kudroz

Children doing a mans job. The level of technical expertise in Thailand is scary. So many people are doing jobs they are not qualified for, or do not understand. I was speaking to someone the other day, who was referring to the lack of expertise when it comes to getting a question answered about wine, at a restaurant in a 5 star hotel. They are charging 300 baht per glass, and the only details they understood was that there were two kinds of wine in the world. Red and white. Only the GM of the hotel had any detailed knowledge about varietals. How about water management? When the US Marine Corp offered early last year to teach the Thai engineers about water management techniques they were told that Thailand will never suffer major floods, as they had a lot of experts in water management. How much longer can Thailand keep up this charade? People are going to notice this sooner of later, right?

Money you can withdraw from an ATM on your overseas account, up to the daily limit of your ATM card issuing bank, in increments of 20,000 or 25,000 baht maximum at a Thai ATM.  But it is easy to open a bank account, get the routing numbers from your new bank and arrange a wire transfer.

There are many apartments and homes available for rent.  The standard arrangement is a one year lease where you need 3 times the monthly rental to get started.  First month rent and equivalent of 2 months rent as a deposit. Some owners want more,some will take less.  
If you go through a real estate agent the agents commission (customarily equal to one month rent) is paid by the property owner/manager, not by you.  It is sometimes possible to negotiate a rent reduction by offering to pay 6 months or more in advance.  

If the owner will go for it, use the attached rental form as featured in the book 'Thai Law For Foreigners', it is bilingual and much more detailed and clear than the standard bookshop form that is usually used.  My advise is if you are expecting to pay 10,000 baht or more per month, use an agent like Sunbelt, a sponsor of this forum.  If you are going for a less expensive place, under 10,000, not many agents will have these, but they are available by word of mouth or driving around and looking for signs in the area where you would like to live. You will probably get a few PMs with offers.  

Get a signed contract, and get receipts for your rent each month.  The friendly tune is often changed when you want to move out, and then you see the true colors and it can be hard to get your deposit back.  Legal recourse is possible, but not always practical. We currently have a month to month rental with no deposit down.  We got burned by a previous landlord and had to walk away from a 10,000 baht portion of our deposit that he refused to return, even though we left the place with material improvements and  much better than we received it. don

This is not legal. This discussion thread should be stopped.

It's pretty stunning that someone who calls himself a journalist finds it strange that people engage in a political gathering, after months of martial law which banned gatherings of more than a handful of people.  

You don't have to agree with them, or even like them; but subscribing to basic freedoms such as freedom of assembly and freedom of speech would suit anyone well.

OriginalPoster, on 2010-08-22 09:11:46, said:

Wake up Chaps!  This is Thailand.....'Land of Scams'.   A lot of what  constitutes criminal behaviour in Western countries is treated as a joke here and many of the BIB are in on, or participate, in a great deal of the scams.  Use your heads and book direct with Airlines or Hotels.

I know there s a bandwidth problem for Internet data outside of Thailand as the number of backbones is limited.

More, I know torrent uses an incredible amount of bandwidth for data mostly located outside of the country.

Most of the torrent users download illegal things. I regularly ask myself why some people have the need to crash the quality of service for all the other users when they are in a country where the whole DVD is at 100 Bt in the local market with perfect quality.

I pay my Internet connection like the others and I want to have my Skype strong enough to talk to people in Europe. I want also my websites to display faster on my browser, and youtube videos to be more reactive. I make normal usage of my connection and I expect it to work fine. But the quality of my connection is scrapped by torrent users who use all the bandwidth in my area, and reduce the amount of available bandwidth for data located outside of the country.

In these conditions, I don't want to be located to the same router or backbone than torrent/donkey users. This is the reason why I'm not with TT&T as you have to share your connection with your neighbors and you can't do anything anymore when they start they p2p.

I totally agree with TOT decision and I expect it to make my connection working better.

Torrent users have to pay more or to have their own network. Or to go to the shop to buy their dvd.

geoffphuket, on 2010-08-11 10:58:18, said:

I suspect I am. But the reality is it is just not financially sustainable to ISP in SE Asia to provide any reasonable level of performance to Torrents - especially those where most peers will exist outside of Thailand for the type of downloads most popular. The result is degraded performance for everyone and further congestion. The only reason I believe that traffic shaping or blocking has been weak with Torrents is the cost involved in deep packet inspection hardware especially when the client/trackers evolve the protocol relatively frequently (encryption etc...). Someone has to pay..

This had to happen. It probably a good thing. You'll "hopefully" see performance of voip, web mail, etc.. improve. Torrents are drain especially since most peers exists outside of TOT, if you look at an average torrent drainer using a steady 1mbit the economics just dont make sense. I cant even buy full transit routes on 1000mbit commits for < 550baht/mbit (or anywhere near that). So hopefully TOT stop, separate, or traffic shape them.

Ideally I'd like to see torrent drainer pay a massive premium. Part ignorance for most windoze users as the systray hides the little U, but wow imagine how fast the internet would be in Thailand without torrent drainers.

Ends rant.

kudroz, on 2010-08-01 13:16:20, said:

Thanks for this.....its really good advice.

Thongkorn, on 2010-08-05 20:09:58, said:

The "sand" in Pattaya does not speak Danish. Not everyone wants their children taken care of by Thais as they have a more casual approach to a lot of things.

Slightly off topic ,but, i went to the box in foodland today to draw my money by uk debit card ( as i do at least 3 times a week ) and was told by a new face "go atm ".i replied i have a daily limit at the atm but with this card and my passport i can draw up to your limit, she said "cannot ". i said i can and produced a receipt i got there 2 days ago for 50k,,she still says cannot, go atm, im getting pissed off by now and say,. ( normally ) look, i come here nearly every day, you are wrong, she then just ignores me, then another guy comes up and asks for 20k, she says" atm " again, ,we look at each other and are baffled,i ask " your machine have problem " ? no she replies, go atm, talk about thick, how do these illiterate idiots get a job at a bank ?.i find it actually quite frightening,beware as this poster says, gypsys and theives can be anywhere here,.

Siam commercial bank
Be very careful

I have had  dealings with Siam Commercial Bank for 7 or 8 years and thought that they were ok but of late I have had to change my opinion.

I have just bought a new house in Pattaya and I wanted to insure it for building and contents cover.
I went into Siam Commercial Bank  inside Big C on Shukhumvit road.

I saw the manager and she recommended a policy to my wife and I (my wife is Thai so there was no language problems).
I asked 3 times very deliberately if the policy was for both Buildings and Contents.
She, the manager assured us that it was.

We paid in cash and 1 week later the policy, all in Thai, arrived.
All looked well until 1 month later a friend of ours looked at the policy and informed us that we had NO  cover for the building.

It was a contents only policy.
When I returned to the Bank the manager’s attitude was less than helpful.
She said the only thing that we could do is to buy another policy to cover the buildings this would have more than doubled the cost.
I told her to cancel the policy and give us a refund.
She told us that we would only get back a proportion of the money because we have been covered for a month until the banks miss selling had become evident.
We now had to pay for there incompetents.
They told us that they could not return our money and that we had to wait 1 week for a cheque from head office.
It’s now been 1 month  and despite going into see the manager and ringing the banks public relations manager in Bangkok we still have not got a refund.
It makes you wonder if Siam Commercial bank is running short of money,
Perhaps because of its incompetent managers.

If you have any dealings with them be very careful.

2008bangkok, on 2010-07-23 06:28:58, said:

No it's not..Kiosk software can set restrictions on anything within the PC. Even if the user has Admin rights. I doubt the OP can do anything to remove the restrictions. He would have to have access to another administrator account that doesn't have restrictions applied.

It's done for a reason. To protect the security of the company!  USB devices are notorious methods for malware and data theft. Flash memory drives and external drives are prohibited in most companies that have any form of security. They aren't going to unlock anything.
It's not the OP's computer for personal use. It's the company's computer provided to do only the company's tasks within the scope of the OP's job!

Ask yourself, why do you need access to the USB port? You have your answer to why it's blocked.

You said my tablet but doesn't sound like they think it is yours.  Maybe ask them to open the features for you.  They have it in Kiosk mode for a reason.  Changing stuff may be asking for problems.

It will be interesting to see if this topic is allowed to run. I suppose it depends on the positive/negative replies. My guess is that the replies will get get the topic removed.