Lannig

Interesting game but without something to hear the correct pronunciation it's not as fun and instructive.

I know I'm asking for a lot, but if you would consider adding audio like on another Thai language web site (and on Google Translate) yours would be the greatest one

All pre-paid SIMs have an expiration delay after your credit expires.

Every time you top it up, the expiration date of your credit is pushed back.

A certain time after this credit has expired, the SIM will be invalidated and the phone number recycled if not topped up.

It's my understanding that this certain time = 6 months for AIS.

Of course this does not mean that the SIM will be "put our for sale". SIMs have a unique identification number that is not reused. The SIM will become invalid because it will be dissociated from the phone number. And this phone number will be allocated to a new SIM.

Private aircrafts, aero-clubs and Thailand. A mix I would never, ever try.

OP - yes, you could. But no, you shouldn't. You might be anonymous to the end-point of your connection - but your employer, whilst they may not be able to see what you're doing, will at least be able to tell you're using a VPN to hide your actions from them. Which ought to be enough to cause them to ask you some very awkward questions. Wait until you get home.

How so? Most SSL VPNs route traffic over port 443 that is barely distinguishable from the browsing of regular https sites. Only the volume of data could cause alarms and in many companies there's nobody to closely look at this until it starts seriously impacting the usual traffic. If the OP manages to remain under the radar and don't download gigs per day, he'll likely be fine.

OK... enough for me. Bash him away, I don't care. I'm so sick of members of this forum trying to enforce their sets of morals on other people. Especially when there's so much discussion about things that the general people consider as more immoral than downloading a movie at work.

Cheers, I'm outta here.

The French government definitely doesn't pay for this on a general basis.

He might have been sent to Thailand by a company or even a government agency, and part of the deal might have been that the French international school is paid for. Such things do happen.

It's my understanding that if he's left the country before March 20th this year, he's not blacklisted since banning rules took effect on that date.

The biggest drawback to living in Thailand is accepting that we have all chosen to live in a culture / society where the human brain fails to develop past the mental age of around 14 years of age. Once you can accept this immaturity and playground mentality, living here is a piece of cake as everything has more rationale.

Quite true I'd say. Including the fact that one has to learn living with this and it sometimes is even fun.

However it only applies when one is here on vacation, retired or otherwise living on income from one's assets.

When you start working here, especially in a company, the said mentality and immaturity is an everyday's nightmare to get things done consistently.

Depends entirely on where you work. I have an outstanding Sr Staff and the reports below them are very good. All are well educated and perform as good if not better then many of the US people in the same roles. So Yes if you work for a pastry company or a coffee company I would likely agree but consider the source, the age and the education level. In fairness to some posters here Thailand does seem to shunt the older folks who are wiser and experienced and continue to higher younger inexperienced people. That has its own set of issues.

My comment was made based on my own experience working 3 years in a high-tech company which was part of a major Thai telecoms group.

My coworkers mostly were young graduates from the finest universities in Bangkok.

Very nice people to work with, very friendly and open, willing to work and with an excellent spirit, but most of them terribly immature, inconsistent and very, very difficult to rely on. Unable to grasp the concept of production-grade IT. Many where considering the company's servers and network as a playground. "Mental age 14 years of age" might be a bit tough, but certainly not much over 16. For people in their late 20s or early 30s, that's an issue.

No pastry company of coffee company, then.

I think that we can assume that the OP is a grown-up and fully realizes the consequences of his actions.

The fact that he precisely wants to use a VPN to download stuff makes me think he does.

He probably doesn't care what either of us would do if we were his sysadmin or boss, and rightly so.

Granted, I don't use taxis that much as I usually drive myself. However I've never had any really bad experience with Thai taxis, besides the occasional bad driver or guy so obviously exhausted that he could fall asleep any time.

And I really do like chatting with them. Most of them are friendly and very curious to know more about me (and no, I'm not only thinking of the 2 or 3 same questions asked all the time)

Talking politics with taxi drivers is an interesting experience too, it's fun especially for hearing them talking trash of the junta.

Pattaya's not Thailand anyway. If you choose to live there and not get out of town much, then it's already a choice of not knowing much about Thailand.

I'm not being judgemental here. It's a respectable choice.

I really don't think one needs to make much efforts towards understanding the Thai culture and more generally way of life if living in Pattaya.

Good or bad? I don't care, but probably not even needed IMO.

I'd certainly miss:

- the people I love there, of course

- the joyful and open people I have at my place, always willing to chat and have fun together

- the morning kouitieow, the best thing to eat for a brunch

- more generally, the Thai food with all its variety (and its being so cheap and easy to find anywhere)

- the 7/11's (try go buying something on a Sunday afternoon in Europe)

- the beaches with lukewarm waters you can swim in for hours

- the fun and incredibly cheap clothing sold everywhere in markets (doesn't last long but who cares at that price?)

- Zeer Rangsit, Panthip and these places that are a giant toy shop for geeks like me (and cheap too!)

Actually I do miss all of this since I'm not an expat anymore and only come a few times per year.

Highly unlikely, since Thailand has one of the world,s worst educational systems, spewing out graduates who know absolutely nothing ! With their xenophobic policies aimed at preventing better educated people to compete in the job market, I see the only direction as being downhill

Correct, except they won't have much of a choice now with ASEAN. The xenophobic policies won't be there anymore to isolate them from competition.

That's going to be a growing concern to them, especially the abysmal control of the English language from the said graduates.

Whom do you think you are to lecture the guy like this?

I'm a sysadmin too, I would much object to people doing this where I work, but what the OP does is his business and not ours. He's not an employee of either of our businesses. Why should we care? we don't even know what their policies are.

And that was not his question anyway.

To the OP: generally speaking, yes, if you use a VPN the source IP will be seen as coming from your VPN operator wherever you connect from.

However if you're doing this from a computer at work, especially if it's joined to a company's Active Directory, local policies might well defeat the VPN client, so I'd be cautious.

If that's your own private computer hooked to the company's network without any further integration, then I'd say that the VPN will probably work as intended. Always browse to a "show my IP" site (Google for it) before doing anything to make sure that the displayed IP is not your company's.

Note that you might well be unable to establish the VPN connection due to network filtering at the border...

71 yeals old? He looking good

How do you know it's him... no-one is pointing.

Aaaahhh that's why, the pointing thing. Otherwise one can't figure it out from the people on the picture indeed

Oh yes, that's quite obvious from the weather in Thailand since this March indeed

The biggest drawback to living in Thailand is accepting that we have all chosen to live in a culture / society where the human brain fails to develop past the mental age of around 14 years of age. Once you can accept this immaturity and playground mentality, living here is a piece of cake as everything has more rationale.

Quite true I'd say. Including the fact that one has to learn living with this and it sometimes is even fun.

However it only applies when one is here on vacation, retired or otherwise living on income from one's assets.

When you start working here, especially in a company, the said mentality and immaturity is an everyday's nightmare to get things done consistently.

(...)

Sad. One less Gorilla, one more naked ape to trash the environment and buy an iPhone.

(...)

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Priceless

How is asking for the father to post pictures of his daughter not creepy? especially when the purpose clearly is to evaluate how likely she is to be assaulted by a taxi driver based on her sex-appeal?

More creepy than this isn't easy.

I hereby claim to be unrelated to this harassment!

(hint: see my avatar)

@Taotoo: Googling "Google ecosystem" gives the exact vague, changing and mostly meaningless definitions that I expected. Tell us what it means exactly for you beyond using Google Mail, Contacts and Calendar (which can all be used transparently from Windows Phone)

Things like being able to save a Gmail attachment to Drive. Or have a date/time in a Gmail message cause an event to automatically show up in Google Now. etc. etc

I see. Then I am not in the "Google Ecosystem" I guess. I use more basic things.

@TallGuyJohninBKK : thanks for the informative post.

Side note: I'm kind of a compulsive buyer of (low-cost only, fortunately!) smartphones and tablets and I have three Windows-based phones: a Lumia 535 and two Archos Cesium (40 and 50). They probably are at the very top in terms of performance+stability/price of my whole little collection. They offer significantly more than my Androids in the same price range.

And I'm known to be a Windows basher and old geekish Unix/Linux apologist. As much as I dislike Win 8.1/10 on a desktop, as much as I like it on a smartphone. If only it had a decent app store...

I'm no doctor but I've had someting that looks really this several times: Chalazion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalazion

The fact that they advise hot compresses comforts me in the idea because that's what the doctor told me to use . To quote the Wikepedia page, it softens the hardened oil that is occluding the duct.

It tends to recur over and over, unfortunately.

+1

A lot of very well dressed up cheap Chinese phones on sale that really, really look like genuine Samsung products up to the deepest in the menus (Android version and build strings etc.)

I know a few people who got caught although they really thought they knew better...

Prices for 1st tier brands vary remarkably little from one shop to another. If you find what looks like a real bargain, be cautious.

Most MS-Windows XP specific software will run with MS-Windows 95...

Sorry but that's utter nonsense. The opposite is only partially true, but in this direction it's definitely wrong.

Windows 95 has large parts still running in 16-bit code, uses DOS as a bootloader and still uses quite a few of its system calls.

Windows XP is full 32-bit, based on NT and has a much more extensive Win32 API used by applications.

Windows 95 uses ISO and other single-byte character sets, applications developed for Windows XP use Unicode (mutlibyte).

The driver model is 100% different, WDF/WDM in XP vs. VxD in Windows 95, although WDM made a partial debut in Windows 98.

I could go on for a while... There's just no backwards compatibility.

OK, enough drifting from the subject as far as I'm concerned. I'm off.

The Android API run-time translator/emulator (whatever that's called, forgot its name) does exist and works fairly well, according to several different trustable sources. The project has been put aside purely as a marketing decision.

Will MS eventually see the light and release it? I have serious doubts.

@Taotoo: Googling "Google ecosystem" gives the exact vague, changing and mostly meaningless definitions that I expected. Tell us what it means exactly for you beyond using Google Mail, Contacts and Calendar (which can all be used transparently from Windows Phone)

Wow. I pay 60B in my Nakhon Nowhere. Air conditioned shop.