Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
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.
Bruh.
I expect there will be a future of AI-generated John Lennon creations in the not-so-distant future, but for now, this will do… Is this the last song to be released with his real voice?
Back in 2006, I became a bit obsessed with a video I found on this newly-purchased video sharing (or was it video dating?) site called YouTube. It was a 2-minute ad shot in Hong Kong for Nintendo featuring a catchy tune with enchanting vocals called Hatsukoi by Mayumi Kojima (小島麻由美). I blogged about it back then, and looking at the comments, it actually led to a meetup in real life that led all the way to Thailand (where are you, bro?).
That video has disappeared and reappeared (only on YT) several times over the years, always in [potato x potato] resolution, and I’ve tried to keep the post for it updated with a live embed… So it was to my great surprise to find an HD link for it today, after I’d updated the low-res version on my blog post, of course.
Those notes she hits in the chorus (after the lululala) still really do it for me, which is sadly not something I can say for all of the music I used to love – I listened to a lot of it way too much and I can’t even sit through a whole song most of the time now.
I’ll paste the JP lyrics to Hatsukoi by Mayumi Kojima below, because most Japanese lyric sites still employ anti-copy technologies from the early 90’s, which are very annoying.
小島麻由美( こじま まゆみ )
はつ恋
作詞：小島麻由美
作曲：小島麻由美
わたしを置いて どこへも 行かないと ゆびきりした 夏の日
悲しい気持ちで目が覚めた 少女の頃に戻った夢
ルールララー わたしの心は水色
ルールララー あの頃想えば水色
メリーゴーランドまわるよ
誰かに似てた 遠い昔 背丈を気にしてた少年
わたしは何に恋してた？ その顔さえ白くぼやけて
もっと沢山の歌詞は
ルールララー わたしの心は水色
ルールララー あの頃想えば水色
メリーゴーランド まわるよ
ルールララー わたしの心は水色
ルールララー あの頃想えば水色
ルールララー 心はいつでも
ルールララー あなたを想えば水色
メリーゴーランドまわるよ
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.
OpenAI has released an official guide for teachers using ChatGPT in their classroom: Teaching with AI
It’s nice to have something official posted, at least. There are some new resources in there that I’m slowly trying to get through.
The official answer to the question, “Do AI detectors work?” is:
In short, no, not in our experience.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8313351-how-can-educators-respond-to-students-presenting-ai-generated-content-as-their-own
I asked ChatGPT the same question, and its answer was:
AI detectors, specifically those designed to identify plagiarism or academic dishonesty, can be effective in detecting instances of copied or improperly attributed content.
https://chat.openai.com/
So who knows better, the parent, or the child?
It seems like a funny name for a safety product, but I guess they paid someone’s 12 year old nephew to design it, so whatever… Toshino actually makes some of the higher end power strips in Thailand, though (in a market filled with dubious/dangerous products).
Seen at the Thaiwatsadu home center near our home.
UPDATE: The Jetpack suite for WordPress now contains a built-in AI for providing feedback on my posts before publishing. It has told me:
The content mentions a safety product with a humorous name, suggesting that it may have been poorly designed. However, it also highlights that Toshino produces higher-end power strips in Thailand. The accompanying images showcase the product at a home center.
Overall, the post captures the author’s opinion about the product and provides visual evidence. However, it would benefit from the following actions to improve clarity:
1. Consider providing more information about the Toshino brand and its reputation in the market.
2. Elaborate on why the author believes the product name is funny and how it may impact its perceived quality.
3. Share any personal experience or observations with Toshino power strips or similar products to enhance credibility.
4. Include a conclusion or final thoughts to summarize the author’s opinion.
These improvements will help readers gain a better understanding of the product and the author’s perspective.
Groovy.