My co-worker Leon passed on a link to the Sling Media website today. It’s basically a scheme by which a little box called a “Sling Box” streams the content of television to your computer, anywhere in the world. All you need is a cable subscription and a high-bandwidth connection in the source location, and a computer with high bandwidth in the target (viewing) location. Which means, yes, you could technically watch Canadian (or American) TV even here in Korea. Well, I don’t really watch TV, and I certainly wouldn’t be watching much that would be available on my schedule; but …
Month: September 2005
Laying It All Out On the Table
It’s nothing new or anything, but it just kind of hit me again when I was reading about Dickens’ style of representation. One of his critics—perhaps it was even Henry James—complained that his style of characterization was very caricaturesque; that everything was out on the table from the first moment you met a character, none of that subtle revelation of his or her secret nature piece by piece. I found that interesting because I noticed something lately, which is that people actually do sometimes lay things out on the table from the get-go. At least, they seem to do it, …
New Korean Expression
같은 값이면 다홍치마. It came up in conversation the other night, and Lime and her friend couldn’t explain it to me, so I asked Chullsung here at work. He explained that it was something like, “If the two skirts are the same price, I’ll take the fancy royal red one!” Something roughly like that. 다홍 is some kind of word for red, which I could perhaps have guessed knowing that 홍차 is “red tea”. Apparently this means something about choosing the better of two options, given that each one comes at about the same “price”: the nicer of two men, …
Lost: One Recurring Dream
Lately, on returning home I’ve been falling asleep early. I’m talking about coming home from work at 6:30 pm, having a couples of glasses of water, setting up my computer to burn a DVD-ROM, and then laying down to read a little while I wait for the CD to finish, and suddenly waking up at 1:30 am, or something like that. It’s quite strange, though, because when I wake at 1:30 am, I have this clear memory of the feeling I had during my dream. I have the very clear memory of having said aloud in the dream, “Wait, this …
What I’m Reading Now: Dickens Surprise and the Roots of Protestant Korean Ecstatic Rites
Quick Note: That “and” in the title isn’t meant to suggest a connection between Charles Dickens and evangelical Christianity in Korea. There might be such a link, somewhere—hell, one of Dickens’ sons came to Canada and worked for the government, who’s to say someone else from his life didn’t end up in East Asia?—but I’m not posting any such thing. Although I have two other books on the go—The Golden Ass, a brilliant and hilarious Roman tale by Lucius Apuleius “Africanus”, and Philip E. Baruth’s political SF satire The X President—I have also taken the time to dig into a …