::A Geek in Korea::

Proving my restlessness knows no bounds, I’ve gone and muddied up my system yet again by installing the KDE desktop on my Ubuntu Edgy Eft install. I’m now running the Kubuntu setup I used to use when I had my laptop using Linux last year around this time. I’m running a mixed environment, with Gnome and KDE applications sitting on my machine. That’s one of the benefits of using Ubuntu, they allow for the easy installation of different window managers and desktops.

A long time ago, back in college, I used to be a litestep freak. I used to spend countless hours upgrading my desktop by adding little useless applications, designing skins only I used, and installing application after application that were prone to crashing my machine often. These programs controlled how my applications looked, how windows were controlled, and all the stuff people usually don’t bother to think about when they fire up a computer. All of this customization and optimization of desktop environments eventually got away from me and I gave up on the scene entirely.

Moving to Korea, I didn’t even bring a computer with me initially. I just hung out at PC rooms all day, and they didn’t allow/want customization. Once Windows XP came out, and it was stable enough (for my purposes) to allow for a day of uninterrupted surfing, I stopped worrying about having “desktop themes” and “skins” entirely.

Moving back into Linux land, I’ve got the urge to customize my desktops once again. Thus my desire to try out KDE once more. It’s a pretty environment, full of wizbang menus systems and some lovely applications (Konquerer, Amarok,Ktorrent). This time, however, desire is getting the computer set up to do things I need it to do, instead of for the bells and whistles. Pretty native applications that work certainly don’t hurt, however.

I’ve given up trying to do the tasks I’ve found most difficult since I’ve installed Linux in the first place. I accept that I’ve got to reboot to do the following: Encode video, Manage my wife’s Mp3 player, and let my wife use Internet Explorer. If I get those issues solved, I’d be satisfied never using Windows again. However, since I can’t find any easy solutions, I’ve decided to just “deal” with it and accept the reboot. After the tasks are finished, I’m back to fiddling with Linux again.
One thing that has cropped up as a potential serious issue recently has been Korean language typing, which I have an interest in getting working. The less my wife needs to reboot into Windows, the better. It’s simply IMPOSSIBLE in KDE. It doesn’t work as advertised in the language settings. I can switch menus to Korean, but typing in Korean with English menus isn’t happening at all. There are menus and programs and lots of different neat little buttons, but they do nothing. All that work I’ve put into trying to make a nice environment is moot if it’s not going to work.

Unless I switch my entire windows manager to Korean, you can’t type in Korean while having an English environment. That’s simply unacceptable. Gnome, the original desktop environment I installed with Ubuntu allows for a mixed English and Korean typing environment (I’ve set it up following ancient howto files long before), but it’s not easy to set up, despite my recent efforts. I’m fairly annoyed by this development.

The easiest way to have Korean typing in Linux I’ve found was simply creating an environment for my wife that’s got Korean menus (Create new user. Change the choice of language on the login screen) and having scim or (a program that handles multiple input languages) install itself and “just work”. This is simply a workaround. I’d be much happier if I didn’t need a second user and I could type in both languages easily.

Having dual language input work like it does in Windows is significantly harder than it should be right now, and it’s really a sticking point for me. I’m having a harder time trying to set it up than I did last year. That’s not progress. If there is a way to do this easily, I’d love to find it, but until then, all this customization seems like wasted effort.

EDIT:

It appears I’ve completely borked my Kubuntu installation (which I’ll simply uninstall now) fiddling around with this annoying text input problem, but I did get it working like I wanted in Gnome. Yay! One annoying reason to reboot eliminated!

My first class is filled with the lowest of the low for students their age. Some of the children are nearly mute (in Korean and English), while others just have problems with phonics, spelling, or their behavior. The book we use is extremely simple, but for them it poses a respectable challenge.

The book is listening based, which is wonderful for the class, because it means we can listen and speak, instead of being hunched over our notebooks copying things in class. When I assign homework, I make them copy the dialogs into their notebooks. This is how they theoretically should improve their spelling and grammar. Write it down enough and you have some ideas of how English words look.

Since the students don’t have proofreading skills, they often make writing mistakes. If they make mistakes at the beginning of the dialog, when copying it for the first time, it will be in all the later iterations of their work.

One student wrote:

Do you have blue soks?

Ten times. This was a simple mistake, but I had to correct it for her because she didn’t catch her error. These happen fairly often in class.

More rarely, a student writes something entirely wrong that is unintentionally hilarious.
Another student wrote:

I have blue cocks.

I actually laughed so hard out of surprise that I laid my head down on the table. The students had no idea what was so funny, so I just corrected the paper, handed it back, and let them wonder what was wrong with their teacher. I told the student to be more careful from now on.

This is the sort of stuff I have to deal with every day in this class. If it wasn’t so funny, I’d be worried about their poor writing skills much more.

마빡이, or “Mabbaki” is a current popular skit on the show “Gag Concert”. There isn’t a translation of the video available, but seriously, this isn’t Shakespeare. Watch the video to see a guy slapping himself on the head for five minutes straight while being stupid. All the actors on the show have the characters they do each show, and they simply change the jokes from time to time. Imagine Saturday Night Live, but with recurring characters for nearly every skit each week.

This poor guy had to become popular by slapping himself in the head, so he’ll be doing that in every skit pretty much from this point onwards in his career. Gag Concert is nothing but a series of these kinds of skits, where people do the same dumb stuff over and over again.
I always wondered who watched these sorts of programs. While I was here during the rise of the shows popularity among school children. A few years ago you couldn’t go a single class without someone quoting a line from the show. Every skit that gets popular on the show is quickly run into the ground.

Remember everyone quoting “Wayne’s World” all the time? “Party on Wayne, Party on Garth!” “We’re Not Worthy!” (Bohemian Rhapsody is still cool) or quoting Beavis and Butthead’s stupid grunts (NSFW?) in High school? It used to be like that when a skit on Gag Concert got funny in my class.People quickly seize on the popularity and run the joke into the ground. After a point people looked back on it, and couldn’t remember why it was all that great to begin with. Like the Macarena.

Luckily I don’t even hear children talking about the show much any more. Some of my student do occasionally do the head slap thing, but it’s not nearly that bad. They tend to stop after a few seconds, unlike the poor fool that popularized the skit that has to do it for minutes at a time on each show. This is one of those things that sort of naturally weeds itself out. If you’re dumb enough to slap yourself on the head over and over again, eventually you forget enough things to ever remember the skit to begin with.

How did something this stupid get on television in the first place? Someone’s got to be watching this stuff to find it funny. Then I stumbled upon this video and it explained everything. The target audience is pre-vocal toddlers with parents that encourage them to hit themselves! It all makes sense now!

technorati tags:tv, Korea, Gag Concert, mabbaki, headslap

As I posted last night, there were some severe problems going on under the hood of this blog. I first ran into some errors when I tried to post something last night. I was getting some weird errors and wondered what was up. I had also noticed that the logo on my site had disappeared and wanted to know what had happened to it.

I fired up my FTP server, but I couldn’t log in no matter what I tried. ODD. I went to send an email to the administrator of this site, my friend from college that lets me share his space. No sooner had I opened my email account than I got a terrible notice. “Your account password has been compromised!”

I went on to read, in horror, about how [tag]Brazilian hackers[/tag] had set up a phishing scam on my account. It looks as though it was a scam to steal banking passwords and install keystroke loggers via viruses. I didn’t see the site, but the security person that cleaned out my account described what they were up to. It seems over 10,000 spam emails were going to be sent from my account, and I didn’t know anything about it! Luckily since the domains and ip addresses could be tracked back to Brazil, both me and the administrator could be cleared of any wrong doing.

They changed [tag]passwords[/tag] and advised me about how to set more secure passwords from now on. I took this very seriously and am in the process of upgrading all of my accounts. Mail, online services, everything. It’s such a pain, but it pays off in the long run to be more secure. Since I don’t know the point of vulnerability, I’ll have to be extra paranoid for a while. I run ample security when I boot Windows. I have spyware checking, virus checking going constantly. I’m also running Linux as my default OS now, so there is even less chance that there is something spying on me. I didn’t give my password out, so it might have simply been a brute force hack that worked.

As of now, I’ve still got more to do to secure this place. The forum will come down and be replaced. I’ve already updated to the lastest version of Wordpress (SEAMLESSLY. THANK GOODNESS. KNOCK ON WOOD.) I’m just lucky nothing appears to have had permanent damage at the moment. They had complete access. They could have deleted everything.

Learn from me. Change passwords often. Make them as [tag]secure[/tag] as possible too.

Many of the students in our school complain. This is true of any school, no matter what is assigned, who teaches, and what they teach. The role of students in an academy is to do two things; complain and learn. The role of teachers varies from "complain and teach", to in a good school simply "teaching". The role of parents (usually mothers) in the academy is to complain and hopefully pay for another month of education. Directors tell the teachers what to do, and by extension, the parents and students what they’ll be paying for for the next month. Anything not handled by the teachers is handled by the secretary staff and bus drivers. That’s all there is to running a school.

The school I work in operates in the most competitive area of the city. We’ve literally got schools on top of us and down the street competing for students money. There is only so much time in the day, and there are only so many students to go around. If students decide to go to another school, that’s a loss of potential revenue. This is why the school is constantly doing things to draw in parents and new students.

For example, the vocabulary program at our school is one of the most disliked parts of our curriculum by students. Students must memorize up to fifty words per class up to three times a week. This is followed by hard core cram style testing. Students have only five minutes to complete the entire test, are graded on spelling, and are allowed only a minimal number of mistakes before having to stay after class and retaking the test. Parents are notified of grades upon failure, which raises the stakes (and potential punishments at home for failure) dramatically.

Of all the students that I know to have quit recently, the most commonly cited reason that students wanted to stop studying at our school because of our program was these high pressure tests. Students hate them. They have their test at the beginning of class, then have to wait the rest of the hour while we teach in class before they find out the results. Will they have to stay again? What will their parents do if they fail again? They also take more time to prepare for adequately. Students use every available second of class trying to cram in a few extra seconds to review these words. This is good, but it can be a distraction as well.

Parents are the ones driving this testing. A lot of vocabulary is required to learn a language. This is a simple fact. Learning vocabulary usually sucks. Parents want to see test scores and papers, and students with their faces in books memorizing things. This is what this test produces, so it stays. There are even supplimental programs for internet studying parents can use to increase the amount of studying their children have to do at home.

I don’t know how useful it is, as students don’t retain much of the vocabulary from week to week from my experience no matter how much you test them. Are they learning something? Probably. Is it worth the stress and time it takes for these students to do these tests? Probably not. Students show a remarkable ability to memorize, spit out, and forget. It prepares them for the stress of Korean High School at an early age I suppose.

This week we’ll have announcer contests, more homework, and lots of vocabulary tests. We do this because of competition with other schools. If we didn’t pile on homework and do lots of extra events to test students, they’d move elsewhere. If whippings were shown to motivate students to learn English, we’d be given Cat o’ nine tails. Hell, we have a bamboo caning pole in the school already, although I’ve never seen it used for anything other than pointing.

I’ve worked at the "we offer everything" sort of school, the "friendly school", and the "fun" school, but this is the "hard core" school. I hope the parents are happy with the results.

technorati tags:hardcore, parent driven education, esl, cram

Last week I had been touting my ease of adjusting to Ubuntu 6.06 (LTS) “Dapper Drake” (amd64). The reason I happened upon choosing Dapper Drake as my installation choice was that I had already burned the live CD and had it on hand when I needed to install it. Had I done things a little differently and actually researched things a little more, I would have avoided the 64 bit installation entirely.

While I do happen to have an AMD64 processor, the software available for desktops in the 64 bit repository is, rather lacking compared to the robust i386 (32 bit) alternatives. It was really difficult to track down that perfect piece of software I needed only to find out I had to jump through 10 more hoops to get it installed correctly. Things that required reading a series of howtos and required adding lots of third party untested and possibly untrustworthy software was getting on my nerves.

I found out that there is no direct upgrade path to allow you to skip version numbers of Ubuntu releases. The newest release of Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn, will be released later next month. This means I’d have to first install “Edgy Eft”, the release between “Dapper Drake” and “Feisty Fawn”. Seeing as I’d have to upgrade once, and I didn’t want to run a beta pre-release operating system (Feisty Fawn), I decided to install Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgy Eft” i386 (32 bit) instead. I went about researching the best way to do this.

It turns out, Edgy Eft was released with lots of problems for people trying to upgrade from Dapper Drake. According to significant number of threads, the overwhelming opinion of people upgrading to Edgy Eft recommended doing a fresh install, rather than trying to upgrade an already installed system. Since I had a lot of spare CDs after backing up my system a few weeks ago, I decided to make the plunge and simply cut my losses on the amd64 install of Dapper Drake. It had been a good learning experience, but I was off to greener pastures.

What a difference it’s made!

Now that I am a little more comfortable with Linux, I got back up to speed in little more than a few hours than a few days. Here is how the install went. I popped in the install CD, answered the questions, then went to walk my dog. But the time I returned, I had a system ready to use. It can’t get any easier.

Of course, I “cheated” a little bit by using Automatix2. My eyes almost popped out of my head when I actually had choices of software to install that didn’t require running around trying to get 32 bit applications running on a 64 bit machine. I went to a site with Flash in Firefox, clicked the “plugin needed” message, and it actually installed like it was supposed to do! “It just worked.” That problem took me a week of looking for workarounds and fidgeting with things before I could get working before on the Dapper Drake amd64 install. I won’t be going back to 64 bit architecture until software support catches up.

I’m currently enamored with my new Edgy desktop. Because the respositories for Edgy a little more updated than Dapper, I was able to get Shoutcast video support working without even having to look at a howto. “It just worked.” Now I can watch streaming videos like I did under Windows just as easily as in Windows.

I’m back up to speed with Edgy, and haven’t even tried to do anything exclusive to this release yet. Tomboy notes looks like a sticky note program on awesome steroids. (Not the gross kind that cause acne, the awesome kind that cause geeky coolnes.) Keeping good ideas around for a post is always good when a case of writer’s block comes along.

My only standing issue is trying to get “easyh10” to work. Amarok, the music player I use supports this plugin to mount and then write the database for my wife’s mp3 player, but it requires a host of KDE dependencies that I don’t have installed. I really don’t want to run the entire KDE desktop (awesome though it may be) just to get an Amarok plugin working. Either I dive into the Command Line Interface (CLI) to get it working, or put up with dual booting Windows since I’ve got the same program working perfectly with a Graphical Interface (GUI) in that Operating System. If anyone finds me a Linux GUI for that application, I’d very much appreciate it.

I’ve got Winff, a (GUI) video conversion program installed (Huzzah!) however, it doesn’t do any converting  at the moment (Awww.). I’ll have to figure out what’s going on in the configuration that I did wrong. Someone also posted a D2 profile over at iAudiophile that is said to work with iriverter. I’ve tried to get that working in Linux as well, but didn’t have any luck yet.

Right now, I’m an excited to be using a fully featured OS that has applications I need once again.

technorati tags:linux, Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft, Update, Upgrade, Amd64, i386, amarok, easyh10

My wife got home exceptionally late from work yesterday. I had spent most of the time avoiding doing the dishes being being a generally lazy around the house. Since neither of us were interested in cooking, we decided to go out for dinner in our neighborhood.

We had been going to the same pork restaurant for the past few weeks, but instead of returning there again, we went looking for something new. It’s important to try new things from time to time to keep from being burnt out. Across the street from Nolboo, was a restaurant we had never been to before. The name of the restaurant was "Sea story" and it was a shellfish restaurant.

I’ve never really eaten shellfish. I’ve had them occasionally as side dishes. There are a few kinds of Korean dishes, like kalguksu (noodles with clams) that I enjoy, but I’ve never been a person that goes out of his way to eat oysters. I’ve had them before, cooked, but only as side dishes in a larger meal, never as the main course.

I’ve only started eating fish since I’ve gotten to Korea, and shellfish are more foreign to me. Growing up in Midwestern America, I’ve seen fish, caught fish, and even eaten the occasional fish from a lake or river, but our family never ate shellfish. Ever. Don’t know why, but it’s not like you see them in the grocery store in rural Ohio anyway.

My wife wasn’t a very big shellfish eater either. She’s obviously more of an expert than I have, but she admitted this is the first time she’s ever really sat down for an "all shellfish" meal. The waitress was extra kind and helpful to us. She gave us advice as to what to order, and gave us some free cheese to add to some of the dishes.

Unlike most Korean restaurants, the waitress cooked the food for us, told us when it was safe to eat, and arranged the entire meal. This is probably good, as we had no idea what was the standard procedure. She said this was because this was the first time we had been at the restaurant and we didn’t know what to do. Other people were fending for themselves and cooking at their tables with vigor.

I snapped a few pictures, because this was a new deal for me. Watching clams, oysters, and shell fish barbeque in front of me in their shells was really a different experience. The organs would shrink and cook, then get chopped up and coated with cheese and some red pepper sauce.

It thoroughly violated my "visual recognition" rule. I dislike eating fish when it has a head, and generally any animal when I can still recognize it as a whole. Since the things were cooking in their own shells, I just had to get over it if I wanted to eat.

We’d pick out clams and dip them in the various sauces.We filled up two plates or more with all the shells we had to dispose.The meal was pricey, but we left stuffed. We don’t do it often, but when we try something new, I like the feeling that I’m having an adventure, even if it’s something down the street. It’s easy to forget you are living in a foreign country some times unless you challenge yourself to try something new every once in a while.

technorati tags:oysters, clams, shellfish, adventure, restaurant, local, neighborhood

The class I find hardest to keep on task is actually full of some of my oldest students. These students are in their last year of middle school studying the dreaded “Internet Based Testing” book series. The books are extremely boring, so we usually can’t do much in class before they start getting restless and start doing other work or chatting with each other. The majority of the students come late to class, so I can’t start. It’s a problem for all the teachers, but since I’m their first teacher of the day, I have to deal with their late arrivals on top of their bad behavior

I had found some online intelligence test months ago and had done them with some friends.
I introduced them to my coworker this week, and he mentioned it might
be a good activity for upper level classes. Since I had to wait for everyone to arrive, I decided to put some questions from an on the board. That way, the students that had arrived earlier would have something to do while I checked homework and waited for the other students.

The thing I didn’t anticipate was that the normally lazy, apathetic students would go crazy for these sorts of tests. I put a set of about ten questions on the board. They got the easier ones immediately, but needed some hints to get the rest. As I went around checking the homework and more students arrived, I soon had the focus of the entire class trying to solve these questions. This is the first time they’ve ever worked on something collectively.

Trying to get them back on task was nearly impossible. What I should have done was erase all the questions unanswered and let them take home a copy of the test at the end of the class period. Instead, I tried teaching while the students kept trying to solve the questions. Dumb mistake on my part. Eventually I negotiated that the entire rest of our lesson would be their homework, and that we’d take a break from the book today to solve more of the problems.

Some of the worst English students in the class happened to be some of the best puzzle solvers. It was strange to see the dynamic of the class turned on its head and students actually trying for a change. If they put the same effort into their work, it’d be a great class. Next time I’ll have to be careful how I introduce this material into class, and will only do it if I have time to burn or I am too far ahead in my book.

technorati tags:IQ, Intelligence test, slackers

You’ll Never Eat Pork Again… - For more amazing video clips, click here

My students were learning about "decomposers" in their science unit. The students always lack a connection to material in their science book. Trying to make mushrooms and maggots something they can relate to takes a lot of work.

I mentioned "maggots" and got a lot of blank faces. Then I explained they are the gross "crawling things in the food garbage container outside the apartments in the middle of the summer." Everyone got that nasty ,"ewww" look on their face and understood instantly. One of the students said that they saw a dead rat with maggots crawling on it.

"Good! That’s a great example! Where did you see it? A movie or something?"

"No, it was outside the elementary school near the playground."

"Why are their rats near the school?"

"It’s a very dirty school, " a girl offered as an explanation.

Jogging my memory about "recent maggot related things" sparked a memory of the clip posted above. For those of you that don’t know, if you pour some cola on raw pork and wait a few minutes, you can see some maggot like things crawl out of the meat. It’s really disgusting. (Witness the phenomenon and be prepared to be totally grossed out!)

I explained what I had seen. The students had a desperate need to learn more. This is one of rare chances where language disappointed and everyone is captivated by a topic and being totally grossed out.The more scientific students started postulating theories about that could be the cause of what I was saying.

"Teacher! What if it is beef? What if it is fish or chicken!?"

"I don’t know. I’d think any sort of animal that wasn’t freshly killed might have this problem."

"What about Cider (generic name for clear Sprite/7up drinks in Korea)?"

"I think it’s the carbolic acid in cola that causes this reaction. I don’t know if cider has this. Probably?"

"Teacher, what if I use lemons or oranges? Vinegar? They have acid in them too!"

"Well, those are common cooking ingredients. I don’t know if it would work at all. Probably not strong enough."

"Teacher! Does stomach acid cause the same thing to happen? Does it happen after I cook and eat the meat? Are they crawling inside me right now?!"

"No, I think cooking kills these worms, but if it happens in your stomach, how could I know?"

After class I promised to show them the video. The entire class gathered around me in the office while I did my google-fu. The video was grainy and a little jerky, but it had people looking queasy. I made sure to play it a few times.

The students I asked about it said they thought it was "terrible" and "disgusting" and "so-so". (One of those is an odd reaction.)

One student boldly declared, "From now on, I’ll only drink Pepsi."

::Facepalm::

**EDIT** THIS VIDEO IS FAKE.

 technorati tags:cola, pork, maggots, students, reactions, gross, lesson, video

As previously noted, a cousin of my wife now attends my school. My wife’s oldest aunt, is enamored with our school, because the school has been sending her messages constantly about the progress of her son. Any time he has homework, such as memorizing a certain number of vocabulary from his book, they send out messages telling the families what the students are responsible to do. This sort of instant feedback about children’s progress is what parents crave.

As if this wasn’t enough, we now have a new policy in place. On the wall of all the classrooms is a sign stating that any failure to do homework, or any test where they don’t score over 75% will require a call home. So not only to parents know what work the students are required to do, but also how well they did on it.

I’ve had a rash of “no homework” excuses in the past few weeks. I’ve had classes where more than 50% of the students forgot homework at home, or had their mothers throw out their old notebook that they wrote homework in. It’s amazing how often that happens when I go to try to check homework. Mothers must be throwing out notebooks at an amazing rate.

On Monday, I called my director into a class where only 2 students out of 10 did their homework. She told the students that they’d get a trial run at the new homework policy immediately. The secretary called home during class, and the students were very worried.

In my other classes, the students found out that the policy was real. They started asking questions about the details of the message. “Will the failure of vocabulary tests include the score or just a pass fail message? Will you send it to my mother, or my father? What happens if I don’t do all my homework, or just some of my homework?”

I haven’t gotten any clarification on these sorts of issues since my director has been gone this week, but I’ve done my best to make it as scary as possible. I do the “phone call” pantomime with my hands when students forget their work. I’m finding students frantically trying to complete something as I walk around class. I’m thinking we’ll need new paperwork to fill out in each class to clarify who gets calls home and who needs more warnings.

There is a new secretary that’s in charge of calling. I don’t know why the last one left, but if this is why, I could understand. Calling parents and sending out automated SMS messages via computer when dealing with the number of students we have would be a lot of work. I’ve been enjoying my new powers to make students lives hell outside of my classroom, as they’ve been pushing my buttons the entire month.

technorati tags:parents, students, homework, school, policy