UPDATE (8 March 2013): Yeah, as it turns out, I ended up keeping the laptop: he couldn’t install Linux, IIRC, but I figured out a way, and it was handy for dual booting, when I occasionally needed to use a Korean installation of Windows XP. However, the purchase was still a rather dumb one, and as a rule I avoid purchases like this one… to a fault, as I failed to get a new portable computer before leaving Korea when, all told, I probably should have picked one up. Ah well… ORIGINAL POST: Yongsan Electronics Market is famous for cheap(ish) …
Category: GENERAL
Dia-Gnosis
I mentioned having tests recently. I’m fine. The gut pain and rib pain seem, says the doctor, to be related to excessive leaning over during that editing project, and too much sitting around in front of my PC with bad, bad posture. Which doesn’t surprise me: other problems have been cropping up too — back problems, tension and even joint pain in one leg and ankle… Time to start exercising. Between Lime, the doctor, and me, there was a strong consensus that it’d be wiser to start with prodigious amounts of walking, and graduate to running later on, when I’m …
Torke
Michael Torke, that is. I usually review music in my horrible, pages-long bimonthly (or less often) catalogues of everything I’ve been reading, watching (films, TV) and listening to. But I just got my Michael Torke boxed set, Ecstatic Collection, and I have to say, it’s pretty damned wonderful. Michael Torke is a composer who was first mentioned to me by David R. Scott, a Canadian composer who was my instructor during my first year of studying composition. I followed up, and really liked what I heard — a strange blend of occasional snatches of pop music, Stravinsky, and good old-fashioned …
Admit it…
You wonder which celebrities you look like. But you might not want to know, after all. Case in point: It’s an old picture (of me), but… David Hasselhoff? In a ‘fro? (wacky webtoy via tina connolly)
Recent(-ish) Meetings and Events
October and November were busy for me — November insanely so — and I neglected to post about the few meetings I had, and events I participated in, at least since meeting Charles for beers in Kangnam. In order, and I think this is all of them, and, significantly, they’re both with bloggers in Korea: MEMESAK Conference, 2007 One Dr. Hodges, perhaps better known online as The Gypsy Scholar, long ago posted about the MEMESAK — the Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Association of Korea — conference last year, and I expressed my regret for not having known about …
Hin Jook, and More Proof of My Existence
I’ve been eating jook all day. If you don’t know what jook is, well, this might not be the best introduction. There is such a thing as delicious jook — after all, the stuff is just rice porridge. If you make it with a little pumpkin, or chicken, or other flavorful things, it can be delightful. But me, I’ve been eating it plain — hin jook, ie. white rice porridge. A little oil, a little salt, but basically plain. And drinking way too much water. This is how one prepares for the tests I’m having tomorrow. At the hospital. I’ll …
More on Exploiting Evolved Human Instincts and Cognitive Patterns
A post by Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing titled “Neuroeconomics: sub-prime mortgages exploit a bug in our brains” reminded me of my own musings about how killer apps (and products) exploit basic evolved drives and factors in human psychology. At The Frontal Cortex science blog, a fascinating explanation of the neurology of subprime mortgages. FMRI research shows that long-term decision-making takes place in a different part of the brain from short-term decisions — so when you offer someone a cheap two-year mortgage followed by 28 years of scorchingly high interest rates, the short-term side jumps in and overrides the sober long-term …
Villages Don’t Have Bad Neighborhoods, Do They?
An interesting link on Arts and Letters Daily recently was this one, discussing the following point: … those who travel and live abroad must be continually alert and never fall for the myth that we live in a “global village”. Ignorance isn’t bliss when it comes to religious observances, traditions, manners and gestures in other parts of the world. It is all too easy to be caught in cultural crossfire. The impetus for this discussion came from the incident involving Gillian Gibbons, a middle-aged British schoolteacher who did something very silly in Sudan. (She let her class name a teddy …
Ten Spikes, One Spike, Sado, Baejjangi, and More…
Yeah, another writing update. Well, I finally got “The Broken Pathway” (aka “The Broken Path” and “The Spike”) done. Some neat magical stuff and a (somewhat) dramatic (and dramatically magical) ending with a tiny, quiet coda at the very end… which expanded the story up to nearly the same length as the original draft, even though I removed several characters — one of them animal — and a subplot about a monk raping a woman sent by her infertile husband to the temple to pray for a son… and about his meeting the daughter he never knew he sired that …
Costochondritis
Apparently this is what was causing me to feel weird when taking a deep breath. The doctor I saw last week correctly noted that it was not a broken rib — which was my first suspicion — but he said he thought it was a muscular issue, especially with the muscles connecting the pelvis to the ribcage. Last night, I finally had had enough and went to the hospital, and the patient, friendly doctor checked me carefully (even offering to do an electrocardiogram, though I’ve had a few of those in the last few months and they’ve always been okay) …