::A Geek in Korea::

The April 2007 release of Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn is here! The news of the impending release filled me with dread, as there is always a waiting period where everyone tries to get the new releases and crushes the download servers.

I had publicly declared I’d be using Edgy Eft for a few weeks until bug reports about upgrading to Feisty Fawn came in.  Secretly I always have a hard time waiting when I have little to lose and a quick set of buttons to hit. While I’d like to use Feisty for it’s improvements, I figured I’d just have to wait. Just to see if the update was availble, I went to the System->Admin panel and clicked, “Update Manager”. Sure enough, “Upgrade to 7.04″ was enabled.

I clicked on the link, half expecting it to choke on trying to download the latest updates. It told me I’d have to wait about an hour to update my system. Why not? I clicked the link and waited. While I surfed the web, Ubuntu upgraded itself without my intervention. After it finished the updates, I was running Feisty Fawn. Simply as that!

I rebooted to get the new kernel and everything running. It’s back up with no problems and it’s searching for new software updates (again, without me doing anything than clicking once.) The new updates, post-reboot, are going a little more slowly. That’s probably due to the demand.

I just upgraded an OS with about 5-10 clicks! So tremendously awesome.

The only differences I noticed on reboot was Beagle, the integrated search tool, sitting on my alert notification tray, and the new “proprietary drivers running” warning/notification telling me that Ndivida drivers were operational. Neat. I haven’t even gotten to play around with some of the cooler stuff yet like desktop effects. I’ll leave that for later.

Wee!

An incident at work yesterday with one of my Korean coworkers has sparked a lot of soul searching and thoughts about my future career. Some pressure cooker in her head boiled over when I asked to use a book. It resulted in her yelling in a hallway in Korean about me to the head teacher. All I asked was to borrow a book for five minutes. Honest. My job is secure and was never in question, but it’s sparked a listlessness in me. I don’t know what else is lurking underneath. Now I’m just thinking about my career path, my future, and my family.

Everything about being a single guy willing to come over and teaching English on a lark after college has gotten so much more complicated since I’ve been here longer. I’m still only operating as a teacher with a Bachelor’s Degree in Management of Information Systems. I’ve just got more experience, a reputation in the city as a good teacher, and lots of experience.

I haven’t gotten back to getting more education or gotten specialized. The master’s degree course in ESL at my previous employer seemed like a joke, and I don’t really want to throw money away on another paper degree if I can’t use it practically. I’m planning to get more teaching certifications online for ESL, but I haven’t gotten around to signing up. I’ll probably do this sometime after May if I can keep myself focused. I’ve said this before, of course, but I’m planning on a job hunt this year, so this would be the best time to actually see it through to completion.

I’m trying to future proof myself. Eventually there will be a time when I will be the sole bread winner for this family for a dedicated yearly time frame. I need to make sure I’ll be able to provide for my family and also allow us to live comfortably. I’m going to be responsible for paying all the bills, and earning all the money we save without the cushion of my wife’s salary.

Then there is always the question of what I want to be doing in two, five, or ten years. Who knows what I’ll be up to? Anyone want to drop me an offer? Book deal? Freelance writing position for a magazine? I’m open. Contact me.

We’re thinking about moving apartments, again, to use our savings to pay for a chunsae funded apartment. This is why we’ve been saving money like crazy the entire year. Thank goodness for that. We’d pay a hefty down payment first, then live rent free. We’d save a lot more, if we can find an apartment in our price range to rent in the area. It’s all a big “if” right there.

Then there is always the inevitable “Move to the USA” that sometimes it feels like a terminus to everything we decide. Suddenly I’ll approach a dark precipice and need to take a leap into that unknown, if it ever ends up happening. I’d have to figure out what, where, why, and how of all that as well.

You know what they say, Mo’ money, mo’ problems, and all that. Damn adulthood getting in the way of all our fun.

A few months back, I had a student drop out of my class. He never, ever did homework, couldn’t memorize anything, hardly spoke in class, had terrible behavior, and was generally a waste of a chair. I wasn’t sad to see him go.

Now, after the classes realigned and we started a new semester, he rejoined the school. He started back at the same level he was when he left, and is doing as poorly as he ever did. He’s in a class of low level learners. These students don’t talk, so when we did a dictation exercise, none of them could memorize it after we repeated it many times. No one even tried. They had to write the dictation instead.

They are as bad at writing as they are speaking and listening. Any time dictation needs to be written, it takes tons of time, because the student’s don’t listen, and they can’t spell very well either. Some of the students in the class still don’t know their “b” from their “d” after a solid year of teaching. This means I have to repeat, line by line, and help them spell.

The best girl in the class was sitting to the returning boy, who is already busting a new hole in what used to be the bottom of this low level class. The smart girl had tried to memorize the dictation when their book was open, that was she could write it for the inevitable notebook exercise. She got through five of the six lines without major mistakes, but she forgot one of the lines in the book when she tried to write it from memory into the notebook. Since she had “gone ahead” of where the dictation was on the tape, she had written five lines while everyone else was still struggling with the first.

She yelled, “I’m finished.”

The bad boy next to her yelled, “I’m finished too!” at the exact same time.

I went over to check the girl’s paper first, simply because I thought the boy had meant he was finished with the first line, not the whole paper. That would have been more on par with his usual speed of work. When I looked at the girls paper, I corrected some of her mistakes and then moved on to the boy’s paper. He had the exact same lines written, with the exact same spelling mistakes as the girl next to him.

Since I had been giving out spelling advice, if he had been listening to me and working on his own as he had claimed, he wouldn’t have written the first few lines with those mistakes. Only that girl had made those same mistakes.

“You wrote this?” I asked.  I had seen him peeking over at the girl’s paper, but I didn’t know if she was helping spell a word, or what. He replied that he did write everything on his own.

“Then why do you have all the same mistakes as her!?” He refused to admit he had cheated.

As we were talking, there was a police car siren wail directly outside our building. I pointed to the camera mounted on the ceiling. “Run! You better run now! They are coming to get you! Didn’t you hear them? It’s the police! They know you cheated! They saw it on the camera and now they are coming to get you!”

The boy turned a shade of green, as if he was so scared he was going to be sick. The rest of the class laughed. I’m not sure how long he will last in class now that he’s returned, but I won’t miss him either way. I wish there would have been a police officer in the school when class let out to really scare him when he left. That might have scared him straight.

When I first arrived in Korea in 2001, work begun on the Daejeon subway system. It was to link the eastern and western parts of the city. The first part of the line was finished in 2006, and one of the exits was behind our old apartment building. We moved later in 2006.

While we were still on the subway line, we were two stops short of where the previous work had completed. They built and completed half the subway, then build the rest of the subway line and then connected them. We had been waiting for this for a while, but they finally opened today.

My wife and I used to ride in a taxi when I went to work, then she would take the subway from there to go to her job. Now we can simply walk a block from our apartment and both go to work easily. This is a huge improvement, as it means we save money, as well as not having to catch a taxi or a bus when it rains or is cold.

The subway system in Daejeon hasn’t been that popular since it didn’t connect all the places on the line, but today it was packed solid both times I used it. It might have been because they were actively promoting it, and were offering free coffee and prizes. There were a lot of old people riding for the first time, and there were helpers explaining how the token system worked. I even ran into one of my wife’s coworkers on the way home.

We stand to save a lot of money and time with this new subway expansion. I’m very pleased by having easy access to the subway. It’s been a long time coming.

So, sometime after I got sick, but after the medication/zombie/insomniac thing I went through this weekend, I signed up for Twitter. This was on behest of a friend who in an email told me, “Hi! Yes, this is stupid.  But I thought I’d try it out. Join Twitter.”With an introductory offer like that how can I not try it out?

I’ve been hearing about Twitter on all the geek blogs and productivity sites in my rounds on the RSS feeds I read. There are literally only two responses. “This is addictive. I love it. I use it all the time!” or “This is a stupid waste of time. Why do I need this? What is this for?”

I think the differences in opinion come from their approach to the social web application experience. If you want to connect with people and create a (false) sense of intimacy, Twitter is for you. If you want new ways of doing things that strictly increase productivity, and help you do old things in new, more efficient ways, Twitter might not be for you. I’m not sure where I am on this particular service.

For those of you that don’t know, Twitter is a sort of mini-blog tool. It’s dead simple to use from a phone (not in Korea) or from a computer. I use GAIM (Pidgin now) to update a page on Twitter. I could also do it directly from their website, but it’s easier to use my messenger client since I have that running all the time anyway. Twitter only supports 160 characters per post, so it’s not actually a full on second website to maintain. It’s more for short messages, reminders, lists, or keeping track of what friends or family members are up to. It’s absolutely dead simple to use.

I guess it’s useful to keep in touch with friends. Just tonight I got some updates on what friends were doing even thought they hadn’t blogged and didn’t send me email. Perhaps they messaged me on their phone? Maybe they were online, but not available to chat.

It’s certainly easier than email since all your friends can easily get the message almost anywhere easily. I get to track what my friends say during the day if they twitter. It’s something akin to ICQ’s offline messaging. It’s a little like that, except you can share it with everyone too if you want and add RSS feeds and whatnot.

There are all sorts of things people do with it. Some people will tweet EXCESSIVELY about every single thing they do. “Putting on my socks.” Twenty seconds later. “Putting on my shoes…” That’s a little scary and I don’t really need to get that much detail. I get plenty of feeling of “sharing” my life with this website, I don’t need to share everything all the time.

I’ll tweet stuff I’d like friends to see, but wouldn’t post about, or perhaps use it to keep up with friends when they aren’t online. There are some applications that make use of Twitter, but I haven’t found anything super efficient to do with it yet. Random webcomics? Whatever.

Another friend wrote, “My expectation is that the novelty of posting short statements will quickly wear off.” I agree with him. I’m willing to give it a try, but I’m not really sure what I think of it at the moment. I don’t add things to the “public timeline”, I have an invite only account at the moment.

Add me if you want: Torgodevil.

It’s closing in on four days with very little continuous sleep now. All of this because of an itchy throat? It’s getting downright ridiculous. After posting yesterday, my wife and I went to the local doctor.

I’d never been there before, but in the same apartment complex shopping center there was a tiny clinic. It’s literally operating at the entrance of our apartment complex. This tiny “hospital” is set up in the corner of the second floor. Also on the same floor: an Art school, English school, and a hot dog restaurant. Elsewhere in this building you can also rent videos, get a (bad) pizza, go shopping for vegetables or fruit, visit a butcher, baker, or hair dresser, or go buy some real estate. I’m not sure what else can be accomplished at this place. I had no idea there was a clinic inside before yesterday. There might NOT have been a clinic there last year. I don’t know how long this place has been operating.

We went into the local clinic to find it was full of children. They said they weren’t a pediatrician office, but there was no one over 13 looking sick besides me. They had lots of signs up for different treatments they offered that weren’t for children, but showed a Disney film on the television. Half the children seemed to have what I was suffering from, a sort of cold, cough, zombie like state.

The main two reasons I wanted to go to the hospital were my cough, and the whole, “I can’t sleep” problems. I also had a headache (from the not sleeping), and was feeling a little weak.

They checked my temperature. My fever had subsided. I got examined by someone I think was an “Ear.Nose.Throat” guy, but I’m not entirely sure. I’m guessing because that’s what he asked about and what most of his posters, diagrams, and devices were geared towards. He checked my ears, which seemed odd, since I complained about my throat being sore. He said he wanted to make sure there wasn’t an infection in both places (or something).

The entire interview was entirely in Korean, which should have been a big warning sign that maybe this guy wasn’t someone I should be visiting. He asked me for my approximate weight, and was unwilling for me to go out and get on the scale in the waiting room to check it exactly on my own.

He tried to examine my throat next. I’m entirely too sensitive about non-food items in my mouth. He gave up after his tongue depressor kept making me gag after about ten seconds of saying “Ahh”. He also listened to my chest.

He went on to ask some questions that my wife helped translate for me. I had some stomach problems earlier. Turns out eating fruits and vegetables was a bad idea during my illness. Damn my intake of fiber and vitamins! Orange juice! No, don’t drink that! Why would I ever thing those things were a good idea to consume?!

The doctor recommended eating a sort of soup made from rice and water. You cook rice, then add water. It’s bland-tastic! I’ve been eating it for breakfast now for two days and it’s like swallowing 100 spoonfuls of medicine. Since I am sick I’ll continue to eat this as long as I have stomach problems, since it doesn’t upset anything, but it is rather boring.

He got very concerned and asked me about penicillin for a few minutes. He asked four or five times if I had any penicillin allergies. He said, and I’m paraphrasing my wife’s translation, “Westerners don’t take penicillin often like we do, they have allergies. Do you have allergies?” I told him I don’t.

Looking it up later, it seems it was a smart question to ask, as the side effects of penicillin allergies include rashes, bumps, and death. He added that to the prescription. He also offered to give me a “take home IV drip bag”. Wow! My very own drip bag? To go? He’d poke me with a needle and let me wait for the bag to drain at home. Then I could take it out on my own. We turned him down, as my stomach problems weren’t quite that severe and I wasn’t dehydrated enough to need it. He also offered to give me a shot of “something” before I left. I asked if I needed it because of my illness. He didn’t press me and offered no follow up information.

The whole “I’ll give you a shot” offer is a common medical practice in Korea. Older Koreans feel like they need a shot if they go to a doctor for any reason. Doctors simply jab them and send them on their way to get the rest of their medicine. I’ve had it done to me when I first arrived in Korea. It’s the placebo effect in action, or at least I hope it is because pumping sick people full of one dose of antibiotics then sending them out seems like a way to breed a super-bug.

I wasn’t given a diagnosis, or told what I had. He did tell me to stop using Q-tips to clean my ears, as it was simply pushing the wax in deeper. If that had been a problem I had come to him to see, I’m sure I would have cared. He told us that this flu, or whatever it was, was going around with children at the moment. He thought I must have picked it up there.

He also did the whole “taxi cab driver” set of questions on me. “Where are you from? Oh you’re married? How long did you live here? Can you speak Korean well?” It was really annoying. Even my wife thought he was being too chatty. Perhaps he was bored of looking a sick children’s dirty ears all day.

We went downstairs and paid at the pharmacy in the same mini-mall. The pharmacy took the sheet we got from the doctor upstairs, and divided the medicine into packets. Each packet has the time you are supposed to take it. Yesterday night, I took my dose of medicine, then failed to sleep, again. Not only could I not sleep, but I had my cough. What the hell was this medicine for? I laid in bed for a total of two or three hours, then got up to watch a movie on television. Total mony spent on this trip to the doctor? 3,000 won. Medicine, 3,000 won. At least it was cheap.

This morning, my wife admitted the doctor had told her that some of the medicine he had prescribed would prevent me from sleeping well. Since all I wanted from the entire trip to the hospital was some cough syrup strong enough to knock me out for a few hours, this got me a little frustrated. Four days with poor sleep does this to me too. All I want is some NyQuil with a big fucking Q.

We went to a new pharmacy and brought my pills along. We had to go to a new pharmacy, because it is Sunday, which means doctors offices and pharmacy places close. (Yeah. Don’t get sick on Sunday.) Since pharmacies cut up the different pills for dosages, and they didn’t give us back the list of drugs I was supposed to take, only the medicine, I have a bag of “mystery pills”.

The new pharmacy could only identify three of the seven pills in my packets. I already knew which one was the penicillin (which I should take, if I have strep throat.) There were two large Tylenol painkillers in the bag as well, but since I have a headache due to noting being able to sleep, I don’t want to take those. I’d like to sleep. The other mystery drugs can go to hell.

This new pharmacy gave me new medicine. It’s not cough syrup, which doesn’t EXIST here or something, but another set of pills and some powder stuff as well. However, the box of cough pills has a picture of:

 Which looks like someone coughing, or possibly laughing. One of the words does mean “phlegm” (karae) so that’s a hopeful sign. After eating rice cake soup (Yay! Something different that’s not rice-water soup! No really, I like this stuff!) I took the medicine and collapsed for an indeterminate amount of time on the couch. My wife, who is now getting very tired from taking care of me and being kept up all night from my coughing has actually been asleep longer.

I think the medicine is helping, but I’ve had so many different herbal remedies thrown at me in the past few days in combination with the pills I don’t know what’s working, or not working. I’ve had: Omicha Tea (translated as the fruit of Maximowiczia typica. No idea what it is. Seems to work.) , Quice Tea (good for a cold sore throat. Didn’t do anything.), few shots of Mugwort mixed with honey (With a sore throat, anything soothing helps. Didn’t do anything to stop my coughing), Barley tea (If I drink this any more I think I’ll be sick).

It’s extremely frustrating to be sick, worse when you can’t sleep, and a nightmare when doctors don’t speak English. We didn’t check the doctor out before we went, so shame on us as well. I’m still sick, and I don’t think it’s anything more than the flu. Why does it have to be so difficult?

Thursday morning, I went walking with Yoshi outside. We did his usual 20 minute lap around the block and through the park. When I got back to the house, my wife mentioned, “Oh, there will be yellow dust outside today, be sure to wear your mask when going to work.” My throat seemed a little scratchy from the walk, so I followed her advice.

Thursday is a very light schedule, just three classes. During my first class, I made sure to drink water. By my second class, I was sitting down the entire time. By the third class, I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom. My body simply shut down as the day went on.  By the time I got home Thursday night, I couldn’t even stand. My throat was raw (mask or no!) and I had a fever.  I slept perhaps 4 hours on Thursday night.

Friday night is my busiest day. Five hours of classes. Since I get paid by the hour, missing this day means I’m out a lot of money. Despite my better judgment, I went to work. I was so weak I wasn’t able to do my normal classroom routine. I did a page or two of reading or review, then gave out word search puzzles to the students to keep them busy. The students didn’t mind, but I felt bad about it. I played a tape in the background of class and sat huddled in front of a heater, shivering, and tried not to pass out.

Friday night I had a bad fever, was dizzy, and had very swollen lymph nodes. When I got home, I drew a bath and sat in the water for an hour. The bathtub is the perfect size to give me a really nasty backache. I was coughing so often I couldn’t get to sleep, because I’d wake myself up. I didn’t get more than 15 minutes of uninterrupted sleep the entire night. My dreams were very scattered and random too. Not only that, but I woke up my wife so often she felt exhausted from my frequent trips to the bathroom.

Saturday I had to cancel my plans to try to catch up on all the sleep I’ve lost.  I’ve got stomach problems, a headache, and am extremely sleep deprived. I eventually fell asleep for a few hours this morning, and am currently waiting for my wife to return so we can go to the hospital. I hope to get some medicine and pass out for the rest of the day.

Deathly ill. Will post sometime this weekend. Wish me a quick recovery.

My favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut has passed away. I’m currently working my way through every novel he’s ever written. The things I’ve read are intend to read are listed below:

• Player Piano: Loved his take on what a society that no longer needs manual labor does with itself. It was a little slow to get going, which is uncharacteristic of most of his novels.
• The Sirens of Titan: This is a weird, weird book. There are a few themes here I like in the novel, but it’s not my favorite.
• Mother Night: The first book I ever read by him. Really good take on who you think you are versus how people around you think of you.
• Cat’s Cradle: Bokononism and Ice-9. A wonderfully strange bit of story.
• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: I loved his “Just be KIND” message. This book ask a lot of questions that seem funny, then you sort of wonder why no one else is saying the same thing about the world we live in today.
• Slaughterhouse-Five: I’ve read this multiple times. I love this book so much. If there was ONE book you have to read by Vonnegut, this is it. Superb.
• Breakfast of Champions: This book is very strange. A must for Kilgore Trout fans. He’s a character in a novel that finds out he’s a character in a novel. His one request, “Make me younger!”
• Slapstick: Wow. This book is really strange in a good way. Very different. I’ll have to read it again. The stuff about inclusiveness seems to parallel the rise of blog-cliques very well.
• Jailbird: I haven’t read it yet. I will purchase this on first sight.
• Deadeye Dick: Currently reading this.
• Galápagos: The human race evolves to live on the Galapagos islands as told by a ghost. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
• Bluebeard: Meh. Abstract impressionism isn’t my bag I guess.
• Hocus Pocus: I didn’t care for this story much.
• Timequake: It’s an interesting twist on the idea of “fate”. Watching yourself make mistakes that you’ve already made in the past but are powerless to prevent seems like a special sort of hell.

A wonderful mind has passed away. He is one of my biggest influences as a writer, and I find his work a joy to read. Even at his strangest, his stories teach about mankind and morals that I thought were provoking and challenging. I’ll miss him dearly.

There is always a joker or daily problem maker in one class or another. One student will get the reputation for being sarcastic or rude. Other students get annoying when the same student keeps wasting class time.

Our head teacher has set up a series of spies in each class. If any student is really bad and ignores the foreign teacher, causes problems, or is very rude they get a warning. The “spy” in the class will say something like, “We should tell the head teacher about this.  Do you want us to tell her what you did after class?”

Usually that warning is enough to calm students down. No one wants to make the head teacher angry (including me). It’s ingenious to use peer pressure in this way. Korean students love ratting each other out. It’s a natural behavior and isn’t frowned on.

Empowering a student or group of students to become an official rat to watch fellow students means that they take the monitoring of behavior of classmates as one of their duties. Having a redundant set of spies in class helps from it becoming a means for revenge.

The students chosen are usually the most responsible and trusted in class, but if they have problems collaborating their stories, they won’t be given special treatment out of class. Being a good spy earns extra rewards by teachers. Not being spied on and being trusted when a dispute arises in class is also a perk.

Since the only time a spy would ever speak up in my class is after a student ignored my directions anyway, I don’t mind the head teacher keeping tabs on my students behavior through “back channels”. The more students know that eventually everything they do gets back to their mother in one way or other, the better behaved they should be. This is better for me.

It’s ironic that in a country with an dedicated number for spies (112), we have an effective little ring operating in our school.