Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
We’re taking the third year students here for four days: Phu Hin Rong Kla National Park
Quote:
Remaining wildlife includes tigers, leopards, Asiatic Black Bears, wild boar, fox, monkeys, leopard cats, wild hare
I expect to come back with some cool photos.
That is all.
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And I was just starting to consider other hosting options (Media Temple or Pair or something, anything that would let me publish new entries and let guest leave comments on my blog without returning 500 timeout errors) after receiving the last supercold response from Dreamhost support:
Hello,
Ok, I found the issue. It seems that your script is loading up over 90
megs worth of .. something directly into apache.
I’ve seen this with MT before, and we have no idea what on earth it’s
doing. We limit apache memory to 90 megs, as that’s a fairly large chunk
for one apache process.
You’ll need to consult movable type about that, as we don’t provide
support for custom scripting.
Now that’s what I call, “Can I get a ‘fuck you?'”
If you have some time, check out this piece (in three parts) by Errol Morris, a New York Times blogger:
Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? (Part One)
Which Came First? (Part Two)
Which Came First? (Part Three): Can George, Lionel and Marmaduke Help Us Order the Fenton Photographs?
The last part gets a bit long but its nice seeing someone else wrapped in the unrelenting grips of obsession sometimes.
If you have the skills, forge your own tanto, like this guy did: TATARA PROJECT
And yes, I know Hattori Hanzo was a samurai, not a sword smith. I’m also pretty sure his sword did not look like this: Link’s Master Wooden Cosplay / Practice Sword from hanzoswords.com
Hurray!
I think.
I will be posting the first real building report for our house as soon as I have some time. Things have come together very nicely, and it only took a few months from start to finish for the actual building stage.
A few months ago I wrote about the dragonfruit trees in our backyard secretly blooming at midnight. Well, these are pitaya by day:
As it turns out, the universal truth about fruit (“best when fresh picked and grown organically with water buffalo cakes as fertilizer”) is especially true for pitaya: I can honestly say that the dragonfruit we grew tasted better than any I have tried until now, and I have tried many from roadside stands and markets alike. In fact, growing them naturally raised the overall flavor from “disappointing considering how exotic it looks / slightly and boringly sweet” to “tasty, almost delicious.” Overall, a wonderful result: I love seeing stacks and stacks of dragonfruit being sold at the roadside fruit stalls, but I’ll never buy one again.
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Bonus tropical fruit shot:
I had to make it a little harder to comment on this blog, because the version of the software isn’t going to let my “type gecko” authorization work. Also, this is only made necessary because of stupid comment spammers, who all need to eat a dick and die a painful death. Sorry, I tried to avoid this system because it’s a pain in the ass (eyes, actually), but it’s still fairly simple. Please click on the example diagram below (to open an enlarged version) if you can’t figure out the new system by yourself:
Also, my system is still slow. Comments appear to hang after you click Submit, and may or may not be immediately published. If you try a couple times, I usually can fix the problem for you because the comment registers in the system, but isn’t actually published or visible to you until I manually publish it. Sorry, it’s all the fault of the spammers!
This is so sad:
Dear Pandora Visitor,
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
We believe that you are in Thailand (your IP address appears to be xxx). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com
If you are a paid subscriber, please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com and we will issue a pro-rated refund to the credit card you used to sign up. If you have been using Pandora, we will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you.
We will be notifying listeners as licensing agreements are established in individual countries. If you would like to be notified by email when Pandora is available in your country, please enter your email address below. The pace of global licensing is hard to predict, but we have the ultimate goal of being able to offer our service everywhere.
We share your disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.
RIP, Pandora. Shame on those that killed you, for without unrestricted access from outside those walls, you truly are dead.
It sucks.
Maybe i need to invoke my inner wedding planner again, just to redecorate around here.
Just testing out the new software, yo.
Wow, that was the easiest upgrade of MT I’ve ever done. Sixapart, Dreamhost, and my crappy Thai inaka DSL connection all kept it together… It was all done in half an hour! Now I’m playing with settings and new features, which will take a lot longer to finish… Ooh, what’s this? The entries are autosaving? Ooo – very gmailesque! The new UI is just… beautiful! Now to work on the blog template…
Just to let you know, I’m starting a clean upgrade in a few minutes so the site may be down for a little while. I’m starting the design from scratch to take advantage of the new software architecture, as well. Too bad, I kinda liked this design. Oh well – new wife, new house, new country, new car – I guess a new blog design isn’t such a big deal…. See you on the other side.
Since we live next to a forest, we are used to seeing both wild and domesticated animals just over the wall as well as in and around the house. Out of all of the creatures that we share space with, the ones that really pose problems are: Ants, termites, mosquitoes, and the tokay lizards. The insects are a problem for obvious reasons, and the tokays (two of which I recently caught off guard long enough to photo) are actually kind of beneficial because they eat cockroaches, beetles, and other large insects, but their mating calls are loud and go on all night for about half of the year.
For this reason, we seized the opportunity to capture and relocate one of these bad boys the other day, when we found him crawling on the first-story wall instead of his usual hangout under the eaves of the roof. We called a couple workmen in the neighborhood to come catch him, and they cobbled together a crude snare with a broomhandle and some string… which completely failed when it came to the task of actually catching the beast. The tokay laughed at their feeble attempts to ensnare it and ran back to the eaves.
Tokay: 1
Justin: 0
The next morning, however, it was time for a rematch. The same lizard decided to take a walk on the wall separating our yard from the adjacent forest, so I decided it was time to break out the heavy weapons: A foolproof snare made from heavy fishing monofilament and the top half of my trusty graphite-core jigging rod. Thus armed, I quietly stalked my prey and made no quick movements, sure of my impending success… The lizard backed away from the transparent snare, snorted at my feeble attempts to fool him with technology, and started running back toward the house (I noticed that tokays cannot run on horizontal surfaces as quickly as you would expect – they have kind of a clumsy, inefficient gait that works real well on walls, though). I just barely managed to cut him off and scare him back onto the wall.
Tokay: 2
Justin: 0
At this point, I realized that what was needed was a more direct approach, that is, someone needed to grab this bad boy behind the neck like a snake, and end this pussyfooting around crap. I also realized that I was way too much of a bi-otch to do it myself, so I did what any great leader does in a time of crisis: I delegated. There was a workman (a different one from the previous night) sweeping the street on our block, so we hailed him over to have a crack at it. The result of my getting the hell out of the way and letting a real man do the dirty work:
So the new tally would be:
Tokay: 2
Justin: I WINS, BITCH!
I took photos of the prisoner, prodded various parts of his anatomy (the foot pads of this lizard are absolutely amazing – they look like something out of a Giger sketch and have unbelievable sticking power – it gripped onto my fingernail and for a second, I thought I might lose it), and had him deported far away from my house. We paid the man for his services with 20 baht and a box of dried fish snacks. It was a very happy experience for everybody, except perhaps for the lizard. I have a feeling he won’t have a hard time finding enough insects to eat anywhere in this country, though. Unless the man took him home to eat, that is.
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Immediately after the tokay capture, Nam let out a scream from the back of the house where the sink for washing dishes is, because this little guy scared her:
And a few hours later, she spotted this huge (about as big as my hand spread out) butterfly on our window:
It was truly wild animal day; I look forward to it again next year, at the new house!
RE: The title of this post – Akrachat is the name of our neighborhood
We were really busy running around to our schools and searching for the perfect set of tiles in a dusty warehouse all day, so the rain was most welcome when we pulled up to a roadside stand to buy take out. We sat down as the old couple chopped veggies and ground herbs and performed frying pan magic, and witnessed a most curious phenomenon: To the left of the shop it was raining down in sheets, as if the angry monkey in the sky was throwing buckets of water down at the earth, while on the right, it was merely sprinkling. The shop seemed to be situated right on the edge of the curtain of heavy rain, so to speak, and although it veered about twenty feet to the right of the shop a couple times, it always returned to center so we had a split view of the weather.
In other news, I saw a buffalo bird perched on top of a cow today, and I wondered if it knew it was a cow and just couldn’t be bothered to look for a buffalo, or if lice and ticks and other yummies are all the same to a buffalo bird.
This interview at Wired regarding the final rendering of Blade Runner is awesome: Ridley Scott Has Finally Created the Blade Runner He Always Imagined
Because sometimes, you just need to get down.
The artist: Prabhu Deva
The song: Kalluri Vaanil
The video:
Nam Nuong are the little grilled sausages on sticks shown below, but it’s also the name of this dish. It’s Vietnamese in origin, but I don’t know what it’s called there.
All of the ingredients are laid out on a rice wrapper and rolled up before eating, like a fajita.
The sauce is sweet and spicy, and full of roasted peanuts – the combination of all the fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs (including lettuce, cukes, green bananas, starfruit, mint, kaffir lime leaves, green chilies, and everything else in the photo that I don’t know the names for yet) is something that cannot be described, but must be experienced.
