::A Geek in Korea::

I just read an article about American emigration. It seems like I am ahead on the curve of this trend, as I left my home culture of the United States when I was twenty-two years old, and I haven’t lived there for more than six months total when visiting in the past eight years. While most of this article is focused on American Expats living in Panama, a lot of it applies to me as well. I didn’t set out on this path, but this is the path I am on, and I thought this was an interesting article discussing some of the topics I deal with.

The article states that there is a growing trend of Americans living abroad. The general assumption people tend to make when dealing with The United States is that immigration is a one way door. People spend their life savings, put all their hopes and dreams into getting a visa, and then work to come to the United States. Living in America is a dream realized, people still equate living in America with success.

The basic assumption is that no one from The United States ever leaves to find opportunity abroad. The simple fact that the article spends time explaining people leave for reasons other than political amuses me. I’ve never met a single person on a sojourn from the United States that claimed they left due to politics. I’m here by choice, plain and simple.

I really identify with the people in this article.

While business is what initially drew him to England, Sheren is now deeply attached to the British way of life. That includes everything from a generous government-backed system of social supports for all citizens to a mentality that is more comfortable with leisure. “I consider the quality of life here significantly better than what I would have over there,” he says.

Sheren acquired British citizenship and has at times been tempted to abandon his American one, but he attaches relatively little importance to nationality. His closest friends are an international lot, and he greatly values the freedom of movement that comes with a European passport. “I feel more like a sovereign individual,” he says, using the label coined by authors James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg in their book, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.

I definitely think the quality of life I am afforded in Korea outstrips where I would be as a married guy in the United States teaching. I wouldn’t even like to contemplate how much debt I would have had when I was ill for several months with bad stomach problems if I didn’t have insurance in the United States. I can live at a very comfortable level in Korea with very few sacrifices because of the Internet. Other than friends and family, there is little I miss about the United States day to day.

I’m someone that places very little importance to nationality as well. I’ve got friends from around the globe, literally. In my casual drinking group, I’ll run into people from Detroit, Vancouver, Moscow, Seoul, Cape Town, and anywhere in between. It doesn’t matter to me where you are from, as long as you are a friend, it’s all good. A new country is just another topic to discuss over a beer.

The article also discusses the risk of people leaving the culture they grew up in to start a business in a foreign land. I came to Korea not being able to blurt out their word for “Hello” reliably. I didn’t know a person on the entire continent of Asia, had never been abroad alone, and had no money for a fall back plan if this whole “Korean adventure” failed.

It may not be much of a stretch to say that today one of America’s strongest exports is its skilled, energetic, and often idealistic relocators. If America’s information-driven economy is the engine of globalization, it is fitting that Americans are working in those parts of the world that are being transformed by the process. They make up an entrepreneurial “peace corps”—establishing businesses, employing, instructing, setting examples, and often currying goodwill. It is a cliché, but still largely true, that many foreigners say that they distrust America but like Americans. These relocators have something to do with this.

I am, in part, on the first line of foreign relations every single day. My presence in this country is, if I want it or not, providing others an example on the culture I left. I will show the power of my culture through my example.

Escaping “sameness.“ Doing most of their work out of their condo, the Hudginses have two young children whose edu-cation at a local Spanish-language Catholic school is supplemented with materials that their mother downloads from the Internet. Describing themselves as libertarians, the Hudginses went abroad out of discontent, not with American politics but with a dull sameness they found in American suburban life. Even though they did extensive planning for the move, they admit that the challenges of the new life are considerable. (Some of the greater ones are imposed by the U.S. government, which, though it grants an exemption of close to $86,000 of earnings, is the only developed nation that taxes citizens who are living abroad and paying foreign income taxes.) But both are quick to say that the rewards far outweigh the difficulties. In addition to valuing the warm weather, the idyllic setting, a close family life, and a busy social schedule, both are clearly invigorated by days that that are demanding but not stressful in a culture that blends the modern and the traditional in a comfortable way. They appreciate the irony that American know-how and technology (largely the Internet) make it possible for them to enjoy what is in many ways a very un-American lifestyle. But they are doubtful whether they can go home again. “We may decide to pack up and move on one day,” Allison says. “But it’s more likely that we’d find some new port of call than move back to the States.”

This is another topic I’m dealing with at the moment. I don’t know where I’ll end up, but I really would have a big problem with reverse-culture shock if I ever went back to the United States. I can’t live in a suburb, drive a car, and root for a local sports team. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with living in a suburb and enjoying the company of neighbors. It’s just that once you get out and experience to vast array of things the world has, it’s tough to shrink that world back down.

It’s ironic that I’m dependent on the Internet and technology to provide me a life style that allows me to substitute for what I miss in the culture, but at the same time, I don’t want to go back to that. I’m very happy here, and I think it’s provided me with opportunities I wouldn’t otherwise have gotten. I think of myself as grateful for having the opportunity to have an American background and upbringing, an American passport, but I don’t want to live there right now. Maybe in the future, if inspiration and hope can bring change to the culture, but for now, living outside of the United States is the right thing for me and my family.

Seeing as how I’ve completed all of the text books for the last semester, and have been running on fumes for the past week, I needed a new activity to get through the last week without a book to take up the majority of the class. I luckily made an activity that went over so well I used it in basically every class.

I started the class by telling the students, if they did well enough and had a perfect paper, they would win as much as they would for winning a small contest at our school. The challenge of the paper was that the students had to write down ten words relating to a topic without looking up anything in a book, on their phone, or in a dictionary.

I made a form with eight columns with ten numbered rows in each. At the top of the column, I labeled it with an age appropriate topic from their books. For the easy low level class, students had topics like “Food”, “Things I can do” or “Body parts”. The upper level classes had topics like, “European Countries” “In my Body” or “Objects in Space”.

Everything in the column had to be spelled correctly for the column to count for the reward. They had eight chances to get something, and one or two of the topics were easy enough that anyone should have been able to pick up an easy reward. The challenge came from remembering ten words AND spelling them all correctly. One mistake and the other nine words were wasted.

The students sat down with this task and worked intensely hard for about thirty minutes, which is phenomenal for a worksheet I thought up and made in about ten minutes. The rewards being spread through the class so that they could see that thinking up just one more word was worth the heavy prize distribution I had promised. The best I did was hand out four prizes, and that would be high for an activity I normally do, but I rarely have an activity that lets me sit, in near silence, and just watch the students work. It was a nice change of pace.

There were some hilarious spelling mistakes, some clever answers, and some very explosive sighs when one mistake repeatedly sank their chances to get a reward. I think the thing went over pretty well, and I’d do it again in a few months.

Helix is a game that came out of nowhere, got my attention, and became an immediate purchase based on this review. The basic premise of the game is that with two Wii remotes tracking your hand movements, you preform gestures to the beat of music. A robotic dancer tells you how to perform the move, and you must mirror it with your hands. The typical move might be “Right Punch, Left Punch, Disco Pose” or something.

The game has 26 tracks of techno dance music. If you like this kind of music, you’ll like dancing to it. If you like dancing to it, you’ll like swinging your arms around like a madman. The easy mode is just basic moves at a slower pace. “Punch, wait,….wait, Punch”. The medium mode gets frantic enough that you don’t have time to wait between most sets of move, “Punch, Safe, Raise the Roof, Safe, Punch, Disco Move….rest…oh man, again!?”

I haven’t touched hard mode yet, but I feel I’ll be sore in the morning. I think I’ll add this to walking the dog and see if I can make an exercise routine of some sort. It certainly felt like a workout. I played the first five songs, and by the end of playing each, once on easy, then again once on medium, I had a sweat worked up. The music isn’t bad, and if I have some fun, that’s not too awful either.

The presentation is functional, but basic. The dancing robot gets across what move you need to do before the beat passes by. I didn’t get confused watching the moves it was doing, and keeping in time wasn’t that hard. When there are five or more moves cued up, it’s hard to remember them all, but that’s why you need to practice.

The two player mode is “Each player controls an arm, work together to try to complete a song.” That’d be fun for parties, but I don’t think I’ll get much use out of it otherwise. You unlock songs by playing on various difficulties. I’ve got a LOT to work ahead of me if I want to hear all the songs. It would have been nice for them to include a “jukebox mode” for people that just want to listen to the music. Perhaps there is once everything is unlocked. I don’t know.

If this is the first step to a series of these style games, I’m happy to get in on the ground floor. I can’t move my legs to a beat and finish a Dance Dance Revolution song, but moving my hands to the beat was pretty easy in comparison. I’ve got a few moves I need to work on, but the calibration setting on the game that records my moods should help me get better at it.

For 1000 Wii points, this game is a steal. I’d highly recommend anyone looking for a dance game, party game, or a fun exercise game to pick it up. Hell, you can practice your cabbage patch while you play this game. If that’s not worth it, I don’t know what is.

Korean farmers have a unique ability to drive me insane when they are vending their wares. I’m not talking about the independent farmers that sell stuff at markets. That’s fine. The people that drive me up a wall are the noise polluting farmers that sell from their trucks. These people have horrible sound systems hooked up to bull horns set to the noisest, most distorted level.

Listen to this Farmer as he sells his onions to everyone in earshot.

That was recorded on my mp3 player as I walked by while he was a block away. Most apartments don’t allow people selling stuff into their block, so these farmers will set their speakers to incredibly loud volumes, park outside for ten or twenty minutes, drive everyone insane, then drive off. This guy was waiting for people to come over and buy his green onions.

These farmers make everything sound this bad. Strawberries. Potatoes. Watermelon. Anything delicious you’d love to eat gives you a headache as they pimp their wares with noise pollution. The only other noisy thing in Korea is the mae-mi, or cicada, which also can be deafening.

If the farmers selling produce out of their trucks could only teach the cicadas how to sell produce, we’d be driven mad by their 24-hour assult on our sense of hearing. Don’t EVER tell them it was my idea.

When I was growing up, we had the most spectacularly shitty ancient dishwasher that didn’t actually wash anything. It was my chore to clean up the numerous different pots and pans, while the rest of my family watched prime time television.

The dishwasher was terrible because had to wash them by hand, then put them in this hard to load machine that did nothing but blow hot steam for an hour. Then you had to UNLOAD the dishes later in the evening, wasting even more time, which were still wet. Not only did you wash the dishes, you had to DRY the dishes. The only thing a dishwasher did was make more work.

My dishwashing policy is: Once a day, or if the situation absolutely demands it. NO MORE.

Despite moving up to a nicer, larger, more lavishly decorated apartment, we do not own a dishwasher. That is a luxury item most people in Korea don’t have, seeing as space is at a minimum in apartments.  The only dishwashers commonly sold are sink top models that hold not much more than a meal’s worth of dishes. They aren’t much bigger than a microwave and hold nothing larger than a small pot or pan. You’d spend as much time loading and unloading a small Korean dishwasher as you would actually just washing the dishes yourself. It’s in the “why bother” line of appliances that never caught on here, like clothes dryers.

I go to work after eating lunch at home, so I usually wash the dishes before I eat. It’s an enjoyable chore I can do while I listen to music or something. There are only two people in the house, and usually only one or two meals every day to clean up from at most. I like washing dishes in the after because it makes me feel I started doing something productive with the day. I leave a part of the house cleaner than I left it, and that almost never happens.

Now that our kitchen has multiple spaces to hold wet dishes, I don’t mind washing the dishes. Also, since we have actual cooking utensils, and have the proper tools, I enjoy cooking much more. There are more dishes to do, but they are easier to get done. That’s not too bad a compromise for more ambitious food at home.

When I get home, if my wife has prepared dinner, there are more dishes sitting in the sink that someone will have to wash. She’ll wash her dishes from a meal she cooks for herself, and depending on what she has to do around the house. If I want to make a snack, or need a utensil, I’ll wash what I need. I won’t break down and do all the dishes twice in the same day unless we have guests expected over to the house.

If I cook both lunch and dinner, I still would rather not do the dishes twice. While mid-afternoon dishes don’t bother me, after work the last thing I enjoy doing is washing up multiple times. That’s just my rule, and I’m sticking with it.

This weekend was the first chance any of my D&D group had to meet again. The last member of our group to DM had made an entire epic adventure he hadn’t yet used. He told us that instead of running his own character, we should make up our own secondary characters to control to beef up our forces, because otherwise, we wouldn’t survive to tell the tale. Despite the challenge of controlling two characters at once, it was a great success. This is a different style game compared to what I ran last game, and I like the action heavy stuff a lot.

I went through the process of pulling from different sources and putting together a character. In addition to my Shrike like, sword weilding construct badass, I’ve got a new character. This guy is a more “into the fray” charging, running, lycanthropic monk slicing-open-your-face bad ass. It’s a totally different sort of badassery. Really.

We ended up being attacked by air pirates on a ship during the course of the adventure. My new character lept from one of the masts, grappled a falling character mid-air, and slammed him into the other mast of the ship using his momentum. My character then floated down to the ground, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style nearly unharmed, while his victim did a face plant from sixty feet up.

It was the first combat action that the character had made, and it set his tone really well. The only problem is that he’s got so few hit points he spent several rounds escaping harm and trying desperately to heal himself. He’ll improve when he gets one more level. That’s the hook that keeps me playing. Just one more level and I’ll really be awesome. I had a lot of fun making the new character now that I actually know how to tweak some of the statistics to be in my favor. My previous efforts felt a lot more clunky, but I really like how I’ve structured him and got to use this new character to do different things.

My older character got hit several times and even approached single digits in health at a few points. This is the most damage I’ve ever taken in one game, and I had to worry about death. Unlike some of the past adventures, there really was no where to run, and I had to roll well at critical junctures or some shit would have really gone down.

Over dinner, I talked to the current DM. We’ll be continuing the story the next time we play, as we stopped mid-battle. This is the first time we haven’t resolved the story at the end of the session. This means that we’ve got to go back and reach our destination before the next DM can sort of interject a new part to the main character’s story. We played for six hours, and we’ll need to continue just to reach our destination. That’s epic.

He said he wanted to turn up the heat a little bit, and he thought a confined area, lots more attackers, and a “wave” mentality to our opponents would keep us on our toes. It worked. We’ve almost died several times, and this was just trying to get to the place where the really dangerous stuff was. We haven’t even gotten to where the main encounter will occur. If the first few “days” of our journey were that exciting, I can’t wait for the next adventure.

Now that there are at LEAST a month or more of adventures before my next shot at taking the reigns of the story again, I can really shoot for the moon when I think about how I want to change the direction of the tale. Any potential survivors of this tale will be really deadly by the time it’s my turn to run the game. We’re deadly now, and we’ve got twice the characters we had before we started this adventure.

My last story got referenced repeatedly in this session, as our characters bragged about what we did last time around to impress a captain we encountered. One of my ideas for a potential character I wanted to make actually became the standard storm trooper guy we faced this time. My ideas were integrated and brought to life in a sense! I impacted the story! I helped mold the world, and I nearly killed the party with my idea! That was a pretty sweet feeling.

I think the next time I play, I’ll take some tips from our current DM and work on something different, however, I don’t think I’m up for a multiple day campaign at the moment. I’ve got a podcast I’m listening to for inspiration, but I still don’t have my basic plot sorted out yet. I’ll let my ideas perculate for while and see what I end up with. I’m running two characters, but I’m totally digging them both.

Of course there are awesome Firefox plugins that everyone needs to use. Anyone can find those. Recently however, I’ve been using several plug ins that make the status bar dramatically more useful. What part of the browser is the status bar? It’s usually the bottom of the browser, the part that reads “Done” when a page loads. It’s usually 20 pixels of wasted space sitting over your taskbar/window list.

I’ve found a string of plugins that has reclaimed that space and made it a much more useful space in my browser:

1. Delicious Bookmarks: If you need access to tagging and blogging bookmarks for your delicious profile, you can use this from the status bar to update your account from delicious.

2. Webmail notifier: Want to check your multiple web email accounts without having to log into each service individually? This sits in your status bar and tells you if you have mail. Added bonus, it works with Korean web email services like Naver. Score!

3. Google Reader Watcher: Do you have tons of RSS feeds? Do you use Google Reader? Then monitoring new articles can be annoying, but you can use this from the status bar to keep up on your feeds. WARNING: This wil DESTROY YOUR PRODUCTIVITY. Keeping up with feeds is really distracting.

4. Twitterfox: Twitter, that unproductive, utterly narcisictic waste of time. How could I amuse myself blogging at work without you? WARNING: This wil DESTROY YOUR PRODUCTIVITY. I only follow and keep up with Twitter because of the little “T” icon sitting in my status bar which seems to be saying, “People are talking! Waste more of your time!”

5. Fire.Fm: Fire.FM is the streaming service of Last.FM integrated into your browser. Do you like Last.Fm ability to find music from your preferences, and how you can listen to free music of related artists? Then you’ll love being able to do all of that without having to bother with the Last.FM site. Letting a music service pipe in music from bands I like while I focus on browsing? Sweet.

6. ForecastFox: Need to know the weather for the week and you don’t get cable television? Watch the status bar of your browser and let ForecastFox get your weather for you. I’ve installed this in the past, but had to uninstall it because it was messing with browser stability. I hope it’s improved since I’ve last used it.

Do you know any awesome Firefox plugins that use the statusbar? Share them in the comments below if you do.

Korea's Gold Medal Team

Outside of a handful of games of baseball I actually attended, the last time I sat around and actually WATCHED an entire game of baseball probably had to be around 1990, when the Cincinnati Reds won the World Series. I do not enjoying watching baseball. It’s usually too boring. It can be exciting, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

The Korean Gold Medal game between Korea and Cuba was exciting enough to keep my wife, dog, and I watching the entire time. Korea had the lead, 3-2, bottom of the ninth inning, with runners on first and second. The pitcher was going for a complete game, and had a full count. The umpire’s strike zone was a touch…inconsistent, to put it politely. When yet ANOTHER questionable call went against Korea, walking the Cuban runner and filling the bases, I had to simply get out of the room and go to the bathroom. It was way too tense.

The Korean catcher got tossed for complaining about the call, and the pitcher got replaced from the bull pin. At least in this game, they had a translator to sort out what the umpire was saying, unlike the controversial Women’s Handball decision. Eventually they sorted it out, and the Cuban player hit into a double play.

When the won the game, the apartment complex was shouting loudly like normal. For once, when the crowds were cheering, we were watching and cheering along too. Seems 14 of the players on the team that get gold medals don’t have to go to mandatory military service. That’s probably why they are so happy too.

I don’t like watching baseball, but that last inning was worth sticking around to watch. Good stuff.

A ridiculously awesome, and gory zombie claymation.

(I don’t want to spoil the awesome end by telling you the title.)

House of the Dead Overkill

Sega’s goes with the Grindhouse asthetic.

It’s a good day to loathe the undead. In particular, the House of the Dead Overkill trailer captures the whole B-Movie asthetic perfectly. That entire series of shooting games is over the top and ridiculous, but if you put the idea forward as, “Yes, we know 2 people gunning down thousands of zombies is awesome, do you want to dual weild Wii remotes and slaughter the undead or not?” then you pretty much have to agree. I think it’s the first game I’d pick up based on the marketing, boxshot, and trailer alone. So sweet.

Bonus: Juzt Mizunderztood is the best Emo Zombie song ever.

I’ve got to give props to the Jordan Jesse Go! crew for recommending a series of podcasts. They had dropped a bunch of recommendations for shows that followed a similar format to their “talk about humorous stuff of no important consequence” style. This show is the first of this particular format I listened to, and it and The Bugle are two of my favorites.

The first thing Jordan Jesse Go! recommended was You Look Nice Today, which I like, but is a little too silly, and occasionally too racist for me to really enjoy. They have skits, they sort of stick to a topic and try to out-silly each other, but usually go off on tangents and sidetrack the conversations. Depending on the topic, this can be hysterical, or run even the best joke into the ground (usually, the later).

I think a lot of this podcast is trying to make declarative statements about things they do and don’t like, but I’m so foreign to their world that it’s different for me to even understand the distinctions they are trying to make. “Someone you consider a douchebag is different than a hipster in WHAT subtle way?” That’s either funny, or completely obtuse to someone that doesn’t know them. Even with their editing of things to make the show more coherent and focused, this still seems like they run out of something funny to say far before they actually stop talking. The show is usually 30 minutes long, and it comes out sporadically.

The thing I’ve just started listening to based on another JJGo! recommendation, and can’t stop listening to, is Stop Podcasting Yourself. This is a Vancouver based comedy podcast hosted by two comedians. They have set topics like, “Get to Know Us”, where they catch you up on their week, “Pop Rocks Minute” where they try to podcast with a mouth full of painful cracking candy, or funny competition sorts of skits like “Pullman or Paxton”, where you try to decide if something is relating to Bill Pullman, or Bill Paxton. (This is nearly impossible for me.) This is 45 minutes to an hour of comedy that has me laughing out loud on the street. They have other comedians on as guests too, and people use it as a way to plug local shows.

Stop Podcasting Yourself is silly. It’s funny. It’s more structured around skits than Jordan Jesse Go!, but it’s better edited, and thus more amusing than You Look Nice Today. The only problem with Stop Podcasting Yourself is that they namedrop people that might make Canadian comedy fans say, “Oh, I’ve heard of that guy,” but everyone else is left scratching their heads. Still, the heavy Canadian inside joke sort of references aren’t really that distracting, and they usually occur in places that have humorous city names.

I’ve listened to five Stop Podcasting Yourself episodes so far, and they have a steady quality. I’m probably going to catch up with the show by listening to all 25 of the back episodes, which will keep me busy for the next week or more. They tend to release stuff consistently, so it’ll be another one of my regular podcasts. Now that my intensive schedule is ending, and it’s not raining every day, I’ll be able to go out and walk the dog more frequently to eat through all my other feeds.