freddy123

Im pretty sure if you use over 30gbs of data a month, you can just recharge early. Maybe if you can speak thai or take a translator to work out exactly what their policy is, I could never quite work out what would happen when you run out of data before the end of the month.

I don't think anyone really switches to 3g network here becuase they want to use it anywhere in the city. Thats just marketing bs, same as back in Australia all these ads saying you can use it on the train and bus and stuff. But in reality you wont and will never want to.

Also yes, it is very easy to find out how much data you have left.

You could always ask, but I doubt the staff would be able to make a decision like that unless they have a policy to do so.

Best chance would be to find a friend that has one. Then you could test it out.

stopped again

The charge is 100,300,500,900, 1500bt pm

Good for you. I hope to say goodbye TOT also. Sorry, I have not checked this out myself. How does it connect? Is it like a "dial up" in that you must log on each time you use it? What is the difference in the quoted costs?

Please keep us posted on how your experience goes after some use.

Thanks.

With the usb dongle thingy, you need to connect it everytime the computer starts. Its a little annoying but definately worth the trade off for the quality of net your getting. If this bothers you I think you could get the other box for almost 6000 that is like a wireless router I believe, which would always be on. Im only here short term so that option wasn't worth the extra money.

Sounds like a pretty dodgey request, first thing that comes to mind is that your spying on someone. If shes going to be your future wife, if you can't trust her now then youll probably have trouble in the future aswell.

Maybe you need to explain the background before one of the people on here might be willing to help. A 1 hour conversation would be alot of work for someone to do without any monetary reward aswell, so you might want to offer a small reward if someone helps out.

BTW my thai is no where near the level of translating a fluent converstaion yet (so im not angling for anything), im just providing some ideas that may help you get what you want. Good luck.

I have 3g ais, but im closer to town that San Sai. Have you looked at the map that AIS have with the coverage? If your in range you should get almost as good speeds as if you were in the middle of town itself.

As for reliablity I havn't had any problems with it whatsoever, been running for a bit over 3 weeks now I think with no outages or slowdowns that I have noticed. I spend alot of my day on the net so I probably would have noticed if there were any problems.

I have used TOT for a month previous to getting 3g ais and the speeds with 3g is much better, its getting close to what I would expect from my internet back in Australia, especially with international sites.

So if you can confirm that you are definately in range of a tower, I recommend to go for it.

Maybe you could borrow someones to test it out to see if your in range?

I'm not sure if this has been brought up already, but anyway.

I recently brought a 3g AIS usb connection thingy. It has worked brillantly with no problems whatsoever. Speeds to Australian sites have been not very different to what I would expect in Australia.

If you live in range of the towers, it may be a way to get out of TOT hel_l. Expensive way, but that depends on how you look at it, if your willing to pay more to not gid rid of the internet hassel in your life then this seems to be the go. I ended up buying one cause the lady in charge of my apartment building turns off the internet when she thinks no ones using it, or when the router downstairs gets hot lol.

Costs 4000b to buy the connection thingy. And then there are plans such as 500B a month for 3gb. But im on the 900B a month plan for 15gb.

petepete, you definately have an interesting method of learning. I have tried some of the techniques you described but, I'm a very logical person and therefore tend to learn in a very structured way. I ended up learning the tones as described below, im a programmer by profession so I needed something to relate to, so I created a flow chart/table. I've posted it here incase it might help anyone else.

The columns are: Initial Consant, Sylable Type, Tone. (Sorry for some reason you cant actually do a table here.)

High -> Live -> Rising

High -> Dead -> Low

Middle -> Live -> Mid

Middle -> Dead -> Low

Low -> Live -> Mid

Low -> Dead -> Short (vowel) -> High (tone)

Low -> Dead -> Long (vowel) -> Falling (tone)

With this method all you really have to remember is the tones on the end, ie Rising, Low, Mid, Low, Mid, High, Fall. And its further simplified by rembering that it starts with a rising at the top and falling on the bottom, and then some nice repetition (low, mid, low, mid) and then the only tone you havn't done yet is high. If you know them then you can work out the tone of any (non tone mark) word pretty easily after a fair bit of practice. This framework is starting to drop away from my consious thought now when im reading, but I think it served as a good basis on which to learn.

The tone marks are pretty easy I suggest just doing some reading exercises after making up your own tricks to help memorise them. Mine are something like Mai Eek just drops everything low, and if its already low consant then it makes it fall. Mai dtow makes everything fall apart from if its alreday a low consant then it 'tows' it high. The other 2 are easy, you just have to remember which one is the high tone and which one is the rising one.

Now listening for the tones and pronouncing them is another story completly .....

[edit: tried to fix table formatting]

Ok thanks alot for everyones help. I will go to the thapae office when i get a chance and talk to them.

Travesari thanks for the offer, but it sounds like you still use it alot, and to take the risk of buying a second hand one the price would have to be substantialy below the 3900 baht.

As for if its actually 3g or not, I know its probably not technically 3g but all the branding is 3g so its just easier to play along with the games. There are other threads dealing with that topic.

Also let me know if your looking to buy one second hand in 2-3 months. I'll probably be selling it if I can when I go home.

Thanks

Hey guys, Im looking for a USB modem to work with the AIS 3g network. Im guessing someone might have one and be willing to part with it for a lot less than the asking price of AIS.

If not then I would appreciate suggestions on which AIS store to buy one from. I went to Airport plaza one time and they spoke less english than I can speak thai. Are there better AIS shops around?

I only want prepaid, no contracts or credit cards involved.

Thanks

I've also got $10,000 of US currency if anyone would like to swap it for thai baht.

Only problem is you just have to take it home and wash the black ink off it.

Anyone know what the hel_l the airforce is doing, this morning. I'm just started living pretty close to the airport and a few jets ealier seemed to be practicing maybe a bombing/strifing run at the airport.

Now they seem to be doing a VIP exercise, with 4 jets circling a helo. Anyone know whats going on?

And why arn't they doing it over the jungle somewhere instead over the middle of town?

I really hope they couldn't afford to buy live ammunition, just incase someone presses the wrong button.

Or maybe were about to be invaded by china and that was the vip's in chiang mai being extracted? ...

Hi Guys,

This is really more of a food issue but im thinking i'll have more luck with you guys that have been here a bit longer and know thai, since you have obviously had more experience in ordering from thai restaurants where little English is spoken.

Theres a Thai/chinese place down the road where i have seen (or rather smelled) some great stir fry blackbean dishes..I have used the "same same" method of ordering when possible but havent been able to in this case!

Ive tried to order the black bean chicken/beef using:

ถั่วดำ... thuaa dam ghai/nua...To no avail!

I know there are many different words for black bean as its used in desserts and what not but the above obviously doesnt work! I have heard a different specific word for this dish but cannot recall it.

So does anyone know the thai wording for black bean as used in a spicy stirfry???

If you can include the sounding in English it would help..not that great with with thai spelling/sounding as such..

thanks!

Maybe your getting the tones wrong? Especially if the people are chinese, they may not pick up so well when a foreigner is speaking thai. The tones are in brackets after the translitteration for you. Maybe someone that knows more about black beans could help you, or maybe just take a picture of black beans with you to the restraunt. Or try and read the menu (if they have one) , if you can't read very quick maybe take a picture of it and work it out using thai-langague.

tuwa(L) dum(M) gai(L) / nua (H)

Ive also changed the transliteration slightly to what I think suits the Australian way of speaking better.

Good luck

[Edit: Realised questioner was Australian]

Hi,

Anybody have any suggestions on how to get them Thai words to stick to memory? I have like 200 new words I want to learn, and I've tryed using flash cards, but that method just seems too boring. Have you any better, more effective and maybe even more fun suggestions?

Thanks.

Bob.

Yeah I'm in a similar situation, flashcards work for me in that they help me to remember, but its <deleted> boring. I have found that reading simple stories that are are almost within your vocab is quite beneficial for picking up new words and sentance structures/grammer/idioms. I recently brought a workbook for thai school kids that has a bit of a running story that is a bit above my current level of reading, but I find it good cause I have to look up 2-3 words per sentance, and once you see them in use and read the story a couple of times I find I can remember the word alot easier. However this doesn't help with a list of words as such, is there any particular reason you want to learn a list or do you just generally want to improve your vocab?

Another technique you could try is arranging the 200 word into interesting sentances, that you can memorise, might help a bit more than just learning it word by word. eg in english "The cat can eat the pig if he wants", just something that stands out in your mind. I havn't tried this technique yet but im planning to in the future. This would work aswell if you havn't learnt to read thai yet, cause you can just write it out in transliteration.

Good luck with it, ill be watching for any other ideas aswell.

I went there last week, im pretty sure I saw 2 air cons on the wall, they wern't turned on though. But when it gets to the hotter months I imagine they might turn them on at whim. The day I went they definately wern't needed.

I've recently purchased a used Honda Sonic Motorbike. What is the best way to carry stuff on this bike? Are tail Boxes available and where?

Thanks, Daniel

Get yourself a good comfortable backpack.

Don't know anything about tail boxes on those bikes, apart from I can't remember ever seeing one fitted to a sonic.

Anyone know of any volleyball comps or social games happening up here?

I'd love to have a game again. Much appreciated if anyone can help at all.

I was having dreadful connection problems, browser wouldn't load, mails wouldn't go and then - I uninstalled the 'Thai Forum toolbar - heaven has returned to my computing since

Toolbars are generally a waste of time, I don't think ive ever used one for more than 5 minutes before uninstalling them, even the google one. All they do is take up processing power, and in your case it sounds like bandwidth aswell.

Make sure your using https://www.opendns.com/ the Thai DNS servers seem somewhat hopeless, and this can lead to the internet appearing slow aswell.

Just tried cinamon on mine, worked pretty good.... until they found another path around it. But at least I stoped them coming in under the door.

Maybe you could take an approach the Thais might recognise... Buy a fake official looking badge, slap it on their counter and tell them your from the International RSPCA. Tell them that your gonna take photos today, and then come back in a week and if nothings changed for the better your gonna start fineing them 1000B a day.

If your convincing enough they may even try to bribe you, then you could use that to feed the temple dogs or another animal welfare program. At least you would get their attention that some people think its not ok to get animals like that.

Btw do buddist believe in reincarnation? Maybe you could take that approach if they do.

If you do find one, make sure its a dam_n good one lol. I'd hate to fall into that 'Water'.

I saw some thai people doing it the other day, so there must be a supplier somewhere, maybe someone with more CM time can help out.

Not sure where in C.M. you live, but here's the name & phone number of the company we get ours from.

315 Wattana Co.Ltd. 053-868318 / 089-9534818

Thanks guys, Do they speak English? Cause my Thai isn't up to that yet. What sort of water do they deliever? I'd prefer a brand name, cause im not going to be here all that long and I can afford the extra cost, even if its only for peace of mind.

I'm near wat jed yot, near rincum intersection (superhighway and huey gow)

Ok after a half hour of searching using the brilliant "search" function I know how to get water delievered if Im in Bangkok but I can't find anything about Chiang mai, mainly due to the fact that every page on thaivisa has the text "chiang mai" on it somewhere, so there seems to be no way to narrow the search down to a certain subform.

Im pretty sure there was a topic about how people get their water delievered about a month or so ago. Can anyone find that, maybe if you posted a message in it you could find it though the account page. Can anyone give me the link, or tell me how to get water delievered, Id be happy with just getting the 6L nestle ones for a couple of months. (I don't have car)

Also is there a way to narrow your search to subforums?

Thanks

notice the roof next door has a blue pipe running across it and into the roof space, is it one of those water sprayers to cool down the roof, or a after thought ?

Not sure on that... I didn't really inspect it much, maybe someone else can tell the difference between a thai roofing fixture and a piece of random pipe? If it was a water sprayer then I never saw it in action, but I doubt they would use it much in the wet season.

I've been watching the progress of a house being built from my hotel room the last month or so, I've been keeping a record with my camera evey so often. Noticed this prgression a couple of days ago.

Taken on the 29th

Taken on the 30th

Taken about an hour or 2 later on the 30th

Sorry about the small size, you may need to download. If you didn't notice anything strange, well youlve probably been in thailand a while, but where I come from once a wall is in place it generally stays there permanently, or until someone does renovations.

Just another one of those little differences in cultures that makes this place so interesting