-
Modernized!
I stuck with the previous theme for quite a while, but it was really just a new take on the old two-column blog layout I’ve used since blogspot, yo. It’s been a QUARTER CENTURY! But we are not going to talk about that today. Below, I am adding a photo of a waitress (the owner?) of a plate lunch joint in Pattaya we ate lunch at last year when visiting students interning at hotels and resorts there. If the photo does not appear, my new template needs additional tinkering. When I wrote the word “below” in the first paragraph, I should have said “above,” because that’s where it appears on…
-
Duck what?
So thicc.
-
A Shared Meal
Catching up with photos from last year. This was a trip to Pattaya in July to visit students interning at hotels with my pal Tee. We ourselves arrived with no reservations and had to stay at a seedy hotel run by nice old people that had wall-length mirrors next to the beds. We went out for noodles at 3 AM after people watching on the busy streets and I met the cutest doge. This may or may not have been the same night we checked out one of the new Indian night clubs at the end of walking street. It was a pretty crazy place and the 99% Indian crowd…
-
a nice iced latte from last year
-
Having a truck is nice
Yes, I can fit all of these things in my normal cars. But I don’t need to dust them off or lay down plastic because it’s a TRUCK. Honestly, the Mitsubishi pickup truck fills a very specific role in Thailand – it has enough loyal fans that buy them new to enable secondhand value hunters like me to find customized gems that are good for another couple hundred thousand kilometers or whatever. These things lose value like crazy compared to the top-tier pickup brands like Toyota and Isuzu, yet are equal in most functions to other mid-tier brands like Nissan (best for towing) and Mazda (best interior). If you just…
-
Retrieval-Augmented Generation aka Dynamic Chunking
So after years of paying for ChatGPT, I switched to a (discounted) paid Gemini plan. Not because of the cost of paying for both, but because I don’t have time/energy to try and main both at the same time. At the end of the discounted first month, I cancelled the Gemini subscription and all but convinced myself to try a paid Claude plan next. But Claude is a stingy, elitist asshole who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and ignores green text bubbles, so fuck that guy amirite? Anyway, because Gemini is freer than Claude (you can barely get in a few sentences before he abandons you for paying customers),…
-
I switched from a Google Pixel 6 to a Xiaomi 15t
Of course, it’s a much newer phone, but it’s pretty hard to deny that even the newest Pixels don’t have big flaws. I am mainly attracted to them because of the cameras and stock Android. But the Xiaomi is no slouch on the photo front, and has better reception and battery capacity/usage. I debloated it by deleting all the preinstalled crap first thing by running commands from my PC, and I’m happy with it. Here are some photos I snapped, mainly from car windows. I got them off of a chat group I sent them to, so they’ve been degraded a bit. YOU ARE PASSING ANOTHER FOX I actually quite…
-
It’s time for a road trip
These are some photos from last year, taken on my expired Pixel 6. If in this lifetime self-driving cars become the norm, I will miss driving. I see the greatest things on the road, but usually when I’m driving myself. Otherwise, my phone is much more interesting. I’m going on a trip to Nakhon Pathom tomorrow, a bit past Bangkok from here. We’re taking students to an academic competition at the Rajabhat there, in a van.
-
Quest with Questers
I was making a thumb drive with videos for my cars and kinda went down an old school rabbit hole. I remember when we had groundbreaking sounds, lyrical feats, and French hip hop was a thing. Remember Luck of Lucien? That’s this dude: AKA Lucien Revolucien. But hip hop kinds fell victim to its own success. I know, because I grew up through the revolution. Hip hop won the war against against old values and just became the BGM. My daughter saw me flipping through YouTube videos and lamenting the current near-absence of female rappers. She said, “Well, there sure isn’t any Lauryn Hill.” Damn, I raised my kids right.
-
I dropped my phone
I mean, I really dropped it. It slipped out of my sweaty hands when I was checking a message while walking. I kicked out with my foot and the phone hit the soft part of the padding, but bounced off, so I technically punted my phone into the asphalt. It immediately died, and after trying various online recovery techniques, I could not get it out of a bootloop. The multicolored “Google” logo appears and disappears endlessly, as the device seems to scream THAT’S WHAT YOU GET FOR DROPPING ME. But that’s when it’s plugged in. When it’s not plugged in, there are no signs of life at all. So maybe…
