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 …
Category: KOREA
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 …
New President
Not the one I was rooting for. Nor the one the vast majority of my students claimed to be rooting for. I’m curious to hear how the ongoing “independent investigation” of various charges of manipulation of the price of shares will go. Especially since he’ll be immune to prosecution while he’s President. He’s, ahem, promised to step down if there’s proof. How can proof be ascertained if he can’t be prosecuted? Hmm? That’s all I’m going to say for the moment. Oh, and is family name is really 이, which sounds like “E”, not Lee. We all know which e-word …
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 …
용산 멍청이, aka “You Can’t Run Linux on Laptops”
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) …
Go, Mo-Sa, Go, Go!
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past day thinking about how my story “The Broken Pathway” needs to end. Mo-Sa, the focal character, has been coughing and sniffling rather impatiently as I’ve struggled to figure this out, and finally, looking through older drafts, and at what I did with what was once his cat, Nabi (“Butterfly”, a common name for cats in Korea, for who knows what reason) — now it’s a shabby little brown thing, an apparently stray mountain cat who leads him right to the big what-the-hell-is-that early in the story — and at one other …
Chapbook and The Broken Path
I spent time today on two projects. One is a chapbook of poems written by my poetry course students. Some people haven’t mailed in their poems yet, but most have, and it’s now at almost 50 pages. I’m guessing 60-72 pages when it’s done. I’ll see what the costs are at the printshop, to get enough for three copies for each student, plus a few spares for me and for other profs in the department. (Plus mailing a few to friends.) Since I cannot do the layout for staple-bound texts, they’re going to have to be perfect-bound, and that costs …
FFFFFFFFFFF!
That’s what I wrote on the top of one paper from midterms, which, yes, sadly I’m only handing back this week. (I’ve had them for several weeks, but been to busy to grade them.) Most of the essays were fine, a few were inspiring (considering the students’ circumstances — it’s not easy to write an essay in a foreign language about a poem in a foreign language, after all — but a few were pathetically plagiarized. I stopped in the middle of higlighting the stolen bits in one — they made up two solid pages at that point — and …
Media Accountability
For those who like to rant about the Korean media and its promulgation of bogus urban myths and the like, US papers (and presumably Canadian ones) are not above reproach. (PDF there, just warning you.) It seems that suicide rates actually don’t go up in the US around the holidays: Newspapers are close to putting to rest the myth that the holidays increase the risk of suicide. A new study shows a dramatic drop in articles that – despite having no basis in fact – attribute the arrival of the holiday season with an uptick in suicides. An analysis of …