::A Geek in Korea::

We had to set up our schedule for the move. In typical Korean fashion, it’s actually impossible to do anything scheduled more than a week in advance. We called places and asked them to estimate the moving cost, and no one would come over to the apartment to see how much stuff we had until it was a week before the move. This “just in time” sort of attitude is also reflected in our remodeling. If you think buying a house, moving in, and remodeling a house are stressful, imagine having to do all of it in the same week.

The people living in our new apartment move out, and a day later we’re in there painting all the doors ourselves. We hope to get that finished in a day or two, because the we need to finish before the wall paper hangers arrive. If we can paint without worrying about making a mess, we’ll have no problems. I just hope we can get it done in time. We’re saving a huge amount by painting ourselves, and since we can make a mess and get the wall paper ripped out immediately, it shouldn’t be TOO hard.

We’ve only been in our apartment twice. Once to look at it, once to bring my mother in law to check it out for final approval. We’re deciding everything we need to do to remodel it blind because we can’t set up a place to put our things after we’ve moved in. We either remodel while the house is empty or don’t do it at all. It’s kind of nuts that it has to be this way, but we’re doing the best that we can. There is just no time to get moved in and decide things slowly. It’s all or nothing, quick quick quick. It’s just the Korean way.

Picking out the wall paper was a marathon 3 hour color session. We picked colors for the “base”, then one for the “point”. The “point” is the crazy colored wall in each room that sets of each area’s colors. This is the current Korean style of designing a room’s style. For example, you put a dull wallpaper behind the television so your eyes can rest, but a “point” paper behind a couch to start conversation and make the furniture stand out. It makes no sense to me, and we’ll probably regret everything we chose in a year’s time. The walls will be silk or regular, depending on the room, and we’ve also got different rules depending on where it is in the house. We have a nice neutral color on three walls, then behind a bed or sofa an explosively colorful wall with designs and colors. It doesn’t matter if these “point” walls clash with each other.

I was very tired by the end of this whole process. Every time I made a suggestion, I got shot down by some sort of evolving rule about color combinations, styles, and “darkness and brightness”. I got one “point” wallpaper pick through for the computer room, and it might not make it through the final approval process. My wife claimed she has final right of approval, and I conceded gleefully. Do you think I want to hear about an ugly wall for the next five years that I picked out? Hell no. I only made the demand that we can’t have flowers on every wall, but she wore me down. There will be at least two walls with flowers but nothing very “Korean” that will be instant kitsch.

By comparison, the lighting, fixtures, and flooring took twenty minutes to pick out. We found a nice frosted glass, the cheapest set of light switches that worked, some mock wood floor, and told them to come the day after our wall paper was set up. The wall paper guys claimed it will only take a day to hang the entire apartment. I have no idea how they work so fast, but it must be because of the standardized layouts of apartments.

After the lighting guys are done, we’ll call the air conditioner crew. Hopefully they can set it up the day we move in. We still can’t remember the house address off the top of our heads, and yet we’re dropping several thousand dollars to remodel it.

The movers came to check out our apartment. Despite the fact we’re literally moving across the street, they’ll be costing us a good bit of money to pack everything for us and move it. We got a few different quotes, but every move we’ve had has been progressively more expensive.

Hopefully everything will go off without a hitch. We’ll both be working and trying to fit in the moving preparations into our schedule after work. Tomorrow we go to get the deposit check for the house. It will be the most money I’ll ever had in one place at one time in my pocket.

In a week, we’ll be living in our new apartment. It seems crazy to imagine. It’s been a long, stressful road to house ownership, but it’s a first step to a more secure future, so it’s something we have to do.

I was riding the subway to go downtown with my wife to look at wallpaper for the new house. While we were riding, the subway was filled to near capacity. We had to go several stops, so I wanted to sit down, listen to The Bugle, and wait until we got to our destination. I was scouting out different places that might open up at each spot. Every time there was always someone waiting to snatch the seat when someone left.

Sensing we had simple picked a bad spot to stand to wait for a seat, I went off on my own to find a seat. I was in luck, as a group of teens exited in mass, and I grabbed the last seat that wasn’t snatched up by the other riders.

I was sitting in my spot, clearly listening to my headphones, not paying attention to anyone. Then, the elderly man next to me patted my leg and said, “Hanguk mal chal haseyo?”. “Do you speak Korean well?”

This is ALWAYS a way to get on my bad side. By asking in Korean if I speak well, I can either come off as an idiot and say, “No”, or come off as an over confident person that’s going to have to answer a bunch of other annoying questions by saying, “Yes”.

The “correct” answer is always modesty (false or not). You say, “A little”, “Cho-kum?” in Korean, shrug, then wait while they compliment you. This is the routine. This is what most people do to get out of the situation. It’s a total lose-lose situation when an old guy asks you that sort of question. It’s slightly more acceptable when it’s an attractive woman, but not much.

Imagine walking up to any foreigner on the street of your home town and asking them if they speak English, or whatever the language the majority of the population might be. See, you wouldn’t because you know that makes the foreigner uncomfortable, and it makes you look like a jackass. Here, that means you are “curious” and possibly “adventurous” to talk to someone different.

I dislike being touched by strangers, and really dislike being bothered when I’m listening to something that requires me to rewind my podcast. I took one look at the guy, said, “Yes, I speak Korean well.” Before he could even say another word, I spoke to him in English while pointing to my headphones and said, “You can CLEARLY see I’m listening to something. Please, do not bother me.”

Had I said this in Korean, I probably would have been using rude language that I learned from one of my bad students. It’s probably best if the guy couldn’t understand what I said and my face got the “I’m annoyed, don’t bother me” message across.

I then turned my head to ignore the man. I waited for the next stop on the subway with great intensity. When the door opened, I left the subway, walked up the side, and re-entered the train next to my wife, careful not to turn around to see if anyone was staring at me. I ducked into the slot reserved for motorized wheel chairs so that no one that saw me speaking to the man would see I got back on the subway. I just didn’t want to be hassled again.

My wife insists I didn’t do anything rude or wrong by not indulging this man in his questions. She said I should just lie next time and say, “No.” I hate being talked down to by old strangers on the street telling me obvious things. I also really hate being corrected in Korean for speaking Korean poorly. The sheer fact that I can understand that I am being scolded should be enough effort to give me a free pass to ignore the scolding itself. I’m not going to invest in ridiculously oversized headphones just to get people to leave me alone either.

My best bet, ironically, is to just stand on the subway. Far fewer old people bother me then.

My school, like every one before it, has now instituted a “No Korean in class” policy. The difference between this and every other school I’ve ever taught is how they explained it to the students, and how it will actually be enforced this time around.

My director went into each class and said, “Your mothers and fathers paid a lot of money to send you to this school. It’s very expensive to study here. While I know it’s hard to study with foreign teachers, and you want to speak Korean to try to understand what they say, you shouldn’t. You should speak English so you can use your parents money the best you can. If you are speaking Korean in class, you aren’t practicing English. If you aren’t practicing English, you are wasting your parents money. Your parents work hard to make money so you can come to the school and study English the best you can. By speaking Korean you are wasting their money. They work so hard for you, why would you do that?”

Once she laid down the massive guilt trip on the students, she went to work explaining the policy. “You can’t speak Korean in class. You can’t speak to each other in Korean. You can’t ask questions in Korean. You can’t complain, or speak Korean at all in class. No exceptions. If you speak Korean, the teacher will give you a warning. If you speak Korean again, you’ll get a second warning. If you speak a third time, at all, in Korean, you have to stay an extra hour after school and write a punishment. If you continue, you have to speak you have to stay even longer!”

The kids had some questions about this, but the change in behavior was instantaneous. I had warned students not to speak Korean before the director came in. I started warning students and writing their name up on the board. One student had spoke Korean TEN times before the director had entered to explain what was going on. His classmates had caught on right away. This intensely dense, poor listener, instantly stopped speaking Korean after he found out he’d have to stay an hour later.

Classes that I used to have to keep quiet by repeated raising my voice were speaking entirely in English after this 10 minute speech. It was AWESOME.

The only problem with this policy is when students start ratting each other out and saying, “Oh! Oh! She spoke KOREAN! QUICK! MAKE HER STAY!” I told all my students I will not be “Korean police”. If I hear it, and I get annoyed by it, I’ll enforce the rule. If someone mixes their vocabulary up and says a word of Korean by mistake, I’m not throwing them into detention.

We’re still working out the details, but right now, it’s working really well. This is the first school where a “No Korean” policy had taken hold the first day without any shouting or anger by the students. I like watching the previously noisy students squirm as they try to explain something now. I also like the threat of throwing someone into detention.

Today I was finalizing some of the details for my friends’ visit to the Demilitarized Zone. We will be going via the USO tour, and there is a series of rules you must agree to and a procedure to follow to be allowed to go on the tour.

If you bring a Korean on the tour, like when I brought my wife a few years back, they have to get a criminal background check. This is so that they wouldn’t decide that they’d rather run to North Korean than serve time in South Korea. I guess this is a logical sort of thing to request to prevent an international incident from occurring.

When I went last time, they had made a big deal about the “Dress Code” we had to follow. Since my family was going in the dead of winter, we’d be wearing coats the entire trip. It wasn’t hard to follow a dress code, but I wanted to review the code for my friends so that they didn’t wear anything that would get them kicked off the tour.

Here is what is not allowed on the tour according to an official document. North Korea and South Korea, through the UN had to come up with the following rules about proper attire at the DMZ:

• Sleeveless shirts, exposed midriffs, tank tops.
• No shirts with insulting, provocative, profane, or demeaning representations.
• No frayed cut off shorts, gym shorts, or shorts that expose the buttocks.
• Nothing sheer.
• No sports uniforms or athletic clothing of any kind.
• No shower shoes or “flip flops. Sandals with straps on the back are fine.
• Items of military clothing not worn in a uniform.
• No over-sized “gangster” clothing. No baggy pants, oversized shirts, etc.
• No leather “biker” clothing. No leather chaps or vests.

Since I paid money to be on the tour, I’m going to follow the dress code, but I guess those North Korean guys just don’t know how to party. Banning booty shorts and leather chaps? What kind of country would have a problem with those? Any upstanding member of society should be allowed to go into military compounds in attire that exposes the buttocks. If I want to

That’s the American way!

I read this article on Wired magazine about how Chinese translators are running around Beijing trying to wipe out any traces of “Chinglish” before the English native speakers arrive to take pictures and make fun of their poor English skills.

“Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it’s escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.

In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by a shortage of native English-speaking teachers, who are hard to keep happy in rural areas for long stretches of time. An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don’t get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.

It’s not merely that English will be salted with Chinese vocabulary for local cuisine, bon mots, and curses or that speakers will peel off words from local dialects. The Chinese and other Asians already pronounce English differently — in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, in various parts of the region they tend not to turn vowels in unstressed syllables into neutral vowels. Instead of “har-muh-nee,” it’s “har-moh-nee.” And the sounds that begin words like this and thing are often enunciated as the letters f, v, t, or d. In Singaporean English (known as Singlish), think is pronounced “tink,” and theories is “tee-oh-rees.”

Basically, this is happening all over the world, Korea included. I have a JOB because of this phenomenon. I’m here to keep people from adopting the “Konglish” pronunciations as the default, and people pay me a salary to try to break their Korean speech patterns when they speak English.

If you’ve ever taught or spoke to a very young child that attempts to speak English sentences they use the wrong cadences and breaks. They speak and intone English like their native language, and it comes off as broken and weird. Getting enough practice with a foreigner at a young age will help you break this habit, as will immersive English training. The only problem is that there aren’t enough teachers to go around, and those that are here are too expensive. A student in a Korean elementary school can study English in their primary class, but they won’t be able to effectively communicate until they have one on one class time with native speakers.

“English will become more like Chinese in other ways, too. Some grammatical appendages unique to English (such as adding do or did to questions) will drop away, and our practice of not turning certain nouns into plurals will be ignored. Expect to be asked: “How many informations can your flash drive hold?” In Mandarin, Cantonese, and other tongues, sentences don’t require subjects, which leads to phrases like this: “Our goalie not here yet, so give chance, can or not?”

This article is somewhat redundant, in that if language changes, the grammar and sentence structure changes too. My PARENTS speak with different grammar and rules than I do, and we grew up in the same household. These sorts of rules vary by education, class, and region. Languages are influenced by their surroundings.

Despite my attempts to surround myself with English speakers and English media, I still occasionally mirror Korean in my speech, if unintentionally. For example, I give verbal “grunts” to indicate I am listening like Koreans do instead of asking questions you know the answers to like Americans tend to do. I’m still a native speaker of English, but being surrounded by Korean for so long has changed the way I speak, write, and talk.

“And it’s possible Chinglish will be more efficient than our version, doing away with word endings and the articles a, an, and the. After all, if you can figure out “Environmental sanitation needs your conserve,” maybe conservation isn’t so necessary.”

I both like and dislike this idea. The purpose of language is the communication of ideas, and grammar are the rules for organizing those ideas. If you change grammar and the idea is still accurately communicated, then there is no problem. However, if you make things less precise and less accurate by stripping out grammar, that’s damaging the sharing of ideas.

I deal with horrendously poor essays from students that have only a few basic understanding of grammar that make my head ache trying to decode. I try my best to understand, but this is where a lot of information is “lost in translation.” Solid grammar is like a cup for holding information. The better the cup, the less information that is spilled along the way to the next person.

“Any language is constantly evolving, so it’s not surprising that English, transplanted to new soil, is bearing unusual fruit. Nor is it unique that a language, spread so far from its homelands, would begin to fracture. The obvious comparison is to Latin, which broke into mutually distinct languages over hundreds of years — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian. A less familiar example is Arabic: The speakers of its myriad dialects are connected through the written language of the Koran and, more recently, through the homogenized Arabic of Al Jazeera. But what’s happening to English may be its own thing: It’s mingling with so many more local languages than Latin ever did, that it’s on a path toward a global tongue — what’s coming to be known as Panglish. Soon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they’ll have to learn may be their own.“

This is what I thought was really interesting about this article. English isn’t the lingua franca. What a native speaker considers “Broken English” is what most people in the world know. This “Panglish” varies from region to region as it mingles with other languages, but is generally understood all around the world as long as the key concerns are finding bathrooms, checking into hotel rooms, and finding a taxi cab. When I can go to a country as poor as Cambodia and get around by telling a tuk-tuk driver where to go in English, Panglish is here and it’s amazing to consider it’s influence.

If you talk to people in the Commonwealth of English Nations, they consider American’s form of English broken too. Just ask your English friend to say the word “Aluminum”. I enjoy the variations and differences in English that I encounter, and am employed to bring more people into the fold of people that understand and can communicate together. It might not be a complete or total understanding, but it’s a start. As long as native languages exist next to English, there isn’t anything lost by the spread of English. While this isn’t always possible, the freedom of travel opened up my a default worldwide language is huge.

(I’m saying that as an Native English speaker. Would I feel the same if I was a native Chinese speaker and had to learn an entirely new language? What if Korean was the default and I lived here? Or what if Japanese because some sort of default? I don’t know.)

Since I started using Opera’s “Speed Dial” feature (Firefox users can use this extension), I’ve had to pick which nine sites I like sitting in an open blank tab when I fire up my browser. I check, surf, read, skim, and obesses over many more sites than my “9″, but here is a list of the sites I use in my Opera Speed Dial:

1. Popurls. News: This is where I monitor several dozen social news sites at once. If I had digg or reddit in my RSS feeds, I’d be getting HUNDREDS of news stories every day. However, at an aggregation site like popurls, I can skim all the best news aggregation sites quickly and pick out the stories that interest me. This is like a nozzle on a fire hose. There is always more to drink, but this keeps me from drowning.

2. Penny-Arcade Forums: Guilty pleasure: This is where I keep up on games. It’s suffering it’s “school’s out” invasion of bored teenagers at the moment, and isn’t holding my attention like normal. (Shrug).

3. Discovery Channel’s Puzzle Maker: Work: This website has saved my ass so many times when we’ve finished a book, or I need to make a puzzle to entertain the class after a test. This is a total lifesaver.

4. Google Reader: News: I check my RSS feed using Google’s tools because it’s easier to sync, and I hate RSS readers that treat news like emails. When I check a story, if I don’t click it, it should be GONE.

5. A Geek in Korea: Obvious: I’ve got a post in the oven every day of the year barring illness, so I’ve got to keep this site easy to access when inspiration strikes me.

6. Amazing Handwriting Generator: Work: This is for my lowest level, can barely read, can barely write, can’t do any other homework class. These kids get two handwriting sheets to strengthen their wrists before they move up to higher levels.

7. Boggles World ESL: Work: Why reinvent the wheel? There are great worksheets here. A lot of my teaching worksheets come from, or are inspired by something on this site.

8. Io9: Science Fiction: This is where I keep up on stuff related to science fiction, whether it is television, comics, movies or anything else. They don’t update on the weekends, which makes me think that eventually this site will get replaced by something else.

9. This is the “Wild Card” slot. Currently there is a game I posted about a while back. This might switch to Gmail, or iGoogle, MSNBC.com, Youtube, or whatever else I am using at the moment.

Keep in mind this is my “work” related list. It makes sense that almost half the stuff is teaching or material generating sorts of websites.

When you count all the websites I check via RSS and through aggregation, I’m sure I’m checking content on several hundred websites, never mind the 20+ podcasts I work my way through during the week.

Today the students were given new bags from the school. The bags were emblazoned with the school’s logo and phone number. We’re basically paying for the students to be walking advertisements.

We actually got the bags in the school last Friday. My director had told me to float a rumor to expect to buy a bag as soon as I saw them delivered. I had told the students to expect to pay for them as per her directions. The director had told me we’d be charging the students 7000 won each on Friday, and I passed this information on. Students were annoyed that they’d have to buy bags for the school, but they are annoyed about paying for anything.

My director decided today that she’d be giving the bags away instead. She entered the class to explain that the bags were free, but made the students take a pledge. She said that the teachers had come to her and said that it wasn’t fair for the good students to pay for nice bags. The director said that the teachers forced her to compromise. If the students kept doing their work, and did a good job in class, they could keep the bag for free. Otherwise, the students would have to pay for a bag like any of the students joining the school after today. These bags are actually very nice, and I was surprised they were going to be giving them away, lie or not.

The younger students instantly promised that they would try hard. They got their free bags, put them over their heads, huffed the plastic fumes, then dumped their books into the new bags. Any student on the border line between passing and failing was extra earnest in their promise to do well in class.

My worst class is filled with sarcastic near-teens with terrible attitudes. My director came in and did the same “Oh, I wanted to charge you, but the teachers wouldn’t stand for it” deal. These children each had to then promise to be a good student, or pay for the bag. All of the students said they would rather pay for the bag, and produced money from their parents to pay off the director rather than make a promise. They told the director they don’t want to try hard and don’t think they can improve, so they’d rather buy the bag than do more.

The director actually turned down the money and made me come up with crappy reasons for each student as if I was noticing improvement in each student and that if they only tried a little more they would totally be “earning” that bag. The truth of the matter was that the students had all failed their speaking tests earlier in the class, and if I had a choice I would hold back several of them from reaching the next level.

I played along with the little game of false praise, and the students all got their bags for free. I think it sort of blew up in my director’s face when they were more willing to buy off the teacher than actually try harder.

Outside my apartment complex has been a rotating set of trucks promoting Internet service providers. Each week, a different company stops by and tries to entice people to switch their service by promising them free stuff. This week was the service provider we actually used, and you didn’t anything free immediately by staying with the service. They let you sign up for a raffle and would give away prizes on their last day camped out in front of our apartment complex.

We showed up for the raffle along with around twenty or thirty other people. According to the man running the whole thing, the turn out was low enough that if everyone dropped their spouses name into the box, they’d still get to take home something. We did just that, as did everyone else in the crowd.

Some of the people had submitted serveral names of relatives. The only requirement as that they had to have a phone number, and that the person winning could only bring home one prize. I saw one couple that had dropped dozens of names into the raffle. The pregnant woman would shuffle around nervously as she would look at half the numbers, then she would give some of the numbers to her husband who was wearing a denim suit. If they needed to cheat at a free raffle that badly, they probably needed someone much more than we did.

Before the raffle started, we checked out the prizes. There was toilet paper, instant noodles, rice cookers, irons, microwaves, and a few other appliances up for grabs. My wife said, “I hope we win a microwave for my mom. We don’t need much else. As long as we don’t get instant noodles or that steam iron, I’ll be happy.”

I said, “It’s free stuff. Anything we walk away with is more than we had. No reason to complain.”

The raffle was set up so that you had to call out the numbers if you won. They did this so that no one complained it was rigged somehow. There was a volunteer that called out the first number, then when a winner came up to take their prize, they kept grabbing numbers till someone won.

My wife’s number got called for the third or fourth prize. She had won a large box of individually wrapped packets of instant noodles. She laughed and went up to call out numbers. Eventually she got to return to the group when the moved on to steam irons. We were 0 for 1 in our desired takings.

I won the second steam iron. 0 for 2! I went up to collect, then had to draw out numbers. The guy put a bullhorn to my face and told me to shout out the numbers. I paused, not because I didn’t want to speak Korean in front of a crowd, but because three fire trucks were blaring towards us with sirens and lights flashing. They parked right next to the raffle, and no one could hear me on the bullhorn calling out numbers because they were all worried their apartments were on fire. The raffle guy wouldn’t let me leave until the next winner was found, so I had to call out numbers while he tried to keep people’s attention.

Eventually, despite the chaos, someone claimed a prize and I was off the hook. I got to go home with our bundle of unwanted gifts. We’ll give the spicy noodles to my brother in law, and the steam iron is now “wedding present in waiting” for anyone that announces a date in the coming year. I said I didn’t want to complain about a free prize, but next I win a raffle I hope we get something we can use.

So, I had given up on Lost in the middle of Season 2. There wasn’t much of a point to watching the show anymore, since they would air a few episodes, then have LONG stretches where there would be repeats. They didn’t keep it interesting enough for me to continue watching when they started holding back new episodes, so I quit watching. I liked the premise, but I didn’t like it enough to continue watching .

Now I’ve got the first three seasons of Lost on MegaTV on demand. Instead of wating for a new episode to be released, i can watch one I haven’t yet seen and work my way through the episodes one at a time. I’ve got an entire season in the queue at the moment too, so it’ll take several weeks to watch them all. I wouldn’t have bought the DVDs to catch up with the show, but I’ve heard that the fourth season is where Lost returns to form. Seeing as there won’t be new Battlestar Galactica episodes until next year, I’m willing to catch up with Lost while I wait.

My wife and I watched three episodes in the past two days, and I’ll probably finish the second season this weekend if I keep at it. I didn’t hear good things about Lost’s third season until the last few episodes of the season. Hopefully I’ll make it through the third season since I’ve got all of them sitting in front of me waiting to be watched.

So, does anyone still watch Lost?

So, Twitter is still around, and I’m still signed up for it. The best case for using Twitter on a frequent basis is as a sort of “super-SMS” style service, where you can basically “Reply to All” via the Internet. Imagine an SMS everyone on the Internet could see so that you could tell people what you are up to. You send short, 140 character messages, and you see them posted on the Internet. People can respond to you directly too.

If my group of friends would adopt Twitter over Facebook, we could all easily keep in contact with each other via a website/SMS, and I wouldn’t get these obnoxious “Join Facebook!” messages in my email. (Yeah, I’m never joining Facebook. I’ve got a blog 8 years strong. Deal with it.)

Ideally, this Twittering would work out of the box with Korean phones. The Twitter SMS service doesn’t yet work in Korea properly. There is no one to send the Tweet messages to. You can’t send an SMS to a Korean service provider and have it pop up on Twitter directly. This RADICALLY diminishes Twitter’s usefulness. Considering the only time you can update is when you are in front of a computer, and I already have a blog, why would I bother with Twitter when I can update fully here on my website?

I’ve found an acceptable work around for any phones capable of sending email. You will be able to sign up and use Twitter in a semi-functional manner. However, it requires you to sign up with a third part unaffiliated with Twitter, and hand over a password. It’s best if you don’t rely on your Tweets for anything mission critial. As long as you are having some fun with Twitter, it won’t matter.

I’m hoping that Twitter eventually comes to Korea. I don’t want to use a clone like “me2day” Tweeting at work between classes is about all I have time for when I sit down. It’s a sort of micro-blog of my day to help me recall topics I might want to talk about later in the evening when I write. (I can also use the “Notes” feature in Opera to keep a unified notepad that follows me where ever I work.)

I signed up for service at Twittermail.com. I was going to use emailtwitter.com, but Opera told me their security certificate had expired. Hmmm, I have to hand you my password to my Twitter account, and you have an obsolete security certificate? Yeah, no thanks.

So, anyway, the first problem is figuring out what email address you have. I know for KTF my email address is “my_numerical_phone_number@vmms.nate.com”. However, this is an “email out” only sort of service. I can’t figure out how to send an email back to my phone at all. My phone gets emails from other phones, but not from gmail or outside services. I sent an email to my normal account and tried to reply to it. No dice.

Once you sign up for Twittermail, you can set up their “Secret email address”  as a contact, then send an email to that address. It will show up as a tweet.

One of the services at Twittermail was recieving “@your_username” tweet replies directly in email. This would be like getting an SMS when someone was talking directly to you on Twitter. Sadly I can’t get this to work, as everything that hits my phone email address doesn’t get to me on my phone. So, while I can send to Twitter an email that gets converted to a tweet, I can’t get any of my old tweets, or anything people contacting me send.

Of course, if I signed up with a third party email that I could check on my phone via the web, I might be able to use this gateway Twittermail service to retrieve my tweets. However, this would probably run up my connection fees, so I’m hesitant to even try. As it is, I don’t know how email is calculated into my service contract.