jamiesensei

Was excited to hear on the BBC this morning that Aung San Suu Kyi is coming to Thailand, today. She will travelling out of Burma for the first time since 1988. And apparently she is coming to the North to visit Burmese exiles. Am hoping she will come to CM and I can see her in person.

Anyone heard anything about her plans?

Hi,

Thought some of you might find this idea rather fun. It seems to work quite well for me so far. I continue to struggle with tones in this language and have decided I really want to concentrate on them to see if I can improve the general comprehension of my Thai.

I am working with the text from the translation of "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" which I have the Thai edition of and an English edition. Have recorded someone reading the text sentence by sentence in Thai and have embedded these sound files as well as the Thai text in Anki Flash cards to repeat to me again and again. I have the 'record you voice' plug in in Anki and I can record my voice and compare it with the Thai version.

I am quite excited about my use of colours to indicate the tone of each syllable. I find that this really helps me with the tones more than trying to using a lower script h or l or whatever. In Anki  it is fairly easy to add colours to text. So a typical sentence looks like this :

ถึงหน้าปกมันจะเขียนไว้ว่าอย่างนั้นก็เถอะ

The colours really seem to help. Black is mid tone, green is low, orange is falling, red is high tone and blue is rising. I think it is a nice intermediate step between using roman letters with accents and Thai letters with no indication of tone. I think the colours are much more immediate and evocative than accents or any other system could be.

I have found if I try to read the words while trying to work out what each tone the word is this is just to much strain on me at this stage and the words really are not going to flow in a natural manner or I am probably going to end up ignoring the tones or getting them wrong.

I tried to share the anki deck I have so far with ten or so sentences in it, the first page of Diary of A Wimpy Kid for every ones enjoyment but unfortunately I am having difficult with getting the sound files to work in a shared deck. I may have another go at this another time.

Jamie

Am in the process of getting a 100 Mbps cable internet connection from True as detailed here : http://www.trueonlin...tra_hispeed.php

I thought that the 50 Mbps and up internet connection deserved a new topic thread although there is already a very long thread on the True cable service here : http://www.thaivisa.... internet cable It seems that 50 Mbps and up you get a DOCSIS 3.0 modem rather than the DOCSIS 2.0 provided for customers using 10 - 20 Mbps.

I have been provided with the Thomson TCW 770 modem as shown here : http://support2.true...document_id=317

The technicians have been round repeatedly and we have found that you need to disable the wifi access point in the Thomson TCW 770 to get higher speeds. The technicians actually managed to get 105 Mbps speed test results from speedtest.net but with the wifi access point enabled speeds from the lan cable drop to 20 Mbps despite having nothing connected on wifi. Have found it better to use my own wifi router plugged in to the lan ports of the TCW 770 modem and then I get speeds approaching 90% of what is available on the lan port over wifi, although the signal for my wifi n router does not seem to reach all over my large house.

Speedtest.net speeds have now dropped down from the 105 Mbps speed I was seeing when the technicians were here last yesterday to 30-50 Mbps and I see speeds of 10-17 Mbps as measured on dslreports.com to L.A.

Am trying to get True to give me a CISCO router instead of the Thomson one which I don't have much confidence in. If they would provide me with one of these CISCO EPC3010 shown on this page http://support2.true...document_id=316 without the wifi and then I bought my own good quality wifi n router or a router that used the power lines that would I imagine be much more reliable and might even squeeze an extra few Mbps out of the cable??

I wonder if I would get similar speeds if I dropped down to the 50 Mbps plan at 2,800B instead of the 100 Mbps plan. I think I might try that and then I can always upgrade if I want to.

The True technicians and True in general have been very helpful. They do not know there way around this technology very well and do seem to try various settings out in a rather random way to see if it improves any problem but they have said that I do not need to sign the contract until I am getting a satisfactory service. They seem to expect that I should be seeing 100 Mbps speeds on speedtest.net and apparently on the 10 Mbps service customers normally get near the maximum 10 Mbps speedtest.net results which would mean pretty high real speeds. I get the impression that they have not installed a lot of 100 Mbps connections as yet and are not really sure what kind of speeds to expect.

At True I was told that it is possible once you have signed your contract to upgrade speed at any time and to down grade after 6 months. I am not sure if this would mean restarting a new contract though. I presume the cable contract is like the ADSL one which I believe you can quit with no penalty after one year.

Will try to post follow ups on what kind of speeds and set up I end up with. Would be very interested in hearing of others experience particularly with 50 Mbps and up and also perhaps people could fill me on some of the areas above I am not sure of??

Hi,

Anyone seen any cheap plastic rowing boats or reasonably priced Kayaks around town. Am not sure exactly how much they charge but there is a shop selling Kayaks opposite the train station. It is never open when I am in the area which tends to be on a Sunday. I have heard the Kayaks they sell there are primarily for export and are priced accordingly.

A plastic rowing boat might be fun.

Jamie

Hi,

I have bought myself a xexun tk 103 GPS car tracker. It is a pretty cool unit. I can track my car on a map on the internet. And I can turn off the engine off by SMS among other things. It cost 150 US including postage.

I need a good car electrician to fit it. I am thinking a good car alarm installer would be able to do the job. I just need someone to connect it to the battery, connect the lead to turn off the engine if possible and position the unit and it's aerial in a sensible position.

Previously I had a hands free bluetooth phone system fitted by Amnuay Air but the thing has never really worked properly. I don't think they fitted it properly despite me going back there twice to get the thing fixed. So I want to try somewhere else this time. Khuan Singh is a well known car stereo fitter I might try there.

I will share my experience of getting one of these things fitted here if and when I do get it fitted, in case others are interested.

Jamie