By the way… yeah, I’m not in Japan. The University I’ll be working for in a week called me to tell me I didn’t need to do it. Some loophole has apparently been found by someone or other over in the admin offices. He says that since I have a foreigner registration card, I will not need to leave Korea to start a new work contract. I was under the impression that I will always have to leave the country to start a new job, just not to continue with an already-held one. And every foreigner I know who’s heard …
Category: PERSONAL
one last thing about this data loss…
oh, one more thing… I am SO glad I started doing my writing in a hidden page on my website, in its own blog. I didn’t lose more than a couple of poems I didn’t much care about, anyway. Whew.
ARGH!
So, here I am in a PC Bang… Korea’s full-on blippy bleepy gamers’ version of an Internet salon. It’s amazing, how connected Korea is, and I keep commenting on it because it does amaze me. It’s like out of an SF novel or something, really. Sometimes, computers are amazing machines: I can say this without hesitation when I think about the friendships I’ve formed across many kilometers and even on the far side of the world; when I think of how much I’ve learned; and when I consider how powerful they can be, these machines. That’s probably true. But I …
Neil Stephenson, Christianity, Informational Hygiene
This is the weirdest writing I have ever seen on computers and knowledge. The idea of memes is basically one of the materialist’s most powerful arguments against Christianity, after all – for memes claim religion is an idea-complex virus just like fashion and art and anything else. How can one use memes to defend religious ideas? I don’t get it. I hope this person got some medication or psychotherapy or something.
Back from Seoul
I am back from Seoul and having a hard time getting my computer to behave. It’s semi-stable, but there are little functions that are not working, to my great consternation. Anyway, I’ll get it working. Gotta de-frag the drive and I am thinking about getting a new, bigger hard drive. But I’ll need to make some specifications before buying it, since my PC doesn’t have a floppy disc drive (so I will need BIOS installed on it, or on a CD-ROM anyway… which might be possible, I don’t know, to install BIOS from a CD-ROM. I shall have to ask …
Nice Things From This Week
Here are some nice things that happened this week: – I ate Tang Su Yuk (“Chinese fried pork”, Koreans claim this is) without getting ill. It was what gave me food poisoning three (3!) times last year but I worked up the courage to try it again when the school put some out after teacher training finished. I did NOT get sick. I am pleased. – I managed to get this computer working again (I think), which is nice despite the fact I lost months and months of email archives. – My friend Young Ja helped me not only to …
Teacher Training One-Liners
For now I have no photos to share, and I may not for a while (since they were taken on film and I need to get Trisha her scanner very soon), but yesterday we marked the final exam for the teacher training workshop we gave at Wonkwang University. The test consisted of a role play in which teachers were supposed to use a number of spoken-English elements from previous classes. Some amazing things happened, including a skit where one of the other teachers was lampooned with loving respect, and where I (for whatever reason) was played as a gangster killer …
Letters to Bushie
UPDATE (much later): Yeah, I never got around to scanning them, and it seems like the rest of the world figured out what these little kids knew at the time. So, whatever… ORIGINAL POST: During the recent Gulf War, I think a number of teachers had their students write letters in English to George Bush. I did, partly because kids brought it up in class, and because we were doing a section of their textbook on letter-writing, but also because I was curious to see what they would say. I still have the letters my kids wrote on my desk, …
Dead Computer Update
Actually, I spoke too soon when I claimed I’d succeeded in resurrecting my computer. It started dying on me 5 minutes after reboot, and at one point even complaining of checksum errors. All very scary. It may or may not remain as stable as it has been in the 20 minutes since I finished the last install. I need to try a few more things to find out. If not, I’ll be going to Seoul with it to get it repaired later on today. (If it is okay, I’ll still go to Seoul, but on a somewhat different mission.) Oh …
Why I need you to email me…
Everyone! I need you to email me because my computer died a couple of nights ago. I managed to resurrect it, and I do have some email addresses in backup, but a lot of archives and some new sender addresses were lost, especially those new to my computer in the last 6 months. Granted, there are some fairly unhappy emails in that archive that was lost, so unhappy that I can actually say perhaps I am happier that they were lost… but still, the addresses are something I *didn’t* want to lose. So please do email me again soon. Thanks!