curare

This is my story about how I am accessing the Internet at my current location, which is Ayutthaya, Thailand. I spend most of the year in Vienna, Austria, where I was born more than half a century ago. But I certainly can do without the European winter and therefore enjoy spending time together with my wife on her home turf. If you want to see pictures, please check this link. Sorry, the captions of the pictures are in German only. When I was staying here before, I used to go to an Internet CafĂŠ that was open 24/7, and the hourly charge is only 15 Baht (some 35 Euro-Cents). So, in a sleepless night, I showed up there at 4:00 A.M. âCLOSEâ said the sign. Drove back home (5 kms), had another coffee, continued reading a book. At around 9 A.M. I went back to the CafĂŠ. âOPEN 24/7â the sign said. Sure Before they used to have a guy there who had something like the faintest idea what a PC was and how it was supposed to be used. Now they have a bouncer. You might ask, why in the world would they have a bouncer in an Internet CafĂŠ? Well, there is a reason. These CafĂŠs primarily cater to schoolboys who skip school and have a prolonged PC game instead at the CafĂŠ. All of the 50 PCs in this particular CafĂŠ have popular games installed. They are running on Windows ME (yuck!) and are protected by âNorton Go Backâ or a program called similarly. You cannot even change the mouse orientation without entering a PW. Very annoying for a leftie like me. The bouncer is there to keep the schoolboys under control. Whoever encounters a group of school kids these days anywhere on this planet will know that they can get quite rude and nasty at times. Therefore the bouncer is present. So I am sitting there, checking my email, checking my website, reading the news from back there in Austria. Speed is not overwhelming but serves the purpose. I want to access the cpanel of my website, enter the URL, and there Norton Go Back shows up and asks me for a PW. I close the window. Norton closes the browser window. I try again, same result. I call the bouncer. âWhat is this?â He looks, than shouts, âNo downloads!â - "I'm not downloading; I just want to access my website. See, this is my website. This is my work!" Screams he, "NO DOWNLOADS!!!" Now, for those of you who donât know, itâs not for nothing that Thai people are well known the world over for their kindness, friendliness and their willingness to help each other and others in every situation that might occur. Therefore, screaming and shouting is seen as extremely rude and impolite. Shouting at someone is equivalent to putting a huge knifeâs tip at your throat in a western country. The school boys started watching. I got up and pointed my index finger at him (consciously using this gesture which is also considered very rude here) and said, âYou donât shout with me, boy! How much?â with an angry look on my face. â15 Bahtâ he said, I put the money on the table and left. On my way out it occurred to him that I might not be a rude school boy but just an unhappy customer and he said âSorry!â I went to another Internet CafĂŠ, run by the owner himself, friendly, but this was next to the market, and therefore has a lack of parking space. Considering my options, I faintly remembered that my Nokia 7650, (the first one with a camera built in, 3 ½ years old) has a modem built in. So I went to AIS, Thailandâs largest mobile phone operator, and inquired there, if I can use my phone to access the Internet. The friendly lady said, âSure!â â âSo how much would that cost?â â âOne Baht per minute, but we have GPRS packages, for instance 25 hours per month for 100 Baht.â 100 Baht are Euro 2,16. Heaven! âAll you have to do is make sure that there are enough funds on your prepaid phone.â They were. âShall we help you to set it up?â â âI donât have my notebook with me, so Iâll try and if I fail, Iâll come backâ â âAll right. Thanks for coming.â To make a long story short, I am somewhat knowledgeable when it comes to computers, but I am totally clueless when it comes to setting up a GPRS phone, plus she had not given me the necessary data one needs to set it up in a working manner. I took the trip back to the AIS store twice, at the other end of town, but it was worth the effort. Nominally, the speed is 56 kilobits, but what actually gets through is 32 kilobits at best. But I work and surf at the environment of my choice, no bouncer bothers me here and I would spend more money for gas going to the Internet CafĂŠ alone than the phone company charges me per hour! So a happy end to this story, and an end to my 26 days of posting silence on this fine board.

OF COURSE I saw them. Beautiful pics, m^e! Never been to Ko Phangan, just saw it from the plane going to Ko Samui... if I remember rightly. That's this f-ed up hippie island where the pol*ce robs you blind? Heard about it, no, thank you, never set my foot on this island. Hua Hin any time. Love it. Spent 3 weeks there this year already and going back for more soon. Enjoying to come back with a guide from Petchaburi to show me around.

I quote from the Wired article that the topic starter mentioned: Nobody needs to worry about Google Print, not even the authors. I searched passages from Shakespeare and it came up with the text I had searched for. Not the whole text, mind you, just a snipplet of medium length, maybe two pages. Below the original text the reason was given. For copyright reasons. Glad to hear that Google cares about the copyrights of a person dead some 300 or 400 years. Whereby it is not scientifcally established that he lived at all - it might have been a bunch of people who wrote "Shakespeare's" works. This is just ridiculous. Google Print, in its current state, is worthless. WORTHLESS. Admittedly, I enjoy using GMail and the search engine and I am sure they got a lot of brilliant people there.

I can not only confirm this, unfortunately the bots have become a little bit smarter meanwhile. They are not as good yet as us humans and cyborgs but they could read an address like myemail_AT_mydomain_DOT_com and turn it into you know what. I subscribed to a mailing list recently which has a repository accessible via the web. Although the mailing list transformed the addresses in the way described by you, a couple of days later the spam started arriving already. Adressed to my regular email address which I have been able to keep mostly spam-free for a couple of years. It's only thanks to good spam filters of my ISP and my mail client that I usually don't see it, but a look in the junk mail or spam folder tells the story clearly. And changing my email address is no option in my case: the email address I am talking about is in the format of "myfirstname@mylastname.com" §?!%&!!!

I am living in Austria - a German speaking country - and I have gotten similar emails with reference to the BKA in Germany, which is an institution similar to the FBI in the States. An Austrian citizen in Austria getting an email from a foreign governmental body? Did a NS lookup. It came from a ADSL customer deep in the Austrian province.Conclusion (as has been stated before in this thread): This is a worm. Don't worry about it. Just don't open the attachment.Yes, this is not even a nice try, this is just stupid.

I just stumbled over this thread... very interesting.Sorry, I cannot contribute to this, because I am not qualyfied (incompetent) in graphics design. But as a fan of this board I welcome a more sophisticated design. Things look good as the thread becomes more and more active and the results posted so far look very good. Looking forward to the new design whatever it will be,

m^e, I think it's not only me who is eagerly awaiting these pics. I missed them when you posted them.Of course I'll put some images up as well once I get to Ayutthaya next Tuesday. I bought a Canon PowerShot A 520 recently, which also has this "panoramic picture" feature. I have not been able to try it out yet here because of climatic limitations (-2° C in Vienna currently, who would want to go out at such temperatures?) but judging from the thumbnail still available it worx quite well!So, once again, m^e, please do put these pics up again somewhere for communal enjoyment ;)Greez,

I'll try to explain how I see it. It's just my opinion, as yours is yours. If you have a monopoly, (Windows used on 90+ % of PCs worldwide) you are so powerful that you can control what is developed and what not, what is hyped and what not. You have a great responsibility if you are a monopolist (this being a single entity that controls a market) and many people including me think that MS does not live up to that responsibility. You can influence development, you can supress certain developments if you wish to do so. MS does this. The lack of alternatives induced by the monopoly is a vicious circle. Things get worse the more market share the monopolist has and the more market share he has the uglier he becomes. He may think he is the master of the universe but in reality he is haunted by his own might. "He" not meaning a single physical person but "the monopolist", mostly a group of people, a conglomerate, or similar structures. It's a political thing... As stated above, just my 2 cents

I just bought a Canon PowerShot A 520 and the conclusion of the review on the site is about what I found as well, very agreeable. Good review, competent.

The "Online: 2" means that on the website where the link goes to, at the time it was cached by google, 2 users were online, as can be seen at the bottom of the cached page. Easy, isn't it?

I have Windows XP and ubuntu - highly recommended, Link - running on my PC. All you got to do is install Windows first, the ubuntu installer takes care of the rest. In most cases the default settings produce a dual boot system flawlessly. HTH,

Yes, abhiram, that's what I read. It's just that I got my hosting points together after the server switch to CA and it had to be reinstalled, which, I assume, the administrator(s) did today. Very happy,

QpaQue, a million thanks for installing fantastico on the server! I joined here shortly after the server switch, never saw it, just opened cpanel, and there it is in all its beauty!One-click install for everythig! Perfect! Thank you very much Sir, this makes Xisto unbeatable. UNBEATABLE.

It's built into windows, m^e! I did not believe it myself It's all there! WOW! Just run "Eudcedit".

I got 54 to 55 processes running. Without starting some serious work that is. Firewall, virus scanner, one filter proxy, one rerouting proxy, PGP, Daemon Tools, the task manager, several instances of svchost.exe, arcotray, Outlook, Firefox (takes 100 megs RAM), IE and others. Sluggish is the word for my 2.8 GHz 1 GB RAM machine. But I can live with it. Currently there are 10 tabs on my taskbar, but I span the desktop over 2 monitors, so there is room for 3 more before they start stacking up