Acquaintances

piratesrok

06:41 pm - Supreme Master Television and good vegan food

One of our favorite vegetarian restaurants here in town is called “Loving Hut” and it is run by religious wackos. They have a tv which is always airing the channel for their strange cult. It has subtitles in lots of languages which go by far too fast for me to read and switches between different images very quickly. All I can get out of it is that they seem to think that if everyone was vegetarian all our problems— war, global warming, etc—would instantly stop.

Over at Boingboing, they have a roundup of Supreme Master Television and the woman who runs it. The whole thing sounds really creepy and culty and weird, but the food at the restaurant here in Daejeon is really good and the people who work at the restaurant are really nice and don’t proselytize at lunchtime.

Current Mood: hungry

hereticchick

07:27 pm

Dear Guys Without Committment Issues,

I am available.

Sincerely,
Kelly

Current Mood: aggravated

bloodblooms

02:10 pm - Day 1

So I am going to try to start posting again, and what better month to try than National Blog Posting Month...

Okay so the best I got so far today..

I am at my parents, my little sister came home from the weekend and we are both being lovely and lethargic all over my parents leather sofas. My Mom comes in the room with my sisters laundry. She randomly tells my Mom she exchanged the bras my Mom mailed her for a smaller cup size, we all then go into how genetics has dealt us a bad hand cup wise. My mom starts then badgering her lengthy torso and I tell her jokingly it's all your fault that my shirts are never quite long enough. She then says "It's better than having too short of arms!" Annie chimes in "like a dinosaur?" And my Mom ends the conversation with "Yes, it's better than being a dinosaur."

We went to lamenting over tiny boobies to declaring being it better than being a dinosaur in less than 2 minutes.

Yes, I do believe all have undiagnosed=untreated ADD.

That's all I got.

danae

11:40 am - all you white folks look alike to me

Yesterday, I went to the wedding of a co-worker. He and his bride had a pretty traditional Korean wedding, including being carried into the ceremony. My co-worker is not Korean, but his wife is. Anywho... the four carriers were his friends and one of them looked like he was related to H enough to be his brother. I made a comment about how H's brother must have come for the wedding, to which another co-worker tells me "H doesn't have a brother, but he has a sister." To which I think to myself "damn, all you white people look alike to me"

However, I did find out I was right and it was H's brother after all.

dandrake

11:25 am - my Calc 1 class next semester

Next semester I’m teaching a lecture with 230 students.

When I was told I’m teaching MAS 101Z, I was immediately suspicious— they label sections with letters, and a “Z” is very suspect. I learned what the deal is yesterday.

Korea has long had “science high schools”, which are very desirable because graduating from one helps you get into good universities—and until this year, KAIST only accepted students from these high schools. In the last year, KAIST asked the principal of every regular high school in the country to nominate a student for admission to KAIST, and they accepted 150 of these students for the 2010 school year. (The school year in Korea starts in spring.)

Meanwhile, KAIST has been accepting foreign students for a while, and many of these students come from places with the “usual” school calendar, so they start in autumn.

They’ve found that the foreign students that start in fall don’t do as well in the basic calculus courses as the usual Korean students. They are expecting that the new non-science high school students will also have some problems, so the plan is to split the usual one-semester Calc 1 class into two semesters. They’re starting it this semester, which is fine for the foreign students on campus, but there’s the 150 Korean students around the country. So they are videotaping the class and doing something online for these students.

Next semester, the 150 Korean non-science high school students and the 80 foreign students come together in a single lecture with me. Yikes. One nice thing is that it’s my own lecture and I don’t need to stay synchronized with other classes; I just have a set of topics to cover. The class will be a challenge, though.

dandrake

05:54 pm - finally someone in Korea gets it

An appropriate article on the eve of the release of Ubuntu Karmic… a Korean person gets fed up with Korea’s utter dependence on Windows and ActiveX! (Via the Marmot.

Because the Chosun Ilbo seems to struggle with things such as “working links”, here’s the editorial by their columnist Kim Ki-cheon:

Korea is at the cutting edge in technology, the state of the art in
e-commerce, an early adopter of third-generation wired and wireless
communication, broadband and personal media. Yet 99.9 percent of
computer users are on Microsoft Windows. Mac users cannot bank or shop
online, nor do these users have access to government websites. The same
goes for users of Linux, the free user-generated OS, and those using
Mozilla Firefox or Opera to browse the web.

The observation comes from an early 2007 entry on a Japanese blog,
written shortly after the blogger's disappointing visit to Korea. It is
not an unfair assessment nor is it borne of jealousy. Korea's Internet
monoculture has been a subject of concern here for some time and remains
an issue. In a recently published book, Kim Ki-chang, a professor at
Koryo University, says that Korea's Internet environment is so unsound
that nothing like it can be found in any other country in the world.

What is the problem? For one thing, accessing many Korean websites
requires jumping through hoops not found anywhere else in the world.
This may mean installing unfamiliar software programs, one to ensure
secure access, another to protect against keystroke tracking, another
for personal firewall protection, and on top of that, an antivirus
program, all to be able to do some banking online. Nowhere else are
websites so complicated and inconvenient.

It is also a uniquely Korean peculiarity that the programs needed for
access to secure websites are compatible only with Microsoft Internet
Explorer. Many are based on the ActiveX framework from Microsoft. And
while there exist other technologies that perform the same function,
none are in use in Korea. As a result, web browsers such as Firefox used
by over 20 percent of users worldwide have no presence here.

The average computer user may not care whether it is ActiveX or
something else that allows convenient and secure access. But that is
misguided. In the event of worldwide Internet chaos, as was the case in
January 2003 or during the DDoS attacks in July, Korea gets hit the
hardest. Its online environment has become one where users habitually
hit "yes" for every dialog box that pops up and install programs without
a second thought.

Koreans are the easiest prey in the world for hackers intent on
spreading computer viruses and using zombies.

Whenever Microsoft releases a new operating system, such as Windows
Vista, or a new version of Explorer, only in Korea is there a fuss about
previous versions not working. The country's closed and outdated
computing environment is overly dependent on ActiveX.

The following is from a post earlier this month on a blog maintained by
British freelance IT experts: "Korea's excellent Internet infrastructure
may be useless as long as its software programs are adopting outdated
technologies." Korea is like an oxcart going along a highway.

A few experts and industry players cannot change the situation. A
determined effort on a national scale is needed.

I’d be glad to help with their “determined” effort by handing out some Linux CDs, although no real change will happen until the laws governing secure websites are changed.

danae

03:29 pm - I am allergic to Korea

or something like that
I'm on my second round of antibiotics for the cough that won't go away - which may mean that I am developing asthma. I don't know. We'll see how this round goes.

I sent my mom home on Tuesday and we received a guest from France Tuesday evening. He's very interested in games and we taught him Bohnanza and he wants to learn St. Petersburg and others. I believe he'll be coming back to visit this weekend to play some games.

Midterms are over and I need to input grades into Moodle. I am reading again, which is incredibly distracting and I just realized that I haven't finished Hyperion yet. I have about 1/5th of the book left, but it's not a compelling read. I haven't had a compelling read in a while and I miss that. I miss the frenzy of "having to turn the next page" and "must stay up until 3am to finish" but I imagine this is healthier for me. Apparently the last Jordan book dropped today. I do want to finish the Wheel of Time, unlike the Sword of Truth books.