Blinger’s started up a blog for foreigners learning or working on their Korean. It’s for posting about learning, for practicing writing in Korean, and so on. Unlike Kangmi’s blog, which is a kind of personal-self-study log, this is a kind of community effort with multiple posters signed up. I’m sure I shall be the worst poster, and perhaps (with my writing projects) the most infrequent, but I shall try do a regular post and get a few new words and points in each time. I am studying a lot nowadays, not as much as Blinger, but more than I was. …
Category: PERSONAL
Kinds of Crazy
Wanted to write about this before I forget it. Lime’s been working at the Psychiatric department in the hospital, as part of her medical internship. So anyway, last night, we were walking downtown and some guy came past us, declaring that we must all accept Jesus. Well, as he walked past I misheard him, and anyway, during the ensuing discussion, Lime observed that religious fanatics are hated; among all the patients, everyone—including both the interns and the other mental patients—dislikes the religious fanatic patients. It was amusing.
A Good Saturday
Today was a good day. Lots of lazing about with Lime, some good reading, and tonight I met up with an old friend named Sang Joon. We talked about a zillion different things. He didn’t seem to mind that I’ve become a crappy drinking buddy in my old age, switching to hot cocoa after three beer. I came home to find most of the file I’ve been trying for ages to download has come through, and the rest should be there once I awaken… yes, I shall have my very own PDFs of HOL, the satirical look at RPG gaming …
Pens in China, Coke in India, and A Neglected Column
At Simon World there’s a post about this bit of news: China’s annual pen production now totals 29 billion, accounting for 80 percent of the global market share. Simon notes that You never see a pen in the picture of the desperate and impoverished. Flies, malnurished kids and dust. But no pens. And that’s true. When I traveled in India, kids asked me for all kinds of things: candy, chocolate bars, money (of course) but the most stunningly common request was for pens, ballpoint or otherwise. I was shocked. So I suppose eschewing the pen would be an effective form …
Spammers Hitting Me Like Mad
Well, thank goodness I got the new version of MT installed, along with the new version of MT-Blacklist, which is working fine. The last week, some comment spammer out there has decided to do his (face facts, it’s very likely a guy) best to spam the living hell out of blog. I have been hit several hundreds of times a night, and usually about a hundred spam comments get through the filters. Which means about fifteen minutes of cleaning up, each and every day. It’s a bit of a chore, but I am hoping that eventually, the baddies will be …
The Lesson I Learned Today…
I posted some things in anger and frustration this week. Those of you who saw them, saw a side of me not everyone gets to see. But parts of the posts were unfair, and even stooped to the level of an-eye-for-an-eye. So I removed them from my website and decided to talk to a couple of people and get a reality check. After the reality check, I decided I knew more clearly where I stood, and decided that with one person, I could work things out, while the other person was not worth my time and my energy. How did …
Personal Update
Had a relaxed evening with Lime; dinner and then we watched Hellboy at a DVD room. Now, she was resistant to the idea of watching the movie, but pleasantly surprised at how much she enjoyed it. I’ve never seen her make so many puns in one evening. While we were watching the movie, it struck me again how much Lovecraft has influenced horror, the comic book world, movies, and just the modern sense of evil, scary stuff. I’ve got a book of Lovecraft waiting for me to get to it, and now I feel slightly more into opening it up …
The Librarian
This, I promise, is not another vent about someone at work. In fact, it’s a good experience. I went to the library the other day and returned some overdue library books and CDs. When I gave the CDs to the Audio-Visual Center librarian, she looked them over carefully. I guess she remembered that a white guy had borrowed them, and was wondering whether I liked them, since they were all Korean traditional music CDs. I told her I did enjoy them, and as a rule tend to enjoy music from all over the world. She checked the CDs in and …
The New MT
Well, I’ve done it. I finally migrated to the new Movable Type, and I’m quite happy about the layout and all. I haven’t checked out the new features, but I do think it’s a good piece of work. And I can even sort-of understand it not being free anymore, though I do think it’s a bit hard on users to demand no more than 3 blogs and one author for any one installation. Especially now that Bush is in, I have plans to go ahead with a new website, one that will use multiple-authors (as many as possible) and will …
Sleepytime in Jeonju
As I head off to bed, the vote-count in America is still not in, but it looks like Bushie probably will win Ohio and get another chance to drag the Presidency through the international mud. Sadly believable. Oh, America. You might not have been able to do much better, but you could have done marginally better. And on a personal note, I’ve upgraded to MT 3.1, and got my comments problem sorted out, I think. Later this week I’ll see about importing my Korean blog’s contents into the blog, and setting up a blogging schedule with at least one weekly …