| February 8th, 2005 - Where is Mama's Boy? |
Though I'm leaving for a 4-day vacation in Japan tomorrow, I decided to delegate some time to write a long overdue entry.
Yes... there is a Chinese movie starring William Hung. He sings a couple songs and has many girls at his side, I'm jealous. One of the most fitting title's, as he plays the role of "Mama's Boy".
Actually, I started this entry last night but was interrupted when I found that there was something wrong with the laundry machine. Though the cycle ended (around 2:30am), there was still a lot of noise of water rushing through the hose... and water creeping along the floor across a third of my apartment. Fortunately, it didn't get very far and we had a guy show us where the control valve was to shut it off. We spent about an hour and a half cleaning up and lining the floor with newspapers.
By we, I meant my mom and I, as she came to visit -- which also means that I've been gaining weight recently though I have been exercising pretty much daily. My legs have been a bit sore, but that's a good sign. Hopefully there's a gym that I can use where I'm staying in Japan (the hotel is supposed to be quite nice).
I've been meaning to write an entry. It's a shame that I can't jot down every thought that I've had since the last couple of months. Not that any of it is meaningful to anyone else but me, or that I
I wish that I had a photographic/eidetic memory as well as the ability to recollect that information upon whim -- I could be the next Jeopardy champion.
Yes, perhaps existence would be easier as a self-aware robot (with sufficient storage and computing power).
My third birthday in Korea came and passed -- I was in Pusan for my cousin's wedding the day before. Nothing special, but it's depressing that I've already spent 3 birthdays in Korea. Well, depressing because I feel like I haven't accomplished enough during my time here. Took some photos of the wedding as well as a few with my new specialty lens, lensbaby.
I went night skiing for a short time last night. The Lunar New Year holiday traffic was terrible. Even though we took a lot of back roads, it took us about 3 hours to arrive at the Ji-san resort, a trip that is normally 45 minutes.
I stuck around my 14-year-old cousin (since I've lost her once before, when she was much younger which is yet another story) who was snowboarding while I skied. Then, I found out that the rental place had given me ski boots with no room for my calves... they looked like they might fit someone with calves the size of my forearms. Since they only tested the fit using only the bottom clasps, I thought they would fit as I've never had that problem before. After they arrived with new boots (service is convenient), I ended up going down the slopes 4 times with my cousin. Haven't quite gotten used to skiing again since it's been a few years since I've been skiing, but it was fun nevertheless.
I've been getting advice from various people as well as thinking about my own advice to give to people who come to Korea, unaccustomed to the work culture as I was. I'll probably write something in a later entry about it. Seems like the most happens just before you leave. Probably a signal that I should try and live with a little more urgency.
Last week, I visited my dog Sam at my aunt's house. Though I consider him my dog, my cousin also has an equal claim since he has taken care of him just as long as I have, if not longer by now. I still remember when I first received him about 15 years ago when he was around 1 year old. These days, he's aging really quickly. He developed a cataract in his right eye over the past year and lost most of his bladder control. He's not as active anymore, and his hair seems to be thinning out. He gave me a big scratch on my arm as one of his nails was probably broken and very sharp. I guessed that he wanted to go out, so I got up to walk him, but I discovered by an unfortunate step into a puddle that he had already done part of his business.
I took him for a walk without his leash, since they don't have a collar on him anymore since it gets knotted in his hair. I'm sure he hardly runs anymore, and had a difficult time getting him to chase me across the parking lot. But in the end, he chased after me in a slow but animated jog.
I have to take a nap before leaving for Japan now. Happy Lunar New Year!
|
| January 5th, 2005 - 2004 in Review |
January 1, 2004
Began the year Jan 1 at a party Jun-Suk's house with Young-chul and company. We ate dinner and played various board games.
Here's me kicking some butt in Monopoly.
January 3
I went to the Hollywood Motorshow at COEX Mall to take some photos of the cars. I invited a friend who just wanted to take pictures of the girls.
Here I am, sitting in Mr. Bean's Mini which is not quite my dream car, but probably all I would be able to afford if I had the need for a car.
January 18
I went on a weekend ski trip to Phoenix Park with my cousin and his friends. It was my first time snowboarding and I didn't get very good advice
from my cousin's friends. Check out this action shot of me turning.
January 31
The day after my birthday, I went to see Sungook's sister get married in some far-away town. It was tough getting a good shot of her smiling,
so instead I captured this unique wedding moment.
February 5
The company had some event, and I was the designated photographer as well as a performer. I probably would have received more
applause had I done stupid human tricks, but instead I played a duet of an arrangement of some Korean movie OST, Magic Castle (by me) for violin
and viola. Here's a shot of all the executives sitting at the front table. The guy in the middle is the guy I work for. I wonder if he had to borrow someone
else's clothes.
February 22-29
|
I got to go on a business trip to the RSA Security Conference in SF at the Moscone Center -- first and most likely last business trip during my
employment at SDS. Bill Gates gave a keynote speech to show off SP2 and their printed security code for ID-authentication. I took a couple extra days
vacation to explore SF -- on the way back to my hotel room, I spotted a nerd in his Mitsubishi Mirage (I think that's what car it was).
|
March 19
I had a department "workshop" where we went someplace to listen to lectures all day and eat/drink. This guy who I managed looks really involved in the game.
March 28
|
After rehearsing with a group of people at Samsung, we were set to perform at some public place. However, the best they could come up with was a
wine bar. At the dress rehearsal before the performance, the 2nd violinist dropped his bow behind the keyboard of the piano. It took us an hour
to fish it out with a chopstick.
Young-chul came with his date and took a couple photos of us performing with my camera... the rest were of his date and himself (separately).
As you can see from the second photo, they seemed really close. I tried to use hyperfocal for that photo but was not
very successful.
Young-chul is getting married later this month with some other girl he met in August. He scheduled his wedding for the same day as my
cousin's wedding, who happens to be one of his good friends, but it's impossible to attend both because one is in Seoul and the other
in Pusan -- good planning.
|
April 3
I went to Gyeongbokgung Palace with a friend to take some photos of the blossoms. In the morning we went to Yongsan and in the afternoon
we trudged through heavy traffic. He had to go somewhere after we arrived, so I ended up taking photos on my own.
May 5
Children's day in Korea, I guess also Cinco de Mayo. It was a nice spring day, so I decided to go outside to take some photos of what people
were doing nearby. Here's a photo of some kid trying to learn how to rollerblade while his parents sit in the background laughing at him.
May 11
We had a company dinner at Pizza Hut. The idea was to buy food that the Indian guys could also eat, but some of them did not want to eat.
We went bowling after potato pizzas at Pizza Hut. As you can see, the Indian guys would really like world peace.
May 26
Buddha's Birthday... I went out to meet the Korean Ultimate crowd. They played some soccer and scared the Korean kids.
May 29
Samsung corporate training roommate's wedding. Apparently bubble makers are common at weddings in Korea.
I think it would be appropriate to have one at Eric's wedding... with sound effects.
June 24
Watched Colin Jacobsen perform with Yo-Yo Ma with the Silk Road Group at the Seoul Arts Center.
He reserved a nice $100 ticket (overpriced concerts in Korea) for me and I barely got a chance to meet him backstage because some
annoying girl said I wasn't on "the list". Unfortunately I missed Yo-Yo.
July 2
My brother came to Korea for an internship. Here he is posing on my bed wearing my shorts. Image missing for now.
July 4
Independence day, but I spent it celebrating someone's birthday... maybe it was Jun Suk.
I think Young-chul ate a hot pepper or something in this picture although we were at a cake shop.
July 11
Korea Ultimate Summer League in progress. It's interesting what you will see on the path next to the field in Yeoinaru.
July 16
Dinner with the family at the Renaissance Hotel... came out to 100,000W per person which I paid for, which is close to a week's salary.
Here's a receipt of something memorable that my brother and I ate the day before.
July 18
One of the few shots of myself playing frisbee. I'm trying to scare the offense with my monkey tactics.
July 21
Went to a live fighting club. Here's me posing with the entertainment (hint: there are no females in the photo).
July 31
Went to Bukhan Mountain with my brother to go mountain climbing. There's me imitating the guy on the sign.
August 6
Celebrating my cousin's birthday. After dinner at Sizzlers we went to a Karaoke place to sing. Here is my brother and my cousin after dinner.
August 22
We went to eat at the "twin towers" by the 63 building in Yeoido. My cousin is about to get squashed.
September 25
Home over Chuseok (Korean equivalent of Thanksgiving) break. I was playing tennis with my brother.
October 2
I went to go meet my former roommate, Peter, in NYC by Columbia. Here I am holding hands with Mr. Penny. Peter didn't want his picture online.
October 16
Went down to Yeoido to see an international fireworks festival. It was extremely crowded, but I was able to capture Spain's French Fry Fireworks... I don't
think that's what they called them though.
October 23
Went to Yangpyung to go hiking up some mountain with a friend. When we got there it was more like a little hill that took 5 minutes to get to the top.
On the way I asked my friend to stop so I could take some photos and got this great landscape capture.
October 29
Went to a "world series" baseball game between the Samsung Lions and Hyundai Unicorns with some coworkers. The ball slipped through the
catchers mitt and nailed the umpire in the balls.
October 30
I went to Gyeongbokgung Palace again with a friend to teach him some photography with his new Canon 20D. They were performing a
pre-marriage gift-giving ceremony at Gyeongbokgung Palace. This guy looks like he's bringing me some Papa Johns.
November 7
Played a little bit of pickup Ultimate after the league games. This guy got a little drunken and excited... must've been the socks that set him off.
November 16
Met a famous Korean actor Seung-kee Ahn and his wife for dinner. Someone asked me how I Photoshopped myself in so well.
December 18
Received a present from my brother. Not the headphones...
December 23
Made a Christmas card for my Korean friends at Samsung. Someone told me that the stuffed animals resemble me.
December 24
My Christmas Eve was spent meeting old family friends. It was a room salon room sans the girls... I don't mean Juliette and Michelle (featured in the photo).
I was pretty tired because I had just started to prepare for my Dec. 28th performance at the company funciton for executives. The food was also terrible.
January 1, 2005
|
I went out on New Year's night to take some photos of the Luminare exhibit, spending an hour and a half on public transportation.
The first photo is of the bell they ring on New Year's Day. The second is pretty much of the entire exhibit ("Our neighborhood" written below the heart)
and the third is my creative use of bokeh to make the exhibit look cooler than it actually does in real life.
|
See how much more fun a photoblog is than my regular entries?
|
| November 29th, 2004 - Like pulling teeth... |
I must force myself to update this blog every so often. I also recently had two wisdom teeth pulled. It was quite an ordeal compared to what I had expected. The trip to the dentist's office took nearly two hours, and the front desk and patient chairs were combined into one room, divided by a curtain. Despite the novacaine, the first tooth pulling was quite painful; the anesthetics didn't seem to have taken full effect yet and I felt a lot of pain and a resounding crunch from what seemed like a tooth other than my wisdom tooth. I guess it's a relief that my teeth aren't bothering me anymore, though right now I can't properly close my jaw. I had been taking tylenol for the frequent headaches I got from the pressure the wisdom teeth were putting on the rest of my teeth, and I guess jogging every night helped take my mind off of the pain. Had to miss Ultimate for the past two weeks though because I didn't want to risk any infection.
I met a famous Korean actor a few weeks ago and had dinner with him and his wife. He seemed to be pretty normal despite his acting career starting when he was only 5. I've only seen two movies he has been featured in, but I plan on watching a few more soon. In TV commercials here, he always plays the model family man which suits his personality though I wouldn't be able to judge if he really is like that.
I started watching a new Korean drama called "Love Story In Harvard" -- the preposition in the title is not the only mistake made in the first couple of episodes of the drama. It has only been running since last week, so I wouldn't be able to give away much of the plot if I wanted. It's about a native Korean guy who comes to Harvard Law School and runs into some Harvard Med School girl who has multiple part time jobs including being an escort. The drama is actually being filmed at USC though they have a few flyby scenes of Cambridge and the Charles. All the actors and extras wear Harvard paraphernalia, but once they panned out and showed a building with "University of South California" clearly written on it.
Though I've only seen a few Korean dramas, I've come up with a basic framework:
-At least two (2..*) potential couples who frequently have misunderstandings due to lack of communication or deception and change their feelings about each other
-A cheesy OST and techno versions of: Bach Air in G, Rachmaninoff Vocalise, and/or Saint-Saens The Swan
-One or more (1..*) cases of eyedrops
-One or more (1..*) wealthy persons
I've been pretty bored at work. I wonder if I should start work on JavaScript dopewars again. I was thinking that it could be an exercise in learning a little bit of XUL even if nobody ever bothered to admire it. Have to go jogging early today so that I can watch the third episode of Love Story in Harvard on TV.
|
| November 14th, 2004 - ugh |
I was just thinking about a couple other items about some recent news topics that I wanted to jot down that I was thinking about in my state of semi-stupor on the subway. The first is regarding blogs as an early information source and the second is why regulating e-mail spam at a slow pace may not be such a bad idea.
A lot of people claim that blogs are a timely source of information, among other overlavish praise such as this Yahoo news article, but I think they are more for valuable as entertainment than a valid news source. They are mostly unstructured information (difficult to search) with no guarantee of journalistic integrity. It could be argued that there was quite an abundance of this in trusted news sources regarding the situation in Iraq over the past year or two. You may as well be sitting in an IRC channel or surfing newsgroups if you need to get your information instantaneously. You could argue that RSS sorts the important information, but fine-granularity searching is difficult (did I write about this in a previous entry regarding blogs and knowledge management? If not, I forgot to do so a few months ago...).
E-mail spam is a painful distraction and waste of resources, but in a sense it forces us to advance technology in parsing out
and more importantly created spam and anti-spam related jobs. Though they are somewhat devious, new methods are being used to deliver marketing information to users as well as track user information, and new methods are being developed to prevent this. I think the ideal product to create for the health of the economy is something that requires an innovative opposition force to regulate it or filter it out. Not only does it advance general knowledge, but it creates a market for new jobs in which the production of something innovative is essential. I suppose this is a side effect of a lot of current inventions/technology, but if we (and everyone) had been incredibly quick to regulate spam it may never have occured.
By the way, FLAC files are quite convenient and in most cases sound unmistakably better than mp3 files with my setup. I guess I purchased dissatisfaction with mp3s for about $1k ;) Which brings me to another point that I've been thinking about which is optical-based storage (CD, DVD, etc.). As far as audio resolution goes, we can currently losslessly compress an audio CD by about 50% without much overhead processing involved for decoding it, so how will we use the space on all the new media such as Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, etc. and beyond? Higher sample rate? Uncompressed 3D audio? Dime-sized media? Who knows...
My dad arrived in Korea; and has been pushing me to go to medical school since he's arrived which has gotten quite irritating. He's completely against me going to Business School for no apparent reason. Seems like now he's pushing more stereotypical Korean ideals on me. Perhaps I should try for a Masters of Entertainment at Carnegie-Mellon. With about 30 graduates per year, it seems about as big as Harvard's entire Undergraduate Computer Science department. My hopes would be to enter a decent company and learn more about project management and progress into financial management. Enough about my future plans... time for a quick stress-relieving nap before I go running..
|
| November 10th, 2004 - Kimchi, kimchi, what are you doing? |
The subject of this entry is from an annoying, or maybe disturbing TV commercial in Korea where a woman asks a ball of kimchi what it's doing while it sits frozen in a kimchi refrigerator. If they had not been so heavy on the white theme and soft focus, I would have expected the kimchi to respond by either dancing or responding, analogous to my favorite Korean book, Doggy Poo.
I don't fully understand the pervasive need for a kimchi refrigerator in Korea, but I guess it helps maintain freshness by maintaining a certain temperature. I went to the Kimchi festival last year, where they dedicated an entire floor of the expo center for kimchi refrigerators. Most of them are quite large with a profile of about 2x the area of a normal refrigerator. It seems worth purchasing for a restaurant, but judging from the quality of kimchi from most Korean restaurants, either they don't work or they don't have one.
At work, I've been doing a bit of research on UI Engineering Processes, though I haven't been able to find as much information as I had hoped. But, I did find a couple interesting sites.
This one is a collection of columns written by a former Microsoft program manager. Some of them are interesting to read:
www.uiweb.com
The second describes a very clever UI device:
Maddog Fly UI
I was also featured in the recent article in the SDS magazine "Human @ dream" (which is how they translated it).
Read it here. Oops, it's in Korean... the photo they decided to use was somewhat unflattering and wasn't even the one I chose. I wrote most of the article, but the credit was given to the translator (who made up some supposed facts about me!).
I've been trying to get into shape by jogging ~4 miles per day, but I think all it has done in the past 3 weeks is make my legs hurt and marginally improve my endurance.
That's all for now...
|
| October 20th, 2004 |
Taking a short break from work, where I'm searching for seemingly non-existent information on formalized specifications and processes for outsourcing web UI development.
Tomorrow, I'm going to SDS headquarters instead of work to perform during the lunchtime concert. It's supposedly a charity event, but I doubt my performance will encourage anyone to donate. Here's a list of what I'll be performing:
Bach Cello Suite No. 1 Minuette I/II
Bach Cello Suite No. 6 Gavotte I/II
Vieuxtemps Capriccio
Samsung Company Anthem (arr. for solo viola by me)
And some Korean pop song in with piano and violin, which I haven't heard or rehearsed yet.
I was just copying the Cello Suites to eliminate the page turn, but the tiny A4 standard paper size chops off either the notes or clef. I haven't even been preparing for this performance for a week, and still need to complete some ornaments in my arrangement of the Samsung Company Anthem tonight. I'm out of shape and my fingers ache from practicing more than an hour yesterday.
I found out my panda drawing (check previous entry) has been crosslinked by two sites:
http://pandabaerinfan.12m.de/ - German Panda Bear Fanclub
http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=pokoccs - some 14-year-old girl's Xanga blog
I was thinking of temporarily replacing it with a gruesome photo of roadkill, but I thought that it might be too traumatic. Apparently, there are also php sites that display random LJ images, grabbed by some webrobot. I wonder why I've been getting so many (close to 7000 this month) hits on my art page... guess I should clean it up and remove the not-so-great pictures ;)
Random thought of the day...
Why don't pop singers/musicians sing the same songs with their own interpretations as is done often in classical and impromptu jazz? Is it due to some binding agreement between songwriter and performer that only that singer/group is allowed to perform the work? Or is it just that it wouldn't be very marketable because the majority of their audience is not composed of analytical listeners?
|
| October 12th, 2004 - Some stats |
Top three accessed files on dorkus.net this month:
1. 1490 hits
Probably my friend's sig on some bimmer community, a resized photo that I took from the cramped backseat on October 2nd and posted for public access on the 5th.
2. 509 hits
A photo my friend took in NYC last year that he posted on fredmiranda.com forums.
3. 456 hits
An uninteresting picture of a giant panda eating bamboo that I drew for art class in 1993 using charcoal and colored pencils. It somehow got a decent position in Google's image search.
|
| October 7th, 2004 - Today |
It was a fleeting moment of happiness, what limited time that could
purchased by negative vacation days. It was my first time back in
NJ in 18 months, where I spent a week over Korean Thanksgiving.
Upon arrival, the first thing I noticed was the fresh air, walking
through the skyport bridge (I think that's what they called it) into
the arrival, seeping through the joints. When I arrive in Korea,
the reverse is usually very conspicuous.
I had some time to go shopping, play sports, and eat a variety of
quality foods difficult to find in Korea. I couldn't adjust to
the time difference well because I would eat so much food at home that
it made me drowsy after every meal. Of course I would go take a
nap, which would end up lasting a few more hours than I had
planned. The weather wasn't that great either, which prevented me
from riding my bike down the canal after spending some time cleaning
and adjusting it.
We had a small reunion over the weekend which included a small feast,
board games, and sports. I met Eric's fiance -- after an hour of
waiting, Eric didn't introduce me so she introduced herself. I
guess it is only characteristic of their relationship. ;)
I picked up Paul Graham's Hacker's & Painters and read through about
half of it on the plane trip back. He has some pretty interesting
views, some of which I agree with, and some of which is more apparently
gut intuition. I was initially a little flattered that I fall
under Dr. Graham's classification of "hacker" and that the book offered
pertinent advice for people like me, but I can't consider myself to be
a very competent hacker. Recently, I've been assigned to do a lot
of boring research on business processes standards like BPML and BPMN
(through which I discovered IDEF and BPEL4WS), but I began to think
that it could be useful to me in the future if I want to do some sort
of strategy consulting.. After picking up the book and moving to
the engineering section at B&N, I met some girl who asked me if I
was interested in working for her e-commerce company. That was
somewhat interesting; hopefully, it is a sign that the US job market is
picking up again.
I also bought a new headphone amp to help power my headphones, and a USB soundcard. Works pretty well, though
I wish that I could bypass the opamp in the USB soundcard. It
seems to add some coloration to the resulting sound, though I could be
wrong.
I went jogging yesterday for the first time in some time, and it caused
a lot of soreness in my hip today. I was thinking on my way home
about how difficult it is to keep in shape at a stagnant desk job,
where the only exercise I get is climbing stairs and getting up
periodically to use the bathroom. Since work hours dominate most
of my day, I have to spend my leisure time engaging in some physical
activity which keeps me from writing in my LJ (among other
things). Now the soreness is extending down to my calves, guess
I'd better stretch.
Saturday, I'm performing at the wedding of one of my team members from
corporate training, so I'm trying to get a feel for playing viola
again. I also have to perform a few solo pieces in a couple
weeks, which I have yet to pick out.
Time for bed.
|
| August 18th, 2004 - |
Jumping back to the continuation of my July 27th and 29th entries, I started watching some Korean TV programs again. The other day, there was a movie preview program for Korean movies in English. They were previewing two Korean movies (in English), and the theme was multiple girls dating one guy and vice versa.
Then the host boldly declared, "These days, monogamy is out of style" and then proceeded to talk with the co-host about how they would prefer to be the center of attention. From what I've observed, maybe it is not that surprising to a native Korean since they often go on blind dates for periods that overlap with each other. And I've even heard of people here who have had significant others for a long period of time, but agreed to go out on a blind date anyway. From this evidence, I am expecting Korea's divorce percentage (I don't quite understand the "divorce rate" statistic) will exceed the US's this year, giving Korea the title of highest divorce percentage.
To top it off, later that night I was watching a Korean soap opera with English subtitles and the theme was the dispute between a married couple. A seemingly innocuous quarrel turned into a show of their true sentiment. The woman made comments about how she could've married a rich guy instead of a struggling actor, and the man tells her that if he screws up his next audition, it will be her fault. The woman sees an old ex-boyfriend whom she heard was rich, and he tells her that he hasn't married yet. Just when it seems like she is about to leave her husband for this guy, she finds out that he lost his money to gambling debts and loses interest in him completely.
Gotta head to a meeting now...
|
| August 13th, 2004 - at work |
I've been contemplating the type of information I should write in my blog to make it more attractive. I often think about keeping multiple blogs: one for photographs, another for information about my work (if only it were interesting enough), one for other hobbies, and another for some humorous topics. I can't seem to adhere to a single type of entry, and it might save time to have some structure similar to Slashdot.org. Perhaps when I find time to build myself a framework that is more suitable than LJ...
After reading Paul Graham's essay on Python programmers vs. Java programmers, I started reading the tutorial from Python.org just to check out the differences with Perl. Though I had planned to read through it this morning, I've been assigned some new duties starting next week so I have to read up on it. By the way, I agree with his statement that Java programmers are not necessarily smart -- it has turned imperative/OO programming into low-skill work, meaning that it can be learned and executed easily (though it could be preferred by the most skilled programmers). This is a frightening perspective; technology is simplifying itself through the rapid development of frameworks and reusable assets. More later...
|
| July 29th, 2004 - The media to blame? |
When I first came to Korea to work in January 2003, I started watching a Korean movie on TV called Ju No-myeong Bakery (2000), which is a movie about of an outwardly stable married couple that worked at a bakery together for years. The wife becomes depressed and cannot understand why until she meets and becomes infatuated with a customer of the bakery.
She began to smile again, while her unsuspecting husband was ecstatic and did not realize anything was wrong until one day he overheard them (I don't remember exactly what activity they were engaged in). Initially, he tried to conceal his surreptitious knowledge, but instead he ended up confronting his wife and somehow he ended up having an affair with that guy's wife. They traded marriage partners for some time, but the couples kept meeting in the supermarket and eventually they went back to their previous arrangement.
Although the movie does show them getting back together, there were no lasting consequences or punishments for anyone involved. As if it were a fairy tale, their bakery became extremely successful and everyone lived happily ever after.
Since then, I have watched several popular Korean movies, which rarely condemn extra-marital affairs. A friend of mine told me that her Korean friend said that having sexual relationships with someone other than your spouse while you are married is not unusual. Another acquaintance told me she still got setup by her friend on blind dates behind her boyfriend's back.
South Koreans should be more cautious about "oba" (excess, overindulgence). They imitate other cultures and exaggerate them; shows like Sex in the City are held to be representative of the typical US lifestyle. South Korea also holds the shameful title of the second highest divorce rate (read the bottom half of the linked page) in the world , close behind the US, and will most likely claim the top spot this year.
One possible reason for the dramatic shift in values could be the explosive growth of the internet in Korea. Although this article claims the majority of divorces were driven by the economic conditions in 1998, another article from Forbes last year states that approximately 60% of divorces are caused by infidelity through relationships started over the internet.
More later...
---
Personal news:
-Interviewed at AT Kearney. First case interview went well, but the second one I don't think I did as well. I'm expecting rejection based on that and my level of proficiency in Korean.
-Finished writing a case study about SDS' Knowledge Management System (just a couple hours ago). I wasn't given enough information
|
| July 28th, 2004 - When will I get my LiveJournal back??? |
From Newsweek:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5506142/site/newsweek/
INTERNET: A Blog Blanket
South Korea may be one of the most wired societies in the world, but some Koreans are beginning to wonder if Seoul is truly ready to embrace that status. Last Thursday a university student in the capital was fined for posting political parodies on the Internet. In 2003 some 18,000 Web sites were censored for crimes such as "undermining law and order." And since late June, about 50 Web sites have been shut down for allegedly trying to post the video of the execution of South Korean hostage Kim Sun Il. Authorities have also blocked large Weblog services, cutting off thousands of blogs that did not offer the video. Officials claim the blanket ban is merely a technical matter: although they could shut down Korean sites, they couldn't be as targeted with foreign blogs. Bloggers, though, worry that average Koreans are coming to accept infringements on the free flow of information as normal. Kevin Kim complains on his site, Big Hominoid, that Korea "has not come far out of the shadow of its military dictatorship past." While that may be extreme, Robert Koehler, whose blog, the Marmot's Hole, is one of the most popular English-language sites about Korea, says, "there seems to be this idea among Korean Netizens that the Net [is] a forum for expressing the power of nationalism." Trying to help the country's reputation, though, may only end up hurting it. -Mark Russell
|
| July 27th, 2004 - Diatribe on Korean Culture |
I often believe that if I were a caucasian here in Korea, I would not be experiencing many of the problems that I have been recently.
The ethnocentricity and hypocrisy is brutally prominent in native Koreans, and those who lived in Korea during years in which their beliefs were most pliable. I've decided to enumerate each disappointing fragment of mainstream Korean culture that I have put some thought into below:
TV dramas and movies are abounding with poor values by portraying corruption, violence, and sexual incontinence as morally acceptable. The media grossly exaggerates any potentially inflammatory material (admittedly, this happens in the US upon occasion) without providing sufficient context.
Examples to follow...
|
| June 20th, 2004 - Busy week |
This week was much less painful than the previous few. Sunday, I spent most of the day cleaning since my mom told me my father was coming to Korea the next day.
Monday I went up to Seoul after talking to my company's unresponsive HR department to meet one of the people I went to training with and his wife. He has been in Slovakia for the past couple of months.
After a job interview on Thursday, I set out for the Harvard Alumni dinner at the northern-most edge of Seoul.
I got there a little bit early andI met Miss Korea 2002 who had come up from Daegu (southern edge of South Korea) just for the dinner as she will be a freshman at Harvard this coming fall. I didn't know at first, but I had a chance to talk to her a little bit since nobody else was around. She had to take 2 years leave to go to the Miss Universe 2003 pageant. She was cute (especially her smile), well-dressed, and always had something nice to say She does look quite different from her pictures though. I do feel sorry about MIT students harassing her when it's obvious no Korean would ever choose MIT over Harvard.
Friday, there was an ultimate frisbee league party, and that ran until 3am out in Shinchon. Took another hour and a half to take a taxi home. Saturday I woke up late, headed for Yongsan to get my Xbox fixed and buy a couple items. While I was on the way, my friend called and I found out she was in the hospital because a dog attacked her while she was teaching English. After my trip to Yongsan, I went out to visit her and got soaked along the way despite using an umbrella the whole time.
Today is something of a typical Sunday after the game of ultimate in the morning in the rain. No photos this time because I didn't feel like brining my camera into the rain. While waiting on the sidelines to join a pickup game, a Korean guy from Canada wanted to talk to me about academics and politics after hearing but his sentences rarely made sense and were quite disjoint. Perhaps he was just as excited to meet a Harvard graduate as I was meeting Miss Korea, but I remember my sentences making sense. Today is Father's Day in the US, so I was going to take my dad to dinner, but he wanted to eat his cooking instead. Koreans just combine Mother and Father's Day into one holiday...
I'm currently basking in the light of the LCD screen, reading dpreview.com, the news, and listening to some mp3s that were never added to my iTunes list.
The ball of my left foot still hurts a bit from playing SDS basketball when someone jumped and landed on my foot. I've been thinking that it was just a bone bruise of some sort, but maybe I should go see a doctor. Now, I have a slew of e-mails to reply to and some work to do, assigned for my third interviews (plural) while I watch my new USB2.0 200GB drive slowly low-level format.
|
| June 1st, 2004 - addendum |
I realized I forgot to stress the point that the Indian guy was also unhappy because his team members would blame the Indian or the Indian development center in India. They rarely communicate the plan to him and don't invite him to meetings. It would be strikingly disturbing if there is merit to his claim since they would seem they would be a rather convenient scapegoat given their inability to communicate in Korean. He also felt his role was severly limited and often sought a high-ranking employee, namely the VP of his team, to resolve his problems. Both scapegoat and serving the company as a facade of a global workforce, he does not seem very satisfied with his work. He constantly feels the need to threaten to leave the company because he feels he is not being treated well. The company makes small concessions and convinces him to work longer -- I wonder if he feels the tug of his leash yet.
Judging from the quality of workers from India that I've been managing, I cannot make the judgment that this is truly the case. Perhaps they are not exemplary native Indian IT workers, but it was something of a struggle getting them to do actual work and our manager was rarely around. They had a lot of complaints from the first minute of meeting them, and didn't make a great effort to adapt. I think that Indians, especially from the northern end, are used to following a single level of management and everyone else they are reluctant to take orders from. Thus the clash of cultures makes it difficult and perhaps not worth the expense and time. In conclusion, it will be a difficult task for me to find satisfactory work! Well, I have to go watch a Korean soap opera called Love Rollercoaster with English subtitles to improve my Korean now.
|
| May 31st, 2004 - time flies painfully fast |
And there isn't enough time to write in my LJ!
I went to my Samsung training roommate's wedding yesterday and played ultimate today for a few hours. It was my first pickup game with the Korean Ultimate community at the Han River park by Yeoido. I only found it recently after my interviewer mentioned that his coworker attended ultimate games every weekend after I told him my hobbies. I haven't seen a frisbee since I came to Korea (except the ones I asked my mom to bring) until I found out about it, and went to some small gathering on Buddha's birthday (last Wednesday) which happens to be a national holiday.
I have two scraped knees and hands as a result of playing for 5 hours which caused a very painful shower. Then I put some pain-relieving gel on which made the cuts sting for close to a minute... no ointment, so I hope they don't get infected. That wasn't the limit to my injuries either, I got a big blister and the backs of my heels are chafed
I was trying to grab a endzone throw which was meant for me, but didn't quite arrive in my general direction and my defender was chasing me down. Realizing that it would land a split second before I could get my fingers underneath it and that there were some pebbles nearby that I didn't want to layout on, I slowed down but my defender didn't. Some helpful people in the community gave me some creme to treat them with and I bought some water to try and wash out the dirt, but the cuts on my hands scabbed up and turned black.
I took some photos of other people playing while I took a break, and will upload them when I get the chance to edit them properly. No pictures of me though.
Afterwards I took the subway home with an Indian guy working for Samsung Electronics. He was having a tough time with Korean work culture despite his attempts to adjust and felt that Koreans did not like to talk to him or invite him to meetings. His experience is not too different from mine, and it made me question my reasons for staying here once again... it's a tough decision. I would like to learn Korean pretty fluently though, just I need the resources, motivation, and time.
My cousin who finished his junior year at Cornell came to Korea for summer break. He has a really busy schedule so I haven't seen him yet.
|
| May 8th, 2004 - drowning |
Meeting with recruiters and getting a couple more interviews. Busy, tired, nervous.
Saw Lang Lang perform from 5th row seats at the Seoul Arts Center with my mom. He played 4 encores including a new version of his "Horses" song with his father, "Magic Castle" (from the Korean Movie "The Classic"), and Schumann's Traumerei I think he really wants to extend the relation between himself and Horowitz. A large portion of the audience was composed of teenage girls who all lined up to get his autograph right after the concert -- at least 100 of them.
Took photos along the man-made stream on Children's Day this past Wednesday, a few photos here. Something's wrong with either my lens calibration or technique, so many of them were backfocused by several feet.
Must finish prep for case interviews.
|
| May 3rd, 2004 - globe, speckled, solid, toroid, pinwheel |
This past week was eventful:
-I met a recruiter in Seoul and discussed some possible positions that would be appropriate for me. They brought up a position as "International Asia Business Analyst" which seemed interesting. I realize I should've been an economics major and pursued my early life interest in investments (baseball cards, comic books, etc.). Then again, I've had many interests that I spent a lot of time with including computer programming (in BASIC on the C64) and music.
-I attended the concert of a cellist that was my friend's friend at Curtis, whose husband had the same piano teacher as me and is in the same quartet as one of my friends, and whose sister had the same teacher as me for a year. The second half was Mahler 9, so I felt sorry for the girl whom I came with.
-Went to a traditional Korean medicine doctor that charged $425 for a month's supply of medicine that I doubt will help me.
-I went to dinner in Itaewon with some friends at a Thai restaurant, and then to the Hyatt Grand Hotel for dessert. I ordered pat bing su, but they put way too much off-season frozen fruits in it, which ruined it entirely. Everyone was talking about leaving the company, recollecting the instances where people asked why they wanted to work at SDS during their training (I have similar recollections which can probably be found in an earlier LJ entry).
-Played an OpenGL port of Bungie's Marathon (AlephOne on sourceforge) with my friend (brings back memories), which was mostly unsuccessful because of the latency causing disconnects.
-I saw my old dog at my cousin's house. He's around 15 years old now and getting weaker every time I see him. Today, he was jumping over my legs, but occasionally tripping and sliding on the floor. I felt sad that I couldn't feed my dog whatever I was eating since he needs to stay on a balanced diet. Yet, he was jumping up on two feet and pleading for a taste of my jjajangmyun, and making sounds like the cub in the movie "The Bear".
-I went to a live performance diner and we waited over an hour for one singer to arrive, but he never came and the DJ made some lame excuse about him visiting family at the hospital. The title of this entry describes the light machine patterns they would project while the singers sang a few of the audiences' requests.
-I went to a karaoke place with my cousin, cousin's parents, mom, and aunt. My cousin wanted to sing "I Believe I Can Fly" with me so I agreed, and noticed that I my singing was not unlike William Hung's recent recording.
This week I'm meeting recruiters, interviewing at companies, going to a Lang Lang concert with my mom, and teaching essay writing to a student on Children's Day (national holiday). Hopefully I will get some time to go jogging in the evenings again.
I was going to write a short narrative just for practice, but realized how long it would take me to write something I would be content with!
|
| April 21st, 2004 - brief recap |
I've been meaning to post this for a couple days now, but keep running out of time. I've been learning Bach Cello Suite No. 6 Gavotte and a couple other pieces for the past couple of days in preparation for a possible 20 minute appearance at a concert at SDS headquarters. And started jogging again (ouch) after a 3 week interim, which is explained directly below.
I finished tutoring two students who I taught almost every day from March 31 to April 16 for 3-4 hours per day. It was quite tiring and stressful (I'm sure the students thought the same), but hopefully I've helped them improve their study habits. Speaking of study habits, I should probably start some materials myself for my own future. All the travel time spent commuting to the students' house has given me the opportunity to ponder a number of observations I'll point them out at a later date, don't die of suspense!
My mom came to Korea and has been cooking me food. I bought a nice suit today at the department store and have to pick it up tomorrow since I plan to wear it to an interview on Thursday. Wish me luck!
As an aside, don't you hate when an an event lacks closure? Espeically when it is mostly your own fault. My brain has already resolved to take action, but my body becomes disinclined at the moment I need to take action. This inevitably brings pangs of regret, not easily forgotten and pining for another chance. Then, the realization that you've made the same mistake before, and that it will happen again tomorrow lingers for days. I intend to avoid this in the future, but lack a good plan. Someone help me out!
|
| April 9th, 2004 - Inspiration or embarassment? |
William Hung's "Inspiration" album was released a few days ago on iTunes. I wasn't certain of the progress he has made having had a famous singing teacher, but it seems that he's just as bad as when he sang on American Idol. The short monologues inbetween tracks were also good for a couple laughs. In one of them, he talks about how he sings for passion and not for fame and money... but that's rather hypocritical since he's singing and selling this album itself.
A lot has happened since my last entry, but I have been too tired to write about it. I've been going to teach straight from work for 3-4 hours per day and arriving home around midnight.
Concert at the wine bar was quite a disappointment -- some parts sounded extremely bad, very few of my invited guests came, and it completely destroyed my weekend. The only true gain from the concert was the recording at which my brother and friends could laugh at.
I went to the electronics market in search of a decent powered mic for my MD, and it seemed like noboby had even heard of such an item. I found one by browsing store windows, and the shop owner seemed to know very little about it. It was interesting to see how little they knew about what they are selling, or anything related to what they were selling. I would not be surprised if some pimp was in charge of their operations and even giving them aliases.
I've started applying to jobs, including global financial consulting firms. I'm ready for a career change, and ready to leave my current company which has shown me repeatedly that they don't value me, nor do they deserve my services. I'll leave you with that sour note, which is not quite as bad as the concert or William Hung's album.
|
| March 26th, 2004 - my poor mouse |
My poor Intellimouse Explorer has died! Five years of faithful service (rain or shine, Quake or Counter-strike) from touching up skin blemishes to navigating through virtual worlds...
It was actually not completely flawless, and malfunctioning at crucial split-second moments which may have cost me fame and fortune. Who knows, I could have been like fatal1ty, making 2x my current salary playing games, or not. So I switched to my new Razer Boomer Control ball mouse, but feel myself longing for an optical mouse again (or perhaps I just need a new pad), perhaps the new Razer Viper :)
The other day I felt like I was working at my first full-time job from 8 years ago, formatting a server, installing a new OS and software on a slow machine.
It reminded me of a scene from the end of 2001: A Space Odessey, when they showed that guy watching himself living a complete cycle both forwards and backwards. Interesting movie!
I'm playing a small chamber music concert this Sunday at a wine bar, so basically we'll be performing in front of a partially-drunk audience of 30-40 people. Despite having invited many people, very few people even took the time to respond to the invitation. I'm also breaking my promise not to play in front of intoxicated people. Why??? I don't know either, but this was supposedly the only place we could get.
The next few weeks will probably be busy with English tutoring moonlighting work. I need to scrape up some money for my future... it is possible that this will soon
become my full-time work here for a little while. I'm thinking of further education or complete career change, perhaps in accord with the perceived shift of jobs to offshore sites. Then again, I would need to consider the eventual collapse of the boom in India, as I believe it will change their economy for the worse within 5 years. But since sustenance and enjoyment of life both require some amount of money, I'd like to find a career where I could make an ample amount to support a family (maybe) and retire, seeing as how Social Security will probably disappear by then.
Last weekend I went on a company workshop and took some pictures. I actually left my 512MB CF card in my card reader at home, but luckily I had a 128MB backup CF from my old camera with me. I'll work on that photographic journal someday...
Though I wanted to write more, it's already getting pretty late. Don't want to oversleep and get to work an hour late like today...
|
| March 19th, 2004 - A trip down the decision tree |
I attended the RSA Security Conference in SF during the last week of February, my first visit to the US in over a year. The first thing I noticed was the air quality was so much better than Korea -- even at the airport. I had plenty of good food and was able to see most of the sights I wanted to see. I even made full use of the hotel's workout room facility for three nights. First time working out since college I guess. Yes, I'm much weaker now.
Overall, San Francisco was a great place, but I don't know if I would want to work or live around there (in the unlikely event that I could afford to). I took a ton of pictures, got to see Bill Gates give a rather dry keynote speech, saved only by the product manager who demonstrated some interesting features of Windows XP SP2. I took a bunch of photos during the conference and afterwards.
Security is a pretty interesting field in IT these days. But, certain companies such as Verisign and RSA already have monopolies in their segment of the market. The conference was pretty well-done and there were lots of freebies (well, they should give us quality stuff for having paid $1900 each for the full admissions fee). There were some interesting sessions and I learned a lot about the field while I was there.
I recently saw The Net on TV for the first time and recognized the Moscone Center. What I don't understand is why the Praetorians were so uncreative and how the IP address of the CEO of Gregg Microsystems had a segment that was greater than 8 unsigned bytes.
I had time to visit AJ and Umesh and see their nice apartment and TV. I also visited Fisherman's Wharf, Muir Woods, Twin Peaks, Golden Gate Bridge, and Sausalito. I went shopping
and bought an iPod mini at the Emeryville Apple Store (the one in SF opened the night before I left) and waited an hour for the Emery-go-Round and some homeless lady with a child started talking to me. It's difficult to maintain a conversation that begins with "did you pay for that in cash?"
That being said, I spent at least $70 in taxi fares and wasted $20 on Holiday Inn webTV-like internet access. Ah, the joys of omnipresent internet cafes where you can use their computers for a dollar an hour.
Tomorrow I'm off to a company team workshop event... sounds exciting with hours upon hours of presentations in Korean. Bringing a pillow would be a little too obvious...
|
| February 16th, 2004 - What privacy? |
Privacy seems almost non-existent in Korea. An e-mail I write to friends and acquaintances gets forwarded around to people who it was really unintended to reach. Luckily, the main subject was just humor and cultural differences rather than Peter Chung-esque explicit content. My actions and casual conversations are closely observed and communicated to others without my consent or knowledge. Information pledged to secrecy is quickly leaked and spread within a week. Maybe some people enjoy this kind of attention, but I have yet to see any positive result. I guess I should be a little more cautious -- perhaps I will start distributing documents with NDAs. I wish people would read my blog/LJ with such fervor.
However, privacy may be contrary to the intent of one of my upcoming goals. Speaking of goals, I can't find time to accomplish anything important... I've been staying up quite late just to touch upon them, but it is difficult to make any progress this way.
Today, I had dinner in the basement of my complex with my father. It was one of the worse places I have eaten in Korea; they served my father the wrong thing, I found hair in my soup,
Well, the only positive side was we got to watch a TV program with some women competing to get a job as a flight attendant and one of the tests involved describing an arbitrary word in English. One contestant tried to describe the word "service" as "giving [a] smile for others to see and that is [a] service". But, I'd rather just cook some noodles because at least those have some quality standard and I have my own TV...
Tomorrow is yet another company dinner-type event to celebrate the past birthday of 3 people in my team. I wish I could tell them I had no time, but my birthday is one of the three ;)
Anyway, I'm off to work on writing an important letter now.
|
| February 14th, 2004 - BYC |
February has been a busy month, with little time to work on my plans. Some positive results include possibility of having my photos published in the company magazine, business trip scheduled for the 22nd-27th in San Francisco (first time going back to the US in over a year), and the possibility of joining a different department in my current company.
Today I played basketball with some company club -- I felt really out of shape. I had been doing toe lifts earlier in the week and my calves have been sore for the entire time. Running is very tiring, especially in Korea where the air quality is terrible. I developed a minor cough, but perhaps that is tied to my lack of sleep.
On the 5th I had a special company event with my division and the company CEO in attendance. I was the official photographer as well as a performer. That day I learned that performing in front of drunk people is generally ok, until they are given the chance to speak. It was somewhat disheartening when the MC started talking to me and I understood all of what he said except for the question he asked me... So, the audience decided to yell out that I couldn't speak any Korean. Well, that precluded me from making any comments as well as concentrating on all aspects of my performance. Performing the Samsung song seemed so appropriate at the end, but I couldn't get the MC's attention while he talked to the violinist I performed the duet with.
You may be wondering what the subject line is... I was bored on the bus and started having acronym wars with myself. Koreans abuse acronyms by converting any long English word into an acronym leaving me only to guess what they could possibly mean. I recalled a recent sermon by a pastor about a Korean-American who wanted to disavow any connection with his Korean heritage on a plane ride to Korea. An old lady tried speaking to him in Korean but he pretended not to understand, but finally he gave in and asked how she knew he was Korean. She identified him by his socks, which were tagged BYC, a popular Korean underwear and socks brand. Anyway, here is my serendipitious acronym which I used Korean words transliterations for:
B = Bballae (laundry in Korean)
Y = Yori (cooking in Korean)
C = Chungso (cleaning in Korean)
Every working male deserves a wife with these qualities -- I'm just kidding of course.
But something far more humorous was shown to me by my brother... William Hung singing Ricky Martin's "She Bangs".
Nothing more needs to be said besides "I already gave my best and I have no regrets at all." and
"One good thing is that I am meeting more girls than usual. I don't know who they are, but they are much more friendly with me, so oh well."
Happy Valentine's Day to those who have a reason to celebrate it :)
|
| February 2nd, 2004 - Would have been funnier if NE lost |
Now I know the purpose of Samsung corporate training. All those 5 hour projects assigned at 10pm were to prepare me for
occasions like this. My co-worker approached me last week about performing a viola solo for some department talent show/dinner
last Thursday. So I spent some time over the weekend to practice a bit and arrange a special encore (our company song).
Today, I was approached by some manager who enjoys playing violin at his church to play a duet. So I told him that I could arrange
the encore for violin and viola, but he pulled out some popular Korean pop song, "Magic Castle" (homonym in Korean for "Magic of sex"
and printed it out and asked me to arrange it for violin and viola.
It's not short, and will probably take me at least 4 hours to play through and arrange. There goes my Monday night, and Wednesday
night since we would have to rehearse then. Tuesday night I'm going to a piano concert about an hour and a half from where I live
which means I have no time to practice my solo. I know I will find out how terrible this violinist is on Wednesday... One of the virtues of being
disagreeable and stubborn is that you end up using your own time as you see fit. "SELECT FROM * where clue > 0" please!
|
| January 30, 2004 - Happy Birthday to me Part 2 |
Over a year has passed since I came to Korea, and another birthday has arrived.
Time hurdles forward but there is little we can do but buckle the seat belt and
gaze out the sun-flared window. Some choose to open the window, and hope to catch
something important -- but are instead met with a bugs that lodge themselves in their throats.
This year, I hope my ambition will deliver more than airborne raisins!
The upcoming week will be a busy one...
My old supervisor at work will be leaving for another company, I will be attending a company
dinner today, family friend's wedidng tomorrow, concert Tuesday, and performing (yes, as hard
as it is to believe, solo viola) Thursday for a company function with the CEO in attendance.
I guess it is not so bad, especially if I perform after the Indian guys from my department
sing an Indian song!
The cherry is the new 8am-5pm strict work hours -- now I have to wake up an hour earlier! :(
However, the most important issue of the day is: will I get the ultra mega mega man this year?
|
| January 14, 2004 - A New Year |
I decided that it's about time to start writing again after many failed attempts at writing
a complete entry over the past few months. I doubt anyone even reads this page anymore, but
perhaps it will serve as a useful reminder to me in the future. Actually, I'm writing this at
work simply to pass the time and feel that I've accomplished something useful today as I have
no assigned work to do.
Here are some things I have been busy with which kept me away from my blog:
-Teaching English and standardized test strategies.
-Exploring photography which is quite time consuming and expensive.
-Sightseeing (and taking pictures).
-Practicing viola. Hey, I performed solo at a wedding and joined a chamber music group...
-Playing games, especially Counterstrike, with my brother and friend in the US.
-Watching TV and Simpsons reruns.
Last year was filled with new experiences, but also many diappointments. But, the new year
is a good time to review my losses and determine how to prevent/avoid them in the future.
I'd like to leave it a mystery for you to wonder about ;)
Here are some plans I have (but might not keep) for my webpage:
-Add a gallery of my favorite photos.
-Create a more uniform and appealing interface.
-Flesh out some of the sections and update others.
|
| September 21, 2003 - Handful of Rocks in a Glass House |
At long last, an update to the ol' weblog. Even I am unsure of what provoked my sudden spark of productivity.
Of course there are many events that occurred during this period of time, and I think the main
reason why I have not written any updates is because I have been engrossed in researching
and learning photography. Though I did not purchase my new digital camera until the end
of August, I spent a lot of time researching the camera online. My final decision was to purchase a
Canon EOS 10D. It was a rather large
investment to make to start a new hobby, but I felt it was the best way to learn quickly.
Photography and studying photography has changed my visual perspective.
I find myself searching for angles to compose an image, even when I don't have my camera with me.
You can find some sample images from photos I took in England here.
My desktop computer has been out of order for a bit, progressively getting worse.
I've narrowed the problem down to the motherboard or power supply.
I first detected the problem while fiddling with the BIOS settings hoping it would help me boot up.
I found the power monitoring and the +5v level was down around +4.3v which is quite low.
Then I changed some jumpers around, hoping I could fix it somehow and found that the
power supply connector molding was burned at certain pins, which corresponded to the +5v pins.
Guess I will have to go shopping in Yongsan for a new motherboard and power supply :(
I purchased a refurbished 29" HDTV from a friend working at Samsung Electronics Display Division.
The quality is decent, though my TV reception is less than spectacular. My hopes are that I will
be able to learn some Korean through watching it. So far, I think it has enforced the learning of
words that I have already learned.
England was interesting, here's a quick overview of what I did there:
-9/10 - Arrived in England, ate dinner with family, and setup my new camera.
-9/11 - Took a boat tour in London, visited London Tower, saw David Blaine in his box by Tower Bridge,
ate fish and chips.
-9/12 - Visited Blenheim Palace
-9/13 - Traditional English breakfast, End of Class Ceremony, dinner with an old friend from Harvard.
-9/14 - Went punting, visited Deer Park
|
| August 6, 2003 - I'm Four and I Can do Anything! |
The title is just a flashback to an event long ago, which is a rather funny
memory of a family friend who couldn't join in our group activity because he was
too young. He threw a tantrum which involved cleaning off all the pieces off the
board game that we had been playing. It somehow crept into my mind as today was
my youngest cousin's 13th birthday. On the way to TGIFriday's, she kept repeating,
"I'm a teenager now." After eating dinner, we went to a nearby park and rented
a tandem bike, the first time I have ridden one. Nothing special, and not as
comfortable as riding a regular bike.
There haven't been any news entries for a while as I was hit by waves of laziness over
the past few weekends. Every couple of hours I look at my watch and think about what
I just accomplished. One o'clock... nothing, three o'clock, nothing, five o'clock...
still nothing. But I did eventually do my laundry, go to the grocery, clean up
my room, and practice viola. I also played some Counterstrike with Marc on some
Korean servers and made fun of their names and inability to speak proper English.
Had everything gone as planned, I would actually be in India right now, or even
this weekend. But my ticket was cancelled as other people want to use our department
funds to go to conferences. I suppose there is a positive and negative side to
going on the business trip, so I'm not complaining. As my consolation prize, they
bought me Indian food for lunch along with the other Indian programmers.
At work, the staircase resembles a sauna that is becoming increasingly pungent.
Don't buy into the myth that oriental people don't have body odor. Originally,
I was going to write this entry about the different unpleasant odors that I
encounter everyday in Korea. But I'll try and avoid culturally-centric
generalizations as my current English student often criticizes Americans which
I find a little bit annoying.
We had a "workshop" at work as well, where we listened to people present some
information about what they are working on and then eating dinner and drinking
at a nearby resort. The next morning we took a short walk and then went back
home. It was not especially productive, but was a welcome break from work.
I also recently finished some required online training, "Six Sigma". Basically
it is a methodology for quality control where you strive to eliminate defects,
up to 6 standard deviations from the mean of a normal distribution. It has
become such a popular catchphrase throughout the company. Many people are
involved in training for becoming a "Six Sigma" expert.
I just looked up some of the diagrams that they make to illustrate some analysis
on the web and used them to learn the material. We applied this process to
some optimization for decision-making; I threw together some diagrams and fudged
a conclusion but ended up with a 97/100 for the course (was a surprise to me!).
Must get some sleep, more news at a later date of course.
|
| July 17, 2003 - Riding the Waves |
When I started this entry, I had just come back from watching The Hulk with my
cousin. The plot moved a little too slowly, probably to show off all the special
effects (which were mostly great, though some parts looked rather silly). I felt
like falling asleep during some parts of the movie, and was hoping it would end soon.
Though I read various Marvel Comics titles when I was younger, I never really
followed the Hulk because he seemed too powerful and one-dimensional. There was
lots of Mac advertising in the movie though Bruce Banner's laptop looked like an IBM.
At work, I wrote a couple more test programs and learned how to use ANT as
well as other open source utilities used in analyzing the tests. I was told that
my role would involve more testing; though I'm not thrilled about this role, it is
still one way to practice programming. Hopefully, we will get through the project
soon, and I can work on something more interesting later this year.
One of the Indian guys received his Samsung ID card after waiting over
a month to receive it. Unfortunately, they made a rather glaring error in
spelling his name, resulting in a piece of plastic with a bunch of numbers and
"Sameasabove" inscribed. Apparently, there were multiple instances where he
had to enter his name, so he tried to save a little time (which ultimately cost
him another month).
The TOEIC (some English competency test) that I took last weekend was rather easy
as expected. There were a couple ambiguous questions
and answers. My favorite was a listening question "We have a meeting in the
morning, didn't you get the newsletter?" One of the answer choices was "Yes,
I am feeling much better, thank you."
My test paper was blown off my desk during one of the listening questions since
I was sitting in my assigned seat beside the window, but I think I got the
questions correct anyway. I finished 40 minutes early and fell asleep for the
rest of the time. My coworkers are a little concerned about getting low scores,
but I heard that it's rescaled so much that 5 wrong is still a perfect score.
I pick up my viola now and then, but am often discouraged by my faltering
technique and the terrible tone quality I produce. I think I should replace
all the other strings, the A string is sounding rather false. Maybe tomorrow
I will pick it up again and do some practicing since I don't have to go to
work. It's "Sandwich Day" tomorrow, but the main reason that we have off is
simply to connect Korean Constitution Day with the weekend. I'm glad that
SDS stopped requiring its employees to attend work on Saturdays.
I often want to formulate some plan for myself to learn more about Korea
including food and language. Work has kept me rather busy, and there are few
people who could probably answer all my questions and provide me with a
satisfactory amount of information. Too few people know the area I live
in well, and I also lack a car which would be the best way to explore each
of these places on my own.
Today I played basketball with some friends from SDS training in the morning.
We played 2-on-2 for about 40 minutes. Everyone was taller than me so it
was a bit tough getting rebounds. Having lost a lot of weight, I didn't play
a very physical game and got blocked a few times, but ended up scoring a bunch
of points.
Afterwards, we ate out at some kalbi place which was pretty expensive. We talked
about scenarios in case of a war with North Korea, as well as our corporate
training. The conversation somehow drifted to Starcraft and professional gaming
in Korea... so I felt the urge to go home and play a few games.
|
| July 8, 2003 - Augh, I've got a paper to write |
I'm writing already; I thought that as long as I'm doing some writing in Korean, I may as well
add to my weblog.
Last week I had the chance to watch
28 Days Later
which a Nobel Laureate reviewed (but he gives away the plot and the ending). It was an interesting concept, but
not very scary for a horror movie. I thought the ending was somewhat open, contrary to what the Nobel Laureate
had written. He mostly focused on describing his thoughts about the virus paradigm however.
At work I've been sifting through bugs, writing some JUnit stuff using a special StrutsTestCase package.
Most of the tests I'm writing seem a little useless, but at least I get to explore the current projects
in a little more depth. I think my Samsung mouse drivers are buggy. Often times it double clicks when I click
only once and I lose control of certain functions at different times. At first I thought maybe it was a
problem generated by running Eclipse and other resource hogs, but it happens regardless of what program I
am running.
I received an e-mail from one of the people I attended corporate training with that I thought I'd share.
They are an advertisement of wedding photos, showing before and after shots of Asian women -- we always make
fun of how much make-up they wear, I guess we should be glad that some of them do wear it:
(1,
2,
3).
I'm actually writing a short speech about differences in Korean and American culture that I will give
tomorrow in Korean to a few coworkers, part of a morning bonding activity in our office. So far I have talked
about my favorite Korean book, Paul Graham's Nerd essay, and my Summer Festival. Since I can't think of
too many more topics that would be interesting to everyone else, I decided I should compose a multi-part
speech in order to avoid finding new topics every couple weeks. It's still a burden to write in Korean.
I came up with the idea for this topic after reading
this article
this morning. Reminds me a bit of my father, though he doesn't demand to play. I found some interesting
but poorly written material, I guess I can just summarize what they wrote about.
I guess I should cut short so that I can finish planning out and writing my speeches.
|
| July 6, 2003 - splag writes ,'hey.. when are you going to post to your lj again?' |
I did neglect my weblog for a week, and felt as though I had been shirking my duties. Obligations
to myself to write about my life in hopes someone is entertained by reading about it as well as
record some interesting events (not very personal ones) that someday I can receive the pangs of nostalgia.
But mostly I write because I want to keep everyone up to date, or provide a humorous jest to invoke a
smile -- and it keeps me busy. But my excuse for not writing is that I have been feeling a little bit
sick that week. My voice was hoarse and I was not able to eat very much (possibly related to the
trauma of the poke in the eye?). As an aside, Vancouver was chosen over Pyongchang as the site of
the 2010 winter olympic games... I guess we didn't impress them enough [see June 22 entry]. ;)
Tony, Charles, and Arnie came to Korea to visit before I left for the Summer Festival, but they
stayed long enough for me to have dinner with them last weekend. I took the subway out to Shinchon
(100 minute trip) to meet them as well as another family friend. It was great seeing friends from
the US again and we had a pretty fun time although we didn't get the chance to play basketball.
My father brought my viola to Korea during his latest visit. The d-string had broken, maybe during transit,
so I thought I had a spare. However, the spare turned out to be a new brand of strings that I wanted to test
out, but they were extremely short and barely even reached the pegs. I'm certain that I ordered the 15 1/2"+
strings, but I guess they sent me the wrong ones. Anyway I started practicing in my room after work
and on weekends. Someone next door actually plays piano, or is starting to learn piano, and practices
at odd hours. Whenever I start practicing, they start practicing as well -- I hope it's not a little
kid whose parents make him practice just because I'm fooling around with my viola.
At work I started on a project with two of the Indian programmers with weekly milestones.
Last week, I worked on an authentication console using struts and JSP, or rather copied over some previously
written code from a different part of the project and integrated it with some hierarchical tree
GUI that the Indian programmers are working on. I wouldn't call it work, but I did spend over 3 days sifting
through commentless code trying to figure out why some aspect of it wasn't working. This week I'm learning
JUnit and will write some test code for the part that the Indian programmers are working on.
I saw Charlie's Angels 2 over the weekend with my coworkers. Not by choice of course, but it was
entertaining in a ridiculous sort of way. Sometimes I felt they were trying to emulate Austin Powers.
I also met with some of my corporate training classmates out in Yongtong, maybe 20 minutes by taxi from
home. In the street and the bar that we went to, they were playing some of the music that we had to dance
to for the Summer Festival. I was constantly wishing that I would not hear those songs ever again.
What made my day today was while I was playing Counterstrike, and I singlehandedly leveled the Terrorist
team, well 10 out of 11 players (without touching an awp once), wish I had taken a demo.
|
| June 22, 2003 - Samsung Summer Festival 2003 |
It's a relief to be back in civilization again. I had been occupied with the preparation for
and the celebration of Samsung's Summer Festival, where new employees of the company gather
together. Over 5400 people were in attendance, and I'm sure that tens of millions of dollars
were spent. The preparation for the festivities varied according to division of the company
as there were five different teams, mostly composed of multiple divisions.
For the first seven days, our team of about 750 gathered at a ski resort in Yongpyung, near
Pyongchang, which is one of the candidate cities for the 2010 winter olympics. We took buses
to the gym, where they had some screens and loudspeakers setup. They started playing the
music from Starcraft -- it was sad that I recognized it and even more humorous that many
of the people sitting around me recognized it as well.
It seemed like
a nice place, with a golf range and a mountain biking course during the summer. The food was
terrible though, most people threw out half of their food during the first few meals.
We usually
practiced in a gym designed for a skating rink, which was not really well-ventilated. The
air quickly fogged up with dust making it rather unpleasant. The bathrooms were extremely
dirty, littered with cigarette butts and dirty tissues.
We also wore a tri-colored
jacket for the team performance to form words and pictures as a team which retained all the
sweat, which was somewhat uncomfortable. One of the letters we formed was "V", which I found
strange since it has no significance, and Koreans also pronounce it /boo-ee/, which we had
to yell upon making it.
I had a great time, despite the constant complaints made by teammates, meeting a few new people
and spending some time together with my IT training classmates. We discussed issues such as
the origins of Gatorade and how Christians in Korea are very discriminating on whom they associate
with (much different than the US).
We learned several dances and a choreographed team performance which also involved dancing.
Combined, I think it was close to an hour of dances that we learned.
Not sure if you can actually access these outside Korea, but if it's possible, you can listen
to some of the songs we danced to:
Let's Start on a Journey
A Romantic Cat
Champion (this one is a funny remix of the theme from Beverly Hills Cop)
Arirang (so many versions of this song exist, I couldn't find the right one)
Parts of our team performance music included the first couple bars of Zigunerweisen and one of
Vanessa Mae's arrangements... maybe The Devil's Trill? I felt rather silly dancing to that...
During the actual performance, one of the flag bearers, holding a 3m pole, hit me in the face with the tip.
Luckily, I had a short time to avoid it, but it still glanced the side of my left eye. It bled a little bit,
and is a little bit swollen, but I am otherwise okay.
After practice was over, we went to Phoenix Park in Bogwang for the event itself where we met with all the teams
and many vice presidents of various divisions of Samsung. Since our company division didn't have much money to spend,
we crammed 20 people per room, which were originally designed to house 5. We slept arm-to-arm, and the bathroom was
always occupied. I was unable to take a shower during the three days that we were there.
Other events besides our performances included taking
some oath, hiking up a mountain, Idea Development Contest (various skits prepared by different divisions of the company),
live performances by Korean pop singers/groups, candlelight ceremony, and a
meeting with the SDS CEO and other people in the company. Excellent blackmail material for whomever was videotaping
the meeting.
We received quite a bit of paraphernalia including wind jacket, wind pants, hat, sun visor,
backpack, longsleeve shirt, polo shirt, handkerchief, pen, and inflatable cushion. I threw it all
in the laundry machine for a couple hours, hoping that I could just get it clean enough to store away in a not
often-visited corner of the closet.
Upon my arrival back home, I was able to use a computer for the first time in 10 days.
My Yahoo Bulk Folder was filled with over 600 messages including another 100 that passed
through Yahoo's spam mail filters. Since I got back I've just been cleaning and resting, need
to go back to work tomorrow morning. My father is also coming to Korea tomorrow, bringing my viola hopefully.
Finally, an interesting read.
|
| June 8, 2003 - South Park |
I started writing this entry on the 3rd, but did not get a chance to finish until tonight.
Although I haven't been following South Park that closely, I got the chance to
watch some of this season's episodes. The past few seasons of South Park have been
rather mediocre, but recently they started recycling some of the more humorous aspects
adding a fresh twist. The ones that I watched were episodes
704 and 705.
Thanks P2P filesharing ;) Speaking of which, I believe that it could be much easier to find
legal content than through the web due to the filters and relevance to the preferences of the
content to sentient beings rather than web robots, unfortunately, it is far more often used
for not-so-legal purposes. This is a paradigm that I have thought of often, but needs further
thought to become a feasible service.
Other events that have occurred since my last entry -- I saw the Matrix Reloaded with my
coworkers, met with my SDS IT training group to watch an exhibition soccer game between Korea and
Japan, and attended the wedding of one of my fellow trainees.
I must not be sleeping that well these days as it seems as though I am waking up a few minutes
before my alarm goes off which probably means I am waking up quite often, but don't remember it.
It's rather noisy here, with dogs barking, children crying, couples fighting, and a piano next
door. When I get my viola here, I will have my revenge!
I also heard that my cousin almost lost my dog while taking him for a walk. The collar fell off while
he wasn't looking, and I guess he had not been paying attention for a while because he couldn't
find him anywhere. So he went to a friend's house and when he came back to his apartment
complex, there was my dog sitting at the front gate.
Windows went haywire and a critical configuration file went corrupt forcing me to reinstall
Windows XP completely. I actualy didn't have a driver floppy disk which would allow it to
recognize the RAID 0 striped array in my computer, so I had to go to the PC room in the basement
and put it on a floppy. It also took quite some time to reinstall most of my apps that require
registry entries. I didn't bring all of my software to Korea, so I'm still missing some
non-critical programs.
A lot of people have been asking me why I came to Korea, a frequent question that I can
provide a simple answer for, but after answering, this often causes second thoughts about
diving headfirst into this turbulent pool of unknown dimensions (forgive the melodrama).
I've postulated that the best way to approach this new environment is not have any regrets,
mindlessly charge forward leaving behind any form of dignity, and to muster a great amount of
self-confidence. It seems to be a contradictory divergence of personalities.
In the words of David Letterman on the Late Show after the 9/11 attacks, "And it's very simple, there is
only one requirement for any of us and that is to be courageous, because courage, as you
might know, defines all other human behavior. And I believe, because I've done a little
bit of this myself, pretending to be courageous is just as good as the real thing".
I just wanted to point out how it was interesting that it bears relevance to my life.
Interesting,
how my entry has gone from South Park to personal philosophies. It's very much a patchwork entry, but
I have much on my mind, much to do, and not enough time.
|
| May 26, 2003 - The Robo Story |
So why is the title of this entry "The Robo Story" you ask... or perhaps you skipped
over the title completely. This morning, I was reading the front page of the Samsung
SDS portal, and they had a little story about Samsung's N270 phone featured in
Matrix Reloaded
(a somewhat ugly phone).
The funniest part about it was the phonetic pronunciation of Matrix Reloaded --
/ meh too reek soo re roe dee doo /. Here's a Scooby Snack, Scooby.
The second part is that I met someone at the church I started attending (Global
Mission Church) who had graduated from Harvard in 2002, but I never met him even though
he lived in the quad (Cabot House). During freshman orientation week at Harvard, I
vividly remember watching the Love Story, which of course takes place at Harvard. I
related this movie title with the way Koreans pronounce "love". My friend was trying to
tell me about "Robo Hotels", but I really had no clue what he was talking about until he
spelled the word out. This is the very distant connection that I wanted to point out
when I thought up the title
My pace of work has shifted this week with the addition of online and offline training
courses as well as a new book to study on JSP and
struts. On Thursday,
5 programmers with 2-4 years experience in the field came from SDS's India branch.
I was designated as the messenger to facilitate communication between them and
those who couldn't understand what they are saying. It's not a role I particularly
enjoy, but keeps me busy at work.
I learned all of their shortened names; it's probably not that difficult to learn them although
calling them by their full names may be a little too time consuming. One of them is named
Mysore Nagaraju Visweswaraiah -- my friend pointed out his name "Mysore" is a popular name
in Indian cuisine. Too bad his middle name isn't something more exciting like "Bhutt".
They also decided to call me "Mr. Chris" last week, though I suppose that's a little better
than my team leader's (or manager) spelling of my name "Cris".
My housewarming party was ok, not as many people as I had hoped showed up, but we had a
fun time eating, drinking, talking, and went to a PC bang for a couple hours to play
Starcraft. I haven't played in a really long time, and my team lost more games than
we won (partly because one guy on our team had never even touched the game before).
It was interesting watching them play, as well as trash talk... it brought back memories
from college ;)
Wednesday, we have a special dinner with a few people from work. We ate samgyupsal
(thick sliced bacon) at some place nearby work and afterwards went to a bar. We have
another special dinner on Wednesday, and will probably go to the theatre to go see Matrix
Reloaded which was just released in Korea last Saturday. I need to get some sleep, will
write more this week.
|
| May 17, 2003 - Wasted the day away... |
I finally found some time to write an entry -- actually I accomplished almost nothing today, so
I'm writing in order to feel productive. Actually, I should be working on some of my online
training material for work, but it's too frustrating to try and translate and understand it.
I received my new laptop on Wednesday. So far, I'm satisfied with its performance with basic
applications, but it gets very hot while in use. It's too hot for continuous use
Sony and IBM have somewhat similar
laptops in the market. Continuous use of the laptop on your lap is uncomfortable and not advisable,
as it brings back memories of this
article. I don't think I've ever seen the fan turn on, I'm starting to believe that it's broken.
I've been meeting more people at work and have had the chance to talk to them more. A couple
of them really seem to want to learn English from me -- one guy buys me juice or soda at work
so that I will teach him some conversational English. One of my friends made me a poster to
advertise my English teaching services around the area. Hopefully I'll be able to get a few regular
students to secure an additional source of income.
I planned a housewarmnig party for next weekend at my new apartment for the people I attended
corporate training with. Regardless of how few attend, it should be interesting to host. I have
much cleaning to do ahead of me.
|
| May 11, 2003 - 95% of my e-mail inbox is spam |
I completed a short report on web services for work though I did not discover
many interesting points in my research. Monday, I will be ordering a laptop for
work, Samsung brand of course; I'm in the process of choosing between two models,
the P25 and the
X10. I'm leaning towards the X10 since it uses the new Centrino chip and is
slightly more compact, but slightly slower -- also it resembles Apple PowerBooks in
appearance (minus the widescreen).
This
accident is horrible, and it seems really stupid to assume that the people that got
sucked out of the plane at 10,000-35,000 ft. had any chance of survival. The result of
negligence, either in production or maintenance of machinery can be devastating to human
life. Almost equally horrible, well to a much lesser magnitude, is the way that
The Korea Times often translates its
articles into English
(example 1,
example2).
At least they make the effort to translate the article to English. Speaking of which, perhaps
I should start translating my weblog to Korean for practice.
This is a pretty nice computer-generated movie
that I found through Slashdot. It looks amazing, especially since it was built using
existing commercial tools.
Last night, I went out to meet the staff of Ivy
Connection. Their website is under construction again, but basically it's a small
business to setup graduates of Ivy League schools with tutoring jobs such as teaching English,
college essay corrections, etc. Had some dinner, met some of the staff, and a couple new
members including some girl who was one of Guus Hiddink's personal translators (one of the
most famous people to South Koreans, as he is the coach of the national soccer team who led
them to the 2002 World Cup victory). The business seems promising, although I haven't been
assigned any students yet.
I'm going out to play some b-ball in the awesome (relatively) spring weather now. I still have
lots of shopping to do for my apartment, and will be having a housewarming party this Saturday.
Busy life in Korea.
|
| May 6, 2003 - Quick Observations |
As I was returning to my apartment today, I noticed the Cafe name next to the entrance
to my apartment was called "Azit Cafe", but pronounced much like
AJ's name! I've never
gone in before though, it doesn't appear as though many people frequent it (just like
my webpage :) ).
I started some research at work on "current web service trends". It's far too broad, I don't
know what to concentrate on exactly. Since the assignment was delivered second-hand, I
wasn't able to narrow down the topic of research. I will probably try concentrating on either
component based or serviced based architecture and hope I can find some good case studies
to present in my report.
I got a haircut today at the department store nearby. It took over an hour though because
when I got there they told me it would not take long at all. But the people ahead of me
were getting some hair treatments, so I waited 45 minutes until I got my haircut. Then
the lady cutting my hair had to stop and treat the person's hair next to me for another 10
minutes. The haircut didn't even come out that well and was relatively expensive. I
guess I'll have to search harder for a good barber.
|
| May 5, 2003 - Children's Day |
I've been on vacation from work (corporate-wide holidays) for 3 days, mostly purchasing
items that I need for my apartment, or
"officetel" as it is often called in Korea, with my father. We often have different
ideas of my actual necessities.
I watched a Korean movie with one of my friends from corporate training at Samsung Plaza
on Sunday morning. The title might be translated into English as "Recollections of a
Murder Case". It was historical fiction, portraying a series of murders of women about
15-20 years ago in Korea; the murderer was never found. Other than the fact that it
dragged on for over two hours, the movie itself was pretty good, though I couldn't
understand every detail and joke. Some parts also didn't seem to fit into the flow of the
movie... just unnecessary content.
I discovered a basketball court nearby, so I bought a basketball in hopes that I will have
time to shoot some hoops by myself and maybe with my Samsung acquaintances. There's also
a large hill behind the apartment complex which you can climb for exercise. There are situp
boards and hula hoops for public use halfway up the hill. Maybe when I'm bored, I will explore
some more and take some pictures.
While perusing Slashdot, I came across an old
BBS game that I used to play, Lord of the Red Dragon, except
this version is web-based and changed
names to Lord of the Green Dragon. There are still some "holes" in the game, but it is a
noteworthy attempt at bringing life back into an old game. Reminds me of my old attempt at
porting Dope Wars into JavaScript. Though I finished it long ago, I never really posted
it publicly since it barely felt like a game.
I like the title of this article because figuratively, I think that it is true:
Sun Shines
All Over Korea, referring to Sun Microsystems of course. The core programming language
seems to be Java in Korea, whether it is cell phones or IT solutions. The college curriculam
for computer science usually involves Java as the main language. I know the article is focused
on wireless applications and BREW, but it provides a nice segue into my observations. Tomorrow
I have work, so I'm off to bed.
|
| April 26, 2003 - First Day of Work at SDS |
I wouldn't exactly call it work, but I commuted to Bundang (next to Seoul) this morning to attend
work at the SDS Hi-Tech Center with the Software Reuse Team in the Service Delivery
Support department. Yesterday, was the conclusion of our introductory training --
just a quick recap: February - 3 weeks of technical training, March-April - 27 days
of corporate training, and an additional 6 days of SDS information lectures. I didn't
start any real work, and probably won't for some time. Instead, someone was giving a
presentation of future work plans. I didn't understand most of what they were saying
about it because the presentation was mostly in Korean and they use so many unconventional
abbreviations.
I'm also moving to a new location near my workplace. It will save me about 40 minutes of
commuting each way, but the rent is still somewhat expensive (in proportion to my salary).
I also will have to buy some appliances like a new refridgerator which could cost a week's pay
for the compact size. I will be moving over the next few days as well as attending work.
Hopefully, I will have something interesting to write about work next time I write my blog.
|
| April 22, 2003 - More SDS fun |
This afternoon, we had some short group interviews with the Service Delivery and Service
Management departments (or SI and IS). I don't think I will be going to either department, as I am
trying to arrange working at the Service Delivery Support group which didn't have any advertised
openings, which looks like it will work out. Actually, I felt as though neither the Service
Delivery nor the the Service Management departments even wanted me (at least the representatives
of the departments gave me that impression) due to my inability to speak fluent Korean. It didn't
surprise me much, but if I am simply a handicap to every department, why bother hiring me?
The Service Management representative was from the "E-Vision" department, but he is one of the most
cynical interviewers I have ever met. Maybe he doesn't like his job, but you would expect that they
would hire someone more optimistic to determine the company's vision.
But it is likely that I will join the Software Reuse Team, one of the Service Delivery Support
groups involved in component software development and maintenance in Bundang, a small city next to Seoul.
It will most likely be Java development, possibly mixed with other tools. I have a lot of material
to study over the next few months: Java, component-based tools or maybe APIs, Korean language, etc.
Hopefully I will be able to squeeze in some activities such as teaching English, exercise, and working
on my webpage. In the meantime, I'm glad I'm not
one of these people
anymore.
|
| April 20, 2003 - Easter |
It was not a traditional Easter this year, as I wasn't able to attend church since I didn't plan
ahead well enough. My father came to my apartment in the morning, just a couple hours after I had
gone to sleep. We went to eat a buffet lunch at the Mariott hotel where I had about 4-5 plates
of food. Other activities I did this weekend was eat dinner with my SDS training group, meet with
my team "senior" from corporate training, and met a couple people from my corporate training for dinner
tonight. I added a few photos from my corporate training on the right side (in case you never noticed those
links before) as I received a CD of photos that I need to make copies of for my classmates.
Tomorrow, I will need to make a choice between Information Systems and Systems Integration departments at
SDS. Neither one is what I really want to do, but they only have openings in those departments. I am
attempting to contact a separate department nevertheless, in hopes that I will be able to further my
software development career by obtaining pertinent job experience. Some of my classmates are extremely
stressed out because they did not major in any field related to computers. I think it is a mismanagement
of resources by putting those people into technical fields. After hiring them, why not put them in their
appropriate specializations?
Anyway, since I need to wake up pretty early tomorrow for training, I will cut my entry short here.
|
| April 16, 2003 - The conclusion |
Two days ago, I arrived back in Seoul after successfully completing my training
course in Chun-An.
I am pretty sure I lost some weight, I took a before and after
picture.
Despite the rigorous schedule and unfortunate cultural and language barrier,
it was an incredible experience. Some share my opinion, while some people believe it was too
difficult. In my first entry, perhaps I emphasized the negative aspects, but it was not an
exaggeration. Many of my classmates began sporting many white hairs and looked as if they were
ready to collapse (to pass the time, I often counted how many white hairs they had during lectures).
After a while, I became accustomed to the schedule and was able to focus on the
more positive aspects.
Upon our return to Chun-An on the 30th, we had an activity called the Marginal Ability Test (M.A.T.).
We climbed a mountain next to our training center and stopped at five checkpoints where we performed
some exercises at our seniors' request in a military-like fashion. The most difficult part was not
climbing the mountain but rather the exercises at the checkpoints; of the five different exercises
we did, the fifth type was the most difficult and I believe impossible to do the number of repetitions
that they asked for. I was impressed by everyone's
ability to stay with the team. This was one of my favorite team building exercises because each of us
really made the effort to carry the burden of fellow teammates. We had to physically push a couple
people forward uphill, but their efforts were very visible.
Our next activity involved traveling to Daegu (where they speak a funny dialect, Kyung-sang Do).
This trip was preceded by a lecture about American Football by some American guy in English.
I thought it was interesting to observe how some people who don't
understand much English react to the lecture since the situation is usually reversed for me.
In Daegu, first we visited a Samsung Cheil Mojik (Textile) plant and took a tour of the inside.
The machines were extremely loud, dusty, and mildly pungent. The next day we visited a center for
mentally handicapped children to do some volunteer service. I helped clean the bathroom and then spent some
time with some handicapped girls, most of them could not speak so you really have to read them through
their facial expressions. When my partner and I took one out for a walk in the afternoon, we had
to use the type of wheelchair that you lie down in and make sure that her clothes didn't get caught in
the wheels as they lacked motor coordination as well. On the third day, we had an activity called
the Life Adjustment Marketing Ability Development (L.A.M.A.D.) -- ok the title doesn't make much sense
but basically we had to sell some Samsung products, specifically CDP/MP3 players, digital cameras,
film cameras, and binoculars. We also had an interesting performance to show potential buyers in hopes
of convincing them to buy the product -- unfortunately, that strategy did not work too well.
I recreated the performance [Edited: but decided to remove it to maintain some humility, I hate to
show off ;) ].
After we arrived back at Chun-An from our 3 day sojourn to Daegu, we worked on learning to present
proposals and began working on our "Power Performance" dance. For those from each team who designed
and worked on the dance, I think they had the toughest jobs of anyone during training. Luckily,
I was not part of this team. We also did an activity called a CREPIAD (I have no clue what it is an
acronym for). The idea was to think of some original product and build a marketing plan for it.
Our class decided to create a reshapeable modular mouse which would let you build your own custom
mouse and then reshape it whenever you wanted. I made a
small logo for our product.
Some example names of other products were "Samsung
Nopia" (Notebook + Utopia) which was a wireless mouse attached to the computer, Scan Aid which was
a camera holder so that you could take pictures of documents and use your camera as a scanner,
Ansae Corporate drink saver which compresses a bottle of carbonated beverages in order to preserve them,
and Joi-R, an online avatar-based exercise system. I was responsible in helping make one of the
CFs (commercials) for the product, so I designed one in Flash with one of my teammates of a mouse
dancing to Funkytown. It wasn't really as great as I had planned, but we were constrained by time
and were using extremely slow notebook computers on a congested network.
Our last small activity before we gave our Power Performance was an English 3-minute speech in front
of everyone in the auditorium. Each team had to choose one person, so naturally they wanted me
to talk. I spoke a little about Reverend Gomes' Harvard graduation day speech and how it applied to
my current situation and recited part of Robert Frost's "The Road Less Traveled By" as it also applies
to my subject. I added a little joke to my speech after they showed Richard Gephart giving a
speech and saying "You didn't have to go to Harvard to know that", but very few people understood
the joke. I was somewhat disappointed, since I spent some time trying to simplify the language and
grammar in my speech, but very few people understood what I was talking about. At least I had a
laugh when a classmate of mine was returning to his seat during lecturing, having had stood in
the back trying to wake up, missed his seat and fell on the floor. He fell asleep shortly after
during lecture.
Our Power Performance was pretty exciting to rehearse as well as perform. Three training groups
gathered together for a total of 600 people, each training group with their own performance.
After a couple Korean pop songs and Arirang, we moved into formation to spell out 43 and 24 which
were our training group numbers. We formed the numbers while they played We Will Rock You -- a
lot of people had terrible rhythm and were rushing the beat which everyone would tend to follow.
We fixed most mistakes before our performance, and I think we did pretty well. After our Power
Performance and some other side activities, we went to Everland to take some pictures and relax
with all three training groups.
We did drew up an Action Plan to determine some possible course of action in the future.
We also did some 360 degree evaluations with our classmates -- the most common weakness of
mine was that I couldn't speak Korean well enough. I regret that I had left at least
one weakness for each person in order to help them with their Action Plan whereas few people
left any negative comments about me. Oops.
We went through the closing ceremonies, returned to Kangnam and went drinking early in the
afternoon until around midnight. It was sad, parting with the people you worked hard with and
lived with for 27 days as soon we'll probably all be at different divisions of Samsung, some
working in other countries.
Thus ends my summary of my experience at Chun-An training center. Tomorrow, my final week
of training begins, so I need to get some sleep. I promise to post a little bit more once I
figure out how to save web pages in Korean format.
|
| March 29, 2003 - Halfway through |
There's so much to say, but so many tedious details which might make this entry
boring, and so many details that I've forgotten due to sleep deprivation. Today our
only vacation from corporate training started, and will end about 24 hours from that point.
My luggage got stored away on another bus and we had to have it delivered by taxi. Then
about 12 people from our team went to a beer house in Kangnam to celebrate the halfway
point of our training with our teacher. Another group from the Samsung training was
sitting at another table and were celebrating someone's birthday. I lost the paper-rock-scissors
match so I had to go to their table to ask for a piece of their cake. They wanted me to sing
the Samsung song...
Starting from the beginning, we were instructed to wear only our
shillaehwa
indoors. We were assigned teams, seats in the auditorium, rooms, and schedules. The procession
and future events reminded me of some sort of military training. We started with a lecture (the
title was "Back to the Basic"...), and then met with our teams that night. We decided on a team
name ("G-Zone", phonetically similar to a Korean word which means "peerless" or "matchless") despite
my complaints about the potential English interpretation of the name. Probably gave other people
a bad impression of myself by doing so, but what native English speaker would accept a name like
that? I suggested "Got Game" which was quickly dismissed by almost everyone because they didn't
really know what it meant and it required an explanation. While we were drawing up our
"Ground Rule" (should be plural), our designated note-taker wrote "Back to the Future" instead
of "Back to the Basic". One other spelling that bothered me was "We are the Champion" (should be plural
again) written on a big poster in the gym.
We also drew "Mind Maps" which is just a drawing of how you perceive yourself with different
characteristics or hobbies in separate sections of the paper.
That night, we compared our team names, songs, and chants among the eight 25-person teams (A through H).
There were some pretty lame names, like A team's "Alzip" (a popular ZIP compression utility in Korea),
B team's "Best and Basic", C team's "S^3: Super SamSung", E team's "Emotional Tecnology",
F's team "F4S: Fast Forward Fighting Forever", and
H team's "Hi High". Our team chant, decided by our team leader is "Glo-bal Sam-sung, Grea-t 24 (why
24??? Never mind, our training group was 24...),
Gol-den G-Zone". I'm pretty sure I'm the only native English speaker in the 200-person training
group. I also get the feeling that some native Koreans lack an active imagination due to their
education or nurturing.
Every morning, we go jogging, meeting at 5:55am every morning outside the gym, lining up and counting
off as one might in the military. We wear our sweatsuit uniform and fluorescent yellow Samsung hat.
We start with a stretching/calisthenics session (I still have to
watch the person in front of me to remember the order). Then we sing the Samsung song, yell at the
sky, and then jog a couple kilometers while singing a Korean army song or counting in sync with
our steps. I like the exercise, but would rather do it in a less formal fashion.
Every night, we start some team activity which usually takes a lot of time and runs until 2-3am
depending on the activity. Ending at 3am means we only get 2-3 hours of sleep for the night and
there isn't really any other time during the day when you can sleep. Since you need to leave
your key with the instructors, there's no way to get back into your room unless you ask for permission
to get some item that you forgot in your room. One night, we rehearsed a drama that we were going
to perform all night until it was time to exercise in the morning.
We also have to write essays describing our activities and a journal in Korean. Since my Korean
isn't that great, I usually end up mixing some English in as well which they probably don't even
read in order to meet the required length. Speaking of which, I have to type out an essay about
our business management economics game.
We had some interesting activities between the lectures though. First we had a challenge course which
involved mostly teamwork activities and single person activities such as climbing a 12m mountain-climbing
practice wall and jumping off a 10m telephone pole to a trapeze-type swing. We also had a quiz
show on Samsung philosophies and history, drama based on Samsung's history, a field day-type event,
and a business management economics game.
Before the field day event, we split up and learned some dance -- I sat in the sports dance (or
"seu poh cheu den seu" phonetically in Korean) section since my roommates were sitting in that
section and learned the Jive ("ja ee beu"). Our team placed first in this event, having won or
gotten second place in almost all of the events. Instead of participating in the quiz show, I helped give
a presentation on some of Samsung's divisions taking the role of a college recruiter for those
companies. Our presentation was not a success [edited for good measure], but I felt that the
entire team could have contributed a little more.
Our drama was rather humorous -- I was the sound engineer, but
finding songs and sounds was extremely tough, but the end result was worth it.
Our business simulation went pretty well, but we kind of fell apart
in the second half since we didn't follow our original plan, but still managed to get second place.
Yesterday, during lecture, the instructor began to berate us for sleeping and had 4 people come out
to the front of the class and apologize. He said something about kicking them out, and one of
the team instructors came out and went to the podium but started crying instead of saying anything.
This made some students in the lecture hall begin to cry. People started calling out to give them
another chance, and then the lights went out. They started playing music and the instructors came
into the room with cakes -- it turned out to be a surprise birthday party celebration for those who
had birthdays during training. They played a video of our instructors going to the birthday cake recipients'
houses and talking to their parents. Strange way to celebrate...
Finally, today, before we took the bus back to Seoul, we took some test to determine our intelligence
level called the SSAT (not to be confused with the secondary school admission test) which happened
to be in Korean. I answered about 6 questions of about 100 and then went to sleep because I couldn't
read any other questions. Time to get some rest.
|
| March 18, 2003 - Random collection of thoughts |
Tomorrow I will be leaving for Samsung corporate training in Chun-An, so although
it's possible that they will have computers connected to the internet that I can use,
I might not have time to provide regular updates. I will definitely write about the
month-long training session after it is over if I can't write about it before I return.
Every day I will probably be singing the Samsung
Song... I can't wait!
With the seemingly imminent US war with Iraq and pro/anti-war sentiment being the current
hot topic, I thought I'd express my own concerns about the war. One of the anti-war issues that I
relate with is why the US decided to continue with their plan without support from the UN.
In other words, why wage war now instead of later or even back in 2001 after the infamous
attack on 9/11? I suppose some classified intelligence operations took some time, but
the government has not yet released any information to the public which justifies
starting an immediate war other than we are frustrated with Iraq's tactics to appease
UN inspectors. Without this information, we won't understand why we cannot wait for the
UN to pass their own ultimatums for Iraq. I don't understand how it will improve homeland
security by alienating ourselves from the UN as well as starting a war with Iraq (again).
Bush wants Saddam Hussein to remove himself from Iraq, but I also don't see any sort
of plans on how the US intends to replace him with a leader who will lead the country in
a fair manner as well as allow the US and other countries to freely investigate and
remove terrorist groups within the country.
I'm also worried about the US economy. Unemployment is approximately 6% and I can forsee
a much higher percentage to come post-war. I've found it very tough to even get interviews
at technology companies and even tougher to get a position that I feel I am fully qualified
for. I found this article
that describes the current job market situation to which I have become accustomed to.
Chiraq's stance on French non-involvement is disturbing to me, especially if it is
due to their economic investments and agreements with Iraq. I'm sure they would feel
differently if Iraq or terrorists groups protected by Iraq launched a devastating attack
in a densely populated region of France. Their position on the war just seems a little
strange to me.
Through this discussion I never claimed to be anti-war or pro-war. The public poll says
the US public is at a "2-1 margin" in favor of military action to oust Saddam Hussein.
Although I can't think of any at the moment, I'm sure there are other alternatives which
do not involve war or military action in order to replace Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The
reasons for war are more than just replacing Saddam Hussein, breaking down terrorist
organizations, and disarming Iraq. There must be many more ulterior motives -- if there
aren't then I am against the war.
On a much less serious note, I saw a gas price sign the other day that said 1337W per Liter.
1337... hopefully most people who read this understand what I'm talking about. Yesterday
we had a training class gathering in Shinchon and had Samgyupsal and then went to some place
called Weinsberg, a beer house that served some German sausages and played classical music
in the background. Since my webserver will be down while I am at training, I
won't post a link to the pictures today, but maybe after training is over.
On Friday, I wasted many hours going to and coming back from the Immigration Office, but
I did complete my alien registration and will receive a Korean ID soon. They are keeping
my passport as well, so I'm not sure I will be able to take any money out of the bank (which
is where I'm going right now).
|
| March 13, 2003 - Eiko ga wakarimasu ka? |
My visa went through and I took a trip to Japan to enter the country with it to get it
validated. I went to Osaka in order to get it done in one day, but by the time it was
done, there were no flights left for the rest of the day. I went searching for a hotel.
Holiday Inn was almost across the street, but they were charging 16,000Y (equivalent to
maybe $130 US) which was more money than I had remaining.
The first thing I noticed about Osaka was that the houses in the residential areas were
completely packed, but there weren't that many tall buildings. I'm guessing it isn't as
densely populated as Tokyo and space is not as valuable. Actually I noticed that they
had steering wheels on the right side of the vehicle. There are also a lot of people who ride
bikes, even wearing formal clothing. Sometimes, they had a second rider
on the back axel or were talking to someone on their cellphone. I don't remember seeing any
bike locks, so I suppose bicycle theft is not common. I also encountered some people who
resembled sumo wrestlers, dressed in traditional robes and were rather large in stature.
I walked around a bit and found one hotel on one of the backroads that charged only 6,500Y
which seemed about the minimum price in that area. It was called
Hotel 24 -- I assumed
that they spoke English, but was mistaken. However, I was able to communicate enough to
figure out that I could only check-in at 9pm and the room price.
I ate lunch at Subway
to ensure I could order something I could eat and not make a fool of myself. It wasn't as good
as the one I used to eat at in NYC, but it wasn't bad, just a little expensive. I wandered
around Shinsaibashi
through the miles of pachinko parlor/restaurant/shopping arcades. I also visited
Sony Tower and looked
through some of the products that they haven't released in the US such as the cell phones
(Yahoo BroadBand is popular in Japan), hi-fi audio products, media centers, network MD players,
and palmtop computers were among them.
After walking around and eating dinner at Subway again, I checked into the hotel. They had
a poster advertising Playstation 1/2 and Xbox, but they made a slight mistake when
spelling Playstation
which I intend to submit to Engrish.com. When
I entered my room, my guesses regarding the type of hotel were confirmed -- the
foyer had a couch and
there was a karaoke machine built into the wall. I looked into the
bedroom, to find a twin
bed among other things... The bathroom was nice, a shower and a
hot tub.
I went to the airport early and got my flight changed to an earlier one, so I could return to
Korea a little sooner. Tomorrow I have to go to the immigration office to apply for my Korean
ID, and then start working on my training materials again.
|
| March 03, 2003 - 03-03-03 |
I couldn't give up the chance to write an entry on 03/03/03, but I don't have too much
to talk about. The overnight trip was pretty fun although it was in the middle of
nowhere really and my shoes got really muddy from walking outside for less than 10 minutes.
I posted pictures taken during the trip in the same location as specified in my last
news entry.
I also went to Onnuri church yesterday to see how the English services were and to
see new places in Korea. It was a huge building and there were maybe 750 people that
were in attendance of the English services. Though the sermon was somewhat boring to
me, the overall organization and presentation of the church was pretty nice. I don't
think I will go back next week however, as I did not get the sense of community since
it was far too large and the sermon almost put me to sleep.
Today, I just sat around doing some cleaning and taking care of some chores I haven't
gotten around to completing during training. Gotta get up early to finish correcting
some student's English essays for admission to private school.
|
| February 27, 2003 - Week Three |
Though the week isn't over yet, I felt like writing before I go on an overnight trip with
my class directly after training is
over to Gangcheon. I have no idea where that is or what is there, but it's always
interesting to see new places. Shortly afterwards, I have to take a plane back to the
US if my work visa is approved (which I will hear about this coming week).
We've been learning SQL this week which is an incredibly boring topic and mostly useless
unless you plan to become a DBA. Our teacher also seems to be falling asleep during class.
Yesterday was one of my classmate's birthday (the same one who called me a nerd) so we went
out for some chicken BBQ and beer.
I watched a funny Korean TV show today about some guy that farted during his date with some
girl. After that the girl didn't want to talk to him anymore and his friends all made
fun of him. There was a happing ending, however, with the guy and girl getting back together
because they had farted at the same time, while the girl thought that only she had farted and was
too embarassed to talk about it.
I visited my dog that I haven't seen for 6 years on Sunday at my Uncle's house out in
Sooji. Though I'm not sure he recognized me at first, I think he remembered after
we took a walk in the park. It's amazing how much time we can spend away from those
we love, but not realize how much time has passed. It was a happy reunion, but I'm a bit sad
because I think he's mostly deaf and not nearly as active as I remember. He's about 14 years
old now, but I think he is in pretty good health for a small dog his age. I fed him some
ramen noodles from my bowl, something I used to do a decade ago. My uncle took a
bunch of pictures that
you can see, provided my webserver is up. I have to go prepare my third speech (in Korean)
for class tomorrow as well as memorize some SQL commands for tomorrow's test. I think my brain
is functioning in 5mph mode from sleep deprivation anyway.
|
| February 21, 2003 - Week Two Summary |
This week we flew through Java (or as they pronounce it in Korean, "Jabba"), going through
all the OOP concepts such as encapsulation, overriding, overloading, polymorphisms, abstract
classes, interfaces, typecasting, statics, etc. For many in the class, it was probably an
extremely stressful experience. I tried to help as many people as I could, but communication
can be really tough because of the language barrier.
Tragedy struck on Tuesday, when over 100 people died in a subway train fire in Daegu. It is
truly unnerving to hear the details unfold. Not only did the supposed arsonist have a history
of mental problems, but the train operators also may have caused a significant number of those
deaths due to their poor decision-making abilities. I also think it's somewhat wrong of the
news channels to replay emergency phone calls made by people trapped inside the burning trains.
Reminds me of 9/11 and the audio recording of bodies hitting the ground.
On Wednesday, we also had a special dinner afterwards which ran pretty late so everyone was
really tired on Thursday. I also didn't get all that much sleep Thursday either, because
I was preparing my second class speech in Korean. This time I talked about
"Why Nerds are Unpopular", an
essay by Paul Graham, because the girl I sat next to this week called me a nerd.
After the test, we went out to dinner at the CoEX mall off Samsung Station for dinner and
a movie. We went to see Two Weeks Notice which was pretty dumb. My favorite part was the
flyer, which advertised a twix bar free when you buy tickets for Valentine's Day. They chose
Twix because phonetically it is similar to the title of the movie, Two Weeks. The movie
itself was filled with stupid jokes and crappy dialogue. I'm tired, and tomorrow I'm supposed
to go to Lotte World (a small amusement park) with my classmates so I'll end this here.
|
| February 16, 2003 - Week One Summary |
The first week of training is over, it was slightly different from what I had expected. When
I arrived on the first day, I met this girl who asked me where I was from and what college I
had gone to. After I answered, she said "so you're the one" -- I was tempted to say, "are you
white rabbit?" but I didn't think she'd understand what I was talking about (hint: The Matrix).
Apparently, she was friends with the guy I met at Beer Hunter and told her about me. It worked
out pretty well though because her English is pretty good and can translate a lot of essential
information for me.
This week in training, the topic was UNIX. We just learned a bunch of commands, taking quizzes
every day, and writing some reports about computer architecture which I wrote mostly in English.
Mostly, I'm attending this training session to learn Korean, though I hope to learn useful tidbits.
Friday we had a test, which was, luckily, fairly short. Translating the Korean is a little tough
so I didn't do so well on the quizzes, but had a little more time to translate during the test.
The test didn't even touch on anything that I haven't already learned during school, during my
jobs/internships, and self-learning from running LINUX. If I don't score well, I am supposed
to take the test over again or something. Hope everyone in the class passed.
Next week is Java and then SQL the week after.
In Korea, on Valentine's Day, apparently it's tradition for females to give males presents only.
Then a month from then is White Day, where males give presents to females. Every 14th of the
month they have a different holiday, designed to promote the economy. Then there's Black Day
in April, where you eat jjajangmyun if you don't get any presents from the previous two holidays.
I didn't get any presents, which is good because then I can go out and eat jjajangmyun on Black Day.
I don't understand the significance of the names of the holidays though.
One of my classmates was telling me stories about his contact with US culture when he went
to college in England. He went to MacDonalds for the first time in his life, bought a Big Mac,
and cried because he was so happy since he's never eaten a hamburger before. There has been
MacDonalds in Korea for a while, but I guess he just never had the opportunity.
Today, I did my laundry, watched the Lakers lose (which is what I wanted), and went out to
Samsung Station to buy a book. I started working on my speech that I have to give on Monday in
front of the class. The assignment is to speak in front of the class for about 5 minutes on any
topic or event that you found interesting. My plan is to write about the story about the little
dog's feces... for those of you who remember the translation I once had on my webpage.
|
| February 9, 2003 - Into the Frying Pan... Soon |
I've been out buying other small necessities like an alarm clock, air freshener, and the like.
The air freshener brand is called "Feel Good II" -- sounds like the name of a designer drug.
Yesterday, I went out to dinner with my cousin (the one going to the military in a month) and
his friends for some barbecued pork. In his car, my cousin's friend was listening to "great
American music" which happened to be Brittney Spears' "Oops, I did it Again". Reminds me of
the time I watched Wheel of Fortune and the clue was Person and showing on the board was
"_o_ star just_n t_mberla__" and for their turn, they guessed "g".
This morning, I took the TOEIC test at Samsung; basically this is a business English competency
test. It was a pretty simple test, but somehow they managed to screw up the English in the test.
I doubt I got a perfect score due to their mistakes, sometimes leaving out words which would
make the grammar questions have more than one valid answer. The most conspicuous error in the test
was one of the reading comprehension problems on a passage about one company's usage of an automated
answering system for technical support. They referred to this as the AAS, and in one of the questions
they asked "What did the company do after people complained about the ASS?" Sorry to anyone in the
exam room that I disturbed by laughing out loud.
|
| February 4, 2003 - First Day of Spring (Lunar Calendar) |
I spent a few days in Pusan, visiting my aunt, cousins, nephews, and grandmother.
I stayed at my aunt's house, in the middle of an entire section of town that sold
pig's feet, a popular food in Korea. I've tried it once, but don't think I could eat it ever again.
One of my cousins started work as a leg-extension surgeon, which I suppose is popular in Korea
since everyone here likes to emphasize the importance of being tall. It must be a painful procedure
though. Another cousin has to enter the military for mandatory service after finishing his M.D. and
the other has very noisy kids that like to say "yahoo" when they are happy. The younger one always
screams a lot, and both of them just laugh when they are being punished. I wanted to take some pictures,
but had no batteries since I took them out just in case they confiscated them at the airport.
At night, I watched a lot of the gamer's channel, a 24-hour broadcast of Korean gaming events. They
mostly showed replays of Starcraft tournaments, some of them in a special studio where they would sit
across from each other in space-type suits with dry ice vaporizing between the computers.
The maps they played were often not Blizzard maps, and none that I recognized. Most of them played
moderately well. Often they didn't make very good choices although they were quick to manage
their units.
I started doing this online training required by Samsung, which I didn't have access to until today.
The Korean is pretty tough, even using a dictionary to translate it. I also have to go read four
Korean books and summarize them in a three-page essay. Hopefully I can keep up.
A friend sent me a link to a website showing the bootleg Asian DVDs of the Lord of The
Rings trilogy, especially showing off the English subtitles, a couple of my favorites which
you can see here and
here.
The site itself can be found on my funny page.
|
| January 30, 2003 - Happy Birthday to Me |
The last few days have been really cold (down to -12 C without windchill). The hot water
in my apartment runs in spurts, so taking a shower is something of an ordeal. Today, the
pipes were frozen and the superintendent was not able to fix it and will send someone to
fix it tomorrow. The traffic here is also terrible, because it is almost lunar New Year's Day
and everyone is traveling to celebrate with relatives. I takes hours to get anywhere by car
or bus at the moment.
The other day, one of the superintendent's assistants came to our apartment to fill out the
agreement for the rental of the room. On the back of his jacket he had a patch on the
back of his jacket that said "Majah Flavah, Member of the M.F.! club". I found that somewhat
humorous because of the way Koreans often make bad attempts at copying American culture.
I also got a computer desk which the same
guy found for us, though we paid him about $40 for it. It's ok, now all I need is a chair.
I've been correcting some essays for some kids that my father is helping get into private
school in the US. It has been really eating my time, but I'm almost finished with them
now -- maybe 20 essays in all. They say some really funny stuff although I know they didn't
mean them to be.
For my birthday dinner, we went to some place that looked like it would be decent because
it was a large restaurant, but it turned out to be just expensive and really bad. We went
to another restaurant and had some soup, and then bought some small chocolate mousse cakes
to represent my birthday cake at a nearby
bakery. I didn't get any of the mega men this year so no Ultra Mega Mega Man. :(
|
| January 27, 2003 - More about Korea |
I took a couple pictures of my room
(1, 2).
Notice the makeshift computer table. It's not bad although it is a bit expensive to rent.
The building is really out of the way though, and is difficult to find by car. I'm trying to find a
good map of the area, so that I can figure out all the different ways I can come in and go out.
Yesterday, I went to the Tower Palace, a new apartment complex where one of my
mom's friends will live when it is finished. When it's done, it is supposed
to have features like voice command which will allow you to control your
appliances, I'm guessing using Bluetooth. The apartments were pretty large
and looked nice. On one floor, they had a health club filled with exercise
machines and freeweights, a golf practice room, pool, public bath, sauna, and
a coffee room.
I also met one of my mom's friends whose son works for Samsung SDS. We met
at some place called "Beer Hunter" (very odd name, reminds me of the game
Deer Hunter) next to KFC. From what I heard, I'll probably have a lot of trouble
with the Korean during training, as well as during my job if I want to do
programming or consulting as all the positions that are in the US are marketing.
At the moment I'm still leaning towards programming/consulting, but may have some
difficulty adjusting to Korea.
I bought a cell phone today, the LG Cyon SD100.
It's pretty nice and although it's not one of the new models it is as thin as my old LG 510 without the
battery. It's a 3G CDMA2000 phone which could be nice, if I subscribed to the more advanced services.
The headset looks kind of nice, but lacks an earclip or any system to prevent it from falling out of your ear.
On our way back, we stopped at a dumpling shop to get dinner. On TV, they were
showing a 1v1 Starcraft match -- the kids playing were all dressed up in special
suits, one guy wearing some shirt with large metallic shoulderpads. The guy with
the shoulderpads lost, I was disappointed because I thought the shoulderpads would grant him
special abilities.
My birthday is coming up in 3 days, I want someone to get me a red, green, and yellow megaman
so that I can make the Ultra Mega Mega Man.
|
| January 25, 2003 - Arrival |
I arrived in Korea yesterday after a turbulence-filled flight.
There were only two movies during the flight, I didn't feel like watching Blue Crush
(I have no idea how they picked that one), and fell asleep before the second one started.
The food was okay for airline flight food, except for some of the sandwiches -- the tuna
tasted spoiled so I didn't eat more than a bite of it that meal.
I finished reading Dreamcatcher on the plane, a typical Stephen King book starting
out with a realistic scenario and then warping it into something chaotic and unrealistic,
but yet an interesting read. The movie should be pretty good, especially with all
the flatulent people throughout the book.
After we got to Korea, we unpacked our luggage at my long-stay hotel room. The roads around
the hotel reminded me of Korean and European country roads -- very narrow single lanes, full
of bumps, and steep hills.
My room is on the second floor, behind a security coded door that opens inwards into a
J-shaped hallway. If you are carrying something big or if you are excessively obese,
you will most likely not be able to get through it. My door has some sort of magnetic key,
or optionally opens with a combination. The doors automatically lock after a few seconds in
the closed position, which was pretty neat but could get annoying at night when I'm trying
to sleep. More about my room and pictures coming soon.
Then we ate breakfast at a nearby restaurant and then walked to the Samsung SDS building
in Yeoksamdong. It's about a 7 minute walk from my hotel room which is nice as far as commuting
goes; no crowded subway to take, no traffic to wait through. Then we headed to the Immigration
Office to submit my request to receive a work visa. However, the HR department at SDS apparently
didn't know which type of visa I was required to get, as we were informed by one of the
employees. Apparently, I need to return to the US between my two training periods and get my
visa from the US. They are not paying for any of this either, which irks me a bit.
Then we went to Yongsan, the electronics market, to meet my father's friend and go shopping for a
monitor, scanner, and printer which I needed since I left mine behind at home (purposely of course,
since a 19" CRT monitor is a bit unwieldy to carry). My father really wanted me to purchase an LCD
screen, so I picked out the LG Flatron 1710B as it was the second best quality next to the pricey
Samsung 17" LCD screen. It also had DVI which I wanted, since a lot of the analog LCD screens
looked pretty colorless and blurry. I doubt I will be able to play games as well with this monitor, judging from a
quick test of single-player Quake 3 due to latency issues, even though it has one of the fastest
response times for an LCD monitor of 16ms. I don't think it's available in the US after doing
a quick web search to find some reviews. After some color adjustment, I think it will look
as nice as a decent quality CRT. We also bought the HP PSC750, which is a combo printer and
scanner. It's old and clunky, but I suppose it might come in handy.
Then we went to drink some Bubble Tea above the theatre in the same complex that we purchased the
computer peripherals. We took a taxi back to the hotel -- the driver put on Prince of Egypt VCD to
watch on the headrest of the passenger side front seat. He also had GPS going, telling him where
to turn which was pretty neat.
We ate dinner at some local restaurant by the hotel which had the worst kalbi (barbequed beef)
I had ever had. It was rubbery like beef jerky, and had very little taste.
We returned and I setup my computer but it wouldn't budge past the RAID validation screen,
so I fiddled around a bit until I got it to boot. The newly-purchased broadband
internet access was out by then, and stayed out for the entire night. More to come, I'm off
to go shopping with relatives in Namdaemoon.
|
| January 22, 2003 - Off to Korea |
|
In a few minutes, I will be headed to the airport for my trip to Korea on
Korean Air. Hopefully I'll fall asleep for most of the trip, and I won't get
a seat near loud crying babies. My father reserved a long-stay hotel room for
me, where I will most likely be staying until training is over (mid-April I believe).
Gotta cut this short, to clean up and do some last minute scavenging for stuff I
haven't packed yet.
|
| January 15, 2003 - The Voyage of the Dawntreader |
I arrived home last night from my trip to the United Kingdom. It was eventful, and
I took many photographs to document our travels. My mind is still attuned to the
British accent, which may also be affecting my writing. Pay close attention to the
links embedded in the story below, as they are pictures that I took.
Day 1: Our initial departure was delayed over five hours due to a snowstorm in London.
We received a $45 voucher to replace the in-flight dinner we would have received
had the flight been on time. We purchased a number of sandwiches and bottles of
water from one of the few remaining open stores which we packed up in hopes that
we would be able to eat them the following days. We later found out that there
are laws to prevent you from bringing meat products between the US and UK, even
if it is already prepared and you plan to eat it yourself, so we had to throw most of
them out on the plane. As we boarded, I got stopped at the gate by two security guys, they
made me take off my shoes and searched through my bag and jacket. I'm still puzzled
by why they chose me, even if it was random, since I was obviously traveling with family and
we're all US citizens.
One interesting feature of Virgin Atlantic Airlines was their in-flight entertainment system
called v.port. This comprised of a small TV screen and a controller to navigate
through their selection of movies, pre-recorded TV shows, music, video games, and
internet access. The system was most likely thin clients connected to a centralized
server since it didn't handle the simultaneous access too well. It was also missing the
advertised person-to-person messaging system which would allow you to send text messages
to other people in the plane. However, it's still a step in the right direction for
in-flight entertainment.
When we arrived at Oxford, it was too dark to go sight-seeing so we found a Thai restaurant
to eat at, and then went grocery shopping afterwards. I was pretty tired at that point, so
I slept early. I woke up very early to find my brother asleep next to his laptop. He had
been watching the Malcolm in the Middle DVD set that I bought him for Christmas, and I could
hear it through his headphones.
Day 2: On our first full day there, we visited London, taking a tour bus from the Marble Arch
past Madame Tussaud's (famous wax mask sculptor) and Trafalgar Square, stopping off at Picadilly
Circus for some shopping. As a UK neophyte, I automatically thought this was a permanent building
that housed a show with animals and acrobats. We went shopping around this area, backtracking to
a coat store, Highlands, where my mother bought me a particular type of coat that seemed popular
in England to replace my old winter jacket.
For lunch, we met some old family friends at an expensive restaurant called Foliage in the Oriental
Mandarin Hotel. I didn't know the names of many of the foods we ate until after the waiters
explained them. Each dish was served with an artistic presentation and desert was almost as large
as the main course. Three hours after we walked into the restaurant, we headed to the famous Harrod's
Department store to look around for a bit. In the basement level, they displayed Princess Diana's
engagement ring and wine glass. The display case made them somewhat difficult to inspect, so it
was somewhat uninteresting.
We walked over to Buckingham Palace as it began to get dark early in the afternoon. We weren't able
to see much since the palace is not open to the public until the summer seasons. After a few minutes,
we continued to the bus station and returned to Oxford. For dinner, we ate at a restaurant called Beefeaters
at The Mitre, a pub founded in the 13th century. I ate fish and chips for the first time in the UK, it was decent.
Day 3:
Since my brother had some school-related activity, my mother and I wandered around Oxford, stopping to take
pictures at the Radcliffe Camera and the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin. I thought the little gargoyle
heads adorning the tops of the small spires were interesting. I don't remember seeing anything similar in
any of the art history books that I've read in the past.
Then we took the Oxford bus tour around, sitting on the upper deck with the tour guide across from us.
He pointed out the various colleges and significant buildings to us including the Eagle and Child tavern
where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein read their stories, Kenneth Grahame's grave, and other tidbits that
I can't recall. We passed most of the colleges, exam building, Bodleian Library, Sheldonian Theatre, Ashmolean Museum,
Rhodes Scholar administrative building, Bridge of Sighs, and many of the college gardens.
After the bus tour ended, we walked to Christ Church and explored the tower, cathedral,
and dining hall of Harry Potter fame. There was also an interesting sundial on the way out.
We met my brother for lunch after his class was over by KFC, which happened to be across the street from
the oldest building in Oxford (a small tower built in 1050). Interesting mix of buildings. We ate at
a small sandwich shop where I noticed that their terminoligy for "take out" was "take away". In England
they also used "give way" on a "yield" sign, and "to let" instead of "to lease" which confused my mom
because she thought they meant "toilet". We stopped by Thornton's for some toffee and some random souveneir
shops for gifts. Then we went to The Oxford Story, a short tour of Oxford's history on an indoor ride.
The ride was a replicate of old Oxford school desks, and featured carved figures and even cow manure smells.
Day 4: We left for London again, after visiting the Wadham dining hall, gardens (1, 2), and music building (1, 2).
This time we started at Buckingham Palace, moved through the adjacent park to Trafalgar Square. We ate lunch
in the basement of the museum, where I tried some bread and butter pudding. Was a bit rich for me, I couldn't
eat more than half of it. After lunch, we visited the Horse Guard Palace (1, 2), House of Lords which was an unexpectedly large building,
Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, and Westminster Abbey. We couldn't go inside any of them except for Westminster
Abbey which had an overwhelming amount of of carved sculptures and stone architecture. On the floor, they had
small stone memorials for various famous people from the 18th century on.
Afterwards, we went to get on a tour boat down the Thames to the Tower of London, but the one we purchased tickets for had
broken down. We tried taking a taxi there, but arrived just after closing time. We walked along the river
and across Tower Bridge. We stopped at a restaurant on our way to the bus station and I ate fish and chips again.
We returned to Oxford and later went to an internet cafe to play some Counterstrike since the internet cafe
had a sign that said "Play Counterstrike". The employee there told us to go to the other location because the
machines were "new", so we walked to the other location. They were pretty slow computers with 15" LCD screens,
and only one pair of headphones for the entire cluster. We found a local game with 2 or 3 other players, and
decided to play with them. The maps we played were really small, like iceworld, and were pretty dark, which
made it extremely difficult to see, coupled with the poor brightness of the LCD screens.
Day 5: On our last day in England, we at breakfast at The Randolph, one of the hotels in the middle of
Oxford's campus. The food was decent; we had a continental breakfast which cost more than our dinner the night
before. Then we went out and bought a music stand for me, some toffee for my dad, and a couple more souveneirs.
We visited the covered market just to do some window shopping, and then headed out to the bus stop to return to the
airport. At the airport, the ticket security man asked us to show our passports and tickets. Immediately, he
asked if we were going to Hong Kong -- which I found a bit strange if not racist since there were plenty of
international flights with different destinations from the same airline going out around the same time. He
also backpedaled a bit, saying that he only assumed it because there were lots of people going through that day
that were headed to Hong Kong. Anyway, we returned home safely, and that was the end of our trip.
|
| January 9, 2003 - New News Section Design |
I ended up playing with stylesheets a bit, but my experiments were cut short
by the need to prepare for my upcoming trips. Enjoy my temporary design,
feel free to e-mail me suggestions.
Tonight I'm headed for Oxford, England to visit my brother for 5 days. Hopefully,
I will get to see most of Oxford, London, and perhaps one other tourist attraction
as I have never been there before. I'm not sure exactly where I'm going to go yet,
but my brother has a site-seeing guide in his dorm room there. I've packed my bags,
but have yet to clean up my room.
When I get back in five days, I'm going to need to hurry to make my last preparations
for relocation to Korea for my new job. I'll be leaving for Korea in under a week, and
will be staying for an undetermined amount of time. After a month of training, I
will be taking some soft of competency test to determine what I will be doing and
where I will be able to work. Since training and the test will be in Korean, I'm
afraid that my Korean comprehension skills will be lacking. But perhaps it won't be
too bad, since it is technical training, I would guess there's a good portion that
requires English knowledge.
Need to finish cleaning up now, hope to do some updates while I'm in England.
|
| January 1, 2003 - Happy New Year |
Happy New Year! I don't have a new design or any new gimmicks for this page yet,
like some people (AJ) yet,
but I'm hoping to work on something soon. I'm not using my old design anymore, only
to force myself to work on something new.
A lot has happened in the last six months since my last update to this page. In order to keep it short,
I left my last job because I was extremely dissatisfied with it and found a new one at
Samsung Data Systems. One
thing I hope to learn there is why their website does not make it immediately
obvious what the acronym SDS stands for.
I'm scheduled to start training for the job in February in Seoul, South Korea, so
I'll be moving out of the United States in a short while. I've been working on my
Korean a bit and getting ready for the move. It should be interesting, and I will
hopefully be able to keep up with regular updates.
|
|
|
Cafe Azit
Champion(s)
Economics Game
Challenge Course
Challenge Course 2
M.A.T.
M.A.T. 2
4324 G Team
4324 G Team Senior
Me in Osaka
Bear and I
Bear and Steve
Fish on the Thames
Harry Potter cow
Leafpile
Phonebooth
Steve at Wadham
Steve on Balcony
Marathon namesake
|
