Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
A close friend of ours has bought an antique foot pedal-type sewing machine that had been converted to motorized belt drive to use for her alterations side business. She got it for about 600 Baht (less than $10), and I would have bought it for that much just to use as a lawn ornament.
I’ve never heard of this brand, but for all I know there are a million out there.
It seems my flash memory karma went to hell. After having to trash the new fake Kingston USB drive I bought, the 8GB Samsung Micro SD card in my HTC decided to crap out, taking with it a bunch of cool photos I wanted to post… Lost perhaps forever, until I have access to a NAND reader in the future.
Wouldn’t you know it, I was thinking about backing up the photos just the day before it went bad… Dammit.
I went to the annual Chinese festival in downtown Maha Sarakham last month; this is one where they host Chinese opera at the business association meeting hall (I uploaded crappy vids of the opera this year here and here). Aside from the performance, which I generously bear for up to three whole minutes every time I go (once every couple years), I also like walking the wide area of stalls filled mostly with unimpressive yet numerous food vendors.
At the end of one row of stalls was a memory card/USB thumb drive vendor selling at very low prices. I picked up this 8GB Kingston stick for a couple hundred baht with the intention of filling it with Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and Yo Gabba Gabba episodes for the kids, which they can use with our DVD players at home and in the car.
Unfortunately, the plastic case of the flash drive separated into halves within a week of unpackaging, and most of the files stored on it were corrupted or lost even after low level formatting. I had noticed that the packaging looked a bit suspect just after buying it, but had used fake name brand USB sticks before and hadn’t had any problems… I took a closer look at the packaging:
Lesson: If you buy fake crap, sometimes you will be burned.
During my first year of study at Tenri University in Japan, I met my cousin Erisa. She was from a line of my dad’s family, the Yoshidas, who emigrated to Mexico, whereas my family went to Los Angeles. I never even really knew we had Mexican relatives until I met Erisa.
She spoke zero English, and I spoke high school level Spanish (just enough to not be able to do anything with), but we were both starting to learn Japanese, so we ended up using that over the time she was in Japan (just a couple of years, whereas I stayed for 13 or 14 cumulatively). We were both totally Japanese in appearance, so it must have been a sight when we had these multilingual conversations out in public.
Even though I was using e-mail and laptops before anybody else around me, nobody else was, and I’ve lost track of many good friends from those days. So it made me immensely happy to reconnect with Erisa on Facebook back in August, by accepting her friend request and commenting on one of her posts. She just replied to the comment today, so I guess she was busy or whatever, but I know I can contact her whenever, now. Maybe this leaves the door open for me to visit family in Mexico sometime…
I still hate Facebook for being evil and selling my private information to boner pill companies, but it did a good job for me today.
This could be a killer new feature for some people. Apparently Google at least partially pays for it by the return messages from the mobile device (that you’ve first sent a message from Gmail).
The way it works is that you start with 50 credits (displayed in the Gmail chat window where you send the initial SMS message). Every SMS message you send from Gmail uses one credit. Every message replied to from a mobile device restores 5 credits (for a maximum of 50). If you use all the credits, 1 credit will be restored automatically in 24 hours. So I guess you could game the system (because you’re a rebel screwing the system, man) by never replying from a mobile device.
So I’ve been trying it with both supported carriers (DTAC and True) in Thailand this morning, and there’s one big problem: The messages are arriving to the phones 8 to 10 minutes after I send them from Gmail. Too slow. The return messages are much faster, taking 2 or 3 minutes, but this is also very slow compared to sending between mobile devices in-country. I hope Google can use their magic influence to make their free SMS messaging a bit more usable in Thailand, but maybe it’s a case of you get what you pay for.
#1 Rule for Social Networking Sites post-Facebook Domination: If you name your new service something uppity like Diaspora, Exodus, or Migration, we expect you kick things off by nuking your competitors from orbit (or something equivalent to an Act of Gawd).
Taken during a meeting a couple weeks ago on my HTC Desire HD with Camera 360. I’m really happy with this phone.
We picked up a Nikon D40 body, the successor to my trusty D50, with a charger and two batteries for 3,000 baht (exactly $100 US today). On the D50, I’ve mounted the old Nikkor AF 70-210mm f/4-5.6 lens I bought in Japan, and the D40 will sport the lens from the D50 kit, the Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G ED.
I’m very happy with these cameras because they’re still much better than a pocket camera in most cases, but they’re cheap and worn enough now that I don’t feel like I have to baby them all the time. Also, sadly, I have very little time for hobbies at this particular stage in life. That’s OK though, because cameras and lenses tend to get cooler with age… Maybe I’ll have time for camera stuff again later on, or maybe I’ll just give them to Max and he’ll keep it on a shelf like I do my old Asahi Pentax.
First of all, people who called Google+ a “killer app” the week it was launched are either Brinlickers, or just completely misusing the word.
Second, rapmushi is truly a killer app for the iPhone.
I fucking detest Apple and have refused to buy anything they made since Steve Jobs sent me an email demanding money for a previously free macdotcom email address ~12 years ago and declared that “the era of free is over.”* However, if I could overlook the kind of mindlessness and snobbery that that Apple culture perpetuates, I might buy an iPad just to play this app; it’s that good. The last time I was moved to purchase a new system by a software title was by Parappa the Rapper on the original PlayStation.
*Actually, this statement was and still is true for Apple users, but he was talking about free services like webmail. The really ironic thing is that this truly outstanding rap mushi app is free.
I took this photo a couple months ago out toward the local ostrich farm. The political party that put tons of these signs up on all the roads won Sunday’s elections, so I guess Max and Mina will be getting their ThaiPads soon…
