Thai Cat Food

Or mostly Japanese, actually.

At the original Big C supermarket location in Maha Sarakham, which has been on a steady decline since so many competitors opened – Makro, Tesco (many branches of varying sizes), some independent stores that usually go bust within a year, and most recently, CJ. What Sarakham really needs is a Tops supermarket, which is is more high-end (but not as high end as Villa).

Pickle really likes wet food recently since she’s getting older, and she crunches reluctantly on dry food like her teeth are sensitive. She likes this Nekko brand a lot (although it’s pretty expensive at Big C, as pictured here), and won’t eat some of the other brands. She still keeps in shape as a mouser and regularly presents us with trophies like rats, mice, squirrels, birds, and lizards. I try to keep her full with cat food so she doesn’t eviscerate her prey on our doorstep like she used to – this system has been working pretty well so far.

Triton is no longer the Bang Saen Special

We wanted to transfer my lowrider to Nam’s name from her sister’s, in order to prepare it for possible sale. The prefectural inspection officer we ran into at the Land Transport Office either wanted a bribe and didn’t ask for it clearly enough, or was just having a bad day, and decided to insist that my truck was too low and had to be restored to standard height (which is technically not a law here). Either way, we were not in the mood to pay into corruption and thought it might be easier to sell the truck at standard height anyway, so we took it for modification to Nam’s old classmate across the street, who runs a garage in front of his house. Pics of the restored-to-stock truck will follow after I’ve replaced the tires to match the ride height. The photos below are just a remembrance of why I bought it in the first place (in honor of the lowered racing trucks AKA rod sing cruising the beach roads in Chonburi Province).

Gauge cluster (mostly wrong/defunct – true racer style)
A shift indicator – the first one I’ve used since learning to drive stick in a Porsche 944 35 years ago!
Up on the stand
Rear drums, baby!
Pickle loves hanging out under the truck and in its shadows all day – it’s very secure

The shop pictured is the one written about above, but the photos are from a previous visit, when they were replacing brake pads and doing maintenance.

21 Years of Steam

If that’s not a cringey Steam profile, I don’t know what is. I’d like to say I registered for Steam on dial-up, but looking back on posts from 2003 just before I signed up*, it was either my first FTTH line (NTT 100Mbps service on a Japanese island 20 years ago!), or Dual ISDN (128 kbit/s and more expensive than the FTTH, if I remember correctly).

I was one of the only Dual ISDN subscribers on Awaji Island according to the techs who installed it. After I upgraded to FTTH and they came by for maintenance, they said I had the fastest hikari (fiber) connection they had seen, as well. I can’t remember all the tweaks we were using, but there were software configs as well as hardware hacks and accessories. Ironically, in those infant days of broadband speed tests, some cable internet company in Yokohama often had the highest scores on the leaderboards!

It was interesting over time to see where broadband expansion flourished. Korea was the leader for a long time. Back home in the states, it was sad to see how slow both the rollout and speed of FTTH was, and how corporate monopolies and weak legislation resulted in terrible service for almost everyone. Over here in Thailand, things took off five or so years after I got here. My very first FTTH provider here was a neighborhood kid who hacked together his own DSLAM in his house (his main cost was keeping the equipment from overheating, he would leave the aircon on all day) and strung lines for subscribers all over the gated community. Back then, almost nobody had a computer (net cafes were in their heyday), but damn, that kid had a sharp business mind (and a miserably hot St. Bernard named Tang Mo). I still see that kid around sometimes; I’m pretty sure he’s running several businesses around town.

*Steam apparently launched on September 12, 2003. I registered within the first month, and a few million users had registered by the end of the first year, according to Reddit. The reason I got on Steam in the first place? To make playing Counter-Strike easier! I never would have thought it would still be so popular (and basically unchanged).