msg362

I bought a Canon HF100 last April. Really pleased. I use 16Mb ( class 6) SD cards and they will give 2 hours of HD and more at lower definitions. I think Canon have revamped the line up. One problem I bought mine in the UK and I've not seen them here. There I paid £450 ( at the tim about 22,500 Baht) they were advertised in Photo bug, but not available at 45,000 Baht.

I friend of mine has just bought a Panasonic. The difference seems to be in the type of sensor, Panasonic use CCDs and Canon use CMOS. don't ask me to explain!

neither will be brilliant in very low light. Look out for the wide angle. The standard Canon is not very wide, about 40 mm I bought a 0.75 converter which I use a lot.

Best of luck, PM me if you want to know more

I assume you mean 16 Gig SD cards? --- lighting isn't an issue and I don't need HD. I need an automatic switch for light (mostly will be shot under fluorescent).

A regular camera won't be adequate.

SORRY YES 16 GB!!!!!! My Canon has 'Auto white balance' which works well under fluorescent lighting but also has a way of setting it manually. You point the camera a a white card under the lighting conditions and the camera remembers that this is white. Normally I don't need to use it. You can set the camera to lower definitions and get longer time on the card. you might not need such an expensive camcorder, a standard Canon / Panasonic might be enough. I avoid Sony because, although they make great cameras, they have a habit of fixing things so that it is difficult to interchange. For example they use their own cards, which are more expensive than others etc.

I bought a Canon HF100 last April. Really pleased. I use 16Mb ( class 6) SD cards and they will give 2 hours of HD and more at lower definitions. I think Canon have revamped the line up. One problem I bought mine in the UK and I've not seen them here. There I paid £450 ( at the tim about 22,500 Baht) they were advertised in Photo bug, but not available at 45,000 Baht.

I friend of mine has just bought a Panasonic. The difference seems to be in the type of sensor, Panasonic use CCDs and Canon use CMOS. don't ask me to explain!

neither will be brilliant in very low light. Look out for the wide angle. The standard Canon is not very wide, about 40 mm I bought a 0.75 converter which I use a lot.

Best of luck, PM me if you want to know more

I went to AUA and got the most awful teacher, several other people seemed to get her tooCC The very structured teaching book is about 20 years old.

I go to the Thai Language Centre, on the same Ratchadamnoern road towards Wat Pra singh. It's a yellow building that does tours and great coffee.

If you are only here for a short while, they will try to adapt to your needs. I like it, it's fun and I am making progress

Hi - actually thats interesting as their name hasn't come up before in previous threads (as far as I can see) can you give examples of costs? group and individual rates? looks like this thread is useful after all

One on One is 250Baht/hour.They run 3 week group classes which of course are cheaper which might be right for you, it depends on your timing. I'm assuming you want conversational style Thai and don't yet want to learn to read.

I tried Payap ,but you have to learn to read Thai there.

Suggest you look them up on the net. They are a small family run organisation who worked with the US Peace Corps some time ago. Very friendly, good coffee and reasonably priced food too!

Whatever you do, best of luck, learning Thai makes such a difference to your experience here.

This has been covered loads of times - trust me... yawn

Get off your "I have been here longer than you" High horse. This forum is about helping others.

I have not tried it, but others that I know have. They endorse the YMCA.

Hope it works for you if you try it.

hey thanks Khun 43 posts over two years - your contributions have been invaluable... and helped many I'm sure

we have been through the YMCA's, talktalk, CMU, AUA avenues many times - people tend to (if they want group learning) to choose between YMCA and AUA - now where's my horse parked?

I went to AUA and got the most awful teacher, several other people seemed to get her tooCC The very structured teaching book is about 20 years old.

I go to the Thai Language Centre, on the same Ratchadamnoern road towards Wat Pra singh. It's a yellow building that does tours and great coffee.

If you are only here for a short while, they will try to adapt to your needs. I like it, it's fun and I am making progress

I can't see how to edit my advert and I can't put a new one in HELP!

Like magic. Make a thread about it and it works ten minutes later

I'm not on drugs and I am very computer literate. I swear on my mother for the last two days it was re-directing to the cybercops page. Tried it five minutes ago. Just now it worked LOL

THEY ARE WATCHING

A similar issue yesterday, blocking a site to an innocent bike site in the UK ( Trek UK) ,made a thread then when I tried an hour or two later it was miraculously working fine. TOT CM

May be a bit of help, although different circumstances

I'm married with the fancy pretty marriage certificate to a Thai girl. We are going in April first to France, then Switzerland ( Schengen),back to France, then Chile, back to France and then back to LOS.

Because we are married she got a multientry Schengen valid for 3 months ( That's all we asked for) for free ( except for the 2300baht we had to pay to the UK consul for the letter saying they recognised the marriage!!!!)

So for you I suspect, you will have to pay for a mulitentry Schengen from the Belgian embassy valid for 6 months ( about 60 euros?). Can't help with Bulgaria, is it not part of Schengen yet?

You'll need the same sort of paperwork that is needed for the UK. Tickets, first place to stay, maybe insurance, etc etc

I got my son to send an upgrade Win 7 Home Premium from VISTA disc that I bought from Amazon and had posted to his house. He then sent it on. Cost me about £65 from Amazon and about £5 postage. He emailed me the activation code but also sent it as a precaution. I had to wait for the disc as ,unless you buy the upgrade directly from Microsoft there seems to be no way of downloading it.

All worked fine, took about 3 hours to upgrade, had to load HP drivers yet again but otherwise fine. No problems with a UK version in Thailand so far ( 2 months)

Good luck If you can wait the extra week or so to get the copy from the UK it's the way to go. A real version, and you have the disc.

1: use your spelling checker please (or perhaps has to do with FF problem, see #2)

2: Firefox: open 'reply' etc, and click on the button with two blue arrows upper right of the message window.

3: Mict is the Thai cybercops warning page that you get when of a censored site, what is the URL to the site where you got it, perhaps there where nud_e girls sitting on the bikes ?

This is the URL http://www.trekbikes.com/uk/en/bikes/road/fx/73fx/ and seems to be working fine now OK TiT!

Thanks for the advice about editing, seems to be fine to. I'm a happy bunny and just hope I get behind that behind when I get my new bike!

I am thinking of buying a new bike, I look up 'Bikes UK on Google and get the Trek website OK Then I try to look at a sepcific site and it gets diverted to 'W3 mict.go.th' and stops Why is the government interested in me looking up about bikes? If I use a vpn I get through with no problem

STILL CANNOT EDIT USING FIRSEFOX 3.6 HOW DO I DO IT?

I CAN'T EDIT TIHS, SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THAI VISA SO EXCUSE THE MISTAKES! Try Black VPN I use in in Sanlamphaeng with TOT 4 Mb, no problems To ship. try Seven Sea I shipped with them. They give you boxes to pack ( in the UK) and ship by sea or, more expensively, by air. I got them to deliver to Chiang Mai, more xpensive, but they did the cusroms clearance and I did not pay duty. Used them twice, reliable

I am just back from a saturday morning in 'Robinson' ( Aiport Plaza) and just added a noise meter to my Android phone.

I always knew the noise levels were very high there but i was applaed.

Sitting having coffe by the iStudio stand was 95dB further down ,where there was a promotion of CDMA things and loudspeakers were operating, it was 110dB at 2 metres from the loundspeaker. The pretty girls in short dresses were exposed to 95 dB

I ued to deal with this is the UK

The current noise level for work is 85dB, sinc it is a logarithmic scale, every 10 dB means a 10 fold increase. The girls were 10 times over the Uk limit and by the loudspeakers it was over 100 times over the limit. This means that is it is 'OK' to be exposed to 85dB for 8 hours, you can only work for 1/10 of this at 95 i.e 48 minutes and near the loudspeakers, less than 5 minutes!

Even sitting having coffee should not be for more than .say. 1 hour.

Can anything be done?

PS MY 'SCORE' HAS SAT A 47 FOR A LONG TIME NOW WHAT IS HAPPENING?

Right...so I'm crossing the 'Honda Phantom Ta200' off my list then.

Buy a Kawa Boss ,cheaper and better!

I have two expensive Nikon lenses worth about £1000 in total. They are mine, used but without UK receipts. I want to post/ courier them back to my son in the UK, I am registered at that address

How do I avoid having to pay duty/ VAT on them when they arrive? I will be in France in April, can I send them from there, i.e. inside Europe, without a problem?

any help appreciated

If you head to Samoeng, about 4-5Km before you get there there is a strawberry 'pick your own' on the right. The sign is in Thai unfortunately. It's down on the 'plain', the flat bit after the last twisty descent.

Chock diii!

Try east, around San Kamphaeng, a really nice town 20 Km out ( 20 min to the airport) mountains, rural quiet yet accessible.

Hi,

Good and recent news.

My wife and I are going to Paris in April. If you are a EU citizen ( they include the UK in this!!) can PROVE a UK legally recognised marriage then your wife will be issued with a Schengen visa from the French Embassy FREE! and it will last until 6 months before the expiry of her passport.

Proving a legal marriage is difficult. Although the UK government recognises ours, I had to get a letter from the UK consulate here in Chiang Mai ( 2088 Baht!!), a translation of our Thai certificate into nglish and a copy of the pretty Thai marriage certificate. I am told that is OK. it is in process now.

The French Consul talked about certificate from the UK embassy in BKK with a Red seal, I've no idea what that is.

If you cannot do that, you can apply for a normal Schengen visa, 6 months validity I think, costs 60 euros. Because your wife will have a UK visa there will not be a problem, but you will need the same documentation that you need for a UK visa: tickets, finances, where you will stay etc. Thankfully the French form is only one page long !

The whole process takes about 3 weeks.

So advice is- get your wife a UK visa first then apply for a married persons visa.

good luck

If you need more, feel free to PM me

Cheers

M

Thanks for this. I contacted my VPN ( Lamnia) and they suggested installing 'Pearport VPN (www.pearworks.com/pages/software.html) This is supposed to automatically reconnect you if the line drops. I'll try it out for a few days and report back. I've had the problem for several months and if this works I'll be over the moon (Oops it's almost a black moon tonight!!)

I'm not an expert on internet connections so I really would appreciate some help.

I have a TOT 4 Mb/.5Mb connection which normally runs at 3.2/0.4 Mb in Thailand and of course slower overseas. I use a VPN to connect to BBC iPlayer to download BBC programmes. what seem to happen very requently is that the connection breaks and I get ' PPP Server not responding'. This happens with two different VPNs, one using LPT2 and one using ??? PPP??? It happens very frequently around 8.00 am to 9.00 am ,less frequently at other times normally. ( Yesterday it cut out about 5 times around 3.00 pm). I therefore suspect it is a TOT problem

I have no idea what to do, if anything. Is there some way I can trace the problem? if I find it what are the chances of getting it fixed?

Thanks

Mike

Several years ago , the security at domestic departure said, as it wasn't sealed by King Power in their special bags they would confiscate it!!!! A good bottle of Malt!!! ( Do I detect a rip off??)

I simply took my hand luggage back and checked it in. At CM I had luggage at international and domestic but the security guard let me back into the domestic luggage section with no problem!

Several years ago I flew back to Britain without a reentry permit. On my return, I had to start with ,1st a tourist visa to get me back in to Thailand, then converted it to a 90 day ??? non 0?? at the end of that I went back to a sort of retirement based visa I think it's called 'extension of stay based on retirement' I really don't understand the difference between that and a retirement visa, in practice they are the same.

The point is all this was done in Chiang Mai immigration without having to leave the country.

For the last several years, I simply renew my visa at CM in the same way I would have done originally, with 800,000 Bt in the bank for 3 months.

Hope this helps

Does anyone have a clue when workable 3G service will be available in Bangkok, and in major cities in the south?

It's in a limited area around Chiang Mai already, has been for some time. I have a 'dongle' and get reasonably fast ( 3 Mb) downloads on my laptop from AIS. 3G phones ( iPhone etc) will work within a limited range. It's a;so avai;able in a limited area down south, but since I can't read Thai I can't say where it is!, it's by the sea somewhere! Ask AIS

I will be giving my Thai partner funds to buy a piece of vacant land. I would like to find a lawyer in Chiang Mai to assist with drafting a usufruct agreement and dealing with the land department to help insure I can continue to have use of the property in the event we have a falling out.

If anyone can recommend a lawyer that is honest and competent in these matters and charges a fair fee, I would very much appreciate it.

Thank you.

Hi,

I've used a guy called Tom, he's Thai, speaks excellent English and has done this sort of work for me and has produced a will. Last mobile I have is 085031789.

If you were in Scotland you would be drinking Grouse. Another good whiskey is Dewars and a big bottle of Ballantines goes for a song in Thailand, and I have always thought someone here doesn't realise the quality of Ballantine whiskey.

Johnny Walker Red is firewater....just my opinion as an expat Scot.

As an Expat Scot you should know 'WhiskEy' is Irish ( Japanese. American and all the others I think), 'whisky' is Scottish. As one guy says later diluting it with coke? that's a crime,,especially with the better whiskys. I've been trying to educate Thais into drinking water with their whisky, no luck, just lots of soda and ice. ( BTW the spell check is trying to make me spell whisky the american way!)

Hi,

Not an expert, but understand a little. I've got Lamnia VPN to a UK server on an iMac/ firefox to get iPlayer downloads via a TOT 4 Mb line in Sankamphaeng. It uses a 'LPT2' connection whatever that is. I've got used to the appallingly slow download speeds,but the real problem is that I keep getting a message 'the PPP server is not responding'. This seems to happen very frequently around 7-9 am and then laterin the afternoon. I try to download overnight as the speeds are faster but still most mornings I find that the line has disconnected.

Lamnia think this is a problem with TOT.

I really do not understand 'PPP' 'LPT2' etc.

Can anyone explain/ help in simple English? I suspect there is not going to be an answer until TOT pulls it's socks up ( ? next century?

Thanks in advance