Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
The girls alerted me to a meteor shower happening a couple months ago, so we drove to a nearby empty parking lot (MALIN PLAZA) and proceeded to take mediocre night photos with our phones.
The blue space invaders looking thingy above the white gas station sign (with the red/blue droplet logo) was a reflection from an unknown source that showed up in all my photos there — thanks, light pollution!
This is our typical order at Sampeenong, our favorite Isan food joint in the area.
Gai Yang (grilled chicken)
Somtam Lao (Lao-style Papaya Salad)
Tap Wan (literally, “sweet liver”)
Kor Moo Yang (Grilled Pork Neck)
And here’s my homie, Aot, working on a new coffee drink in a Chemex at his coffee stand in front of the restaurant:
At my friend’s place out on the MSK bypass.
I’ve been working weekends for the past couple weeks and I’m tiiiiiired.
Thailand, where old Japanese trucks go to thrive once again.
@ Maha Sarakham University old campus
A friend opened a new café out on the Maha Sarakham bypass (ring road) next to her parents’ restaurant. The deck I was standing on when taking this pic is actually shaped like the bow of a ship. It’s a very popular place for selfies: Huareu Café หัวเรือคาเฟ่
AKA Spicy Papaya Salad, (unofficially) the official dish of northeast Thailand. When served on a pink plastic plate, you know it’s the real deal.
This is outside a new café in our neighborhood, the name of which totally escapes me. This is mostly because cafés open and close so frequently here, it’s hard to remember most of them.
Just a few of the wonders to be seen at my local garage’s work yard. My ’71 Kujira Crown is still sitting in the back yard. It was damaged pretty badly in the floods last year, and I don’t want to start fixing it unless it can be done right, which is more than I can afford at the moment. Sad.
These are fried on one side and hot oil is ladled over them to achieve the crispeh… This is the de facto national lunch dish, so please stop using recipes with tofu bits and chili jam mixed in them, and I’ll try and stop Asian corpos from topping pizzas with artificial crab sticks and bacon-wrapped cheese wieners stuffed in the crusts…
A couple months ago, I put together a new PC out of cheap/used parts since I was still using an ancient 4th gen Intel CPU to power a superpotato tower (ambitiously named “fragmonster”). AMD GPUs are very unpopular in Thailand, so I found a Sapphire 6700xt for a song. I paired it with other decent-but-not-exorbitant components, and made a 1440p rig which made me quite happy. I was using it with USB headphones, and it was all good.
Then one day, I plugged it into my stereo amp via the analog line out and I couldn’t believe the whining and stuttering noises coming out of it that started as soon as Windows booted and got worse as I opened more and more apps. Although I first suspected my CPU cooling fans, I eventually realized it was from the GPU and tried every solution online — reinstalling sound drivers, replacing AMD dll files, running audio troubleshooters, Windows updates, etc. — to no avail. This went on for a few painful weeks, and I just tried to ignore it. I may have, even briefly, come to accept that I could never use the analog sound outputs (front or back!) on my new system.
Then on some obscure forum, in a post from a couple years ago, somebody recommended trying a hardware fix for Sapphire AMD cards in particular — a ground loop isolator. I happened to have one in my truck, since I was going to install it my sound system there. It was an simple RCA connector model, plug and play, and it worked instantly and flawlessly.
The downside to using one of these devices or other isolators/filters is that they may affect sound quality. I am using it for playing audio from a PC, so my expectations weren’t that high from the beginning, and I didn’t notice a difference anyway. What I did notice is that the coil noise (whining, stuttering, screeching) that made the normal use of my PC’s analog sound outputs impossible, was almost completely eliminated… and now I can truly Milly rock, hide it in my sock.