Category: Around Mahasarakham

Chit-chat Corner Ice Cream Session

The US embassy-sponsored conversation project that Mina and I have been facilitating on Wednesdays at Mahasarakham University every Wednesday in the evenings goes on break between terms. For the last session of the term, we usually do a special cooking project. Since there’s no kitchen facilities in the American Corner, I usually have to think of projects that require minimal cooking and no running water, etc. This term, I decided to do a throwback to simpler times.

We made ice cream in Ziploc bags with ice and salt, and it turned out much better than expected. Normal Thai milk contains about 10-11% milk fat, so I spent the week before finding the best ratios with whipping cream (cheaper than whole cream) and various ingredients. In the end, a 1:1 milk to cream ratio was the best compromise between optimal texture and ease of explanation. 3-4 cups of crushed ice and 1/3 cup of salt seemed to work best for the freezing component. Surprisingly, green was the favorite color for students, and matcha (I stole Nam’s good stuff from Kyoto) was the most popular flavor. We had a good time.

WordPress — undefined constant error

I try to follow cardinal rules of data management that were drilled into me since I got into computers at university by (#1) taking backups often and (#2) keeping stuff organized. Well, the first one caused my site to go down today because I didn’t really follow the second one.

I try to keep on top of things by doing a full site backup at least once a year, on top of doing periodic database and blog backups. When I finished the full backup today, it stored the tarball (a compressed .tar.gz archive) in my hosted account right next to two other huge ones from last year that I forgot to delete, and it put me over the storage limit. This had the effect of returning ERROR 500 when trying to reach my site. However, I could still get into cPanel from my host’s server address, and support advised me to check the error log and replace core WP files.

The error log was full of lines containing the following:

PHP Warning:  Use of undefined constant DATABASE_SERVER - assumed 'DATABASE_SERVER' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP)

Then I noticed that the file size of the wp-config.php file was 0 bytes.

So I downloaded the tarball from the backup I had made earlier and extracted wp-config.php. I replaced the one on the server, and everything seems to be working again.

The PHP warning above is not specific to my host or WordPress configuration, but I couldn’t immediately find a search result describing this exact problem. Then again, Google search really sucks these days, so maybe this post won’t help anybody in any case.

Here is a photo of a statue in a downtown Maha Sarakham canal that’s supposed to be the tail of a mythical river monster of ancient Thai legend, but is jokingly called “the asparagus” by everyone and has become a national symbol of corruption (the city supposedly paid over 100 million baht for it):

It has nothing to do with the server problem above; I’d just wanted to post the photo for a long time.

Blue Lotus

Also known as the blue water lily, or blue star water lily, which is slightly confusing since a “blue lily” is a completely different thing. The plant pictured could be Nymphaea nouchali or one of its several varieties including Nymphaea nouchali var. caerulea which contains the psychotropic substance aporphine, which lead to the outlawing of possession of the plant where tripping ancient Egyptian balls is apparently frowned upon.

The lotus has roots in many countries and religions, and it’s said that everywhere the baby Buddha stepped, lotus flowers bloomed and that when the Buddha died, they reappeared everywhere that he had walked the Earth. The fullness of bloom and color of the flower also have religious meaning. The blue lotus represents wisdom and intelligence.

I took this particular photo in our hometown of Maha Sarakham, at the Issan Arts and Culture Centre, where Nam’s father was director for many years. They were in a ceramic water planter just in front of the Buddha that he sculpted for the university.

My Own Private Loch

This is my favorite path to take on my daily sunset walks. It’s a concrete footpath bordering the canal that winds through my university’s campus. The water levels of the canals and holding ponds they feed to fluctuate quite a bit, as the norm for these times of climate change mean that long periods of drought are immediately followed by heavy and persistent rains. When the level is right, though, I can say hi to Nessie.

It’s been raining almost every day since Max settled in here for his summer vacation, but I took him here last week. He saw Nessie. I consider this to be the coolest thing to see in the whole province, and the fact that it’s hidden and impermanent makes it even better.