The camp techie, Jang Hui, just fixed my settings so that my computer is accessing the University LAN. Oh joy oh joy oh joy! Here are some things I wrote during the wait for the Great Net Hookup. January 3rd Tonight, the LAN thinks I am connected but nothing is coming down the pipes, so I’m writing a post to be actually posted later. Camp looks like it will be fine, but there are a couple of barricades which seem to oppose things running smoothly. The first is that some teachers don’t seem to be totally interested in getting with …

My goodness, I’ve not had a chance to post a New Year’s post. I shall have to get to it tomorrow evening, before the exhaustion sets in (As it now is doing…) but for now I’ll note that I have a lot to bne happy about from last year, and I’m looking forward to 2005. Which is a great feeling. I wish more people in the world could feel that way.

It’s something I’m usually not crazy about, getting used to a new keyboard, but when it’s attached to a computer as nice as the one I am using, I don’t mind. My first blog-fueled purchase: a used PC, from Shawn at Korea Life Blog. I met him and Julie at the Yongsan Train Station, and they’re nice folks to boot. But what a hellishly long day, going up to Seoul and coming back with only an hour’s break between. Ah well… it’s worth it. Now, to pack my junk and get to sleep. Gotta be at the school tomorrow morning, …

New poll up. Slightly influenced by my visit to John Wendel’s house where I saw the original movie Jaws for the first time. Old poll, by Shawn, is finished. The slight majority of respondents (19, more than usual!) believed that Yasser Arafat is now “… in a box, finishing the rotting that started at birth.” You can see the results here. Please vote in the new (slightly sick) poll! And if you have a better idea for a poll, please feel free to guest-author one!

Logomacy is a cool page in the vein of things in my sidebar under the “lingua” header. Nice page.

Sometimes even a little thing out of place can make a big mess. My web page is now refusing to rebuild automatically when comments are submitted, or when I post a new post. This means I must rebuilt it manually, going in and pressing a little button somewhere in my webpage interface. So if you post comments, and they don’t show up right away, don’t be alarmed. It’s just another glitch in the system. I’m trying to take care of it now, though it may mean waiting for a while till I can export all my archives, delete the installation …

First, the happy news about the gloomy story. I’ve been working hard on my ghost story and I just hit page 160 last night. Second, a funny story about my neighbor Mike’s phone number. He had to change it last term because some kid had gotten ahold of it and was calling him, just to say “F*ck you!” and then hang up. At some point, the kid shared the number with a teenaged friend, who joined in. By the end, the teenager was—and I’m guessing at this—using the voice message system in his cell phone to send a four-letter voice-message …

I’ve just hit page 145 of my novel draft of my ghost story. I’m guessing there’s another eighty pages to go, maybe. My protagonist has just lost a useful ally (and sort-of friend) but he has managed to almost-complete his errand in Pyongyang, after which he’ll be free to go back South and figure out why he was brutally murdered. And now he can at least speak and understand a little Korean, too. I’m pleased, and conservatively guessing I won’t finish the draft before camp starts on Monday, but that I may well finish it the week after camp finishes, …