ccho's weblog

friday

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 14:02:24 GMT

I moved into NYC last week. I have yet to assemble my IKEA dining table, but everything else is built and in use. I have been shopping around for a TV, and have my sights set on a 32" LCD, but I would probably consider an HD CRT if I could find a good deal. Digital cable is going to be quite taxing on my wallet.

I found a pretty cool application of AJAX yesterday from a CNET article -- meebo.com. I can finally start using AIM from work again, as the client site that I have moved to has a firewall in place, blocking certain ports and hosts. I really admire their effort put into developing something more than a hack (e.g. Friendster) and succeeding.

It vaguely reminds me of the time I tried to build a classic MacOS interface using DHTML back in college. I never got past opening/closing and maximizing/minimizing windows. I had been hoping to submit it to HCS once completed, to simplify the process of navigating through documents and services they provided, but stopped developing it after receiving a tepid and insulting response from an unnamed member of HCS. A few weeks, later, they implemented something not web-based, but similar to my interface and put it on every Mac in the Science Center. I was discouraged by this, I vowed never to join HCS.

The client site I am currently working at is pretty nice. Free bagels and cream cheese in the morning as well as fountain sodas. I get a pretty large desk and Aeron chair as well. They also provided me with two 17" LCD's and a decent P4 with 2GB of RAM -- which is nothing compared to the Swordfish-style "multi-monitor system" in the next cubicle, composed of an array of 6 17" LCD monitors.

Here's an article from the Korea Times with a funny typo:

After graduating as an oriental painting major in Sungshin Women’s University, Kim lived her life as a housewife concentrating on house chores. But as she had always been interested in dying, she pursued dying as her hobby. Every night while her children were sleeping, she would concentrate on dying work. And her interest in dying naturally led her to become curious about hanbok fashion design.

``I thought the best way to make the best of my painting talent and dying skills was to become hanbok fashion designer,’’ said Kim.

In other news from the Korea Times, kimchi imported from China is reported to have parasite eggs in them, originating from human excrement, which they use as fertilizer.

Inspiration or embarassment?

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 15:53:18 GMT

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.

my poor mouse

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 16:53:47 GMT

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...

A trip down the decision tree

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 16:39:17 GMT

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...

What privacy?

Sun, 15 Feb 2004 16:17:02 GMT

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.

BYC

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 17:31:13 GMT

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 :)

Would have been funnier if NE lost

Mon, 02 Feb 2004 09:51:50 GMT

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!

Happy Birthday to Me Part 2

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 15:23:37 GMT

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! :(

The big question is, will I get the ultra mega mega man this year?

I'm Four and I Can do Anything!

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 17:54:24 GMT

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.

Riding the Waves

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 19:27:04 GMT

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.

Augh, I've got a paper to write

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 12:32:44 GMT

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.

splag writes ,'hey.. when are you going to post to your lj again?'

Sun, 06 Jul 2003 10:34:47 GMT

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.

Samsung Summer Festival 2003

Sun, 22 Jun 2003 16:23:59 GMT

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.

May 26, 2003 - The Robo Story

Mon, 26 May 2003 15:58:14 GMT

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.

Wasted the day away...

Sat, 17 May 2003 13:50:56 GMT

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.

95% of my e-mail inbox is spam

Sun, 11 May 2003 06:08:55 GMT

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.

Quick Observations

Tue, 06 May 2003 16:35:20 GMT

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 splag (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.

Children's Day

Mon, 05 May 2003 15:47:19 GMT

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.

First Day of Work at SDS

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:28:12 GMT

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.

More SDS fun

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:27:39 GMT

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.

Easter

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:27:20 GMT

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.

The conclusion

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:23:10 GMT

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.

Halfway through

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:21:09 GMT

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.

Random collection of thoughts

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:18:56 GMT

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).

Eiko ga wakarimasu ka?

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:17:35 GMT

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.