Upcountry

The biggest problem I've found is getting electricians to take grounding seriously, assuming they even understand what it is.

It's been a struggle getting the third wire installed properly in our house, connected to a good meter-long spike in the ground.

I remember seeing three prong outlets (as pictured above) installed in an apartment building in BKK that was undergoing illegal renovation. At first I thought that it was a good thing, but then I noticed that only two wires were trailing up the wall, so the ground socket was just for convenience.

Looking at that utorrent thing but it's pretty hard to figure out what to do.

Hm, yes, it's not like searching in Kazaa, or whatever. Firewall/port issues would apply just as they do for any program that accesses the Internet with a port number.

If you do a web search for something like "torrent <whatever you seek> flac", you will hopefully get at least one good match. Once you download the .torrent file, you can open it in the torrent app, and the app should start downloading it if there any sources. Try to find .torrents that have active sources.

It's not as convenient as searching for mp3's in Kazaa, but, like I said, a flac file sounds much better than an mp3. If a CD audio file is turned into a FLAC file, it'll sound just as good (expanded on the fly like MP3, or converted back to AIFF). Higher bit-rate files (24 bit, 32 bit) can be saved in FLAC and played back as FLAC or re-expanded to AIFF, wav, etc..

I really hope that iTunes, Napster, etc., realize that people are more likely to want to spend money on higher quality non-DRM files. But then, I'd probably empty my wallet faster than I should!

Until commercial sites start offering music in FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) files instead of lossy MP3's, I suggest using a torrent app like uTorrent or Azureus and search for torrent .flac files of the music you want. It's not as easy as finding MP3's but there is a lot out there and it's better quality. You can easily convert FLAC to CD audio and vice versa.

Lossy MP3's are to CD's and FLAC, etc., as cassettes are to LP's. Would you have bought cassettes from iTunes just because that's all they offered?

Although "VHS" usually wins out over quality for most people, I think there is a good chance that the future will bring cheap storage and media (Blue Ray data capacity or more) that will make high-quality sound files easy to provide. Even CD's will seem like '78's to folks in a few years.

It's good that companies are dropping DRM. Since they are doing so, that's one less hurdle to providing FLAC versions of their products.

... and it sucks that Napster and others are filtering their customers by IP.

OP, Maybe a friend in the US can help you buy the digital music. They could then send it to you.

As for Bendix, well, the two of us were having a good laugh at, or rather WITH this beggar the other day. I told my driver to stop the chariot (that's what I call my imported 1940s Citroen, brought in direct from germany after the war, used by the SS supposedly, i think that means it is lucky, I like the letter S, and with this car the embroidery gives me 2 of them!) and we decided to see how the other half live.

There was once a snail who was sick and tired of his reputation for being so slow.

He decided to get some fast wheels to make up the difference. After shopping around a while, he decided that the Datson 240-Z

was the car to get. So the snail went to the nearest Datsun dealer and asked to buy the 240-Z.

The salesman was taken back by the snail wanting to buy a car. But before he could recover from that, the snail said,

I want it repainted and re-badged to be "240-S".

The dealer asked, "Why 'S'?"

The snail replied, "'S' stands for snail. I want everybody who sees me roaring past to know who's driving."

Well, the dealer didn't want to lose the unique opportunity to sell a car to a snail, so he agreed to have the car repainted for a small fee.

The snail got his new car and spent the rest of his days roaring happily down the highway at top speed. And whenever anyone would see him zooming by, they'd say ...

"Wow! Look at that S-car go!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_advertising

The OP could be a UBC employee!

I remember reading in "Culture Shock Thailand" about this. If you trip over something nasty on the sidewalk and hurt yourself, the Thais who see you may laugh and giggle. But they may also try to help you if you need help.

Laugher is often a response to nervous discomfort in social situations, so the laugher at someone being dragged down the street on TV might be a reflection of that. I don't pretend to know anything about prejudice against Indians (or subgroup of Indians), but that could also explain the reaction to the TV footage that the OP described.

My wife noted that "Chinese" people like to laugh at others that they consider to be stupid - so if the victim appeared to have done something stupid to get himself dragged down the street, that could also explain it.

We shipped several priceless (sentimental reasons) works of art here when we moved a few years ago, including oil and acrylic paintings. The oils were old but small.

With the help of a friend, I first wrapped the framed and unframed paintings in bubble wrap, then attached thin wood sheets to the front and back, wrapping it around with packing tape. I did this for each of about 10 to 15 works, and they arrived by boat (as part of a container shipment) with no noticeable damage at all.

We sent them by truck to NY about this time of year, and they sat around in a warehouse for a while before being put on a ship. Then they probably did the same in Bangkok before being brought up country by truck sometime in February or March.

If I were you, I'd consult experts about this and if they think it's okay to do something like I did, get help to find the materials and wrap it yourself before shipping it. Too bad, it seems like you have to send it as a single item, which would be expensive. Maybe you could get it included in someone's container if you can live with a three-month or so shipping time. Depending on the destination, you should check on the temperature ranges on land and sea to make sure the valuable painting will be okay.

I've heard that larger oil paintings in museums are sometimes hung upside down to make up for gravity's effects over time, so for larger paintings it could be a special issue. You could try contacting some large museums around the world to get advice about the best way to ship your painting.

New credit card?

Usually you have to call to activate them. They are worthless plastic until then. So regular mail should do.

I never tried to send a active card. I would call your credit card company to temporarily disable the card, as suggested by siam2007, or have them send you a new card and activate it when you get it.

Here in Phitsanulok, I live in a small urban neighborhood that used to be a farming field. I'm not sure about ox carts, but I do see buffalo (both the human and non-human variety) moving up and down the main soi. There are still patches of undeveloped property where the local buffalo owner brings his animals to eat. On these same roads we see occasional speeding motorcycles and booming rot gengs.

The place if filling up fast. Except during the rainy season, it's common to see dump trucks bring earth to fill land that will soon become home to a new house. This place is already too crowded, so I suppose the buffalo guy will have to change is routine or move somewhere else (maybe he'll be bought out).

Having helped sail a 26 foot sloop with a broken motor along the East Coast of the US once, in the process of moving it from point of purchase to its new home, I agree with Jimjim!

Seriously, if the OP thought he and his boats were up to that or that it was practical I'm sure he'd do it!

The very latest....

I called CAT yesterday. They told me that HiNet continues. It will not be canceled. I didn't get the CAT English speaker to confirm CAT's status though. Ironically, when I mentioned international access, he suggested I get a free trial of "Pnim" 256 at 1090 baht. ... New service? He said he'd have someone call me.

Sure enough, a TT&T rep called to offer me a free trial of "Premier" - i.e., Maxnet 256, as advertised.

http://www.maxnet.co.th/product_Premier.php

It's always tough spelling out or listening to the spelling of email addresses over the phone here, so I'm not sure I got hers right. No response to my email yet, but I'll give Premier a try if I get the username/password.

I wonder who is using this service upcountry, particularly in Phitsanulok. and how it works for them.

Garro, congratulations on the birth of your child.

My mother-in-law it a bit nuts, but she's been better lately. I'm glad she lives a few houses away and that we don't see that much of her!

Father-in-law lives in the house with us though, and he's the tricky one to tolerate. But he's not that bad.

We live near the rest of my wife's siblings, and they are all great people; honest, hard working, friendly, supportive. It's one of the good things about staying where we are instead of building our own house in another part of town.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thailand

That'll get you started. If you have decent Internet access you can find a lot of history and cultural background information about Thailand in general, and about individual cities and provinces. Some travel/accommodation web sites have interesting information about parts of Thailand, and history, as well.

The latest....

Today my wife says she was actually told by one source (phone or shop, I'm not sure now), that Hinet was not actually going away!

Background. A Thai TT&T rep called during the day and my sister-in-law ended up speaking to her. After getting word that "internet stop", my wife called (the next day). I thought she got the same news, and she went to the TT&T office to sign us up for Maxnet.

But today she said she was actually told that Hinet was not really going away. So, the rep who called was perhaps just "phishing" to get us to switch.

But some of you folks are agreeing with the supposition that CAT is stopping it's broadband support, so I don't know what to think. And I thought that when I called 997 to speak to a Hinet rep he said Hinet was stopping.

I guess I could go to the office to try to cancel the change. It is probably too late, though.

Hey, thanks for the tangent about why we would use torrent software guys.

Do you use Maxnet? BitTorrent?

It would be great to get some realistic anecdotes comparing BitTorrent on Hinet vs Maxnet.

Monty, a knowledgeable poster on this thread, posted some relevant and ominous info on a related thread (many of us are probably following that one too, but maybe not all).

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?sh...p;#entry1493425

He said that CAT owns the international bandwidth that we get with Hinet. Unless TT&T now has an equal access to it relative to it's customer usage, this will be a good explanation for why Maxnet is worse for anything that connects overseas.

Now the question is, does their new arrangement regarding overseas access (I'm not clear on this) have any bearing on what will happen in September or so? When we signed up for Maxnet for September, we were told that the download speed would increase from 1024 to 2.5mbs. Either that is an unworkable promotion (akin to "1 million cows") that will grind everything to a halt, or they really have made some serious infrastructure improvements.

But if that was true, it would be noticeable by now I suppose.

I can't even use skype or 64kbps radio stations on my connection anymore but torrents are fine, averaging 50-60 Kbps and some going over 100. Nice bandwidth management True! Conversely my maxnet connection was fine for most things but bittorrent was never usable.

Veazer,

I just signed up for Maxnet because Hinet is going away at the end of the month.

With Hinet I could use Skype and Skype Out reasonably well. I can also use P2P apps and Bittorrent apps fairly well.

What happens when you try to use Skype? It's very important to me for personal and business reasons. I stop any downloading that might be going on when I try to make a VOIP call.

How about Bittorrent (I use Azureus)? What do you mean by "never usable"?

Most torrent I download take many days, so I don't expect lightning speed. Same for other types of P2P. But at least it has been working under Hinet.

My worry is that with Maxnet all my torents will stop (at least until I can figure out a port workaround).

All I know is that, despite what they told me on the phone, the TT&T clerk in the office wrote "2.5M" on the price sheet next to 1024/512.

I have a question for you and other Maxnet users. On another thread, a TV member pointed me to this URL:

http://www.maxnet.co.th/product_Indy.php

Sadly, if I saw this one before, I was overwhelmed by all the Thai script and no English button, so I missed this line:

** ผู้เริ่มต้นเข้าสู่ Broadband Internet World (Best for Thai Surf) โดยมีข้อจำกัดการใช้งาน วงจรสำหรับ VoIP/P2P (Bit Torrent) ต่างประเทศมีขนาดจำกัด (limited bandwidth for international VoIP/P2P)

What, to Maxnet users, does "limited bandwidth for international VoIP/P2P" mean?

Can you use Skype voice (including Skype Out)?

Can you run and get decent performance with bittorrent and other P2P apps?

With Hinet, Skype/Out works fine. P2P is not great, but I never blamed that on restrictions per se, just figured it was my bandwidth, etc.

Feedback urgently requested!

Upcountry,

Thanks for the heads up on this... I noticed on TTT site http://www.maxnet.co.th/product_Indy.php that there are restrictions on VOIP and P2P .. I wonder if that will change with the upgrade to 2.5MB.

Drat!

I asked the TT&T Hinet support rep about restrictions, and he said there were none.

If there are, I made the wrong decision.

If VOIP restrictions mess up my Skype (Out) usage I'm really screwed, and loosing P2P freedom will tick me off more than some of the other provider mismanagements I've had to put up with in this pond.

With Hinet, youtube and torrentspy were blocked for a long time. The latter is available now. I don't get the evil eye for youtube anymore, but still haven't got it to load in my few attempts. I guess that's what they do now (the "destination" is 'unreachable"). If that is what they mean by P2P restrictions, I guess it is the same old SNAFU. But if they really try to block my use of the Internet, it is shopping time again.

Thank you for the heads up on this.

Ok, I see: "limited bandwidth for international VoIP/P2P". What does that mean exactly? Is it different than Hinet? What service is better in this regard, I wonder.

i have to use the tedious method of copying a URL, close my browser (Opera) restart the browser and the site loads. if i click within this site on another link nothing happens except "request queued...". to get to this link i have to copy it, close the browser... see above.

I use Firefox, and my solution is to hit the refresh button as many times as it takes. With Opera, I've found that trickier to do, so I can understand why you'd just copy the URL and use a new window.

Just a few minutes ago I had to hit the refresh button many times to get a new page of this thread to load. I noticed that media.thaivisa.com was being called at one point. en.wikipedia.org loaded quickly at the same time, so it's possible that something (an ad, whatever) being called by the page is loading slowly. Either that or too many visitors are causing database access to time out. Something like that.

Sometimes, when MaxNet grinds to a halt, I've found it's worth changing to the following DNS settings instead of using the automatically assigned ones.

203.130.159.20 dnscache1.ji-net.com

203.130.159.21 dnscache2.ji-net.com

I use one DNS IP from CAT, and one from a US-based ISP I use. Pretty much any DNS IP can be called to get domain names.

BTW, I'm having some of the same speed problems you guys are complaining about, and I still have Hinet right now. So the problem may not be TT&T perse. Still I'm sure that September 1 would be a good day to turn off the computer and do something else because all the new Maxnet customers, including me, will be bombarding the system and wondering what TT&T means by 2.5mbs!

Okay, I feel a responsibility here to give you an update after my dear and wonderful wife visited the TT&T office for me today.

1,000 baht, for Maxnet Indy "1024/512" gets me:

1 - 2 months free

2 - Free ADSL router modem (real Ethernet port, not USB) [ ASUS AAM 6000EV/Z2 ]*

3 - 2.5mb down on September first (forget about that misinformation I got from the rep earlier today - he was a *997 Hinet guy not a 1103 Maxnet guy)

4 - No more CAT (though to tell you the truth I always had more confidence in help I got from CAT than what I got from TT&T personnel).

They offer discounts for advance payment (7% for 6 months, 15% for 12 months).

So, still not a great deal by western standards, but definitely a big improvement over my old setup.

The acid test will be on September 1st!

* any feedback from users of this unit would be appreciated. I have a D-link router that I use now, and hopefully I can keep using that without too much trouble.

The worrying thing is that in order to get the CSlox Connection (1024/512 for 1500 Bt +VAT) I have to keep the Maxnet 1024/512 too!

Bizzare! But it sounds like getting TOT is not an answer if their support isn't good.

At least the TT&T office has people who speak just enough English to get things done.

My Hinet connection has been fairly stable recently, so I'm hoping the change won't take me down for days and then be inconsistent, but that would be par for the course.

UC

Well, I just got off the phone with TT&T.

They confirmed that we have to go in with the house registration doc, etc., and change to Maxnet because of CAT stopping their service.

Sadly, the speed bump up to 2mbs only applies to subscribers who have had Maxnet for a year already. Even though we've had Hinet for several years, we don't qualify for the faster speed. How retarded is that?

Forced to change, no promo required! I don't even want the USB modem they will give us for free (support guy called it a router, go figure).

In order to get 2mbs, we'd have to sign up for a different package that will cost 5k Baht per month. No thanks.

Hopefully the phone rep correctly confirmed that Maxnet will allow me to use my smtp/pop connections outside Thailand (CAT required a specific request for each one to avoid using their smtp) and no download filters (torrent, etc.).

Anyway, no additional fees or cost just to change from Hinet to Maxnet. Didn't ask them about JI-net. I thing CSLoxinfo requires a TOT number, because we looked into this a few months ago. The bureaucratic goofs at the local TOT office didn't care enough to verify that they could service our house down the street, so we never followed up on that.

Hi heard today, through my Thai relatives, that my TT&T Hinet connection is going to go away at the end of the month. TT&T called today to explain this. I know they didn't get the whole story, but apparently CAT is getting out of the Internet business or going away altogether (I though it was just dropping "PLC"). I actually didn't know that as CAT would fall, so would fall TT&T, but that's another story.

I haven't seen anything about this in the news (Post Database, etc.).

I searched this forum section of TV, and found one entry in the Adsl Speed / Price In Thailand? that referred to a TT&T Maxnet speed increase recently. How does this sync with TT&T/Cat going away?

Can anyone shed any light on this?

I'll try calling 997 in the morning to see if anyone at TT&T can help me in English. My family sounded pretty clear that there was no upgrade option via TT&T though.

What would be the best choice for another service? I've been paying 999 Baht for 1024 broadband.

Suggestion for a pinned topic - updated price comparison chart of all Thai broadband service options.

UC

Here are some potential negative effects of excessive forum usage:

Reduced concentration and focus

Reduced productivity

Chronic procrastination

Increased pessimism and/or apathy

Being distracted by endless debates and idle gossip

Gradually substituting tribal group think for your own intelligence

Impaired social skills, neglected relationships, and a weakened social circle (a consequence of substituting online socialization for face-to-face conversations)

Reduced energy (forum participation is sedentary compared to more active social outlets)

Reduced self-esteem

Career and income may suffer (including loss of employment)

Forum addiction

The first step is to admit that you are powerless ...

We admitted we were powerless over <ThaiVisa forum absorption>, that our lives had become unmanageable....

For me, I cringe when my inbox bulges with 20 new threads every few hours or so. I feel obligated to open each one up in my email program to see if the subject is of interest. Often it is for human interest reasons if not for something that specifically might affect me. It gets to be "a bit much" sometimes, but I'll admit I'd rather have this than no input from others about living in Thailand.

I've posted questions on other expat forums with very little feedback (same on this one sometimes), but by in large the community here is so active that we generally help as much as we abuse each other. Glad TV is here.

Just a matter of being selective about what to read/respond to.

PS- Jai Dee, it's worth noting that for us TV members, your addiction has an upside. We appreciate your attention and contributions.

UC

Too bad, looks like this thread was over before it started! Immediate flame war.