Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
It seems my flash memory karma went to hell. After having to trash the new fake Kingston USB drive I bought, the 8GB Samsung Micro SD card in my HTC decided to crap out, taking with it a bunch of cool photos I wanted to post… Lost perhaps forever, until I have access to a NAND reader in the future.
Wouldn’t you know it, I was thinking about backing up the photos just the day before it went bad… Dammit.
Yesterday, out of nowhere, Mina came to my desk and said, “Here, daddy.”
She then handed me my passport.
As in, arguably the single most important document I possess living overseas.
I do not know where she got it; I’m just glad she didn’t throw it away or color in all the pages…
Here are some photos of Max’s playmates from the other day.
Meanwhile, Nam is supervising graduation rehearsals at her university all weekend, so I’m watching the kids.
The title of this post is from the best song on the best rap album ever made.
He’s in the zone!
I went to the annual Chinese festival in downtown Maha Sarakham last month; this is one where they host Chinese opera at the business association meeting hall (I uploaded crappy vids of the opera this year here and here). Aside from the performance, which I generously bear for up to three whole minutes every time I go (once every couple years), I also like walking the wide area of stalls filled mostly with unimpressive yet numerous food vendors.
At the end of one row of stalls was a memory card/USB thumb drive vendor selling at very low prices. I picked up this 8GB Kingston stick for a couple hundred baht with the intention of filling it with Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and Yo Gabba Gabba episodes for the kids, which they can use with our DVD players at home and in the car.
Unfortunately, the plastic case of the flash drive separated into halves within a week of unpackaging, and most of the files stored on it were corrupted or lost even after low level formatting. I had noticed that the packaging looked a bit suspect just after buying it, but had used fake name brand USB sticks before and hadn’t had any problems… I took a closer look at the packaging:
Lesson: If you buy fake crap, sometimes you will be burned.
Nam took the babies to see their old nanny. Her new house is almost complete, but is out in the sticks. At night, the house is apparently crawling with all sorts of bugs, frogs, and who knows what else. Max brought back a couple to play with at home.
Living overseas, you might be surprised how many websites and web services (in the US and Japan especially) are closed to the rest of the world. Of course, there are easy ways around this, but if your personal blog is denying me access because I’m visiting from another country? You, sir, are a dumbass, plain and simple.
Bob Ross was like jack bauer – he assassinated a syrian diplomat with a Dragunov sniper rifle.
(apologies to all, I needed a Google result)
