mezzoninny

I suspect the contract is just up, and it's just a general lack of ad revenue for English-language, foreign music stations.

If you weren't in BKK in the 80s or 90s, you probably can't imagine it was actually home to several pretty good stations, each with a fairly distinct format and style. It used to be that they can get a fair amount of Thai listeners, but I guess this is no longer the case (or at least the ppl in charge think so). The former DJs are all around somewhere but not able to stay in this business. Surviving stations like 107 have gradually moved away from announcements in English.

Personally it was awesome when 107 and Get both had a quasi-indie-pop thing going for a while, or have specialist shows, UK new singles release show, etc, and Smooth 105 is my absolute favorite mix of music anywhere. I grew up on those stations so it's always sad to see another one go, even if Wave's music mix isn't my cup of tea (I suspect cost issues). Right now there's 102.5, 105.5 and 107, and if you don't mind Thai pop, stations like 89 and 89.5 have mushy western pop to match their Thai fare.

Oh and I still have recordings from the last day of Breeze 98.5, someone on a hard drive...

For the longest time, Thailand was never considered an earthquake zone, at least not in the public mind.

I remember in 1997 reading somewhere an opinion on the possibility of earthquakes, and when I brought it up in conversation, everyone thought it was absurd, including Japanese people living in BKK.

If someone bought a Nexus One early in the year or a Galaxy S mid-year, there's probably no reason to switch to this phone, I guess? A little too incremental for an update...and the display panel doesn't appear to be actually curved either. If you know how to root/install custom ROMs then the official updates may not be terribly exciting either. And the NFC thing is read-only... why?

I just expected more is all, I like the hardware.

I really like the looks of the interface, but I think Microsoft was very much of a headless chicken in their choices for WP7. Microsoft on its own would never have not provided copy/paste or full third-party multitasking in a product, but they seem to think it's okay (or even desirable/sort of a zeitgeist) just because Apple did it. No other reason.

Currently WP7 is choke full of this kind of choices, it's fine if I just want a tech toy to play with, but I wouldn't choose one as a serious work phone for at least another year.

Hope they won't end up covering every street up with BTS tracks or skywalks... it can get a little claustrophobic. Anyone remember how Ploenchit was before the skytrain?

And of course hopefully they'll add capacity to the BTS itself. Apart from these two things, I totally look forward to what they plan to put in place

The problem is that, in every market that it's been launched so far, the Galaxy Tab has been incredibly expensive. The prices I see in multiple markets all convert to between 21000-24000 Baht. That's very poor bang for the buck compared to the iPad and the many other Android tablets that are no doubt coming our way.

That, plus Samsung doesn't have the best reputation for releasing software updates (to future Android versions).

I think this is one of those ideas that... a lot of scholars in the field will say OMFG it's such a good idea, OMG it's the freaking way forward, it's progress... but the idea doesn't really work in real life for all sorts of reasons.

I've seen the idea thrown about in my home country but probably never put into practice... most likely for the reasons discussed here.

Hey there... (unwilling) Taipei native and resident here.

Air Asia to BKK is now only cheap if you book about 6 months in advance. Their prices have gone up to "regular" levels, i.e. 10K NT, especially for July/August because, as you may know, it's the summer holidays for the spoiled brats of Taiwan

Try airasiachart.com and select "Bangkok to Taipei" to see future price trends, you'll see what I mean. Sometimes they cost more than KLM.

As for the supposed 0-dollar seats, I was excited when I saw it, but then under that article @ the BKK post, some guy pointed out that it's never there when you actually want to book... so when I got regular pricing in my search I just assumed that's the case.

It is true that there's been no price drops TPE-BKK in spite of the riots... but that's true for every airline. They probably think, given that TIT (this is taiwan)... people are not going to stay away for too long.

Thai has a deal now which I think is about 7500 NT all inclusive, but I think that's for travel before the end of July? Beyond that, I don't know any deals. Your best bet is probably to pick an arrangement you'd like best out of them all.

<deleted> Samsung created their own OS? Not based on anything? That's pretty surprising. Anyone have any info on that?

I have a theory: Everyone who used to do WinMo was informed a long time ago, under the table, by Microsoft that they will no longer be allowed to slap their customized interfaces onto future versions of WinMo (which is now windows phone 7).

These are all people who have depended on WinMo because they were either too cheap, or didn't have the resources to create an OS with any sort of popularity guarantee. With the news from MS in mind they then went in different directions: HTC went for Android and Samsung chose to put resources into doing their own thing. It's not meant to challenge anyone or anything, it just that the frozen pizza crust they used for dinner has been end-of-lifed.

I know noone's asking me, but right now I like to choose my phone OS based on what I need the phone to do for me. Say I need to listen to mms:// internet radio streams, that leaves me primarily with WinMo, and then maybe the iphone and android, both of which have apps that may or may not function for me. If I need to use TVUplayer, it's either a jailbroken iphone or a clunky WinMo for me (to run a beta app).

I have complained about WinMo for a long time, but it's proving to be more and more useful for me than Android at this point. So any other consideration for the superiority or inferiority of the OS is moot for me at this point, and I'd happily pick up an HD2 for everyday use.

For all of its possible flaws, I enjoy the Radio Thailand english news, mostly because I remember it from 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. I guess I grew up to it in a way... remember the "travel thailand" show that used to come on at 8pm too.

Also hope English-language radio in Thailand won't disappear any time soon.

[edited for grammar!]

My personal experience is this: I have a phone with a full qwerty keyboard (xperia x1), but once I've had enough time to get used to the general placement of the keys, I can now easily type just as fast (or faster!) on the iPhone's virtual keyboard, while exerting my fingers a whole lot less. I have no problem typing longer items at all, and I wouldn't bother with an external bluetooth keyboard, because it's meaningless extra bulk for a setup where weight and size is paramount.

The hardware keyboard on my x1 also happens to be faulty, it would easily overshoot or miss a lot of letters. The problem is easily replicable but Sony insists there are no issues, so it unfortunately proves the point of Apple and other pundits who think the less moving parts, the better.

I think the iphone probably has the best virtual keyboard right now, but there are other phones that come pretty close. I think you should be fine on any system with cutting edge processing power (eg. the 1GHz snapdragon). Anything less could still do fine but there's a bit more uncertainty. The HTC HD2 is quite nice to type on, with 1GHz to go around and a 4.3" screen for larger hands.

YMMV on this, of course, but I'll always despise myself for listening to everyone who said a hardware keyboard is the way to go. Yeah excuse me, I'm a bit passionate about this because of all sorts of difficult issues with my x1

As for what's in the pipeline ... HTC might have an Android phone with a 4.3" screen coming out, and a version of the nexus one sold under their own brand.

I think any claim that Apple/iphone is a hegemony and Android is the david against the Goliath, is an overt drama queen-style exaggeration. As corny as this might sound, it's just not possible to express "good taste" verbally sometimes, it's not built upon objective conditions, there's a very strong subjective element to it. I could not teach you, another human being, what good taste and good sense is. Out of all phone manufacturers, I think Apple still makes the most sensible and elegant product decisions. I don't need the manufacturer's name shouting back at me every time I use the phone (I've taken a marker to the logo on my phone.) I don't need multitasking when the phone very clearly can't handle it. I don't want Opera Mobile that crashed because it couldn't handle 5-layer nested quotes on this very forum (i even turned off image display!). I don't want hardware keyboard that's actually a lot harder to type on than a virtual keyboard. The list goes on. And also, the iphone's camera might only be 3MP, but it's been very well tuned, and it kicks my WinMo phone's miserable 3MP ass.

These are obviously things I lack on my phone right now, and that's the voice of me groaning under the weight of my particular WinMo phone, so you probably wouldn't understand why I say these things. Or you might have, but you don't think it's a big deal - but it is. So in spite of a very strong distaste for Apple's computers, I have found Apple's app store practices, as well as their overall handset philosophy, extremely palatable and welcome. Reject for no reason? Perhaps it's not in good taste

But there's at least one thing going for the nexus one that I'm surprised pretty much nobody's talked about: the price. If you put windows mobile on similar hardware, those phones unlocked tends to cost several hundreds over the $530 google is charging right now. If it's available to me at that price, I might give it a try instead of waiting on the next iphone.

Can't agree more with endure on this person... every time I see him, my gay ass and I get the impression that being gay to him is probably just something he wears on his sleeve... kinda like having madonna as a "friend".

No, Thailand doesn't "need to lift its bloody game substantially," because you don't realize that's the true extent of development of Thailand as a country. If you're saying Thailand should be a lot more ... uhm... legally structured just because Thailand does a glossy tourism campaign, you're the one who's been fooled by the campaign.

To live there and not comprehend this, means you're kinda living in a Farang bubble, doesn't it?

Also, living abroad for most of us is a deliberate decision. Most of us don't necessarily like certain aspects of Thailand, but we would not want to go live in Singapore or Malaysia even if it's a breath of fresh, and you wouldn't either. You've made your choice.

Lastly, being Asian, we often hear about tourist robberies in Italy or baggage theft in France. So there's no bargain anywhere.

I don't have any insight but I wanted to say that Transmission has been problematic for me for a while. I've checked everything I could think of, firewall etc, and it still wouldn't "reach out and grab". I've given up on it and uTorrent works 100% fine on the same Mac (running windows). I've seen others mention this elsewhere a few months ago, but don't know if they've found a fix.

 

I do see alot of people eating at some make shift seafood dining along the road near CentralWorld. The 1st stall located nearest to CentralWorld always seem to be packed to the brim. Anyone tried the food there??

I'm wondering about that too.

I went to Patana myself for a total of about 8 years, graduated high school from there.

I'll have to borrow one of Josh's comments, and say hopefully you've got some sort of direction, and then the school should work out really well for you. From Facebook I can tell you most people seemed to end up pretty well, though I'm one of those who didn't have any direction, and I'm still floundering to this day, I'm the quintessential bum. So, perhaps because of that, I don't really feel like it was an advantage that I went to Patana instead of RIS or ISB. In fact since the uni side of my studies was always going to be in the American system, I felt that IB did me no favors. This is in spite of everyone I've heard from always saying or thinking that Patana is better than ISB or RIS or NIST. So that's my side of the coin.

The lasting legacy of Patana for me is that it exposed me to so many vastly different worlds, be it Thai or non-Thai, and also the lifestyle of a group of people several castes above mine - I'm still reeling to this day from the expensive taste I acquired...

I live in Taiwan and normally my (cable) connection is several degrees of magnitude faster and more stable than what is available in Thailand. But after the typhoon thing someone posted earlier, my connection quite closely resembled some of the symptoms you all mentioned - youtube will haphazardly refuse to load from time to time (and the worst thing is, the video grabbale by DownloadHelper has changed). Sometimes the BBC is slow, sometimes some random site will decide to be slow or inaccessible. It also occurs on my work connection on a different ISP.

Just thought this underwater cable thing might be the issue, instead of whatever the Thais normally do to their gateway to the interwebs.

Again, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for this excellent thread

My time in Thailand only dates back to around 1989, but I'm already having a lot of nostalgia for the "old" Bangkok, even if it's just stuff like the original Central Silom, or back when Ploenchit was a six-lane? one-way street. The Thais are pretty good at makeovers and so many of the old buildings have been flipped, and after a while I almost miss the old thick brickwall treatment they used to do to every mall.

Sometimes the recording feature on small (esp. stick-type) mp3 players can be less than optimal, e.g. the mic may not be very good at collecting sounds from faraway, in a larger room; or the recording just crashes halfway through for no reason. Theres no way of knowing which player records fine and which doesn't, unless you buy them all up and see for yourself.

I bought a voice recording attachment for the ipod. In spite of apple's tendency to make stuff that just works, this solution totally did not work. On an old ipod video the battery died after 1.5 hours (the battery is fine when playing music). I bought the attachment used for $40, and still think I paid too much :mad:

I would second monty's suggestion and look at one of Sony's cheap IC recorders. They should have somewhat better mics, often run on AAA batteries, and tend to be free of the issues mentioned above. Try the "hardware house", I went to pantip too late last night and they were already closed, but their price list shows quite a few current and last-gen recorders.

To the OP,

Although probably not as intense as India, I definitely think that Bangkok is an acquired taste. It might take upwards of 5 years to learn to like it, and settle in (and of course it's possible you just won't like it).

If you're pursuing objective variables (eg. clean air and greenery), I suspect most people will end up choosing somewhere else. Because yes, Bangkok is rather run-down, it can be technologically backwards. I left Bangkok as a teenager, and I always think about going back, but these things do hold me back, they are compromises you need to make consciously. I think Bangkok's a bit kooky, a bit off the beaten path in fact, it's almost not a choice "rational" people would go for. They'll perhaps all pick places with better infrastructure, or supposedly better English skills overall. If you choose to move to Bangkok, hopefully it's because you find it interesting, or because it's really beneficial for retirement living (e.g. finance-wise).

Hopefully you'll find an angle to enjoy the city, no matter what it is (my own is actually quite insulated from the locals).

It's all very personal. I've been to Singapore, with the superior hardware, and I was not impressed. I liked Japan for a very long time - I even learned Japanese for seven years - but not anymore. Because you know what, all that efficiency, all that cleanliness, they come at a human cost, there's a social/cultural price that the locals have to pay. God knows how many of them are overworked with no overtime, occasionally to death. and they probably work in a way that lose their personal freedom. Most people will think this is none of their/our business, but I feel very strongly about this, and I have basically lost the ability to appreciate Japan as a place. Because you know what... I'm glad I wasn't born Japanese. I would not want to be locked down in that culture. I'll probably be whipped or whatever for such an opinion, but it's got to be said.

I agree with ijustwannateach - Bangkok is not as big a hub of "professional" industries as some of the other cities you have mentioned, and people may already be "old" by the time they made it through the corporate ranks and managed to be dispatched overseas. Just a friendly reminder that it might be futile, and not because old farts all want to date you?

As for myself, I'm 28, when I was young I thought I'd become a professional, but the truth is that I could've never become a professional, it's not in my blood, and then I realized it's not a way I would choose to live. So nope, I'm not in your social group God I need a sugar daddy in the mirror image of Navalator!

Like I said, that was a female relative. I quote Tom Sizemore: I didn't do it. I deny all culpability.

I actually feel Sony's design and engineering are increasingly falling short of what fanbois and the general public expect of them. And they're also by nature less elegant than the path Apple chooses, which I normally chalk down to cultural reasons. So there are times when I feel some other manufacturers can have an edge over Sony if they tried, and that's why I got the Mini 1000. I saw the leaked bottom casing for the Vaio P, and I thought, Jesus Christ, the same design cue, the same texture all over again. It's only the sheer lack of weight that won me over.

i read in a review that a cold boot takes several minutes and the system will "hang" when you try to start even the most simple application.

I've seen four Vaio P's on display in a row, and one of them is just really sluggish for no apparent reason.

Another possibility is that Sony throws a lot of preinstalled software onto the Vaios, in order to live up to the "audio" and "visual" parts of the Vaio name. For instance some of them will try to analyze and index your music files, that's quite a sluggish process. People in the know try to uninstall or at least disable these "Vaio apps", otherwise the first time you power up it might take a few hours preparing itself to get useful. I'd want to check and see if the reviewers are aware of that.

I actually prefer 747s over 777s. I think the 777 flies a bit harsher and the new seats are a bit firmer. I like the cushy buick ride .

I noticed that too when I flew on EVA last year, the "ride" was quite harsh. Granted, my only reference are 777-200ERs on ANA and United, but both felt more solid. I don't know if this is a -200/-300 difference. In the early days my cushiest rides were all on EVA and the (interim?) western pilots would do these very lightfooted landings.

I was trying to book TPE-BKK for late May, and for some reason EVA didn't put anything out for the local websites to sell (costs more on their own website). So I had to grab tickets on CI because seats were disappearing by the hour.