::A Geek in Korea::

Way back in the day, I found myself with a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, which was a cel shaded version of the classic Zelda series. Unlike a lot of people the style didn’t leave me in the cold, but the fact that I was trying to play a game in Japanese certainly did. I learned my lesson that no adventure game is worth struggling through an import guide, even if it was very unique and beautiful.

I learned my lesson from that experience, so I decided to wait for the English version of Phantom Hourglass to hit the Nintendo DS before I would purchase it. The Japanese box would sit in the store, tempting me, but after my vacation to Europe I was finally able to get a copy and play it for myself.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass takes place on the same water soaked world that Wind Waker had, and uses the same wonderful “cel shaded” style characters. Unique to the DS is that the entire game is played with the stylus. All the attacks, puzzles, and menus are navigated by touching the screen. It’s very, very easy to control the action, and I find myself getting lost in the game very easily. Everything happens in a much more tactile manner, as you pull the switches, or mark the path your boomerang will travel.

This game is heavy on puzzle elements, and there are several that will leave you scratching your head. One, the “Unmarked Island” puzzle was baffling due to a poor translation. When you use a “riddle” to build up an island, please, PLEASE translate it more accurately!

The game has a central “hub” style dungeon you must complete with your current set of tools. That will unlock information as to how to get to the next side dungeon. In these side dungeons is where you unlock the various gadgets and tools Link carries with him. You have to then return to the central dungeon to repeat the process.

You’d think that the backtracking would get tedious, but due to FANTASTIC level design, the tools you earn actually make each of the previous puzzles in the levels you’ve already visited much easier. Instead of taking a few minutes to solve, you can breeze through them in a few seconds.

The thing that does get tedious is the other unique thing in the “hub” dungeon. There is stealth game play, as well as a timer. Not only do you need to solve the puzzles to get to the next stage, but you have to worry about these semi-impervious Phantom creatures. One swipe with their sword will send you to the ground, and you’ll lose precious time. If you run out of time, the stage will drain your energy and you’ll end up like one of the corpses scattered around the floors.

Each time you dig deeper into the central dungeon, the levels get more difficult and require you to manage all your tools well. Half way through the game you can get a mid-point warp which will allow you to skip the more annoying easy dungeons. I’ve just gotten that, so I’m working on some of the more challenging (annoying) dungeons in the game.

The sailing and other “exploration” aspects of the game are very fun. There are pirate attacks, golden frogs to shoot, and random enemy encounters in the sea to keep you interested in sailing. You can hunt for sunken treasure, look for mermaids, and do all sorts of other things. Very often, your quests require you to go all the way across the sea. You can eventually figure out a way to travel on the winds that saves a lot of time.

I can’t believe that the Nintendo DS is capable of this sort of game. It looks gorgeous, the sound is classic Zelda series music, and the game play with the stylus is revolutionary. If you are a fan of the Zelda series, I’d highly recommend picking it up.

Internet Nerd Rant mode:

I’ve long told my wife that Korean websites need to start adopting well establish “standards” so that they can actually be functional for people. Every time I get locked out of a service just because it uses some non-conforming standard, I get annoyed. She’s not responsible for designing bad websites, but she doesn’t understand why her geeky husband gets all pissy about such a topic. I’m not sure Korean web designers understand the point of the Internet at times. It’s about access to information, not some “lets add crazy extensions” contest.

A dangerous mono-culture built around Internet Explorer and Active X plugins cut out anyone not willing to surf the “Microsoft” way. Basically, when Microsoft went around trying to split the web by designing proprietary systems that don’t play with others, Korea was one of the few countries that said, “That sounds great!”

Koreans adopted things early since the Internet boomed here, and often went with choices that have locked them into proprietary standards. There were very few considerations for “alternatives”, to put it politely. They’ve suffered as a result. I read that people couldn’t upgrade to Vista because Internet Explorer 7 broke how the major Korean portals were doing their business transactions.

Koreans have an increased rise of spyware and malware because the “target” victim clicks to allow any Active X popup they see. Whenever I use a public terminal, or a family member’s computer, the thing needs to be deloused from all the stuff running in the background most likely stealing passwords. This is a Windows problem, but the culture of “Everyone runs IE” certainly isn’t helping things.

The portal websites that most Koreans use break nearly every single design rule I learned studying the web in college. Granted, when I was learning the web, things weren’t great either, but damn, visit Daum, Naver, or G-Market and tell me these aren’t eyesores? (Heh, it’s almost as bad with Korean Yahoo and American Yahoo.)

It’s a cultural thing. I learned to use the web another way. Google minimalism and whatnot. If I see a page I can’t easily scan for information immediately, I’m gone.

Anyway, then thing that set me off on this topic was that when I was looking for the website for the local cinema, the Google result told me that the page in question would try to install spyware or malware. Without all the crazy extensions and plugins that Korean websites require, their website is barely functional. Would I have clicked some sort of popup to allow their stuff if I was on Windows? Possibly. Now even checking a movie on the web is actively dangerous to people’s machine.

Of course, I’m running Linux, and I’m on Firefox, so I’m not likely to be coming down with any of those sorts of virtual herpes that they probably would be installing on a Windows box. Still, the point remains. If people just learned proper web design, they wouldn’t need all that crazy crap.

The first day back from my vacation, I had a load of different tasks dumped in my lap.

“This class needed a new book. This class needs to be restructured. This class wants to use new materials when it was previously unstructured. Hey, and while you are at it, pat your head and rub your stomach to keep yourself busy for a bit. How’s the jetlag?”

I try to make the best use of my time when I went to the bookstore near our school. I found a book that one class made up of high school students could use as their new material. We’d be learning debate as a way for them to organize and use their opinions while speaking.

Taking a look at the material, I thought I could adapt and restructure it for my other pure speaking class…for third grade Elementary school students. The same book for Elementary school kids, and high school kids? Was I crazy? I went through the material and came to the honest conclusion it was the BEST material for both of them on the subject, all depending on what you focused on and what you wanted to use.

When I returned from the bookstore with only one book, my director gave me a look. “Maybe he’s too jetlagged to think straight, but didn’t you need another book?” I explained to her my plan, and she was cautiously on board for the experiment. She told me I needed to “sell” the high school students on the book, and that she wouldn’t make it a mandatory requirement for the first class because she thought they might want something different. It was up to me to tell them why this was the book I wanted to use.

Both of the classes needed a book, and there were no other debate books that didn’t require lots of background on previous topics that would slow down the lessons. When you teach the basic concepts of debate, like opinions, reasoning, and logic, you don’t need to go into detailed policy discussions. We would resolve pressing topics like “Best pet: Cat or Dog?” in the Elementary school class, while the High School class could talk about something more substantive. It’d work, because it would have to work.

Before the classes began, I ran through the book, picking the pages I’d use with the different classes. The high school students would go into more detail, of course, and they’d do the reading comprehension and writing exercises the younger students could skip. The debate “theory” would be broken down as easily as possible and spread out as much as possible to keep it fun for the younger students. The best part is, we could do mini debates the entire class to keep them talking.

The book had lots of cartoon pictures that got some of their points across with humor, but had dead on speaking fundamentals that I had learned in my communications classes in college. I had been teaching the students in BOTH classes speaking pointers, but it was great to have something written in a proper book to back me up for once.

I had both classes today and they were both successes. One student even wrote about ME in her “brainstorming activity” to think about a topic for a debate. She said I was a fun, good teacher with a funny cute dog. That was pretty awesome. The high school students went from their usual sleepy, “I’d try, but let me take a rest first” sort of attitude to an engaged, interested group of young ladies. Of course, I spent the entire time asking them what they thought about a series of topics for once, instead of trying to get them interested in a book thats as dry as any tome I’ve ever read.

I had a lot of fun being the devil’s advocate (go figure) and taking up ridiculous positions just for my elementary students to refute me. Even a “Dog vs. Cat” debate can get interesting if you get the students thinking about their positions carefully.

(When I can find the publisher and proper name of the book, I’ll try to come back and edit this post for the details. This is a book I’d recommend and pass on to others.)

The coworker who substituted for me while I was in Europe has his girlfriend in town for the next week. He’s currently substituting for my other long time coworker, who also went on vacation. He asked me for a favor sometime last week. Could I take a late night class from him so that he could spend some time with her?

Considering he is the reason I was able to go on vacation in the first place, it’s not like I could say no. I mean, one class? Sure. Of course, I’d have to stay two hours after my last class was over to teach it, but it’s fine. I still get paid for the class. What else am I going to be doing?

This was a middle school class. Fundamentally, those classes are about trying to channel the boredom and angst of young children into lessons slightly less amusing than a trip to the dentist. One of the best things about being a “substitute” teacher is that you can throw off the conventions of the class to a degree.

Before the class, during my two hour break, I had a solid viewing of a week worth of both The Colbert Report and The Daily Show. These are shows I never miss, but I went to the trouble of encoding them for my Cowon D2 so that I could have some entertainment. That sort of detached irony is very much my style of humor.

The mood I was in after watching the shows carried over into the classroom. These are classes that I never see because they are so late in the evening. I’ve gone home and posted on this blog most nights before they even begin. I’ve taught some of the students in summer intensives, or as intensive one on one classes for special test preparation, but never during the regular schedule.

The only thing I was told I needed to do was give the students a “five minute test”, and cover a chapter on Tiger Woods. While I was writing the question on the board about a positive role model, I pointed out that anyone lacking a role model could look up at the board to learn how to spell my name. One of my old students actually wrote my name as her personal role model because I, quote: “Teach English Hard.” Damn straight I do. That’s the only way to teach.

We talked about the students choices for role models, why Tiger Woods was famous, and the rest of the topics in the book. I also accidentally destroyed a girl’s faith in her role model by telling her that Kim Taehee had artificial teeth. I heard Kim Taehee had all her teeth pulled, then replaced with permanent dentures to keep a perfect smile. This is a rumor I heard from Koreans while traveling in Europe, but I can’t find any English confirmation. She was really crestfallen despite my assurance it was only a rumor.

Besides destroying the hope in a role model, we had a good time in class. The students were shouting out answers, entirely engaged, and wanted to participate. It was a lot of fun. It wasn’t “stay a few extra hours each day to teach them every time” fun, but good. I thought they would be a totally dead class, devoid of any enthusiasm, but they were better behaved than my normal classes. They were also happy to see someone new in class for once. All in all, it worked out well.

There is a television show called “TV Ngels” that runs late at night. This is an ongoing series, so the full title of the show at the moment is “TV Ngels Season 3: Korea vs Japan Sexy Battle”. With a title like that, how can you NOT watch it?

The concept of the show is this: Two teams of women, one set from Japan, one set from Korea, go to Thailand and compete in a bunch of elaborate male fantasy games. These games are basically as close as you can get to soft core porn without nudity, and are an excuse to put pretty women in skimpy clothes on television late at night.

The clip above is from the “Sexy Battle” section of the game. This takes up the most time of the show. The male stars are hooked up to heart monitors and monitoring devices, and when they reach certain points, or break eye contact, they have cold water dumped on their heads. The women dress up in various costumes and put on an elaborate show to get one of the two male stars to break these rules. One of the men that have to endure the woman’s shows is from Japan, the other from Korea. The hosts are a Korean man, and a woman that can also speak Japanese.

Between the pseudo-fetish strip tease shows, the girls compete in lamer mini-games. For example, they hide bikini tops and bottoms around the house, and two of the women race around in a scavenger hunt to find them. The women never wear anything more than bikinis anyway, so what’s the point of them finding MORE clothes?

Another game had the women swimming in skin tight jeans, then forced them to hop out of a pool, remove the pants, then ringing a bell before their competitor. *(The Korean women on the show swim like rocks with concrete feet.)

Winning the games gets them lame prizes. The prize for the first show I watched was 30,000 won to spend at a local market in Thailand. Imagine all the bananas you could buy! Talk about a cheap game show gift. They didn’t even offer the home version. (Running around in a bathroom in a bikini I guess.)

I’ve only seen the show twice with my wife. We were surfing channels and stopped to watch because of it’s ridiculous name. I think they were wise to invoke nationalism while trying to sell some T&A. Invoking nationalistic feelings with mediocre entertainment seems to work at times in this country.

As far as we can tell, they don’t “vote” any of the members of the team off. Is there a point system? Do people switch? Does it matter? There is no real point between the competition except the pretext for having women in bikinis do things on camera and the elaborate strip teases. The women may not be able to swim, but they look good in front of the camera, so no one is going home if their team loses a round(?).

The “behind the scenes” footage they show had a casting selection process where they told the women to audition for the part by dancing, singing, and basically shaking their bodies for the camera. It’s basically “Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball 2: The Television Program” sans actual volleyball.

People will got to elaborate lengths for what amounts to soft core porn in this country.

Our new curriculum has added more wonderful books from “American” classrooms. I’m not a history major, but a lot of what I’m teaching are very bold sorts of lies. Lies of omission, lies of simplification, lies of revision. I know the books are targeted at second grade students in the United States, but wow, it’s pretty crappy to have to teach to a bunch of Korean children.

Not every lesson is filled with historical whoppers. There are units about communities, neighbors, as well as map reading and other practical lessons that aren’t bad. I’d be fine with teaching those sorts of lessons if that’s what we did the entire book.

It’s just when they brush over the history of the colonies and indigenous populations I take issue. There is a page with a beseeching Pocohantas protecting an injured settler from an American Indian about to smash him on the head a second time. Pocahontas has her hand up in protest as she cradles the settler’s head on her knee. According to the book, Pocahontas made the American Indians “friends” with the English settlers because she could speak English. They follow it up with a question like this:

“A new friend in school can’t speak English. What will you do to help her?”

Subtle. People need to speak English to be helpful. People that don’t speak English will probably bash you in the head. Nice. Simple as that. Who wouldn’t want to be friends with English speaker? Only someone that tries to hit people in the head with a club. This is what American second graders learn?

I know Koreans are indoctrinated in propaganda extra early in their “Society” classes as well. Young students tell me that Japanese people (or Americans, or Afghani…) people are nothing more than baby eating savages depending on the political climate of the country at the time.

When things get heated, I just try to keep my baby consumption to moderate levels until the crisis at hand blows over. Once the teachers in their elementary schools have a more politically viable target, I can go back to my barbecue baby back ribs in peace. (What…that’s what they are, aren’t they?)

It’s sick, and I hate that sort of indoctrination, but living in a country with an overwhelmingly dominant homogeneous culture, it’s not exactly surprising that minority and outside opinions sometimes getting less than a fair shake. Students have this coming at them from all sides, and I don’t feel good about participating in it, even if I soften the blow from time to time by calling the Pilgrims, “Funny hat people”.

The book isn’t all bad. There are interesting profiles of minorities and other people in history that made a difference in shaping America politically. None of that is very relevant to Korean students. It’s also so simplified and so revision friendly that all context is destroyed. Of course, that’s not what the book was designed for since it wasn’t explicitly made for export, so to expect anything relevant is pointless anyway. I do the best I can with the “good” materials, try to work the best I can with the “bad” materials, and simply ignore anything completely pointless or down right bad.

There were a lack of options when choosing a book for this level with this topic, so I should be happy I have any materials at all. At least I grew up with the history they’ve doctored in the book. My Canadian coworker has extra problems trying to swallow the stuff they throw in since they have their own cultural ideologies embodied in their own historical retelling.

If someone is going to teach lies about America to small impressionable children, it might as well be me.

Paris! Mimes! Snooty waiters! People with fashionable clothing! Lots of stinking cheeses and delicious wines! Serial rapist skunks!

Paris is a lot of things, but it wasn’t the land of stereotypes I was expecting. The entire trip, I didn’t see a single mime. Of course, Marceau Marcel is dead. Perhaps they were all in silent mourning somewhere. It would be silent, I suppose.

In fact, the waiters won’t exceptionally snooty, the people were only somewhat fashionable (London beats them hands down), and the fromage store was definitely pungent, but often closed and avoidable. We didn’t have any wine, but I’m sure it was delicious if you had the budget.

The bakery we went to for the tart above was not far from the Musee d’Orsay. Paris had delicious baked goods, but this was a luxurious place that mostly served exquisitely delicate looking desserts. Walking down the case made me drool. All the bakeries we visited in Paris were exceptionally good, but this was by far the best snack I had on the trip. It also cost like 2.85 Euro, so it better be good.

Outside the subway station, directly across from where we were eating this delicious treat was a homeless man begging for change. He was one of the few beggars not using a dog to gain sympathy in Paris. We were also being attacked by pigeons. Rather than let the delicious treat be soiled by a bird, I bravely ate it all. Someone has to be a hero at times like these.

After Paris, there was nothing left to do but to get on a plane, head back to Hong Kong, and then get to Incheon Airport as swiftly as possible. The flight returning only had 93 people on board, so we all had a row to ourselves. It was splendid. I finally discovered how you can have a comfortable flight: Remove more than 75% of the other passengers.

All in all, our trip was great, with no major difficulties. Regularly scheduled programing may now resume.

I knew that the “Gutsy Gibbon” upgrade for Ubuntu Linux was sometime this month. It’s fairly easy to know when to expect an upgrade: Add six months since the last release. Feisty Fawn was 7.04, so that would make the next release, Gutsy Gibbon, get a release sometime in October (7.10).

Turns out, Gutsy FINAL isn’t due out until October 18th, but they’ve released a “Release Candidate” version that’s probably going to be the final version baring any major fuckmuppetry. Since the command to upgrade was LITERALLY one line of short code, I figured “What the hell? What’s the worst that can happen now that my data is in its own partition anyway?”

Or, maybe I just hate myself and wanted a problem to fix.

Anyway, the upgrade commenced as planned for an hour or so, then it started to throw up all sorts of errors relating to my video card drivers. Crap. I had installed some third party drivers, but the release wanted to remove them and found them broken somehow. It suggested I file a bug report about not being able to uninstall what it wanted. The final warning it gave me was rather ominous, “This upgrade may leave your system in an unusable state.”

Oh crap.

My pictures are well backed up, and I’ve got my data separate from my architecture, so in theory, if worst came to worse, I could just reinstall and not lose any data. Oh well, let’s see what happens when I reboot.

The computer started, but the graphics weren’t the proper resolution. It was in “Safe Mode”, and the title bar of all my windows had disappeared. I couldn’t close, resize, or move anything. A quick search of the Ubuntu Forums fixed that problem rather easily. I switched from Compiz Fusion handling my windows back to Gnome’s Metacity. I’ve lost my eyecandy for the moment, but I’ll find some tutorial somewhere eventually. The point is now my system was no longer “unusable”, but slightly less pretty for a bit. Someone’s got to help me find more Emerald themes to make Compiz Fusion pretty again.

I added the “fast user switching” to my menu. This is probably the most useful new feature I’ve discovered at the moment. Now my wife can quickly log into her account. I also had her default language change to Korean, which should make her more comfortable in front of the computer, but make my life hell if I have to dig out any information from her menu.  I’m still the user that can make and delete accounts, so if worse comes to worse I’ll try setting it back to English or make a new one if I must fiddle with her stuff in the future.

Things still seem to be working relatively well. There might be some hidden glitches here and there that might get fixed when the final version is released next week, but it was a good enough upgrade for me that I didn’t need to reformat.

Most of the pictures from the German set are in the Lego store in the city of Cologne. I’m not actually someone that has space, or time, to play with Lego anymore. Sure, if someone donated thousands of dollars worth of Lego, I might play with them, but I’m much too busy and too little patience to build, say, the Death Star, or the Millennium Falcon.

I was given permission to get anything in the store, as long as I could carry it with me. This is the same mandate I made with every purchase my wife got. She could get anything she wanted, as long as she was willing to carry it to the next city. I settled on some magnets, and later in the day I ended up with a book too.

By this time, the trip was winding down, and the baguettes were getting mighty stale. Next stop, Paris!

Switzerland was the most amazingly friendly place ever. People would walk around with smiles on their faces. This is very different than Korea.

The last time I saw that in Korea was when they were sitting on the top of the World Cup standings for their group in 2002. People would walk around grinning all the time. If you tried smiling at people all the time now, people would look at you like you had a mental problem.

Not only that, but when you got lost in Switzerland, you only had to hold open a map for a minute before people would stop, ask you where you wanted to go, then walk with you to the location explaining the sights along the way. Not only that, but they could probably explain the directions in four different languages.

Koreans have developed GPS devices in their phones, possibly because they don’t want to have to ask strangers on the street directions at any time. They also avoid people with maps most of the time.

It’s the subtle things like that remind you that you are on vacation.