::A Geek in Korea::

I’ve been actively trying to exercise more often. I’ve been riding my bike to work for the past two weeks, listening to podcasts, and sweating as I weave through traffic. This is instead of riding in the nice, new, air conditioned subway that was completed not far from my apartment. What inspired this madness?

I’ve put on some weight in the past year do to my insanely sedentary lifestyle and frequent meals with my wife. While I had been “underweight” (like, visible ribs and all) for my first few years in Korea, my new appreciation for my relatives cooking has caught up to me. I’ve also developed a little sweet tooth, grabbing a single snack each day for an energy boost at work.

I’ve put on a few kilograms as a result, and all the dog walking in the world hasn’t helped much in keeping my weight constant. I’ve gone up a whole pants size! As someone that is already too tall to fit the bell curve for Korean clothes length, my options are even more limited as I slowly fill up the waist band as well. I’m trying to stop, or reverse the process.

I’ve been riding my bike because I enjoy it. I don’t like sports, but riding a bike is practical and fun, and good for the environment. I walk the dog, but he’s as hot as I am when we return to the apartment. We spend 30 minutes walking, and it takes me around 20 minutes by bike to get to work.

Riding back home is great too. The streets are brightly lit, the air is cool, and I’d rather ride my bike and listening to podcasts than answering questions about where I am from in a taxi. Plus, I can get around the city with no problems.

My trips to work by bike might be cut short, as the rainy season in Korea is rapidly approaching. By next week I might not even be able to ride my bike to work, as it rains daily. I’ll get in as many rides as I can until then, and figure out more excuses to keep away from a gym in the mean time.

I was awakened this morning by a call from my parents. They Skype’d me and I got their call forwarded to my phone (that’s so awesome). Anyway, I was awakened and then forced to decipher dates and make decisions about our European vacation coming up in a few months. This is not my idea of a good wake up call.

It turns out my parents will have an excuse to see me for some time while we are in Europe. We’ll check out London together if things work out. The call was about what when we would meet. They are working out their reservations, so now we know when we have to make it there.

We’ve had our tour book planners for months, but we haven’t seriously cracked them open more than a few times to play with Google Earth for some research. Having a concrete day to meet my parents broke down all the “maybe” and “what about this” ideas we were having about planning the vacation. We sat down and worked out an actual route we could both agree on. We made compromises and set time frames. We had everything set. We knew where we were going. All we needed were the tickets to get on the plane to go.

Problem.

We’ve been in contact with travel agents today and trying to reserve tickets to fit our new plan. We’ve run into problems trying to find a flight that’s going where we need but isn’t insanely priced. It seems that between when we called in the morning for information about tickets, and when we called back to make reservations, all the “cheap” tickets they told us about somehow disappeared. Hmm. That’s an awfully strange coincidence.

It seems our normal booking agent doesn’t really handle “backpacking” tours well. We’ll have more research to do to find a cheap flight. Once the tickets get bought, we’ll move onto the details of planning what we’ll bring, what we need, and where we’ll go in more detail. That’s my favorite part.

As mentioned previously, KT Telecom sucks at Linux support. My previous efforts at trying to get a new IP address had failed, and I had tried to call tech support to get them to help me with the problem. They advised me to “Install Windows” and “Call back”. Seriously. That was their solution. No thanks.

I’m finally 100% Windows free at home, so I went about finding my own way to fix the problem. This tread at the Ubuntu Forums provided many possible solutions. So, all I had to do was play around with a few commands in the console and eventually I’d get a new IP address? I started to play around.

Linux Geekery Follows
I had tried the solutions listed in the before with no success. I had done

ifdown eth0 && ifup eth0

in a previous attempt. There wasn’t any luck before. I found that

sudo dhclient -r

would “release” my IP address. The problem was that if I didn’t wait for someone else to take that IP address, it was given right back to me. What I ended up doing was disabling the network connection settings in my system tray. I released my IP address with

sudo dhclient -r

then went off the Internet completely by disabling my connection to the network.

Just to be sure, I went to /var/lib/dhcp3 and deleted all my leases for my broadband connection.

Then I went to work. The idea was that I was giving up my IP address and waiting for a new person to come onto the network. When they requested an IP address, they’d take mine, and I’d get a new one when I logged on later.

I had tried this before, but hadn’t waited long enough. My hope was someone would get my old IP, and I’d get an IP that hasn’t been put on a blocklist requiring me to go to a PC-room to post on my own blog.

Several hours later I returned home, turned on my computer, and found I had a brand new IP address. Awesome. Now I can post and not get false positive blocked by SPAM filters in Wordpress. Who needs Korean Tech support? Not me…this time, at least.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree…unless it rolls down a hill or something. The very highest student in all of my classes is a girl that has a younger brother that I also teach. They couldn’t be more different.

The girl has been [tag]studying[/tag] English forever, and has always been the brightest student wherever she goes. She has a monstrous [tag]work ethic[/tag] that awes me. She would stay up for hours to register for a test online when seating was limited. She has the highest level speech for a student that hasn’t studied abroad for long periods of time that I’ve ever met. Her vocabulary is impressive, even more so considering she studies Chinese characters, English, Korean, and French in school.

She’d tell me that she’d do her vocabulary tests during the break period in a class because she wants more time to prepare and study, and didn’t want to waste my time on a test she couldn’t pass the first time. She’s always asking the director about ways to improve her vocabulary and testing ability. She’s basically the best student anyone could ever hope to get as a teacher.

Her brother is sloth incarnate. He’s never spent more than the minute it takes me to walk around a classroom on his homework, if he bothers to do it at all. His English is as poor as his sister’s is good. He’s been studying for a long time as well, but isn’t doing well.

He fails every single test he takes that I give him. He puts no effort in paying attention in class, and often disrupts class with the sorts of questions that make other slackers in the class look annoyed for wasting THEIR time. Last week, I snapped and yelled at him for his rude behavior when he kept turning around to annoy someone that was doing their work. He wanted to stop class to have a water gun fight. Now that I’ve tried disciplining him, he’s even worse.

Today, he intentionally tried to get every question wrong on a homework assignment I gave him, but accidentally got one correct. The students in the class were cheering him on as I went down the page, slashing at every answer. He grew more smug as things on his test got worse. I removed as many reward points as I saw fit, but he didn’t care. Of course, he had the admiration of his moronic classmates to buoy his self-esteem instead.

I brought in my director, who knows the family well. She had been teaching them both for a long time. I explained that the boy had missed nearly every question on the test on purpose. She was extremely shocked by his behavior. This got the boy to behave in class as she gave him a look of death, but doesn’t help the fact he wastes all my time with his poor attitude.

I’d probably say that his poor behavior is closely related to his sister’s overachieving behavior. He has no work ethic, and she gets all the praise for the grades. He gets negative attention and thrives on this instead. From now on, I’ll avoid grading papers and letting other students see results as I go. That way there won’t be the competition and “build” to see who can get more wrong in this particular class.

Both my wife and I had no plans to spend our Sunday any way other than being lazy around the house. Why be lazy around the house on a fabulous day when we could just as easily be lazy outdoors with my new Cambodian hammock. This was our first chance to go to the park and use it.

We went to a tree filled park where I walk Yoshi to hang the hammock and have a picnic. My wife wanted to get things ready, so I was sent to the store for supplies. She taught me the word “kan” to order the meat we needed. “Samkyeupsal han kan jusaeyo” (One “kan” of pork please.) This isn’t a unit of measurement you use for anything else I know, but I don’t deal with butchers much.

After cooking up the meat, it turns out one “kan” of pork means, “Enough pork for two people, plus just enough that neither person could possibly eat it without being sick and regretting trying to eat han kan, but totally not enough for three people.” It’s a handy unit of measure if you are planning a picnic as a couple. It’s like the hot dog/hot dog bun sort of unit of measurement. No one is upset by it, but it doesn’t make much sense.

I made a trip back to the apartment to drop off the uneaten meat, then returned to the picnic. I set up my hammock, tying it up between some shade trees. It was fantastic. I miss hanging off a hammock at my parent’s lake back in the United States relaxing in the shade on a warm day. Yoshi sat on my chest staring at people as I napped. Eventually he got used to the rocking, and started shifting the weight in his legs to propel us back and forth for a little while. Smart dog.

I was told I had to return to the apartment at least an hour after my wife left, as she wanted to clean the house. No problem there. I thumbed through some vacation planning books, then took down the hammock for the return home. I didn’t get it in the same rolled up shape as the Cambodian woman did when she packed it for us, but it still shrank well enough to be portable. Best $2 dollars spent on vacation ever. It was a perfect day for a [tag]picnic[/tag].

*Just to let readers of the blog in on how dedicated I am, it’s currently 1:00AM as I post this. I’ve been blocked, AGAIN, by over zealous SPAM blacklist sites from posting on my own blog in my apartment. I had to go to a PC room once again, but I didn’t lose any work this time. I still want to punch some anti-spammer in the face though.

Inspired by a heavily edited for Korean television viewing of “Shawn of the Dead” this morning, I spent the day editing my [tag]“Blog Like It’s the End of the World“[/tag] [tag]zombie short story[/tag]. Someone had mentioned some typos and some failed grammar. This irks me. I also wanted to change the license on the text to [tag] Creative Commons[/tag]. It’s now using a license that’s a lot more friendly, so feel free to share it if you enjoyed it. Just give me a heads up ᅟᅠand don’t try to make a profit from it with my permission, okay?.

Finishing that epic 21 page story happened in a rush, as I had a deadline to post to participate in the event, and my loyal proof reader that had been helping had no more time.

Just this week I stumbled upon LanguageTool, an [tag]Open Source[/tag] grammar checker for Open Office. It’s the one thing that [tag]Open Office[/tag] lacked from for me. It’s superb to see such a high quality extension to free software. It’s why I love Open Source. I installed it and let it find all the obvious mistakes I had missed. I had written late into the night and couldn’t do anything by try to put down ideas as I pounded on keys. Sorry for those of you that had read the version I had posted originally. This new edited version fixes a few problems, stops down a few more grammatical errors, and is a better read.

One more thing. The “Add to Search Bar” add on for Firefox is now mandatory for me. I’ve got every single search I do daily up in my search bar. Sometimes I do searches, just because I can. So nice.

So, please read my story if you haven’t had a chance. The world needs more [tag]zombie Korean cross cultural satire fiction[/tag] in my opinion.

A few days ago, my director mentioned that the school would be “remodeled” at the end of the week. If this was anywhere else in the world, that would mean that the school would be closed and when we returned from the remodeling the school would look shiny and new.This is not how Korea works.

Every school I’ve worked at has done remodeling sometime during my stay there. My first school cut holes in the walls of classrooms and didn’t even bother to clean up the dust from the drywall. The floor was littered with particle board and building scraps.

My second school had kindergarten students getting dizzy from paint fumes as they remodeled. Workers with hammers, knocking down walls, and people and painting without proper ventilation. It was so bad they actually called in a half day when all the staff got migraine headaches.

My third school would paint the interior from time to time on weekends, then run fans when they opened the school on Monday. This was probably the best, as it didn’t interfere with us in class directly. We just weren’t allowed to touch the walls for a few days just in case they needed to do retouches.

Now this school. So it goes.

She informed us that they wouldn’t be using any paint, and wouldn’t be going into classrooms. Good. What were they going to be doing then that would qualify as remodeling?

When I went into work today, one wall to a classroom had been cut out. I guess they’ll be adding glass there. There were several gruff looking worker types going around with what looked like futuristic gigantic wallpaper stickers. They’d peel off a roll of the sticker on a base board, then flatten out the air holes. Then they’d cut the shape to fit the board. No cleaning the walls. Just stick the stuff on top of the old paint. It was even textured to make it look like fake wood. Classy.

All of the doors had been removed from their frames. The worker’s tools were stacked in one of the old classrooms. They didn’t need drop cloth or paint buckets, but instead used rulers and razors. They had tons of rolls of the sticker paper. The people worked quickly and quietly, moving and covering everything in a dull silver and gray color scheme that looked more suitable for a dentist office than a school.

The chaos and confusion of students on a normal day is fairly loud. Subtract doors, add some workers, and a “work in progress” remodeling, and it was really hard to teach today. The students didn’t seem to mind winding in and out of the path of the workers. They were trained that construction zones were places to walk long ago with the lazy safety commitments made by every single construction site in Korea ever. The number of people killed by falling items from cranes must be enormous in this country.

My director didn’t seem particularly worried that workers with razors slashing around young curious students was any concern. The remodeling work would continue through the weekend, and we’d have a newly decorated school by Monday. Hurrah.

We are at the point of the year where teachers are slowly wrapping up books they used for the first half of the year. The school will choose books for a summer program that starts near the end of June. Some classes are running on fumes trying to stretch out the last few pages of material to keep a book alive for a few more weeks. Other books have been chewed up and digested, requiring the teachers to find something to teach in the interim.

The second highest level of classes in the school is something I teach. It’s one of the two middle school classes I am responsible for. The book we are using currently is by far the worst book I use through the week, but as far as test preparatory materials go, it isn’t that bad. It’s got all the buzz words of a successful book series: It’s Internet based testing. It requires integrated skill sets. It’s well rounded. While it might not be the most interesting material, if you have to teach for a test, you could do a lot worse.

There are only so many books, and only so many preparatory tests you can get students ready for before they move to high school and switch to more intensive late night schools. The Seoul National University preparatory test, called “TEPS” is a step down from the current international standard test we are preparing students to take.

It had no speaking or writing skills. The “TEPS” test is grammar, reading comprehension, vocabulary, listening, and lots of memorization. The entire test is multiple choice, and everything is hair splitting over the fine points of grammar or subtle meanings in highly contrived situational contexts. It’s basically the continuation of every hellish Korean designed English test taken to it’s most ridiculous useless extreme.

My director handed me several books covering these tests and asked my opinion of the entire series. Should we teach these to students? The book I teach to them currently is 100 times better and more useful, but it’s still the worst book I teach bar none. Things were so niche and so specific that you could learn everything in the TEPS book and still not know how to hold a coherent conversation. You’d know how to use several hundred idioms, but never have any situation in which you could use them.

I gave my harshest thumbs down possible. I questioned the necessity of preparing the students for an English test that wouldn’t do them any good outside of Korea’s warped education system. I told them I thought it wouldn’t make the students well rounded, only better on one test no one really should be taking in the first place. If these students wanted to study abroad, they had better things to do with their time.

I recommended a class based on my high school experience. Short stories, discussions, writing, critique, etc. It worked for me, and I’d enjoy doing something other than teaching for a test for once. The limiting factor seems to be the students free time. All of the students go to several other schools, all competing for their free time. The likelihood that I could get a middle school class motivated to read an entire short story is very slim.

Lazy students bring down the discussions, and you can’t build on things if they don’t get the materials prepared beforehand.  Unless we were allowed to give the students “reading time” in each class to get back to speed, it’d be too much to expect of students that are too tired to keep their heads up when the classroom goes quiet for a minute. Still, it’s better to try and fail while doing something new than being trapped teaching some hellishly boring classes for months on end.

It seems I was the “go to” guy for information about picking high level books. My foreign coworker rubber stamped whatever I said when the director asked him before my arrival. If I don’t give it the thumbs up, it might not fly. It’s nice to have that kind of weight in the school. The shrieking lady didn’t get consulted. This is only the first in a series of choices that will mean how well my summer teaching schedule will turn out.

It amazes me that I can still get bored. Despite all the distractions in my life, all the ways I try to expand my attention and fill my time, I still can sit around bored from time to time.
I’ve got human interaction when I come home. I talk to my wife about her day, we talk about the future, plan things to do. We go out to meet friends occasionally when we both have the time and energy. We eat meals together that we plan, and go about our daily routine.

The attentive responsibilities of a job fill the majority of my day. They take me to my school, where I toil away, chipping at imperfections at speech with a chisel, attempting to churn out perfectly “American” sounding little clones of myself. I’ve developed an accent from being away from home for so long. While I am still interoperable with the models back home, so to speak, I’m departing from what “Americans” speak as I’m surrounded by Koreans, Canadians, South Africans, and others from all around the world. So even while I help my students, I too fall away from my stated goal.

I have a website I write, occasionally with long winded stories. Even if I work hard, and focus all my energy into trying to finish a story before a deadline, after I reach my goal, I still have that feeling that I’ll need a new goal to inspire me. The daily post. The forum. The RSS feed.

While the Internet can be a splendid amusement, it can also be an idiot box of the most entertaining type, infinite and self-manipulated. Without challenging yourself to find the next website, the next new idea, the next forum, you only drown as you surround yourself with the familiar, which leads to stagnation, and the death of new ideas.

I have a program that searches for the content I like, downloads it for me, and plays it without any interaction from myself. Who needs a television when I can have any video in any language from anywhere in the world ready for me when I fire up my computer? Hook up a catheter and a slow drip IV to me, and I could be amused for days without lifting a finger. But still, there is always a feeling that there is something new to try.

I can even carry endless amounts of news with me. Stories, videos, music, text. It all fits in my pocket, ready to amuse me when I step away from the computer. It’s always changing, it’s always current, and it’s free. I can listen to the latest news in my country while I walk my dog, or listen to an author read a story when I need my eyes for something other than reading a book.

I have games to play. I have games on phones. Games on portable machines of various sizes. Games for a television, for a table, for my ears, and for my eyes and brain. A trick, a puzzle, or a new way of looking at things. Something to keep me amused for a few more seconds while I go about my day.

But if writer’s block sets in, and I can’t think of something to post, I’ll sit, stumped, for hours. Bored. It’s a helpless feeling, as if all the amusements in the world still can’t entertain me, and I can’t find a way worth entertaining myself and, as a result, can’t entertain the others that rely on me to fill their days with yet another amusement.

Some people try religion, but that isn’t for me. Other people obsess about something with fanatical detail, a game, a movie, a lifestyle. It’s the same thing really. The love of rules to define how they should be spending their time. They find their own religion in details, and follow them with a devotion on par with any fanatic. Fanboyism. I can be guilty of this at times, swept up in an idea that gets the best of me, but these fevers never seem to hold me for long these days.

I suppose it comes with age, or perhaps I have a sort of detachment with the culture I most react with, but no longer live in. Just as you outgrow a toy or an idea, you eventually realize that anything you own will never make you truly happy. There is always something new, something over the horizon. I find myself bored with the chase at times, but if I ever fell off the treadmill, I don’t know what I would do.

Prologue:

I always knew that Korean parents were dedicated to having their children learn English at any cost, but it wasn’t until [tag]Zombies[/tag] struck that the idea was proved to me without a doubt. Today is the end of the world, and yet I’ve spent my day teaching like any other day. Well, perhaps it wasn’t just like any other day, with the barricades, the explosions, and everything else, but it’s pretty close. I’ll run it down for those of you still alive with Internet access not fighting the Zombie hoard yet…

Working at private academies would be the death of me. I just never knew it would be the death of so many others all around me. I’m blogging like it’s the end of the world…because it is….

Read the rest here, via download, as my first fictional short story (19 pages) based on my website.

Check in with other survivors at my elves are different.

If there is anyone left alive, that is….

[tag]bliteotw[/tag]