Category: Photos

Thailand’s best Crispy Pork resto

We found the holy grail of crispy pork shops on Koh Chang over the summer. Everybody on that trip still talks about it. We were there to visit students interning on the island, so I was with a couple coworker pals and we brought Max along as well. Tee drove us to Bangkok, where we stayed at his condo for a night, then we set out for a few days of island life.

This was probably the best meal of the whole trip because the prices were cheap (less than 2 dollars a dish) and the portions were huge!

Of course, the place is a total hole in the wall, and run by the friendliest people.

The name of the shop? YUMMY

Random soi dog

Thai soi (street) dogs are mostly chill. This huge concrete lot near our house was supposed to be a fresh market years ago, but before it was completed, there was a huge storm. It toppled the poorly-constructed first market area roof and someone was killed by the falling roof while several others were injured. As it turns out, it was built too low and gets flooded a foot deep for the entire duration of rainy season anyway. This doggo and his friends run around here freely now.

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.