… busy. Aside from work stuff, there have been reasons for me to leave the house almost every day this week. Last night was the most unusual one — a party for people who worked on a textbook. I proofread, and so I got invited along. Food, and drink, and some good conversation. I met a (lit?) professor at Hong Ik who is into SF. And one of the editors of the book I proofread remarked on my place of birth, Malawi. How did she know? She’d come and read this page. This surprised me, and I am taking it …
Category: GENERAL
Ontarians 8% Stupider Than Rest of Canada
Via Canadian SF author Peter Watts’ blog, here’s a depressing factoid: Ontarians 8% stupider than the rest of Canada. (And 2% stupider than Americans.) That is, if we can equate stupidity with evolution-denial. And of course, we bloody well can. Yet again, Ontario leading the nation in the race to import the crappiest aspects of American culture to Canada.
The Endless Semester Is Almost Done…
Well, other than an official grade change form — one of those grade-change requests was actually valid! — and handing in some official forms, I’m done with my work for the semester! I’ll be handing in the last of my paperwork tomorrow, including gradesheets and attendance forms, paperwork to collect my pension money from my last job — apparently you have two years to do it — and a sheet notifying Academic Affairs that I’ll be out of the country for a month this holiday. (Lime can’t travel, so I’m going alone.) I’ll be in Laos for two weeks, and …
By the Way…
Happy new year, everyone! We had ice cream cake, pasta, and wine last night. We watched, oh, it must have been about the last half of season 2 of Carnivale today. It’s been relaxed and fun, especially aftar all the frantic scurrying of the last week or so. Tomorrow, I am back to scurrying: off to the bank to get some kind of digital something-something so that my credit card purchases and medical expenses can be applied to my taxes. And I’m going to have to make a trip to Yongsan to get a receipt updated — for some reason …
Happy Thing-Thing
Not everyone in the world — or even among my readers — is celebrating Christmas, but it does seem that this time of year is rife with alternate holidays. A friend of mine used to say he was celebrating the Midwinter Atheists’ Pissup, and it’s as good a handle as any to hang this day on. Of course, it’s also Lime’s birthday, so I made her a cheesecake. (Photo forthcoming.) I was shocked — it actually turned out okay. Better than okay. Chocolate cheesecake. Not as pretty as the ones my friend Jack used to make, but delicious all the …
Passports and Immigration and “Low Quality Foreigners”
Well, headaches averted, really. So far. I’ve been a bit of an ostrich, not paying attention to the whole Korean news/expat blog scene, and it came up and bit me in the back end last night. I came across these posts — like this one — that bespoke a big change afoot in Korean visa renewal procedures. The last I’d heard, those living here didn’t need to worry about that, but this sounded more complicated. Things like having to fly to Canada every time I get a different job, for example, or needing a criminal record check for March 1st. …
용산 멍청이, aka “You Can’t Run Linux on Laptops”?, Part 2 (and more)
I recently posted about being sold a computer on which Linux would not install. I left off with the computer still at the shop, and the guy trying to install it himself. Well, Lime’s looked around online and found that, since I’d taken longer than a week (it took me 8 days to give up on installing anything on the system) to go back and complain, I legally was less able to get a refund — apparently the law really does work that way here, or so she suggested to me. So anyway, when we went there this time, the …
To the Ajeoshi Who Wanted to Fight With Me Near the Exit at Yongsan Station When I was Walking to Emart to Buy Sour Cream and Tinned Tomatoes, Or, How It Feels Sometimes Living Here
Dear drunken psychotic moron bastard, I’m sorry I couldn’t beat the living crap out of you. The problem is, I suspect that you’d be let off scott-free, while I’d be spending a week in deportation jail before being sent unceremoniously to Canada. I’m not sorry that I didn’t wave back at you. I do regret that you found it so offensive that I didn’t wave back at you when you waved at me with a snide look on your face and a plume of smoke searing from your mouth. But you see, contrary to what you think, I am not …
Hacks, Pruning, and The Point of This Blog
The change in my sidebar — a few unused modules pruned away, plus the addition of a feed listing recent publications and sales — is only the most visible one on this site. I’m particularly proud of that hack, though: the stories listed are in order of their entry into the system, so forthcoming and published are mixed up a little, but the feed is displaying excerpts, which means I only need to make one update — to the Stories feed, in the header nav above — to update the sidebar feed. (It uses the excerpts function.) I also hacked …
How I Got Out of Retail, Classroom & Workplace Management, and An Idea About Task-Based Leveling Systems in Classes
An office dispute going on in the life of one Korean person I know, and the way that she tells me it was handled, reminded me of how I got out of retail. Well, really, after a few months, I’d made up my mind to get the hell back to University the next year, because those first few months of my “year off from school” opened my eyes to the way people without University degrees — and people with only a BA — live. That is, I worked in a record store. I actually did relatively well for myself, considering …