::A Geek in Korea::

I got to work this morning on time. I finished my prep work and entered in my computer planning. That’s about all that went right. The computer system went down because my chilly coworkers plugged in too many heaters and blew a bunch of fuses. The reason they are so cold is because they close the office door to the lobby of the school, where the main heater resides. They close the door because they don’t let children in the office anymore so they can spend their time gossiping in Korean about the attractiveness of various Korean stars. Their cold hearts must be lowering the temperature of the room, because I never found it cold in the office until they started working there.

I’m fine in the office without a heater…as long as my DESKTOP COMPUTER THAT I WORK ON can heat up the room. Since they blew all the fuses in the office, I was effectively cut off from any further paper work for the rest of the day. When the electrician came, he got the computers working…ALL EXCEPT MINE. They had damaged my machine, possibly with all the tripped fuses they caused. My tests for tomorrow are on that machine. I’m going to be angry if all my early work got destroyed because they don’t keep a door open.

After that, I happened to need to take a trip to a different part of town. Because of the Daejeon bus service changing their routes, the bus that I thought I had to take was actually headed in the exact opposite direction. I got taken far out in the middle of nowhere where the bus then parked. That’s when my wife called to tell me that I should just avoid the bus entirely because she checked online and there were so many people complaining about the changes  that there was little chance I’d find the right bus. I should just take a taxi, eat the expense, and find out the proper bus to the location later. OOPS!

She talked to the bus driver, who then came over and explained why I was wrong getting on the bus. “You wanted the bus on the OTHER side of the street.” The answer was clear on the map on the bus you couldn’t possibly have know about unless you were ON THE  BUS READING IT! The bus stop materials show the route of the bus, but I didn’t have time to figure out what would be the next stop when I was reading the materials before the bus came. I took a guess. I had a 50% shot of picking the right bus. Live and learn.

I had a long ride back into town, then I had to hear the shouts of different people that also were dissatisfied with the bus service at each stop. It’s lovely listening to pissed off old ladies cursing at bus drivers loud enough to drown out my earphones when you feel bus sick from the motion of the ride. By the time I got to my stop I lept off the bus. I could have walked to my destination, or walked to a subway stop that would have taken me to the right destination more directly. All told it took me an extra hour to get where I wanted. Buses are now no longer for me. Right now I’m still queasy thinking about the ride.

It was NOT A GOOD DAY.

Our DM was out of town, so our scheduled game of Dungeons and Dragons got delayed to the new year. Since no one wanted to run a session on top of their characters, I  had some friends over this past weekend just to chill out and not bring their dice. I asked very politely to my wife, who has spent the past few weeks either in bed, in the bathroom sick, or burping because of gas if this was acceptable. She said it would be okay for them to visit, and her word goes at least until her morning-afternoon-night sickness subsides. She said that she would just stay in the bedroom and rest while we played Wii.

Instead, a Korean fiancée of one of the guys came over to show off her new ring and chat while we played video games. I don’t think my wife wanted to admit it, but she was happy to have the company too. Someone else to share her agony with. Plus, they brought delicious peanut butter cookies.

The Wii got some multiplayer use for once. First my friends and I tried out WiiWare Bomberman. I had already unlocked the modes that let me play as a Mii, but after taking it online a few times I hadn’t played it for a while. It is a party game at the core, and while bombing online is fun, it’s never better than that “In your FACE!” sort of bombing that takes place when people visit. The other players were either brand new to the series or beginners. They wanted the CPUs set to easy. We played a few rounds in each mode. Part of the fun of Bomberman is the hectic, “Oh crap, what now” sort of beginning it throws you into. Everyone can play, but not knowing what is good or bad tile to pick up puts you at a disadvantage. By the end I was winning a fair share of the games and they started teaming up on me. If I was getting pitted against Normal AI I wouldn’t have outshone anyone, as that game usually gets the best of me.

After they got bored with Bomberman, one of them asked me if I got that “World of Goo” game I had been ranting about. I had gotten about half way through that game when I stopped. I really love that game, but my wife uses the TV after work, and that game gets me stressed. I don’t liked to play it before work. Since I play that game alone, some of the levels I found really challenging were much easier when they played it as a team. They also had excellent strategy and communication skills. They even beat a level I had stopped on because the previous level had stressed me out too much to continue. It turned out to be much more simple than I expected. They also had the next level beat, but lost at the last second before we turned off the Wii to go to dinner.

I got to show them some of the sights in my neighborhood. They were shocked to learn there was a “Sexy Realdoll Love Room” down the street from my apartment. It’s in the same building as a transgender bar, and the singing room I took my friends when they visited Korea. They joked that the bachelor party for the DM had to end up taking him to that place. I’m hoping that was just a fun little joke.

Next week we should be back on schedule playing again. Still, it was a fun time and it was kind of nice not to talk about builds, monsters, and magic for once.

This astounding awkward sign was found by a friend while we were in a 7-11. We had just finished eating a spicy chicken dish, and were using the change we got back on ice cream. He went to throw away his wrapper and found this sign. He said something like, “I wonder if anyone has put that sign to the test and had a horrific experience as a result.”

It would be rather terrible to see a confused foreigner think there was a dead animal drop off point located in a convenience store. Make all the callous Korean dog jokes you want, but the “PET” in question refers to “Polyethylene Terephthalate” soft drink bottles, and is used to denote the recycling of water or sode bottles that are purchased at the store.

At least we HOPE that’s what they are talking about.

Korea Beat has an article about how a long time Korean teacher working in public schools thinks that 6th grade students are rude, and that Korean schools lost control when they outlawed corporal punishment. While I’m not interested in, or willing to take part in the beating of children, a fair number of my 6th grade students are little monsters.

Choice quotes:

“Once class starts it’s a disaster. The kids giggle over their cellphones. So the teacher takes them away. One of the kids looks at her with hurt eyes and says, ‘I’m going to call the police’. The student gets angrier as the teacher goes on with the lesson. The students write the answers on the blackboard, one by one. Carrying the chalk, the student says to her ‘fuck you’ [in English]. All the students start laughing uncontrollably. The student has a wide grin at doing such a great thing. So she just had to go on. The teacher whacks the kid on the head. ‘Screw you!’ the kid says [in Korean].”

In my worse classes, I hear language like this all the time. I actually blew up at students on Friday because boys think that once their testicles drop they can suddenly swear all the time in class. The worst part is that students that curse in English don’t appreciate the subtle nature of the language. If they could only swear correctly I could at least get a chuckle at their bravato. One of the WORST influences on Korean children’s language are Gag Concert and other comedic shows that as interesting as hitting yourself in the face repeatedly. In the past year all my students have started saying “Oh shit!” when they are surprised or shocked. It’s cute the first time you hear it, but when a 7 year old kid starts swearing it gets on my nerves. I liked it better when those stupid shows were only teaching the incorrect way to say, “Oh my God!” all the time.

“So she got up the courage to “expose” the truth of sixth-grade classrooms. Scolded students send her messages contained serious insults, students who don’t like their homeroom teacher gather together in the teacher’s room, every year when homeroom teachers are selected, the principal complains, “nobody wants to be a sixth-grade teacher, and I can’t just get rid of the sixth grade…” Inside the classroom things are worse. 5% of the students look down on the teacher and openly challenge the teacher’s authority, and 20% help make the classroom a scene of chaos with their lackadaisical effort. The 15% with significant influence are the ‘key’, and once they are lost there is no hope of control.”

This is from the “Dangerous Minds” school of teaching, where you assume certain students are lost, and you just go into class to perform triage and save what is left of each class. I have roughly three classes where this is the case. Of course, with smaller classes her percentages are pretty out of whack. I don’t have 40 students in a class, so perhaps I’m a little more in control at the start. It takes about 75% of my students to be bad before the class is worth writing off entirely. Only three of my weekly classes ever approach something where I teach to the students willing to listen and write off everyone else. The vast majority of my students are kind, smart, thoughtful children that are just tired and want to have some fun.

“Why is this, you wonder? The first shackle placed on teachers’ ability to teach normally was the abolition of corporal punishment 10 years ago. The inability to use corporal punishment has become teachers’ weak point. Mrs. Kim stressed, “with no way to punish students who violate the rules, the school becomes a lawless place with no control over them. We have to allow teachers to use corporal punishment or expulsion when necessary.”  Beginning in elementary school you can clearly see the effects of an inability to punish violations of the rules.

The first satisfactory result from her idea to “allow teachers to use corporal punishment” would be the restoration of respect for teachers. She said, “when children come to school now, the result of corporal punishment is that they think ‘the teacher expects kindness’ instead of ‘what did I do wrong?’ Please don’t cut down the teacher in front of the children… When you have a teacher devoted to scholarship, parents will openly take care of problems. When teachers are not respected, everything is more difficult and they are insulted behind their backs. That is my story.””

There are a few bad apples, but beating them doesn’t fix anything. It’s often tempting to grab a student and toss them around, but it doesn’t get you respect. It gets you fear, which is temporary…but admittedly, occasionally satisfying.

The difference with my situation is that students are sent to my school on a theoretically voluntary basis. They pay money to spend time with me. Wanting to teach them and have them actually take value from the lessons they paid for causes the stress I feel. Their parents pay my salary, and I find it insulting when bad students don’t value the money spent on their behalf.

If I was in a class and I didn’t want to be there, I would hope I would be more direct about it and tell my parents it was a waste of time. For example if I was sent to a school teaching algebra that was beyond my level, I’d ask to be moved to a level befitting my ability so I could get something out of the class. I took an introductory course in mathematics while in college to prepare for a class that would affect my major. I needed the refresher.  I loathed math in High School, but when I was paying for it, and it was on a level I could comprehend, it was a lot more rewarding to me. Being able to have dedicated time to a subject I needed to increase my skills with was very useful.

An academy system, in theory, should work the same way. Children don’t see the need to study extra hard, and frankly some of these students will never likely use their English beyond their college application test, but that’s not my concern. If you are in class you paid for, you deserve to get your money’s worth.

Worrying students don’t respect me and “demanding kindness” isn’t a productive approach in my experience. All I expect is that self-sabatoging students don’t interfere with the students that are trying to get their money’s worth. If I have to spend time babysitting a class of idiots when one student tries to waste everyone else’s money, I don’t think the other students should have to tolerate that distraction.

“When the children use bad language in her presence, the teacher is in a shocking, shameful spot, unable to say a word. Unable to talk about it, there is nothing she can do.”

This is the problem very conservative Korean people face. A conservative Korean person was always taught that the indirect approach is always best. Never confront someone directly about a problem you have, you need to complain about people behind their back loudly, but never directly. Eventually someone will “pick up” on the vibe and know they have done something worthy of shame. For example, you could say, write a book about how bad your classes are  instead of directly confronting bad students and getting involved with their parents.

The students this woman is teaching has lost the Korean attitude of “indirectness” to a shocking degree. Korean children today are very direct. They don’t hide their opinions when confronted with something they don’t like. Actually, they’ve taken the whining and intrusiveness they see on dramas and amplified it to an annoying degree. They share all their ideas directly, no matter how moronic. It’s a cultural sea change, and it’s worrying for people that spend their entire day trying to avoid being direct.

When a student gets in my face, I don’t back down. I’m creative with punishments, and I make sure parents know my opinion of their children. I imagine I’d be a lot more nihilistic if I was a public school teacher and knew that no matter what I did the students would be there because they can’t fail my class. I might be a toothless academy teacher discipline wise, but if parents are paying me, at least there is a financial motivation for them to care about my class.

My wife, who has taught in public schools in borerderline poor areas has run up against rude kids that didn’t care about English with disaffected parents that didn’t WANT their students to study hard. I’d go crazy in that situation too, but I don’t think I could sit around thinking that beating the children would make the situation better.

(Video unrelated, but awesome.)

My wife and I spend birthdays and Christmas together. No matter who makes plans or asks us to do something, and no matter how fun that sounds, we just hang out together all day, usually to shop. This Christmas was no different. Instead of meeting friends we had a date at the local department store to pick something out for me. I had settled on a replacement wallet for my gift, since my old wallet was slowly falling apart.

The only real requirements were that my new wallet needed to be made of leather of decent quality, and needed two windows. One for identification, and one for the family picture I took after my wedding. I had to check no less than ten different stores just to find a place that had leather wallets that met my requirements. Ridiculous!

While we were getting the wallet selected, my wife told me she thought I had something in my nose and that I needed to go to the bathroom to take  care of it. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, so I left to find some tissues in the department store bathroom. By the time I was back, the wallet, and a matching belt, were being wrapped up. The woman working at the counter asked if our purchase was a gift, and then went the extra mile to actually gift wrap everything. Seeing as she knew I had picked it out, and that the belt was for me, it was weird to wrap the gift, as I was just going to open it again. Whatever.

We went out to Bennigan’s for a power lunch and got stuffed on steak and shrimp. When I opened up the wallet to transfer all the cards and miscellanea that accumulates in a wallet, I found money!

“Wow, magic wallet. I just bought it and it already has money inside. How awesome!”

My wife explained that the custom in Korea when giving a wallet is to always fill it. I had the proper “Korean response” to getting a full wallet. She said that people give wallets with money already in them as a way to express a “New chance at earning more money.”

That’s pretty cool. There wasn’t any Korean custom going on with the belt though.

I made it no secret that mTrans, the Cowon document “viewer” conversion application was utter shit. The problem with the program is that it uses .jpegs then compresses the crap out of them. Jpeg is a lossy format, meaning it is a very poor choice for heavy compression because it has artifacts and leaves the text of a comic book or document completely illegible. The jpg file is small, but you can’t read it so it’s useless. That is why I was so disappointed in the document viewer and was angry they sold it separately.

A work around for this is to use the lossless .png format for files and avoid the document viewer entirely. When files are converted to .png format on the Cowon O2, you can read them while zoomed in 200%! The Cowon O2 picture viewer can open up the much larger .png files easily. Because they aren’t compressed ridiculously, viewing the text on the small screen isn’t nearly as bad. Judging by my experiences using the Cowon O2 as a comic book reader today, 95% of text is readable. Even better, with the right command, you can even listen to music while you read comics!

First and foremost, you must convert a file to the .png format. At a lost to proceed, I tested this out by grabbing a file in GIMP (Graphics Image Manipulation Program) and converting the files one at a time. Yes, this works, but it is terribly inefficient and slow. Using any image program that handles and convert files would work on any OS. Windows users might want to look at this program.

Linux has a better solution however, and it’s easy.

The command line program ImageMagick works to convert files in batches. It is extremely easy to use, and is installed by default in Ubuntu. If the following commands don’t work for you, make sure it is installed by checking in Synaptic. Search for Imagemagick. You can view all the commands explained below at the Imagemagick website.

Steps for making comic viewing better on the Cowon O2 using Linux are as follows:

1. Make sure Imagemagick is installed. (Duh.)

2. Extract or arrange the files you want to view. You can get free Golden Age comics from the web to test this out, or use your own files. Did you know the most common comic book formats, .cbr and .cbz are just renamed .zip files? Click on file containing a comic and extract it, or rename the extention .zip and extract it like you would any other .zip file. You should have a folder with a series of numerically labeled .jpg files. Now to convert them into something usable!

3. Open up a terminal session and navigate to the files you want to convert. Shortcut: In Nautilus, you can right click on the window and select “Open in terminal”. It will open a terminal session right at that location!

4. In the folder containing the .jpg files you are trying to convert, type:   mogrify – format png *.jpg This command tells ImageMagick to take all .jpg files in the folder and convert them to .png files. Warning, .png files are considerably larger (x10) than the same file in .jpg format! That’s okay. We want to be able to read them clearly! An average length comic will be 80-100 megs after we finish the conversion. Plenty of space on the Cowon O2.

5. We’re almost finished. Because of a lack of memory and processing power on the Cowon O2, you can’t rotate pictures while listening to music. How annoying! You can rotate files if you don’t have music on. If you rotate the files before you transfer them, you don’t have to worry about this limitation.  That way you can read comics and listen to music at the same time.

6. To rotate the files we’re going to run another command: mogrify -rotate 270 *.png This command rotates all the .png files 270 degrees. I like orienting the comics counter-clockwise and then turning the player on it’s side to read. If you wanted to turn them clockwise for whatever reason, just use the command: mogrify -rotate 90 *.png instead.

7. Now that the files are rotated and converted, grab the newly converted and rotated .png files. An easy way to view which files are the .png files you want in Linux using Nautilus is to press “Ctrl+2″. This will put the Nautilus file browser in “List mode”. Then you can click the “type” property and all the files will be sorted together. This is much easier than trying to grab all the different files by hand. Delete the .jpg files after you are finished.

8. Put the newly sorted files in the “Picture” folder of the Cowon O2. The document viewer won’t read this file format, so use the Picture Viewer instead. Upon opening up your file, press the zoom function to your desired level. To navigate the file, press the middle of the screen once. That will get rid of the menu allowing you to use the entire screen for the comic. You can navigate by pressing any of the corners or sides. Touching the screen on a side or corner will move the view the view of the comic panel. To advance the comic, touch the middle of the screen again and press the single “>” navigation button to advance to the next page. Enjoy!

There are multiple zoom levels. You can use 150% for page view, but will probably keep to 200% to use to read panels. The Picture viewer has serviceable touch navigation that turns what used to be a video/mp3 machine into a decent comic book reader. One minor annoyance is that when you exit the picture viewer, it only saves the folder you were browsing. It doesn’t remember the exact file you last viewed. If you are reading a longer comic, make sure to remember where you left off so you can go back. When browsing the files in Picture viewer there is a preview displayed, so it’s easy to find where you left off. It might not be the idea solution of a drag and drop comic book file reader on the Cowon O2, but it’s a pretty useful work around and has made the player much more useful for me. I’m pretty happy with the results. Any tips or tricks related to the Cowon O2 you’d like to share would be welcomed in this tread as well.

Rifftrax available to ease the pain.

My wife an I have discount cards from various companies that are linked in one manner or another to our cell telephone numbers. People treat a phone here like a secondary identification number, and any transactions you make send off messages to your phone. My credit card will send me a confirmation message to my phone when I go shopping.

This is a security measure, so that if you see your card being used and you didn’t do it, you’ll know your card has been stolen and you can call to cancel it. You’ll also know where they are spending money in the off chance someone can track them down through the transaction.

However, the various shopping loyalty cards we use also have this security feature built in. I guess the thinking is that if you have “points” that act as money when you spend them, it’s just as important to track a purchase made with a discount card as it is with an actual credit card. Most of the time it is just an annoyance, as I’m standing in line packing up my items when I get a notification telling me I’ve used my card to get a discount. No kidding! How helpful. My wife has set all this up for her cards because she tracks all our spending and so she wants a record of what she bought for future reference.

The loyalty cards are linked to specific stores, and I shop at stores my wife typically doesn’t visit because they are close to my job. Thus, I have some of her cards for discounts at these shops. So, whenever I buy a coffee, or grab some bread at a bakery, I’ll be sending off messages to her phone. For example, when I went on a walk today with my dog Yoshi, she knew I picked up a coffee on my way back and asked me about it when I got back. That’s all well and good for things I buy from day to day. She knows what I’m up to, which is okay. It’s not like she cares if I buy a coffee from time to time.

But what if I was shopping for a gift for her and I wanted it to be a surprise? The only way I can do that is buy it without a discount, which kind of sucks. There is no option to NOT send the messages transaction by transaction if you want the discount. It’s either that, or shop at stores that send messages to my phone and not hers.That’s backwards, because the cards should be getting me a discount where I want to shop, not pushing me to shop at places because of some stupid feature.

There are always unintended consequences to what you do. For once, if I get a discount, I’d like my wife to be surprised about it.

This year was a big one for me. What better to strip away all context than just make a long series of lists about what I’ve been up to for the past year? If you wanted to start reading the blog, but had no idea where to start, this might be a good place for you to catch up on 2008.

Most Memorable Occasions:

1. Finding out I’m going to be a father, on ELECTION MORNING no less.

2. Buying a House!

3. Having my friends visit me in Korea for a week

Best Gaming Moments:

1. Playing D&D with friends

2. Super Smash Brothers Brawl released

3. My own inventions

Best Comedy Related Online media:

1. Podcasts, Podcasts, Podcasts

2. Rifftrax / Cinematic Titanic

3. The Daily Show/ The Colbert Report

Best Sci-Fi Entertainment Related:

1. Battlestar Galactica

2. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

3. Escape Pod (Podcast)

Best Social Media Related:

1. I’m on Twitter

2. I’m on Youtube

3. I’m on Facebook, but not by my own choice!

The last game I bought for PC was Age of Mythology. This is way back in 2001 or 2002. It was “the game” we played in PC rooms. When I migrated over to Linux full time at home, I’d check in on the Age of Mythology page on WineHQ. WINE is not an Emulator, but it a recursive acronym and a method of getting Windows native programs working in Linux using reverse engineered Windows files. Anyway, there were always roadblocks to getting it installed and working properly.

A quick rundown of everything required to install and play the game:

1. You need a custom DLL file for the game to install.Download and set that up in the hidden .wine folder in your home directory where the rest of the system files are. On my machine it happens to be “.wine/drive_c/windows/system32″. If you have a problem with “pidgin”, set up an override in winecfg in the libraries tab.
2. Next, you have to get the CDs to install the game. You’ll need a CD key of course, which is provided with each copy of the game. Because of a bug in the installer, it won’t recognize the second disc if you try to install it from the CD drive. Instead, copy both of the CDs to a temporary folder on your hard drive. First, copy the first CD and begin the install process. Then, when the installer asks for the second CD, copy the second CD in the same location as the first CD in your temporary directory. You will get some messages about copying over or skipping files, and just skip them all. Then, continue installing the program.
3. Once the game is installed, you’ll need to update the game. Go to “.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Age of Mythology”, the default directory where the the install was placed. You’ll find “autopatcher.exe”, which will update the game to version 1.10.This is the most recent version of the game with the most bug fixes and balance changes.
4. Because of copyright protection not being open source, people can’t reverse engineer what is needed to allow for legal verification of the game. This unfortunately means you have to find a “NOCD” executable version of the “aom.exe” file. An Google savvy person should be able to find a file that will allow you to run Age of Mythology 1.10 with NO CD. Sadly, this is the only way to play a game I paid for, by getting around their copy protection.
5. Once the NOCD patch is installed, you can fire up the game. I set up my WINE to pop-up in a window, so that if it crashed or didn’t run well I could easy close it. If you get it working successfully, you can always change the screen size in the winecfg program. I actually had such success that I could run the game full screen on one of my monitors.
6. The game runs a little slower than what it would on a modern computer, but it’s still completely playable. The only minor problem is that fog of war is blocky instead of transparent. It’s entirely playable.

This is the last PC game I played obsessively. After that I went strictly console and never got worked up about another computer game competitively ever again. I got too frustraited playing online and quit because there were too many good people that would crush me. Since multiplayer and Internet connected games don’t work, I don’t have the temptation to go online anymore. I can just play locally against the computer and not have to worry about all the better players in the world. Besides, this game is really old, so it’s not like anyone plays it anymore.

It was a lot of fun to play. I went through the single player campaign mode, which I had never done before. Good times.