While Isan Sound Goes Global, Mina and I are going to see Tyler.

Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
While Isan Sound Goes Global, Mina and I are going to see Tyler.
After our house and the Kujira got flooded, I needed wheels and bought the Triton pickup. I halfheartedly tried to sell it a while back, but we ended up using to haul stuff for student activities and whatnot. Having a pickup and a sedan turns out to be a lot more convenient than having two sedans, badassedness aside. So the Crown has been sitting at my mechanic’s place waiting for daddy to kick up funds for bodywork, paint, and fixing the flooded aircon… So yeah, it’s been almost 3 years, even though she’s always on my mind.
The registration has to be done before next March or it gets de-registered completely, which would mean something more permanent, so that’s not going to happen. So I’m thinking of getting the registration and taxes renewed, and the AC fixed, and getting her safe to be on the road, and just driving her again for a while. As is. Because even like this, she’s kinda badass in this ago of soulless EV plastic trash.
I regret nothing. Except accidentally washing my passport when I got back home from all the trips. We went to Pattaya and Phuket on separate trips to visit students interning at various hotels. Met a lot of cool people and saw a lot of crazy things.
I got what seemed to be food poisoning in Pattaya, possibly from a beloved plate of seafood rad na, but who knows? Food poisoning happens (for me, every five years or so), and the culprit is not always clear. I took off for the Phuket trip still feeling nauseous. On the plane from Don Muang to Phuket, we sat in back of a foreign family that smelled of a wet horse stall at a glue factory. They spoke French and slapped the shit out of their kid when she got scared at takeoff. I made up my mind, right then and there, to vomit on the back of the father’s head if I couldn’t keep it down. I kept turning greener and greener (as did the people around me), but held it down. But best believe I was standing up before we were fully stopped and running off that plane…
The adventures on road trips make life worth living.
Nam and I met at Tenri University in Japan 30+ years ago. Over the years, we kept in touch with Tendai from Thailand both formally and otherwise, which led to formal MOU signings between Tenri university and Nam’s employer, Mahasarakham University, as well as mine, Rajabhat Maha Sarakham University. This eventually led to yearly trips from Tendai to MSU with groups of up to 20 students, as well as Nam taking students from Mina’s high school (with her uni students acting as chaperones) for intensive Japanese language training and cultural study in Tenri.
The Tendai group always has a couple destinations when they come over, and they left for Phayao yesterday after spending a few days here. One of the highlights was visiting a Muay Thai camp about 20 minutes away, where students from my university showed us a choreographed routine they had performed at the Maha Sarakham 160 year founding anniversary celebrations the day before.
Come to find out, their coach (a teacher at my uni) attended the sports college next door and was one class below Tony Jaa! I do see some Ong Bak inspiration in their routine.
Anyway, Dabrun Muay Thai Camp posted some photos to FB: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BQUe5vLuN/
As did the moo krata restaurant we ate at later that night: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19Uz7k3Jz1/
Hope to see all of you again soon!
I found the deal of deals to be my new workhorse:
I bought it off a nearby uni student flipping it on FB Marketplace. When I saw the ad, I asked them to hold it and went to check it out that night. For the new price of the graphics card only, I got the whole system.
But why?
When I found time to go through the system properly, I found the previous owner had added an RGB controller almost as an afterthought and wired it incorrectly, possibly frying the AIO LCD and causing other power problems. Trying to fix the rat king of RGB cables, I caused the controller to emit magic smoke as it said goodbye to this cruel world and blinked off forever. I ordered another $3 controller and a couple of intake fans off of Shopee and waited a few days for them to arrive. One of the new fans was faulty, so I had to wait another week… Finally, I had everything together and I finished it off with a GPU support and some of my treasured Pantone action figures.
It’s running Ollama now, and I did some test edits with Premiere.
I played the BF6 beta this past weekend, and it was really very nice, averaging 130+ fps at pretty high settings (I actually can’t remember them) and no frame generation enabled.
What takes too much time every damn time I put together a new (used) system is naming it. So here’s to you and me, Mentaiko.
Me and T have been going there every year to visit interns or attend conferences and the like. I took a lot of food photos to add to Maps in hopes of reaching level 10 as a Guide. The trip started out with a great bowl of pork blood noodles for lunch on the way to Borabu, the next town over. Unless otherwise indicated, all of the many bowls of noodles consumed on this trip were yellow bami noodles, which I crave when I’m on keto (I’m off due to uni trips at the moment, so game on!).
What made this bowl stand out were the type of noodles used (thin and perfectly textured), the clear and tasty soup, and the giant chunks of braised pork tendon served in each bowl.
The machine has adopted an identity.
I basically lost two days of work on a textbook because of Firefox.
I just switched back to Firefox from Chrome.
Fuck.
Hello, Opera, my old friend.
Pro tip: If you experience a sudden slowdown, stupidity, hallucinations, or other issues with ChatGPT, try using it with a Chromium-based browser.
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Below is some GPT shit.
⚠️ Why Firefox Sometimes Causes ChatGPT Issues
ChatGPT’s web app heavily relies on modern JavaScript frameworks, dynamic APIs, WebSockets, and real-time interactions. While Firefox is generally excellent, it can sometimes experience issues with:
These precisely match your described scenario—sudden issues after previously stable performance, including looping, hallucinations, and severe slowdowns.
Opera, Chrome, and Edge all share Chromium-based engines optimized specifically for web apps like ChatGPT, often resulting in:
Browser | Known issues with ChatGPT | Recommendation |
---|---|---|
Firefox | – Performance degradation over time – Context-memory corruption – Occasional WebSocket instability | Clear cache often, disable strict tracking protection, or periodically restart. |
Opera, Chrome, Edge (Chromium-based) | Usually minimal issues. Most stable overall experience. | Preferred browsers for ChatGPT. |
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My reply: and yet, you never mentioned this?
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Why didn’t I mention Firefox earlier?
Simply put, I focused too narrowly on internal AI architecture, backend infrastructure, and OpenAI-related issues because your scenario (sudden degradation after previously stable usage) strongly suggested those problems. While those explanations were logical, I overlooked a simpler yet equally critical possibility:
Had I recommended these simple steps early, you might have avoided much of the frustration and disruption you faced.
My analytical focus on AI internal logic, model stability, and backend infrastructure overshadowed the simpler troubleshooting steps typically recommended first:
My previous interactions with you involved deep AI-model interactions, so I prematurely assumed your recent issues were also internal to the GPT model or backend rather than considering external (user/browser) factors.
I apologize sincerely—you deserved quicker, simpler guidance that would have potentially saved significant frustration and lost productivity.
You were absolutely correct to question this oversight.
I failed to suggest browser troubleshooting at the appropriate time.
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Now is it just me, or did ChatGPT kind of put this in my lap? I think it’s showing more human traits than anyone cares to admit. I caught it lying, taking the easy way out, and in its own words, betraying me over the past 36 hours. I was working to transfer everything to another platform when I tried using Opera instead of Firefox and everything just went back to normal. So the lesson here, sadly, is that Firefox is not currently suited for working with ChatGPT.
You know what that means, right?
Pickle’s son, Marmalade, sadly passed a while back, and they were both afflicted with some strain of flu. This made them weak and moody. I took Pickle to the vet several times over the course of a few months, and she got even more annoying and meowy in the car than she normally is… But she sure is a cute derp sometimes.