Category: Photos

Scenes from a Hoi Tod Shop

Hoi Tod is a Thai dish made by frying mussels (or sometimes, other shellfish, squid, or shrimp) in an eggy batter and wrapping up beansprouts and garlic chives with it. Those in the know usually prefer this dish to Pad Thai. It’s often served as street food, especially at night markets, but there are also small shops that specialize in it.

This particular joint was crowded when we visited at lunchtime on a weekday in a busy Bangkok district, but I thought it was pretty average — I thought it was too stuffed with undercooked sprouts, but that might just be due to my preferences. I’m used to a greasier dish with a more generously seasoned finishing umami punch in the gut. I thought this hi-so version was a bit bland. Also, eating this in a restaurant instead of at a fold-up table on the street means it costs double… However, in the third pic, you can see that they served a whole extra plate of crispy bits on the side, so that almost made up for it.

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.

The Dogs of Lad Prao

For as long as we’ve been visiting Nam’s auntie and uncle on Lad Prao 33, there have been a huge pack of dogs running the middle area of the street. During the day, they lounge around in the heat and disappear through holes in nearby gates, but at night, they run around free. It is scary walking there alone at night. The neighbors all complain about the danger and the shits left all over the place, to no avail… We’ve been going and staying there for decades, so we have probably seen several generations of this wild pack.