::A Geek in Korea::

We went over to my mother-in-law’s house. She had made kimchi for us, and since we have nothing in the way of side dishes to eat with rice, we needed to pick it up as soon as possible. It’s been a lazy week, with my wife working late and me getting home extra early due to my split schedule. I’ve reverted to bachelor cooking for myself. I’ve fought the urge to order pizza and live like a complete bum, but we haven’t had a decent dinner together all week.

Anyway, we hung out with mom for a while. She immediately got up and started cutting fruit for us, even though we had just arrived from dinner stuffed. When pressed about why she was trying to stuff us further, she admitted she was just “bored” and wanted something to do with her hands while she talked. I fought down a peach and some other fruit, but couldn’t finish off the plate.

While we were hanging out watching some overacted Korean television drama, my brother in law dropped by the house too. He’s living with the parents for a little bit between jobs. He and I chatted a little bit, he asked about Europe, and the dog. The plan is for him to reside in our apartment while we are away. He’s going to be a live in doggy-sitter. It’s not pure altruism on his part, I’m sure he’ll relish in being out of his parents house but still staying rent free.

When it came time to go home, he offered to drive us with his mom’s car. He’s got a license, but he isn’t driving much because he doesn’t own his own car. The license was a requirement for finding and applying for jobs.

A few weeks ago, when I was riding in their family car, I saw they had a “navigation device”. My mother in law had gotten it for free for using a specific bank card to purchase gas. Since she drives a lot at work, she got this sweet prize.

Navigation devices are fairly ubiquitous here. In polling just the parking lot outside the apartment when I walk Yoshi, roughly 40% of the cars have some sort of computer assisted driving device mounted on their windshield.

If you’ve ever driven to a new place in Korea, or needed to find a specific address, it’s easy to understand why they are so useful. There are so many signs, and so many poorly marked buildings, these sorts of devices are essential to prevent getting lost. Korea’s assignment of building numbers and addresses is nearly random. It’s assigned by order of completion in the area. Also, most streets don’t have NAMES. Streets are usually referred to as “Next to this or that building” or “Intersection of these apartment complexes” Yeah. It’s rough getting lost if you aren’t familiar with the city.

Anyway, my mother in law’s sweet navigation system isn’t a first generation model by any stretch of the imagination. These devices are highly evolved in Korea, and they have a wealth of features. This gadget had a large, 4.3 inch touch screen. It could plot a course in any major city from anywhere via GPS. It could receive both antenna and digital broadcast television, as well as had “well being radio” that had calming music that was supposed to help you quit smoking.

There was also a Norebang, or singing room feature! Choose a song, and it would connect to a database and pull up the lyrics. They are all organized in a national song database, so if you go to a location to sing, the same number would pull up the same song, whether it’s in the car or in the singing room itself!
Imagine, not only can you sing in the car, but you can pick the song, it will provide lyrics, and grade your performance afterwards. Any you can do this while driving. Even while you are singing, the directions from the navigation device will cut in telling you when to make turns or change lanes. Really, really awesome.

This sort of entertainment is for bored passengers, and not for the driver. I couldn’t keep my eyes on the road as the passenger. I was having too much fun with this neat toy. If I ever end up getting a car in Korea, this sort of thing will be a must purchase for me.

I was pleasantly surprised twice at work today. This doesn’t happen all that often.

First was when I found out that “level testing” would be standardized, so I didn’t have to prepare anything this month for putting the proper students in the proper classes. As a second bonus, the testing period coincided with one of my classes, which means I got to stick around and help administer the test instead of trying to teach a bunch of unruly students for an hour. Sweet. The students took the “PELT” test, which turns up THIS website as the top result in Google when I went looking for more information.

This PELT test, since it’s standardized, is a more fair way to place students. Or, it would be, if some of the students hadn’t taken variations of the tests previously. One student told me she had taken the PELT I, PELT II, and PELT III, and had already started the “TOEIC BRIDGE” series. We were using a PELT II test booklet for the examination. This only proves that no matter how hard you study, and no matter your age, someone’s made an English test to take your money.

The second surprise came in the form of the easiest question EVER from my director: “Can you finish your books by the end of the month if I give you an extra day of vacation?”

Who is going to say, “No,” to that sort of question?!

OF COURSE I said I was willing to “suffer” one day of vacation if it meant teaching my books a little faster. This extra vacation stems from the fact that we have two sets of classes. Monday/Wednesday/Friday, and Tuesday/Thursday. A national holiday falls on a Wednesday, and the school’s “vacation” was supposed to be a single Friday later in the month.

This means that the M/W/F students were getting vacation more than the T/Th students, and parents were complaining. Students were complaining they were missing out of vacation too, and our director put it on our shoulders to get the materials finished in the same amount of time.

In preparation, for my last class when I heard the news, I increased their workload by a few pages. I’ve got to add on a few pages all around to compensate for the change, but really, it’s not big of a deal.

It’s nice to get a few surprises at work from time to time that don’t make you want to rip your hair out.

I have a notoriously lazy, stubborn student in my lowest level class for today. All the teachers know he’s a total pain in the butt to have in class, but there isn’t much you can do. As long as he keeps coming to class and paying the bill, he’s going to be there. He’s much younger than his classmates, but isn’t going to be placed in a level more suitable for his age. He’s even worse when he’s feeling bored and unchallenged.

When I taught him Tuesday, he had gotten me so frustraited I had him escorted out of class. He is a walking ball of smug wasted potential. He could do so much, yet he wants to get in everyone’s way. He had to watch the lesson for ten minutes outside, via video, before he was allowed back in the room to write down the homework. Everyone has to do that together, but he ran out of the room before I could check to see he had actually written down what he was supposed to do.

I ran into his brother, who I also teach and really like, and passed on a message to their mother that the boy got in trouble and hadn’t been doing his homework. The message got through, and today he had his homework done, but did everything else in his power to be an obnoxious little ass.

He was being watched on the camera, so he knew he had to sit down all the class. This is the only single thing he did the entire day. He had no pencil. A classmate gave him a pencil, but he refused it until I made him keep it to use. He wouldn’t turn the page of his book.  He wouldn’t read. He wouldn’t answer any question, in English from me, or in Korean from his classmates, other than by saying, “I don’t know,” in Korean over and over again. If that really was the case, he should be moved down, but everyone knows he’s just doing it to be annoying. I’m lobbying really hard for him to be “left behind” when we level students next term. It’s worked for some other students, and it might get through to him too.

Even his classmates were like, “Wow, you’re an immature ass today.” His classmates are 9, and aren’t exactly refined. Even THEY thought he was being immature. They said my face was red trying to explain a simple thing to the boy. Why bother? He didn’t want to learn. I didn’t get violent, but even raising my blood pressure to bother with the inanity of his behavior wasn’t worth it.

I decided I had a new approach. “There are five students in this class, and you. You are no longer worth my time. I will teach the five other students. You will sit and be in your own little universe. Do the homework when I check. Don’t bother us. They want to learn. You don’t. Be quiet. Sit.”

It was the last time I addressed him other than to check that he had properly written down all of his homework.

He “got my goat” today. My director said that it’s a fight not worth fighting, and that he’s too stubborn to bother trying to change. I said as long as he doesn’t bother anyone else and does the homework, he can sit in the class. I plan on learning how to use the video system in the school so I can make sure when I toss him out in the future he won’t miss anything and I won’t have to bother anyone else.

I think I’ve got to approach him a bit like a “finger trap”. As soon as I start pushing, I get stuck. I’ll just keep my finger away from the problem. When he gets annoying, I toss him out to watch me via video. He still gets his chance to learn, and he can’t bother anyone.

What’s this pencil case I saw on a student’s desk all about? In Konglish, when you phonetically try to rearrange the English characters into words in Korean, “Da Viche Coat” sounds very similar to what “Da Vinci Code” would be mangled in Korean. I guess this went English to Korean back to English again, if the mistranslation wasn’t intentional to prevent people from suing.

What would Da Vinci’s coat LOOK like? Would it have the secrets of the universe hidden in it’s inner lining or something? I smell sequel!

Cayetano Ferrer is in Daejeon, making the signs disappear. We certainly have enough in the city, no one will miss them. Wonderful! I know where this advertisement turned art is located. I’ll try to track it down and take a picture for myself this weekend if possible before it disappears.

For Daejeon residents: This is the bridge going to Expo from Manyongdong, which isn’t more than 10 minutes away by bike from my apartment. I used to ride past this sign once a week. This is AMAZING.

My wife and I don’t drink coffee or caffeinated drinks. We do look for deals, and when my wife found a cooler bag with insulation that was stuffed full with juice drinks, we purchased it. We found out when we got home that there happened to be some cans of capuchino drinks we would never drink. It’s not like we bought them on purpose. They were included in the price of the drinks we did want.

“Why not give them away at school? The other teachers might like to drink them,” I said.

My wife was skeptical, “Give it away to coworkers?”

“Sure, why not.”

I packed the drinks with my school gear and forgot about her strange reaction to my decision to give them away. She wanted to give them away at her school, but since it was my idea, I stuck to my resolution to give them away where I worked instead.

As I was walking out the door, she stopped me and told me what to say when I offered these cans of drinks to my coworkers. In no way was I to suggest that I was giving away the drinks because I got them with another purchase. I had to explicitly state that I had bought these drinks as a gift to my coworkers.

This struck me as odd. First of all, who would ask why I was giving the office some drinks? If I see some food or a gift from a student, I ask who gave it to me, not why. Who is so deeply suspicious of a gift that they would think to say anything other than, “Thank you?”

I promised I would state, for the record, that the drinks were a gift, even if I thought it was silly.

Koreans are NOTORIOUS for re-gifting. It’s unsaid that most of the soap and shampoo I get as gifts will end up at my Mother-in-law’s house. People don’t even care in my wife’s family. It’s just practical redistribution of items. We don’t all question each other as to the source or reason of purchase if we are given something we can use.

I walked into the door at the office and dropped the drinks off for everyone on the communal “food” table. The only person in the room was the rude Korean woman I don’t like. I set the drinks down as I unloaded my bag. “These drinks are gifts to everyone, please drink one if you would like.”

“Why did you bring them? Did you buy them for us or…?”

Ah HA! So that’s the kind of person that would ask about the source of free drinks, even as a gift. I couldn’t believe my wife knew the first question out of someone’s mouth would be. She hadn’t even said thank you before she started  trying to find out about the gift. Unbelievable.

I lied, “Oh, no, I bought them to give to everyone. Please, drink one.” I think she’d rather choke on her own bile than actually take a gift I offered. I probably should have drank one myself to show I hadn’t slipped in any poison after the look of suspicion she shot me. She didn’t believe my gesture of good was worth believing.

After my first class my director thanked me for bringing the drinks to school, and she put them in the communal refrigerator. It turns out my foreign coworker doesn’t drink coffee in any form either. I’m not sure the afternoon Korean teachers knew about the offer, as they arrived after the drinks had been squirreled away by the director. I don’t know if ANYONE actually drank one, but it’s not like I’m going to worry about it. A gift given is best forgotten about.

I have a bad habit of restlessly installing games and utilities from the web without sometimes knowing what they will do to my system. Installing and uninstalling applications in the Synaptic menu is so easy, sometimes it’s a disservice. “Oh well, I’ll just uninstall it if it sucks and try something else” is my mentality when using Linux these days. It’s really that easy, and it’s encouraged to try something that “works for you”. That’s what freedom is all about.

The problem, oddly, wasn’t FROM Linux being too easy to install, but from Windows games being too easy to install too. I had been using WINE for a little while to play Blizzard games. I’ll get in a phase when I want a really focused RTS experience, but then realize I suck at those games and will uninstall them after a week.

The problem is, installing and uninstalling in WINE isn’t as straightforward as it is in Windows, so I get lots of orphan files sitting around not working anymore. If I uninstall a Linux .deb file, I can check to see if it’s gone, or if the configuration files are still around easily enough. Even when I go digging into WINE’s folder, I still can’t get rid of all the files I need to remove a game from my system. I’m not sure if Uninstalling is unsupported in WINE, or I just don’t know the procedure. (Almost positive it’s the later.).

Anyway, spurred on by a Kubuntu user in the forum, I installed the Kubuntu desktop with Synaptic. It’s literally a few clicks to install an entire desktop environment. No wonder I get in trouble with how easy Linux can be sometimes.

I wanted to check out Kubuntu again, as I hadn’t used it in a while, and KDE is getting a lot of hype these days with their impending KDE 4 release. The install went smoothly, but I realized that I have a lot of duplicate applications in my menus. I got rid of most of the applications I didn’t use, but hit a conflict with media players. The KDE application kaffeine tried to play all my media files, but didn’t display video. Unacceptable. Even uninstalling or removing configuration files didn’t solve the problem.

“Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.”

In a move that is probably complete overkill, I backed up all my pressing new material that I wanted to keep. I went ahead and completely redid all the partitioning and reinstalled everything. However, since I had decided I was in this for the long haul, I nuked my Windows partition along with my previous Linux install. Windows free? Almost.

Since I was reinstalling, I’m trying to set up a multiuser environment for the first time. I set up a separate /home partition for our personal files so that I don’t have to lose my own information if I ever need to reinstall windows again. This is highly recommended to do when installing Linux the first time, but with my Windows partition sitting around wasting space I never did it before.

The ultimate goal is to get my wife using Linux on her own. This is not a simple undertaking. My wife isn’t fatally tech allergic, but it might give her a rash from time to time. She doesn’t have any background in computers, so it might actually be easier for her to learn Linux. She doesn’t have to “unlearn” any bad habits like I did.

I went and installed VirtualBox so she can use Internet Explorer to surf Korean websites from within a virtualized Windows XP environment. Since it’s “in a box”, she can’t really break it, and there is no virus threat. I don’t need Internet Explorer on my desktop, so I don’t need to install it twice or fiddle with permissions. Besides setting out a few icons for her to use Openoffice, she’s all set now.

The idea is that I can set up the computer for her so it “just works” without having to worry about her messing up some of the tweaking I like to do. She gets what she needs without the ability to break anything (permissions!), and I get what I need as well. Our files will be separated from each other, so we don’t need to worry about messing with each other’s work.

That’s the idea, at least. I’m not exactly a sysadmin. I got the box back up and running the way it used to (without all the extra applications in the menus) in a few hours. With everything still being “fresh” the system seems a lot more snappy and responsive.

I’m slowly learning keep my finger off that “install” button. If it isn’t in Synaptic, or run as a standalone application, I’m not going to go out of my way to make it work. At least, I won’t this week.

After a patient wait, the first season of Battlestar Galactica (배틀스타 갤럭티카) is being shown as a marathon on Fox Korea. Check here to see the listings. I’ve been a going crazy waiting for this show to finally air in Korea on a network. Without a series being aired, the chance I’d ever find it for sale on DVD to watch with my wife is extremely small. It’s not for sale in this region currently, and I can’t find a place with Korean subtitles that feature this show.

It’s either watch the series on television, or on DVD if I want my wife to watch it with me. I’ve converted two English speaking coworkers to the show, but it’d be entirely more awesome to get my wife watching “That show with Cylons and space ships”.

We went shopping for a new fan for the hot apartment. The fan has a remote control! Perfect when you don’t want to get out of bed, or off the couch during an episode. After the shopping, I sat my wife down and more or less forced her to start watching the show with me.

I haven’t watched the first season in years, so it’s great as a refresher, and my wife has never seen it. She doesn’t get into science fiction, but she’s stuck around. I’m totally geeking out and planning to watch the entire marathon. I don’t have anything else to do tomorrow anyway.

It’s too hot around here. Summer has really arrived in it’s humid, hot, sweaty glory, and we in the household are all suffering for it. My wife is considering paying for an air conditioning install for the apartment, and Yoshi is sitting in front of the fan as anyone else these days. I’m coming back from walks with Yoshi drenched in sweat. I’ll shower, then by the time I need to go to work, I should probably be showering again. It’s just plain HOT.

My director let the foreign teachers in on the “pace” we were trying to finish our book series. We’ve got two distinct sets of classes. Intensive classes in the morning, and and our regular afternoon classes that we have merged into giant classes.

We chose the same books for both sets of classes at similar levels, but need to go at different speeds. Intensives finish the same book the regular classes do in four weeks, as opposed to six weeks. This means my pace for regular classes has been much too fast for the past two weeks.

Instead of flying through ten pages of work in class, I’m forced to cut back to four pages. This leaves a little time to fudge around trying to fill time. Today, I wrote some palindromes on the board so we could chat about them with our free time. I’ve got quite a few English palindromes memorized now, but my students find them really fun. They would exclaim, “Oh! How surprising!” in Korean when I pointed out how they read the same back to front.

In my first class, they taught me a Korean palindrome. “소주만병만주소”, “so-ju-man-byeug-man-ju-so” which means “Give me ten thousand bottles of soju”. That’s a wonderful phrase. Not incredibly practical for most people, but I’m sure it’s been uttered from time to time without people realizing it’s unique.

In my later classes, I taught them how to try to make their own palindromes. It’s not that easy to do. While they were working on their vocabulary tests, I happened to make my first original palindrome. “Step on no pets”.* They were really impressed.

The students in that class taught me two more Korean palindromes:

“수박이박수 ” “su bak ee bak su“, which means “The watermelon claps.”

“여보안경안보여” “yu bo an kyeong an bo yu“, would be “I can’t see my glasses” or “I can’t find my glasses.”

Part of the fun of palindromes is trying to translate or explain what the expression means. The children’s phrases were very simple and easy for me to understand. We managed create a few simple palindromes in class. It was fun to see the students think about words in another way. I also covered ambigrams which are WAY to hard to try to do on a white board.

*I challenge anyone else to make one better and post them in the comments. Originals only!

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nej4xJe4Tdg[/video]

Bonus: Youtube fun with Weird Al. I need to show this to my students!