from Makro mainly because they were newer. As another poster mentioned the butterballs available were years old and really not flavorful. As for being too fatty. I use the recipe below to brine them. It really brings out the flavor and makes it less noticeably fatty.

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/54614/turkey-brine/

That being said - I am not sure how I will find a turkey this year, but I sure will try. For the folks who said - just eat Thai food, I do that mostly but I sure like putting together a turkey feast on Thanksgiving (US and Canadian) for me and my friends. I cook most every day and enjoy food from different countries and regions.

If you are interested, try this stuffing recipe - I am not a stuffing fan but it was perfect.

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/215477/black-olive-mushroom-and-sausage-stuffing/

A few years ago we had a similar problem. The daughter of a neighbor did not like the neighborhood kids that my children played with. One day the daughter attempted/pretended to run the kids over with her motorbike. Well my wife was having none of that.

We immediately called our "friendly" policeman and told him the story. His recommendation was to "take the low cost option" which means calling someone to deal with the issue. First we located the farang husband of the woman who's daughter was the offender and located him in a local drinking establishment. Once we explained the story he said he would take care of it immediately. At the same time we called a thai friend who, although he is big, is very mild mannered.

The thai friend and the house owner showed up about the same time. We arrived back at the house to witness the mild mannered Thai man blocking the entire street with his minivan and yelling loud enough to hear it 100m away. The farang was loudly agreeing.

Minutes later the offending party arrived and wai'ed at my wife's feet.

It has never happened again. Peer pressure really works well in Thailand. The thing was, it happened once and the response was fast and hard, delivered by locals. Message received and problem solved.

Better stop selling low quality plastic goods which are broken in a few weeks time. I guess 80% of the garbage consists of plastic.

And why do those people from the pictures use those big black binbags? We re-use shoppingbags for garbage and keep them in a basket in the binhouse.

Thanks Thian now I know why they give me a 24 hour warranty on some things and 7 days on others. 30 days is a stretch and for TV's etc. a year. I always buy the extended warranty as I figure after 3 years I am close to break even. With the warranty if it quits after a year I save it from going into the trash by excersizing the warranty. I get 2 years out of a recliner if I am lucky its Thai or Chinese made. I think they give me 30 days on the basic chair and 6 months on the mechanism. Yes your right if they produced quality goods it would cut the garbage in half but then the price would go up drastically. Most things sold here seem to be built with a good idea of when it will expire literally. I am sure the rich corporations that produce these goods could care less if they break makes for more sales let the garbage be someone else's problem.

So true - over the last 11 years I have bought more office chairs than I care to remember, ranging from 3-18K baht. They always break and disintegrate before a year, one lasted only one day!

Finally got a Herman Miller Aeron with a 12 year warrantee. That will be the first chair (or anything but vehicles) I bought in thailand not ending up in a dump somewhere in a year.

Send me the recipe!

To stop the dog poop problem I had to install CCTV. Now I can prove exactly who's dog it is and if the owner is with it, (they like to walk the dog, let it poop and leave it) I just walk out of the house and stand there watching them.

I know the worst offenders and have spoken to them, most are apologetic and have since stopped. Only one continued to let his dog roam so I trained the dog myself. Whenever he came out I chased him on foot, on the bike and even in my car yelling "Go Home". he learned to high tail it right back.

Mine was 4500 baht this month, but I have 4 AC units, 2 fridges, 5 computers and a few TVs. Normally I don't run AC in my home office, but this has been pretty unbearable. I expect it to drop 1000 next month, but never more than that since the fridges and computers run 24/7.

Here is the deal about evaporative coolers. We called them swamp coolers. I lived in Arizona for a while (too long) and they are great when the relative humidity is low. In AZ the weather reporter would tell you the dew point, which is some magic relationship between the temp and the humidity level. Well around july every year, we had to shut them off and use AC. The reason was the amount of water in the air was more than the swamp cooler could overcome and they became ineffective, all they did then was raise the humidity and not lower the temp. I am pretty sure there is no day anywhere near the gulf or adaman sea that the humidity is low enough for these to have any effect.

Now if you are FAR from the gulf then during the dry season they might help, but they are not worth the money. In AZ if you ran them when the relative humidity was high, your carpets would just rot and the temp felt no different than a fan.

Either get a fan or get AC. Here these are a waste of money.

Once this did happen to me, the money was not "seasoned" long enough. The immigration officer knew me and sorted it out on the spot. I got my visa the day after depositing the money.

What makes me nervous in the OP is "I know very little about motorbikes". Commuting on a motorbike if you have not been riding for years in Thailand is a recipe for disaster. I had 30+ years experience and over 170,000km on big bikes before I came to Thailand and it was still harrowing for the first year or so.

That being said, the only thing I would suggest is a narrow body bike. The PCX is cute and all but it is definitely larger and will not fit in all the gaps a smaller bike can fit in. I love my Honda Wave 125i, it has plenty of power for a 100kg guy and can fit neatly in most tight spots. For fun I ride my Stallions 150, but it has no storage area and no helmet lock, so not a great commuting bike.

I had the 16Mbps 3BB service for a few years, but in the last couple months the line quality had degraded and they were unable to find the fault. So I just replaced it with 3BB FTTH 100/10 for 1200 a month. I run 4 computers, 4 phones, 3 ipads and 2 kindles and still can hit 125Mbps down and 12 up. Not only that it was delivered a day after I ordered it.

I think the OP has a point. I was dating this gorgeous, wealthy farang girl a while back. The first time we went out for a fine dinner, she ate just a few bites. I suggested we take it in a doggie bag. She said no, she never ate leftovers and threw it away. Then she ordered desert and threw half of that away.

That soured the relationship for me and I ended up calling it off. I come from a poor family and even though I had money at the time, I cannot just waste food.

If you speed check your connection with a server anywhere inside Thailand you get 30MBps or more most of the time, but doing the same with a server abroad like in the US or Europe or even Singapore you get sometimes up to 3-4 MBps and sometimes less than 1 MBps, so why anyone would need anything faster than 10 MBps is beyond my comprehension.

On the other hand if you complain with the ISP they will probably upgrade you international speed a bit (at least for a while until the next power outage erases their servers and they forgot all about you, then you have to call and complain again....). I read somewhere on TV a while ago about someone who complained about the international speed and they readily increased the speed just for him. But now I don't know with the one gateway.....

I am not sure that is necessarily a true statement. Below are two speedtest results to Dallas from here, one is my 16Mbps 3BB and the second is my 5Mbps ToT connection:

I usually have 4 machines running all the time, everyone of them streaming or downloading (kids gotta have their youtube and steam...)

Sounds similar to my usage back home (mentioned in the OP) with Netflix running in two rooms while Youtubing on various PCs/mobile devices, all happening on a measly 700 Kbps DSL. I still don't see where 30 Mbps is justified except some very unusual/demanding situations. Most of the extreme examples given in this thread will be saved by client-side buffering.

One thing I notice now when I pull down a Youtube video is how quickly the buffer fills on a 30 Mb connection. Great, but how does that help me? I'm paying more than I need to just to keep the buffers happy. On basic DSL I remember the actual download stream staying just ahead of the playback demand. As an end user I don't really care how much gets buffered as long as my experience is the same.

What I have seen is that if I am downloading using bittorrent and my son is playing Team Fortress and my daughter is watching youtube, the voice quality of my work VoIP is terrible on a 16Mbps connection and I have to switch my work machine to my backup 5Mbps connection. I am now trying to get the True FTTH at 50Mbps to fix that issue. Unfortunately True doesn't have fibre up my street yet, so I am trying to pull some strings to get that done.

You are correct though, it is 10% of the people that use 90% of the network bandwidth. I am in telecom and my product identifies those subs that don't need tons of bandwidth and design services with less bandwidth and less monthly data and sell it at a reduced price. Unfortunately no provider in Thailand has purchased my product yet, so they are not able to correctly identify those subs and therefore cannot sell reduced price services...

So because of the telcom's inability to detect user traffic - YOU are paying for me to download 100GB per month! Sorry man...

Just a note, my product is pretty cheap as Cisco products go, a few million bucks. Let all the telcoms know you want them to buy Cisco CPS and you can get cheap internet too.

I usually have 4 machines running all the time, everyone of them streaming or downloading (kids gotta have their youtube and steam...)

Sounds similar to my usage back home (mentioned in the OP) with Netflix running in two rooms while Youtubing on various PCs/mobile devices, all happening on a measly 700 Kbps DSL. I still don't see where 30 Mbps is justified except some very unusual/demanding situations. Most of the extreme examples given in this thread will be saved by client-side buffering.

One thing I notice now when I pull down a Youtube video is how quickly the buffer fills on a 30 Mb connection. Great, but how does that help me? I'm paying more than I need to just to keep the buffers happy. On basic DSL I remember the actual download stream staying just ahead of the playback demand. As an end user I don't really care how much gets buffered as long as my experience is the same.

What I have seen is that if I am downloading using bittorrent and my son is playing Team Fortress and my daughter is watching youtube, the voice quality of my work VoIP is terrible on a 16Mbps connection and I have to switch my work machine to my backup 5Mbps connection. I am now trying to get the True FTTH at 50Mbps to fix that issue. Unfortunately True doesn't have fibre up my street yet, so I am trying to pull some strings to get that done.

You are correct though, it is 10% of the people that use 90% of the network bandwidth. I am in telecom and my product identifies those subs that don't need tons of bandwidth and design services with less bandwidth and less monthly data and sell it at a reduced price. Unfortunately no provider in Thailand has purchased my product yet, so they are not able to correctly identify those subs and therefore cannot sell reduced price services...

Having Sinet 70/30 installed tomorrow which means HD Netflix, HD Youtube and Spotify at Extreme quality coupled with random downloading and web browsing at the same time shouldn't be an issue.

How often will you realistically be doing all of those things at the same time? Telcos love subscribers like you, who purchase premium service but use it barely 1% of the time.

Yes there are extreme users out there, but they are few and far between.

I usually have 4 machines running all the time, everyone of them streaming or downloading (kids gotta have their youtube and steam...)