I’m stopping new production on this blog. I’ve created a new blog which should do pretty much what the old one did. Don’t bother commenting here.

My new blog is here. Bookmark it.

I’ve been using WordPress as the backend software to this blog for over three years. There’s a lot of content here. It’s been great – until now. These days, wordpress is acting crotchety. I can’t edit an existing article without going through some hoops. I’m finding that making comments is failing as well. My friend Jacek tried and gets a blank screen. I do too.

I’ve tried to get some technical support through the wordpress forums, but that’s a dead end. WordPress is free and open-source, which means that the good people who make it don’t charge for it. It also means you get what you pay for and if it breaks, well, you get that, too. I used to be a programmer. It’s way more fun to write new programs and features than it is to debug and fix problems, so the multiple attempts I’ve made to get help have gone unanswered.

This isn’t just a simple matter of reinstalling. The content is mixed in with the software files and the articles are within a database.

I’m not sure which way I’ll take it. I may open a new blog and just call this my archived Korean blog. I may try to fix it which means something might break. I may just hobble along until a clean solution appears.

You may have noticed the recent news of N. Korea firing a few shells and the South firing some as well. Just thought I write a sentence or two in case anyone was worried about me being in Korea. No one I know is particularly worried. There’s always some saber rattling going on and life here doesn’t change when it happens. I think both sides understand the mutual destruction theory well enough.

For a native English speaker such as myself, teaching English as a second language here in Korea leaves me with plenty of free time. Although I work 7 hours a day, my commute time is zero, which leaves me 14 hours a day to indulge myself in other activities. For the past year, I have been actively engaged in another job, more for the enjoyment of creating than any monetary reward. I am the Editor and Chief Technical Officer of UlsanOnline.com, a website for foreigners here in Ulsan, Korea.

I joined the website when it was in its infancy at a time when I was just coming off as Editor of the Korea Sun – a slick glossy magazine that failed after only six months in publication. The Korea Sun had never even published the issue I started working on before dying, so I was more than ready to jump into another creative endeavour. The founder of UlsanOnline is Fin Madden, the first foreigner I had ever met here in Ulsan back in May of 2004. He and I were rock climbing partners and would spend mornings and weekends out at Munsu Mountain. He is also one of founders (and I, a contributor) of “The Ulsan Pear” a now defunct newspaper that filled the same niche of English language local and events news for foreigners here. Both the Korea Sun and the Ulsan Pear failed, as so many other paper publications have: simply due to costs. It wasn’t feasible to pay for paper, ink, printing, distribution and rely on the advertising or paper sales. Print is dead. Or dying rapidly. Since we have no paper, ink, printing or distribution costs other than the webserver we are much more financially viable.

For the last year, the website has been doing quite well. While we are small relative to the big websites, we fill a needed niche in Ulsan and provide a valuable service to the ever changing population of English speaking foreigners here. We haven’t made much, but since I enjoy both writing and programming, getting anything for doing it was a kick. I’ve made much more fame than fortune and I’m very happy with where things stand.

But as the old saw goes, “nothing is permanent.”

After almost 7 years in Korea, Fin is leaving the country and returning to Canada. He hasn’t been much involved in the website in the past few months so I have been the defacto Editor in Chief. But he still retains 50% ownership. I have the other 50%.

With his departure now less than a month away, he’s now focused on getting out completely and is considering selling his half of the site. Aaron, a New Zealander, is interesting in buying Fin’s half. Jared, an American of Korean descent, is also interested in buying in.

Aaron, Jared and I will meet this afternoon to hammer out where we want to take things in 2010 and how we might improve our readership, community standing and revenue. I am a little apprehensive about the two new guys, but only because it’s a lot of unknowns. I’ll know more – and feel differently – as things progress.

SaTang takes a break while the pups are sleeping. This doesn’t happen very often as there’s always one of them that’s hungry. I snapped this shot on a quiet morning after all the in-laws had gone and it was just me and her and the pups.

Almost all of pups are sacked out near her belly. One traveller is way up by SaTang’s head, curled into the corner. 

Shredded newspaper is nice and warm and easy to clean when the box gets messy – just throw it out and put in new shreds.

We weren’t counting on having pups for another 5-7 days. I counted days, the vet counted days and SaTang was only 56 days into a pregnancy that should normally be 60-63 days. But she started panting and being unable to lay down last night so we put her into the whelping box and sure enough, within an hour puppies were here.

I think it was around 1:30 when the first pup slowly came out. The 2nd was right behind, coming within 30 minutes. A 2nd pair arrived an hour later within minutes of each other. Since the vet told us only 4 pups, we thought she was done. We went to bed at 4am. She seemed fine. And I guess she was. She let loose another pair  sometime before MyeongHee got up at 6:30.  So we have 6 pups. 4 girls, and 2 boys. 3 mostly white, one with a few brown spots and two mostly brown spotty ones.

This morning, I went to the vet here in the neighborhood and he said to feed her beef and seaweed soup about 5-6 times today. Luckily, my mother-in-law is staying here this week and quite able to whip up a little Miyeok guk as it’s called here. She snarfed that up and is now resting comfortably with her 6 pups.

A while back I wrote on the continuing saga of the playground across the street. In that story, the city officials had put on shiny new lockable doors on the soccer field while leaving numerous gaping holes in the chain-link fence around it. I mused about how silly they were putting a new door on an enclosure where there were so many other man-sized holes that I wondered why even have a fence.

Over Christmas they patched those holes. They re-strung the chain-link and covered up all the holes. They even repaired the lockable door, which the kids were already tearing apart, its cheap, thin wire merely soldered on and easily plucked off.

For a couple of weeks, all was well.  The park looked like it was going to survive and not fall into a heap of disrepair. Kids played there on the weekends and when winter vacation commenced, more kids came.  They had even patched the nets on the goals to keep the balls from flying out. All was looking well.  When one day, the nets were again torn so some lazy-ass kid who couldn’t be bothered to walk the 20 meters to the gate (this is a very mini field) the string became straws and the proverbial camel’s back was broken.

Someone got the idea that nets weren’t truly long lasting anyway. Much too easy to rip or cut. Indeed, a few months in the elements and most of the string was rotting or frayed anyway.

So the city got smart. They put the chain-link fence everywhere. Even around the goals. Locked the whole damn place up tighter than 3-dollar alarm clock. They repaired some of the structural metal holding the fence up and it looked as if the place would stand up to a tornado again.  All of my worrying about the state of disrepair a few months ago was all for naught. It was new and shiny and strong looking.

That was on Thursday. They finished wrapping the new chain link and soldering on some more wire to the front door – even double panelled it with extra strands of cheap wire. By Friday it looked as if the whole park had been given a makeover.

And then the city got real smart.  They figured that since it looked so nice, it simply wouldn’t do to let the kids play there. So on Saturday, the door was locked. No holes to crawl in and play any more, so it stayed empty.  Until Saturday night.

A bright shiny new soccer field and no access to it was just too much to take for these pent-up Korean kids with damn little to occupy them outside the 20 hours of school they endure.  The fence is once again shredded. It wasn’t enough to rip one hole. Nope. Several holes had to be ripped, some mere feet from each other.

The pendulum swings back and forth. On one end, its the kids and their need for a place for activity in this mostly urban environment. On the other, its the city with their demand for fixing shit up and keeping it fixed. One day, the pendulum might stop right in the middle, but these days it simply swings from side to side, going from complete repair  – and inability to use –  to complete disrepair.  I just watch from the sidelines. And chuckle.

Here’s my dog SaTang. She’s 7 of 9 weeks pregnant. Officially not due for 2 weeks, she looks really uncomfortable.

Compare the pooch in the picture above with the svelt thing on her wedding nightday back  in November of last year to appreciate the difference.

Despite the best efforts of the Korean government and banks, the American dollar  has taken a huge plunge against the Korean won.  In a few days, the dollar has lost about 4.5% of its value. To most of the readers here, that’s a big “so what?” But for me, that’s huge consideration. It would have been nice to have that plunge before I went to America for Christmas – it would have mapped into bit more dollars in my pocket. Instead those dollars simply floated away into the ether of the exchange rate.

With my daughter’s graduation from university last year, the student loans are due. That means I need to be dropping money into American banks often to pay them off. I haven’t had to do that in a while and have been comfortably keeping my money here in Korea. Now, therefore, I need to be mindful of the exchange rate and try and send my money when it will net me the most dollars for my won.

Personally, I hope the dollar goes right into the shitter. Just down to zero. With all the trillion$ of bill$ printed this past year to cover the multiple bailout$ it’s amazing the value is still as high as it is.

My ideal scenario is for the dollar to be worthless – I could take my Korean won and buy a boatload of American real estate on the cheap. Of course, if it did go to zero or even near it, there would be a whole lot of pitch forks and torches to circumvent for anyone still buying big in America.

Maybe it’s that I only had 9 days to enjoy seeing my family and friends. Maybe it’s that I didn’t get a chance to see nearly as many friends as I anticipated. Damn, I didn’t even get to see all of my family with Lizzie not able to make it. And many of those I did see, I saw only once.

Whatever the reason, I’m feeling a little more than homesick today.  In the 3 years I’ve been here, I’ve been home 3 times. The first, I was excited to come back because my wife, MyeongHee, was moving in while I was in America and we’d soon be getting married. The 2nd time, I went with MyeongHee and we shared our sadness (or at least mine) at not being to see everyone again for a while. This time, it’s hard.  I hope it passes quickly.

I probably mentioned to many of you while I was home that Korea is not the forever home for us. I told MyeongHee a while back I wanted to move back to America after her son, DongHyun graduates from high school in the spring of 2011. Not permanently, as she’d feel as homesick as I do now. But she agreed that a few years here and a few there would be difficult, but best for both of us.  It all depends on DongHyun’s college and mandatory military service schedule. We’ll see, but I look forward to the day when I won’t be counting my days left in America. I’d like to think that I’m home long enough to watch my granddaughters recognize me when I come in after just a few days  absence. Having them come running for a hug when Grandpa comes to visit, just as my daughters did when they were young is a goal I look forward to.

MyeongHee’s nephew, ChangHyun is staying with us this month. He’s on winter vacation from his school and he’ll spend it with us. He’s 10 years old and a good kid. Typical TV and video game infested Korean boy.  He’ll start taking English lessons at my school today. He’s got some English knowledge he learned from his older sister, MinGyoung, who is a very good English speaker, but he’s never been to an English school himself. Being family and just for a short time, we’ll get the big discount and it won’t cost him, me or his family anything for the classes. We just have to pay for his books, which should be $20 or so.  I hope to send him back to his parents with a bit more vocabulary and grammar.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Love to all.

Last week I went on a day trip to Muju to go skiing.  No great pictures of that event – you’ve all seen snow and people so bundled up you can’t tell who is who.

One souvenir I brought home, though, was a sprained ankle.   I had fallen a couple of times during the day, most of them no big deal. Once, though, I was coming down pretty quickly and took a hard fall. It hurt just a tad, but I got up and kept on skiing. When I got home that night and had a chance to relax, my ankle swelled up like a dead dog in the summer sun.

I limped around on it on Sunday and Monday and then on Tuesday decided I’d better get it looked at.  Since I knew nothing was broken, I went to the acupuncturist. They are plentiful and cheap here in Korea. I walked right in – no appointment needed and was immediately dealt with by nurses and the Dr.  I’ve been going to see this guy for a few years and his English has gotten quite good. He explained exactly what I’d done and how he would treat it.

First, he stabbed me with a half-dozen needles. Most were in the ankle, but some were even up around my knee. The idea behind accupuncture is that the body channels energy along pathways and the needles help focus the flow and the body’s healing power to a specific area. The red tint to the picture above is the heat lamp he placed to warm the leg. The needles stayed in for about 15-20 minutes.

Then he put on a couple of spongy suction cups that sucked, writhed and pushed my ankle. These too, help focus the body’s energy, but also massage the muscles and tendons. This was actually damn relaxing. They felt like little hands kneading and massaging. That lasted another 15-20 minutes.

When that was finished, I got the Bu-Hong treatment. That’s actually the most medieval part of the ordeal. The nurse attached a suction cup to my ankle and pulled on it a couple of times, giving me a small hickey. Then she pricked the skin with a mini knife and applied the suction cup again. The idea here is draw out the bad blood around the injury. I suppose this was the same idea of the European surgeons using leaches back in the olde days. I tried to take a picture of this, but my squirming knocked off the suction cup and spilled the few tablespoons of blood in it out on the table and floor. They weren’t real happy with me.

Then they put a hot pad on me for 10 minutes and then put me on a hot-water jet massage bed for another 10 minutes.  I could live on that thing. It felt wonderful to have two hard jets of warm water massage my back, neck, butt  and thighs. Because it’s all inside the rubber mattress, no mess, no fuss.

Then they sent me home. I went back the next day, too. My ankle feels not perfect, but damn good. A lot better than if I’d done nothing.

My wallet feels a lot better than if I’d have injured it back in the good ol’ US of A, too.

Total cost for this fine-ass treatment? US$5 each day. No insurance needed.

The US Congress could benefit from a look at how Korea does their health care.

I simply couldn’t help myself.  It was just too easy of a target. The Republicans have done a great job the past several years of simply jacking things  up. Of course, becoming more and more conservative, morally and fiscally, even claiming to be the moral compass of America.  As one famous saying goes, let he who is without a glass house cast the first stone.

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The music to this video, by the way,  is by the Austin Lounge Lizards and if reading the subtitles I placed on the video is a little too boring, the lyrics to this song are precious. They’re a funny group and if you’re planning a trip to central Texas anytime soon they’d been worth making arrangements to see. I hope they don’t mind me commandeering their song, “Jesus Loves Me (but he can’t stand you)”

Oddly enough, I used to consider myself a Republican. But that was back in the days of Reagan and I believed all that rattletrap about trickle down economics. I’m no Democratic, either. I suppose I’m more of a Collapsitarian. Google it.

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Last week my brother-in-law and his wife came over. While they went out to dinner with some friends, we got to babysit their daughter, GaEun.  She’s now 6 months old.  She liked SaTang, who didn’t really return the like, but tolerated it mostly. She tried once or twice to use her teeth to brush off the kid’s grabbing fingers, but didn’t really bite. While MyeongHee, her mother, myself and GaEun played on the floor, DongHyun was content to hid his face behind a pillow on the sofa and watch TV.  It didn’t seem to matter what the dog did, GaEun would squeal with laughter.  Now that SaTang is (we think) pregant, my brother-in-law wants a puppy.  That was a big surprise to his wife. This should turn out well.

Not sure what ?? (pronounced babo) is? If you’ve never been to Korea, you may not know.?? is silly, crazy, stupid, dumbass, or any of several other similar epithets one might throw around.

I wrote an article a few months back about the ??English I was seeing in the classroom. It seemed like every pencil-case a student had was chock full of poorly spelled, ill-formed sentences in English. For whatever reason, English on a pencil-case, book, bag is a selling point, whether it’s crap English or perfectly formed. It’s a little telling as to how effective teaching English is here when the parents who buy it and the students who use it typically have no idea the English is so horrible.

I’ve made it a point in my classrooms since to broadcast poorly selected classroom accoutrements to all the students. I read the sentence and explain the errors to the class, but I don’t forbid them from bringing them. These days, the number of ??English articles has dropped dramatically. Not because of my feeble efforts, but because of the marketing machines out there. I see a lot of the Simpsons, SpongeBob Squarepants, and classic Disney, and usually, the English is minimal, consisting only of the character’s name and perhaps a short phrase. Tie in an article with a popular animation and you’re guaranteed a sale.

Still. there are those companies that continue to pump out gear with ?? English thinking they have the marketing genius to sell. Here’s is the latest installment of my classroom’s??English gear.

This one, from Fancylobby.co.kr, is typical. They can’t even be bothered to put the .kr on their web address (clipped from the far left in this image.) Maybe they are ashamed of their products and don’t want the kids trolling there. They should be ashamed. Because English so good.

While the majority of this pencil case’s text of actually quite good, I really whish they had used a spell checker on the enormous title. They’d have learned that while whish is indeed a word, it is an onomatopoeia, a word created to suggest the sound it describes. But that was probably too big of a word for them to understand. But hey, it’s in the dictionary, and bigger is better, so they kept it.

When I read this I hear Smeagal muttering about his precious ring. “My precious! We knows! We knows! We knows we can use better grammar.”

I did a poor job of focusing my camera on this picture. But I think it makes a nice point about how poorly they focused their words towards a single theme. Nothing spelled incorrectly or grammatically in error, but I get the impression they simply scratched around for English phrases in some book, much like a chicken would scratch around for specks of grain or bugs in a barnyard. Just what a transparent man is in soccer I fail to grasp.

This gem was on a notebook. If the English doesn’t kill you, the butter milk and sugar recipe will. But how one shakes with shake escapes me. Ice tubes are an invention I have yet to come across. But what the tubes possess, as evidenced by the apostrophe, I haven’t a clue. I suppose that’s left for the reader’s imagination. And then one must enjoy too drink. This one seems a perfect example of the designer having used a spell checker, but has little English comprehension beyond that. I hope he choked on his recipe.

Now, who can resist a cute panda? Perhaps they thought the cuteness would overshadow the fact that neither sentence is correct or completes a theme. This designer is a idiot and has about as much English sense as a apple. I wold fire him if he didn’t unchanges his mistakes.

I saved the best for last. You knew I would because it hopes that wait. Wait…what? This pencil case, made is China, is the absolute worst I have ever seen of any of the classroom ?? English. I don’t have the faintest idea of what it means to say, if anything. I think the Chinese designer, having been told that English sells, took his English/Chinese dictionary outside. He let the pages flutter in the breeze while he snatched random words from the pages. Those words when phonetically spoken in Mandarin made a lovely poem that earned him both high praise from his overseers and an extra bowl of rice.

When one goes skiing, one must have proper attire. I needed a new hat, and this one caught my eye.

I’m planning a short ski trip on Saturday this week. Just a day trip: I’ll leave with about 10 other friends at 5:30am on a large bus and return around 7:30pm. It’s been raining the past few days, but on the mountain it should have dropped a bit of fresh snow.

I haven’t been able to ski since early 2007 when I first arrived. Back then, MyeongHee was still going to her family gatherings alone and we weren’t engaged yet. All my big holidays since then I have been with her family. I’m really looking forward to cutting some trails on the slopes.

Among this sea of apartment windows and lights stands a single symbol of western Christmas. Sure, its early, even by American standards to have it up so soon. But the lack of others is not because it’s early but because its not a common practice. Despite the fact that somewhere around 50% of Korea is Christian, the whole tree and other decorations is a little on the rare side.

I haven’t put up a Christmas in my home in the nearly 3 years I’ve been here. I can’t even remember if we had a tree when I shared a house with Circe. It felt nice to put it up, even if I won’t actually be here on the holiday itself. But maybe that’s why I put it up; since I’ll be home for Christmas – first one since 2006 – having one here put me more in the mood.

Koreans aren’t totally consumed by the Christmas bug that America is. It’s a national holiday but nearly all the stores, restaurants, bars and nightclubs are open. It doesn’t feel much like a holiday here.

So now, my little tree, less than $20 for the tree and the lights, will stand as a single reminder of the holiday I’ll be sharing with family back home. I like it. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

This past week or so I was busy getting seriously geeky.

First, there’s the background. There’s a push among the foreigners in my city of Ulsan to have some city services, particular emergency services, cater to the foreigners. Without going into too much detail, Korea imports thousands of teachers like me – people with university degrees and speak English. They do not require us to speak Korean. However, the society here is, despite the enormous effort to teach English, surprisingly unable to communicate in English.  A recent rape of a teacher here has prompted a lot of the foreigners to wonder how they’d deal with an emergency. Koreans can call 119 (Fire) or 112 (police) but unless you speak Korean it won’t do much good for a foreigner to call – all you’ll get is frustrated.

So, as part of my role of city reporter and techno-geek for my other website, UlsanOnline.Com, I had to get into some serious programming. I’ve dabbled in stuff since we started the site, particularly in the menus, and layout. But this time I had to bring out the big guns. None of my cohorts on this site are technical. In fact, few foreigners here are. None are technical to my level – no brag, just fact – I have a degree in computer science. So, I have to strut my stuff here and at least let you, Dear Readers, get a taste of my technical prowess.

First was to create a survey. We hope to use the survey as data that the foreigners are ill-served in Ulsan. The local police are aware and on board, provided we can prove there’s a need. The survey itself, can be found here.

(Unless you live or lived in Ulsan DON”T CLICK THE SUBMIT BUTTON!!!! )

It’s pretty. Sure. It’s just some forms that are easily created in HTML. No big deal. But I put in javascript code to validate the data – each field must be filled out, numbers in some, not in others. If you said other, then expect some text, etc., If you want to see the gyrations I went through, go to the survey and then on your browser click on “View” and click on “Page Source” and you’ll get the actual code I wrote to create that survey and validate the data.

But wait – there’s more. To get the 10 Ginsu knives, I had to save the data from all those submit button clicks. That means a database. We were out of databases on ulsanonline.com and would need to upgrade (that means pay $) to get more. But on this server, martypants.us, on which you are reading now, I have scads of database headroom available.  So I created a new database here and wrote the code to move data from the submit button click on the ulsan computer to this computer. Then I had to write code on this machine to stuff the answers from that survey into a database.   My Ginsu knife code cuts the survey into bite size pieces and puts them into tiny slots, each in their respective places.

But wait, there’s more! To get the handy tomato slicer, I had to write code to get the data back out. That’s another page that pulls the data out in tabular form so one can make charts, graphs, understand trends, etc., – essentially slice and dice the data like the handy tomato slicer.   That page actually lives on this server, as does the database.  To get a peek at the data, still in its early days of foreigners completing the survey, click this link.

In summary, I wrote HTML/CSS code to do layout and pretty work. I used Javascript code to validate it. I used PHP code to cross transfer the data and stuff the database. I used SQL code to create the database and accept the data into a database. Then I used PHP, SQL  and HTML again to pull the data back out for viewing.

And if anyone actually understands any of this, then you, too, get the 10 Ginsu knives.

And that, has been the extent of my week in Korea.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone back home!

A friend of mine, Jared, organized a day trip for a bunch of us to go on this past weekend. I’d seen people do it before and had wanted to try it. Jared, the consummate wheeler-dealer and chief herder put this little paragliding trip together. I hope you enjoy the video.

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We went from Ulsan to Miryang, not very far as the crow flies, but a couple of mountain ranges west of us. We spent just under 2 hours driving to get there and  then another 4 hours prepping for and taking our turns. There were 15 of us foreigners and 5 pilots. So we went in groups of five.  There were a lot of other people there, too. This spot was one of only dozens of paragliding places in Korea. Lots of god wind and mountains.

It was awesome to watch the take-offs, which I thought would be much more hair-raising, but were actually quite gentle.  Mine was uneventful, but I didn’t fit my big ass in the seat too well.  I bet its a lot better going alone than going tandem with a pilot behind.

SaTang had a great time. I considered leaving her at home, but she’d have been locked up for almost 10 hours. Besides, she’s a lovable dog and almost everyone was happy with her there. Lots of the foreigners left their pets behind in their home countries so welcomed a friendly dog around. She barked everytime someone took off or flew overhead but otherwise stayed out of the way. When it was my turn to fly, she got a little concerned and didn’t want to be left behind. I had to have Nina, one of our group, hold her for my takeoff.

Of the group that went,  the nationalities represented was truly global. There were Canadians, Britons, Australians, New Zealanders, a South African, Koreans, an adopted Korean who was raised as an American and me.

OK, SaTang finally got some lessons in animal attraction.  After several days of frustrating her suitor, she finally succumbed to his wiles.

She doesn’t look terribly happy about it, either. Neither was I – she got hooked up just as I was taking her out for the last time before I went to work. I had to wait for things to, shall we say, deflate, before she could extricate herself and I could go to work. Meanwhile, there was lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth. And some of my students in the later classes wandered by and asked why the two dogs were standing butt-to-butt for so long. Try explaining that in Korean.

We’ll see if all their efforts will bear fruit. It’ll be about 5 weeks before even a vet can detect a dog pregnancy, and only 9 weeks to whelp.  If all goes well, we’ll have a littler of pups sometimes in mid to late January 2010.