Richb2004v2

What is with Thais abandoning their daily activities in order to get the lottery results? This seems to happen all over. I used to go to a gym that was closed on the days the lottery was drawn. I couldn't understand why he couldn't just get the results and stay open. Maybe he was so sure he was going to win that he couldn't see the point. The other day we went to a market that was unusually quite. My wife said it's because it's lottery day, everyone stays home. It seems like strange behavior, again.

I can find almost nothing positive about Thailand anymore.

There are plenty of good people and good things here.

Like what? Really.

I'm one of the realists mentioned above. Every time I head back to Thailand I tell myself that I will not let it get me down but it does. I can find almost nothing positive about Thailand anymore. I feel sorry for my wife because I complain way to much.

Someone once in the UK done a survey on a bowl of peanuts that were on the bar in a pub and found that they contained, I think it was 7 different strains of urine. So I'm told.

jb1

I've a feeling that is an urban myth.

The main problem is that thai doctors prescribe antibiotics for every kind of desease. If desease is a virus, antibiotic is useless and using antibiotics everytime just makes bacterias stronger

Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is very hard to get rid of. A so called CRP test, very seldom made in Thailand's hospitals, will show through a blood test, normally ranging from 0.0 to 0.8.

Staphylococcus aureus should not be difficult to eliminate with Methacilin. It is the Methacilin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) which is the problem, not the normal variety which exists in numerous none problematic forms, and is certainly nothing new. However another antiboitic is now used, the name of which I can't remember, I think ventacilin or similar. This does destroy the MRSA.

I remember having just ordered food in a place when I went to the toilet to see the chef (I think) come out of a cubical and leave without washing his hands. I told my wife and she refused to eat any of the food served. We should have complained, but hey this is Thailand.

LA is huge...have you narrowed down where you will live? I lived in SoCal for 20 years (downtown, Manhattan Beach, Newport Beach, San Diego). Miss it terribly...and also don't. Traffic is horrible, weather is great, air can be so/so. If you are lucky and don't have to commute, fantastic!

There is so much to do in California. Fantastic parks (Yosemite, Sequoia, Redwoods, Joshua). Great cities (Santa Barbara, San Diego, San Fran, Monterey). Fantastic beaches. Thailand has nothing like them...a few in Phuket, but that's it. Be sure to visit the human zoo in Venice. More bikinis than you can ever imagine. I lived right on the beach for years...walked out my sliding door and stepped on the sand. Great stuff.

You will not be bored. Eat some great mexican food, enjoy the outdoors, get out and visit Idyllwild or Big Bear. Palm Springs and take the trap to the mountains. Concerts, festivals...Just too much to do.

Cheap eats are tough to come by. Nothing like what we have here. But as you mention, some things will be much cheaper. Steak and wine!!!!!

I prefer being closer to the beaches as opposed to inland. People pack the boardwalks day and night. Great bars, though drinks are not cheap.

Have a blast and enjoy it while you can.

That's the way we saw it. I'm sure there are rough spots but I doubt you just automatically get shot for walking in them. Some folk love to sensationalize. And if you do then just don't go down that street.

As for touching kids, I don't particularly want strangers touching my kids. Who does?

You will be able to walk along the pavements/side walks without obstructions.

You will be able to drive with other right minded folk.

You will be amazed at what a beach that isn't littered with sh*te will look like.

The restaurant food will be more expensive, but you will be served what you actually ordered and there will be no mangey dogs licking their balls in the kitchen.

Even if you are over 40 you can find a women. People do it all the time. You may however find it a little more difficult to find a teenage hottie to attach to your arm.

On my short visit to California I found it to be a great place. Returning to the chaos and mess of Thailand was quite depressing. My Thai wife agreed.

Yes, I don't know how many times I have to tell people to take the fully prescribed cure and not stop after 2-3 days...

Overprescription combined with very little awareness or education concerning the use of antibiotics means that any antibiotic made available to the Thai medical fraternity has it's effective days numbered, and sadly I doubt this problem is confined only to Thailand.

Sadly it's not; in the UK we have MSRA the first of the superbugs, which if memory serves me right, several hospital outbreaks have resulted in whole hospital becoming quarantined [no visitors, and only emergence treatment], until they could control the outbreak.

Doctors have been warning of this for years. I wouldn't be so harsh as to point the accusing finger directly at doctors, although some of the less ..ahem.. professionally driven, do give out antibiotics like sweets. The old 'raan yaa' or chemist needs to take a large percentage of the blame. Many of these places sell antibiotics with only cursory instructions on how to use them. once after meals if your lucky is the best you'll probably get. Let along strict instructions to complete the whole course. Chemists should be where you get your lemsip, paracetamol and condoms, not where you get over the counter antibiotics, (unless you have a prescription of course)

The MRSA thing was in part blown out of all proportion by the British media. Although the instances are high they are nothing like as bad as the media like to portray. MRSA is not totally resistant to antibiotics. VRSA is another story and is one step on again.

I saw a pig on TV tonight that no back legs.

I think I will try Windows 7 as the driver disk does say 'for Windows 7' in it. The problem then is that my Netbook isn't really powerful enough to run 7. I remember now the reasons I switched to Linux!

I am running Windows 7 on my MSI Wind U100 netbook with no problems. You do need at least 2GB of memory to get reasonable performance though. I find the performance, if sufficient memory, running Win7 on the netbook better then with XP - Linux somewhat better still.

Have you looked at using virtual machine (such as VirtualBox or VMWare) under Linux or Wine to run your needed Windows applications?

My Samsung has only 1Gb Ram. I have now installed Windows 7 and seem to be in an even worse position. In Windows 7 the DVD drive is not even recognized and even though I am hard wired to the net there is no driver to connect! Even the mouse does not work on Windows 7! I don't know where to go from here other than take it and leave it at the IT shop for him to sort, which is not what I wanted to have to do.

Prior to my attempt to install XP yesterday I had Ubuntu netbook running brilliantly. Everything was working, other than my brightness adjustment, and it was all so easy to set up. I did install Wine but couldn't figure how to use it. Also I assumed that because I couldn't fathom XP in the normal fashion I would have the same issues under Wine anyway.

I can't believe that this should be so hard to do. I can only assume it is because I have a copy version rather than an original.

The Thai IT tech came around today. He got the install started. He seemed to do exactly the same as me except I think he might have done something in the BIOS. He speaks very little English and I speak very little Thai so I don't know if he did. Anyway the installed as per normal. The problem is that there are many drivers missing now. Even though I have the Samsung driver disk it's not having it at all.Using the 'Add Hardware' option it seems to see the devices but fails to load. I think I will try Windows 7 as the driver disk does say 'for Windows 7' in it. The problem then is that my Netbook isn't really powerful enough to run 7. I remember now the reasons I switched to Linux!

I'm 3km outside Ban Chang in Neang Krapok, heading towards Map Ta Phut.

The trouble you are having I think is down to the boot selector in the BIOS. This tells the computer where to look for the operating system. You need to go into the BIOS menu as you boot up the computer and change the boot sector to look in your DVD drive first. You entr this menu by pressing escape or delete or another key depending on your computer. It normally flashes which key to press on boot. Exit and save changes then re boot your computer making sure the installation DVD is in the drive. Once the DVD has loaded you then need to change the boot sector back to your C drive. It will then install windows and all you need to do is simply follow the on screen instructions which are fairly idiot proof

Thanks for the help. I have the machine already set to boot from the DVD drive and the USB, which is how I use my bootable Linux pendrive and try out Live CDs. I actually got to the point of the Windows installer asking me to select the portion of the hard drive to use. It looked like all was well but after the install had seemingly finished the system was useless. When I restarted expecting to have XP I was asked to do a repair which then did not work. I ended up with no OS at all. I retried several Windows disks to do a further install but could achieve nothing. At that point I reinstalled a Linux OS which is extremely simple to do. However I really need XP or Windows 7 for a few things. I'm taking it to an IT guy and will stay while he does the job.

Thanks anyway.

Do people really think like that? Interesting.

Thanks for that. I remember those screens from previous successful attempts to reinstall a long time ago. Those screen do not appear on recent attempts. Maybe the 'back up' disks I have that are also full of other things are not helping the process.

I find conversion to any religion to be quite pathetic, especially when someone moves to an obviously less developed country and takes to their beliefs. As if the evidence of the flaws in their system isn't an indicator. Amulet wearers I find particularly ridiculous.

I'm looking for someone in Ban Chang to help me out with a simple PC issue. I need to know how to install Windows Xp or 7 on my laptop. I play around with Linux which sometimes leads me to need to do a fresh install of Xp. I have bought the disks locally but can never seem to get it to work. It is easy to take it to a local IT center and have them do it but I should really be able to do it myself. I followed the simple instructions on the disk this time but at the end my machine was doing nothing at all. It's driving my mad! Any help appreciated.

what's your wireless chipset?

(just in case you don't know

$ lspci | grep Network

should tell you)

05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)

Firefox definitely works on the neighbors signal but not my own. I can only think it's because my signal is weak or a poor connection. It seems strange that Chrome works fine though.

you, Sir, are a lucky man! the troubles you're having with this chipset will soon be history as Broadcom released opensource driver for it. it has already been merged in linus' tree (although in staging, the code still needs some work) http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=tree;f=drivers/staging/brcm80211;h=f49827a622f8e6d42ceabce11c7742e36a0d129c;hb=HEAD

expect them in .37 kernel release! if you dont want to wait, you can get them from compat-wireless as well...

I have gone back to playing around and indeed the Broadcom fix is now implemented and works well on most Distros. It didn't seem to appear on Fedora for some reason but it no problem since I've never used it before anyway, and was only taking the opportunity to try different options. It seems this particular Samsung Netbook has one or two hardware issues that make it slightly less Linux friendly than my previous machine. I now need to solve a brightness adjustment issue. Thanks anyway.

A minor clitch I've found is that when I connect to my wi-fi signal Firefox does not work, but Chrome does. When I connect to a neighbors signal both work. It's not a big deal though as I will simply switch to using Chrome.

Hmm is it "Files - Work offline" that is enabled in Firefox?

but then it should fail with the neighbors network as well. this issue deserves a weirdness award of the month....

probably ipv6. type about:config into your firefox addressbar, ignore the warning, put ipv in the filter box at the top, and double-click network.dns.disableIPv6 to change the value to true. close firefox and restart, i am betting that will do it.

k

I've just been playing/disrupting my system again and have had the continuing problem with Firefox. After rereading this thread I have found that your solution does the trick. Thanks so much. Sorry it took me so long to try it. One problem ticked off.

I wonder if I could make it if I just went on and lit my own farts? Probably.

It seems customary here to go in the tradesmen entrance. I am of course talking about entering shopping malls. Sharing the entrance with people offloading goods can not be the best way to do things.

How does Thailand manage to find so many unfortunately deformed and afflicted people to put on their late night TV shows??! There seems to be no end of the poor creatures to interview and probe. Over the last few nights I've seen a teenage girl that was really a boy, a man with the strangest eye defect I've ever seen, a baby with a horrific skin complaint and a child with terrible burns. My wife can't get enough of it. If someone were to bring a circus of freaks here they would be superstars over night! I suppose I should be thankful that the interviews don't include the boing noises.

What would Mohammed do? I think he would like the speakers. He was the last prophet of god, so surely that counts for something.

Well, except Joseph Smith of course.

I use a CDMA system in North Africa. I will try it when I get back there. I will be over the moon if it works.

Thanks.

I have an i-pod and would like to listen to it in the car. I used to have a Griffin FM transmitter but lost it. I wonder if the cheap FM transmitters that plug into the cigarette liter will work. They seem like a cheap alternative, but I dare not try it in case it some how corrupts my i-pod library.

Thanks.