Life Goes On . . .
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Living in Korea
I can't believe this! It's almost a year since my last blog here. What's been goin' on . . ?
Guess what? I'm still in Changwon, South Korea, looking forward (I think, sometimes I'm not too sure . . .) to yet another year in Korea, working for the same boss but with more technology available. Mandriva recently had a major upgrade for the K Desktop Environment (KDE) which caused problems and led to several attempts at re-installation, but what the hell, I had to do that all the time under Windoze . . . now it works fine and the notion of removing Windoze completely is tempered only by the fact that I need it for loading and reloading my expensive little Korean mp3 player, if it weren't for that, I doubt if Windoze has any real use any more . . . Linux does all of the same things and more, and is more enjoyable.
Times seem to be bad for Micro$oft in South Korea. In fact, they seem to bad in East Asia generally. The Chinese government wants to use Linux because it is paranoid and afraid that M$ is an easy access method for the Americans to get into their computer systems (something with which many Sony and EMI customers in the US and Brazil would no doubt agree); M$ also wants to profit by the licensing fees and if you have a big business with many offices and branches, the cost of this is horrendous. Linux, on the other hand, is free, although support for proprietary drivers and the like means you should pay a subscription or whatever. There is a constant threat of M$ pulling out of Korea, although frankly, if we want to be worried about something as trivial as a software vendor – even if it's actually for an OS rather than, say, a chat client – we need to get our heads examined, especially as alternatives have now basically come of age.
But the best news is that (after only three years) my boss has just this week had a NEW aircon installed in my humble abode!!! Tuesday night was blissful, as the summer heat has begun to make its presence felt, how nice it is to go home and not be slithering around in bed all night . . . unfortunately, it also means higher summer electricity bills, but hey, there y'go . . .
During the last winter, my boss bought access to the floor below in our building (meaning that the hagwon now occupies the topmost two floors out of seven floors) and as a result, we now have many more students, and much more work. I have had to start going to work earlier, mainly in order to mark diaries, of which we now have a pile every week. Recently, the speech contest season has been upon us and I have been recording model speeches for the students as mp3s. Alas, this has coincided with a strange decision on the part of the local ISPs to block the transfer of mp3s irrespective of whether there is actually any "intellectual property" repercussion (answer: absolutely none, in my case). But it all paid off and we had some kids winning prizes.
One of the new things installed on the new floor was a large digital classroom, intended to be used with the JFKN Windoze-based set-up, as a means to get the older kids accustomed to real-time listening and comprehension – admittedly only of American news broadcasts, but I'm sure they're overloaded already, in any case. But when I am able to get them to answer the 'phone (i.e. not just slam it down when they know who's calling), they have great trouble in remembering even what the theme was within the same week! Seems like they're suffering badly with "information overload" and basically lose any recollective powers which they are supposed to have.
On the digital front, it seems that things never rain but pour. My ISP now has a 2Mb/s line and despite this, there is little by way of "official" content which could make proper use of the bandwidth. Some time ago, I cancelled my subscription to RealNetworks because their televisual content never seemed to change. So I started using my Akregator podcast software to download video blogs and struck gold in the form of http://www.dailyplanettv.com, which I found through http://www.vodcasts.tv, although there are other sites, but this one seems the best. EastLink TV in Canada has a high-resolution (needs about 350kbps of bandwidth and RealPlayer8 minimum) service but the programmes are of limited content; off-hours, you have background music and timetables of ice hockey games, etc. My free time is limited so it's hard to search for these things. But it remains an odd fact to me that there is not even a subscription service that I can sign up for to get over the constant monotony of Korean TV and keep the kind of constant feed of interesting facts and information that my mind seems to need. Even Democracy, the new video feed client, is ported primarily to Windoze and other distros of Linux which I do not use. So I suppose I'll be kept waiting, as usual.
And that's about it for now. This is a rainy Sunday afternoon and I am thinking about venturing up the road for a haircut, and that's the limit of excitement for today. I'm not going anywhere and I'm probably going to do some more of my online teaching course later, as well as working on some more spoken Korean. Then back to the grind tomorrow afternoon . . . .
