The weather has turned suddenly wintery. The wind-blown sky is completely clear and crystaline blue, there is a strong breeze, and it's about -8 C at two in the afternoon (call it 18 F). This is like Minnesota. I find it refreshing and invigorating. Of course, this being Korea, there is no snow on the ground… only patches of ice from the frozen puddles of the drizzle earlier this week. It's almost always warm when precipitation comes (or, at least, above freezing).
I've been noticing an odd little problem with my MP3 player… I like to keep it on 'shuffle,' but I've noticed sometimes it seems to 'forget' that it's on shuffle setting, and go back to a normal, serial mode of playing through the songs I've loaded into it. I was wondering why this happened, and now I've developed a hypothesis. It seems to happen every time it it hits a folder with unicode (i.e. non-Western) characters in its name. In practical terms, on my MP3 player, that means anytime it hits one of the Korean pop songs I've been keeping in fairly heavy rotation, if only for the linguistic content. But I find it ironic that this seems to 'break' the shuffle feature, given that the MP3 player is a Korean-designed, made and marketed product (Samsung, I think).
It doesn't actually bother me that much, but it means that about once every hour or so of listening, I suddenly start hearing all of my Korean songs in a row, and the randomness of the 'shuffle' disappears' – this is because once the shuffle hits one of the Korean-labeled folders, it drops out of 'shuffle' mode and begins to play sequentially, and for alphebetization reasons, all the Korean stuff is grouped at one 'end' of the MP3 player's memory. Now all that remains is to test my hypothesis. But I wonder what causes it?