Fake Kingston Flash Drive

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:

It's true, nobody reads the fine print!

Lesson: If you buy fake crap, sometimes you will be burned.

a seed

Max, in twenty years will you remember when daddy told you that chicken pox causes you to see Mickey Mouse Clubhouse episodes in black in white? Because it was actually a PAL to NTSC-J conversion problem. I hooked up your DVD player to an old brownscreen set we brought from Japan (that Auntie Merin gave us) that’s been sitting unused in our bedroom forever. We moved you there to be under the new cooler, since it eats comparatively little juice and is running all day to keep you from sweating…

Sorry ’bout that.

It is kinda funny, though (at least funnier than my other idea, which was to tell you you were turning into a dog).

Love,
daddy