The HST반 kids (9th graders) this evening had written essays on the topic of Korean North-South reunification, but they only had about 10 minutes to prepare their speeches after we formed teams. They are allowed to read their notes, but these three kids really impressed me, as they are coming close to approximating what I think of as an "American" debate style, cramming their ideas into a short, timed speech (in this case, 1 minute).
[daily log: walking, 6km]
What I'm listening to right now.
Parry Gripp, "Guinea Pig Bridge at the Nagasaki Bio Park"
Lyrics.
Guinea Pig Bridge!
(Guinea pig, guinea pig , guinea guinea guinea pig)
Guinea Pig Bridge!
Transporting guinea pigs from point A to point B
Utilizing the latest guinea pig bridge technology
Conveniently and safely!
(Guinea pig, guinea pig , guinea guinea guinea pig)
Guinea Pig Bridge!
(Guinea pig, guinea pig , guinea guinea guinea pig)
Guinea Pig Bridge!
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
During break between classes, a student named Jinu, a 9th grade boy with a bit of swagger and machismo about him, was standing at the water-cooler in the hall, filling a paper cup with water.
Four 9th grade girls from the HSA class, next door, walked by, giggling and carrying on, and paused to actually talk to Jinu about something.
He was clearly much flattered by the attention. As a result, he didn't pay attention to his cup in the fill-position in the water cooler. The water kept running into his cup.
It ran into the little tray underneath, and filled that, and onto the floor. The girls kept chatting with him, and laughing. Jinu was only paying attention to the girls. The amount of water on the floor reached his shoes. The girls laughed more, and finally one of them gave away the game, pointing at the floor.
Jinu jumped back, embarrassed. The girls laughed more, and ran away down the hall.
I felt like I had watched a vignette in a sit-com.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
This is an aphorism I saw in my book of aphorisms.
끈 떨어진 두레박
kkeun tteol.eo.jin du.re.bak
cord fall-PPART bucket
A bucket with a fallen cord
Apparently it refers to a person who wanders without friends or relatives. Although I have friends and relatives for whom I am immensely grateful, I admit sometimes I easily fall into a pattern of perceiving myself this way.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
I've developed a bit of a tradition (I don't always follow it, but a couple times a month) of spending my Sundays doodling my imaginary maps and architecture schemes, listening to strange music, and buying and eating take-out pumpkin porridge (단호박죽).
So that's what I did with my Sunday.
What I'm listening to right now.
[UPDATE 20180330: Video embed changed due to link-rot. The new embedded video is a different remix of the same song, and not the one in my mp3 collection. It's similar enough, but the lyrics might not match…]
Absurd Minds, "Herzlos."
Lyrics.
Unwahr ist, was nicht meinem Wahren entspricht.
Unwahr nenn ich alles, was das Wahre verbirgt
Und unwirklich, begrenzt oder einengend ist,
was Täuschung und Wahn, was vergänglich ist.
Unwahr ist Begrenzung durch Zeit und Raum.
Unwahr – die Tränen in meinem Traum.
Was unwahr ist, das BIN ICH nicht.
Denn ICH BIN das Wahre, denn ICH BIN das Ich.
So bist du also wieder einmal hier. Und dennoch hälst du an deinem Unglauben fest.
Es ist der eine, starre, unveränderbare Glaube der Welt,
dass alle Dinge in ihr geboren werden, nur um wieder zu sterben.
Und doch ist dieses Leben ein Spiel,
aber du bist zu den Glauben gekommen, dass es die einzige Wirklichkeit ist.
Die einzige Wirklichkeit jedoch, die es gab und je geben wird ist das Leben.
Meißel nun in alle Grabsteine: Hier ruht niemand.
(… herzlos.)
Das verstehst du nicht, denn du bist mein Traum, der zu mir spricht.
(Du bist herzlos.)
Was willst du von mir? Denkst du immer noch ich bin außerhalb von dir?
Das freie Denken kann nicht durch irgendwelche Grenzen gebunden werden.
Die wahre Bewegung, die allen zugrunde liegt, ist die Bewegung des Denkens.
Und die Wahrheit selbst ist Bewegung und kann niemals zum Stillstand,
zum aufhören des Suchens führen.
Deshalb liegt der wahre und wirkliche Fortschritt des Denkens
nur im umfassendsten Streben nach Erkenntnis,
die überhaupt nicht die Möglichkeit des Stillstands
in irgendwelchen Formen der Erkenntnis anerkennt.
Meißel nun in alle Grabsteine: Hier ruht niemand.
(… herzlos.)
[daily log: walking, 1km ; falling down, 1 m]
Not me. Rather, Jared Diamond, a famous some-sort-of-scientist, wrote this article quite some time ago, that I just ran across.
Any discussion of the origins of the Japanese, he points out, is ideologically fraught in a way that the origins of most other cultures on Earth is not. Korea has similar problems. This is because Japanese and Korean cultural identities, as modern constructs, rely overmuch on pre-modern myths that still undergird modern nationalisms. Many Koreans will tell you with a straight face that Korea was "founded" in October 3rd, 2333 BC. If such a precise date seems implausible, well… they don't care.
Anyway, I found Diamond's article interesting reading.
[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]
I had bookmarked this article about education after reading it, with the intention of writing something about it. I found the article interesting in its reflections of the paradox of public education – that by virtue of being compulsory and free, it necessarily cannot be excellent for all, and those who seek excellence are compelled to opt out.
Anyway, no need to summarize it. Just what's on my mind at the moment. I'm tired and have to work tomorrow morning.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
This is an aphorism from my aphorism book.
쥐구멍을 소 몰랴고 한다
jwi.gu.meong.eul so mol.lya.go han.da
mouse-hole-OBJ cow push-CONTN do-PRES
[Like] pushing a cow in a mouse-hole.
It seems to mean something like a “putting a square peg in a round hole” – doing something impossible.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
Discovery
Violin clutched tightly, I wait.
The bus roars up, clattering
Like a broken dinosaur
In bad movies. The stinging
Fumes stab at my lungs
Piercing the sweet spring air.
Climbing the steps make
Mountains seem easy.
Paper wrappers flap on rubber
Treads. The waiting fare box
Grins like a Gothic gargoyle.
Then they yell at me.
I try to give an old
Lady my seat. She has pain
Behind the brown in her eyes.
Bundles and bags spilling from
Skinny arms, pulling her dress
Askew. She yells at me too.
When I go to the back
To slide on the long seat
The way we used to, Grandfather,
The bus driver stops,
Tramps back, grim, gray
Face behind the glasses.
The whole bus begins shouting
At me. The noise settles
Like crows, around my head,
Pecking my bones with sharp,
Shiny, cruel beaks.
He throws me off the bus.
I was lost and had no fare.
Why didn't you tell me,
Grandfather, that people
Are different if their skin
Is like night, like coffee
With cream, like topaz?
Everyone's the same underneath,
Aren't they, Grandfather?
Their blood is red.
This poem was written by my mother. She is remembering being a child in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1952. I thought it was relevant given the occasion, this week, of remembering the 50th anniversary of the events in Selma, Alabama. I was listening to Obama's speech on NPR.
I had a bad day at work. I don't like being a disciplinarian, but I like even less having other teachers get angry at me for failing to be the kind of disciplinarian they think I should be.
[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]
These are allegations, left lying around on whiteboards.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
I saw this factoid at the marginal revolution blog I look at sometimes:
Percentage of annual net electricity generation by renewables in 1948: 32
Percentage of annual net electricity generation by renewables in 2005: 11
"Ssergorp" is progress, spelled backwards. So it means… regress?
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
I spent Sunday doing two very nerdy but utterly unrelated things.
I was reading The Children of Hurin. The author on the book is JRR Tolkien, but I rather suspect whatever he left behind was pretty fragmentary, and I think it would be more realistic to assume this is mostly the work of his son and editor, Christopher Tolkien. Not that that takes away from it – as always, I like these "obscure" bits of Tolkien much better than the famous ones.
And I wrote a computer program in python. Python is a programming language. The program I wrote takes a text file of data points that form a polygon, and "simplifies" the polygon line (reduces the number of points in the line without sacrificing the shape). It's computational geometry, such as is done in graphics programming or, more to the point, GIS (geographic information systems – the tools that we use to present maps online).
It's really the sort of exercise one might do in an Intro to Computer Science course, except that I stole the actual algorithm off the internet, rather than doing the heavy lifting on that front. Mostly I had to familiarize myself with the syntactic features of python, which I've never used before.
Why did I do this? Um… maybe I'll figure that out later.
[daily log: running, 6 nm]
I have worked every day for the last 13 days, either teaching my full class schedule or moving the hagwon over last weekend.
Plus I went to the hospital for my CT scan, and I think they zapped me with more "contrast medium" than usual, it really gave me a heavy-metal hangover.
Therefore I am tired.
Therefore I am uninterested in posting something interesting on this blog. I am going to be super mega lazy tomorrow. That's the plan.
See you Monday.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
Tenho em mim como uma bruma
Que nada é nem contém
A saudade de coisa nenhuma,
O desejo de qualquer bem.
Sou envolvido por ela
Como por um nevoeiro
E vejo luzir a última estrela
Por cima da ponta do meu cinzeiro
Fumei a vida. Que incerto
Tudo quanto vi ou li!
E todo o mundo é um grande livro aberto
Que em ignorada língua me sorri.
– Fernando Pessoa (Portuguese poet, 1888-1935)
I have in me like a haze
Which holds and which is nothing
A nostalgia for nothing at all,
The desire for something vague.
I’m wrapped by it
As by a fog, and I see
The final star shining
Above the stub in my ashtray.
I smoked my life. How uncertain
All I saw or read! All
The world is a great open book
That smiles at me in an unknown tongue.
– Translation by Richard Zenith
[daily log: walking, 7.5 km]
I did my CT scan, this morning. It's kind of a routine, now, as I've mentioned, but I never enjoy the injection of the contrast medium. It's not painful, per se, but I get this kind of semi-nauseated feeling of imminent-yet-unrealized incontenence, and a kind of burning feeling flowing up and down my body to the rhythm of my heart's beating. It's disturbing and uncomfortable, and it always makes me imagine I'm doing heroin, though I never have done that.
After the CT scan, I saw the radiation guy, Dr. Jo – the german-accented Korean.
He peered at my scans on his computer screens, and poked around my mouth a bit. "It's looking more normal," he assessed. Nothing bad, at all. It's rather comforting, actually, in an understated way.
Then I had a full day of teaching. Now I have a headache, but I guess it's just tiredness and the hangover of the medical stuff this morning.
[daily log: walking, 11 km]
I came to the hospital to get my heavy metals injection and check up.
You will be curious at this blog-post's title. Who is teaching Bulgarian?
I had a vivid, long dream last night.
I was sitting at my new desk in the new building, and Jody handed me a new schedule. Lo and behold, there were many surprises on the schedule – changes that affected me but about which I'd heard nothing prior to that moment. So far, so realistic… this happens once a month or so. It's part of life-at-the-hagwon, the "zen" of working as a member of team where communication is never quite what one would hope, due to both linguistic and cultural issues. I try to just shrug at these things, though just yesterday, I had a minor "tantrum" about a change – perhaps that brought on the dream. But then it got weird.
Studying the schedule closely, however, I noticed, written under a middle school block, the characters "бълг". Was this some weird cyrillic typo?
I went to Jody and pointed at it. What's this? She shrugged, and said Curt put it there.
I went to Curt. He was in the hallway moving desks. This is not unrealistic, but the hallway looked like a Hongnong hallway, not a Karma 4.0 hallway. I was self-aware enough, in the dream, to be disconcerted by this. But I was too upset about the schedule mystery to worry about it.
I collared Curt and pointed at the schedule. What's this?
"Bulgarian," he bellowed, optimistically.
Bulgarian? Why would I be teaching Bulgarian to middle school students in Korea?
Some parents requested it.
Ah, well, that's typical. Customer is king, and all that. Uh, another problem: I don't know Bulgarian.
Curt grinned at me. "You say you're a linguist. You can solve it."
I did see it as something of a challange. I downloaded a "Teach yourself Bulgarian" file from the internet, and printed out some copies.
A few hours later, I'm in my classroom, which resembles a converted storage closet (not necessarily unrealistic). There is an annoying concrete column in the middle of the room, and I try to rearrange the desks so the students can see the whiteboard around it.
My students show up. They are new students – unfamiliar faces. Two of them are speaking something slavic-sounding to each other. Hmm.
I had decided at the start that I would stick to honesty. So I make a long, detailed, impassioned speech, in English, explaining that I am their teacher and that I will guide them in learning Bulgarian, even though I don't know it myself. I don't mention, but have in mind, the fact that some Korean teachers of English are in fact not very good at English. It's not that different.
In fact, possibly this is what the dream is about, in some indirect way?
That's where I woke up. I thought to myself, I should write this down.
I wrote it down.
[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]
Last week my student said she had to study "Algae Buddha."
I was surprised. "What is algae buddha?" I asked.
She was disconcerted. She thought I should know.
It went back and forth.
Finally, I learned she was trying to say "Algebra."
The problem is that epithentic vowel. It goes between the "b" and the "r," because Korean doesn't allow those two consonants to go together. Al-je-beu-ra. Then, the rules of Korean prosody being applied, the epithentic gets the emphasis. And so you get "algae buddha."
I told her I thought it was more interesting when I thought it was Algae Buddha.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
We had no classes to day. We sorted and cleaned and sorted and cleaned. Karma re-opens tomorrow to students. Here is our new building – we're on the 2nd floor – with new orange sign and new logo too.
[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]
I worked today, moving Karma. As a memento, here is a picture of our new conference room with a bunch of books I helped shelve.
This will be the sixth location in the Hugok neighborhood where I have worked.
[daily log: walking, 7 km + 75 desks and miscellaneous boxes]
Yesterday my student cited this aphorism to me – he was trying to figure out how to say it in English. Having seen it before in my aphorism book, I actually was able to decipher his idea – I think without that, I’d have had no clue what his intended meaning was.
세살적 버릇 여든까지 간다
se.sal.jeok beo.reut yeo.deun.kka.ji gan.da
Three-years-MANNER habit eighty-UNTIL go-PRES
A habit of three years goes until eighty.
It means a childhood habit sticks with us for life. He was using it to explain why we can’t easily stop people from eating junk food.
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km; lifting boxes, 1 hr]
This weekend, Karma is moving to a new location. I have to work through the weekend. Packing. Unpacking.
What I'm listening to, and suffering through, right now.
Willie Nelson, "Just a Little Old Fashioned Karma Coming Down."
Lyrics.
There's just a little old fashioned karma coming down
Just a little old fashioned justice going round
A little bit of sowing and a little bit of reaping
A little bit of laughing and a little bit of weeping
Just a little old fashioned karma coming down
Coming down, coming down
Just a little old fashioned karma coming down
It really ain't hard to understand
If you're gonna dance you gotta pay the band
It's just a little old fashioned karma coming down
There's just a little old fashioned karma coming down
Just a little old fashioned justice going round
A little bit of sowing and a little bit of reaping
A little bit of laughing and a little bit of weeping
Just a little old fashioned karma coming down
Coming down, coming down
Just a little old fashioned karma coming down
It really ain't hard to understand
If you're gonna dance you gotta pay the band
It's just a little old fashioned karma coming down
It's just a little old fashioned karma coming down
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
I got nothing. Here's from the whiteboard, the other day.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
Lo que estoy escuchando en este momento.
Noséquien y Los Nosécuantos, "Pacha."
Letra.
(Lo que has hecho conmigo no tiene nombre…)
Ya no recuerdas quien soy
yo te hice el plan en la playa
tu te enfrentabas al sol
yo me acerqué por la espalda;
Pasado el susto inicial,
vencida tu desconfianza;
buscamos algo que hablar,
y cruzamos las miradas
Me fui con tu dirección
y tu número en la agenda
y en la mente una visión
mezcla de hembrita y pantera
Dejé que pasen los días
y a tu número marqué
y cuando por ti pregunté
me dijeron que ahí no vivías
(jajaja… ni siquiera te conocía!)
Tu no estás obligada a satisfacerme,
por esos no debes mentirme
si no te apetece verme
Trata de no ser falsa
busca ser sincera siempre,
piensa antes de recibir,
lo que puedas ofrecerme;
Lástima que con tu gracia
y con esa linda facha,
te quieras hacer la sapa
y actués como una pacha
Pacha, Pacharaca
Pacha, Pacharaca…
No sabes lo mal que estoy,
tú te has pasado de la raya
yo no me olvido hasta hoy
de lo que pasó en la playa;
te hize un par de poesías
No te veo de nuevo…
No te veo para que te ahogues
me dado cuenta al estar contigo
que eres una calienta vohues
Pacha, pacharaca…
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
Two short classroom anecdotes:
In my Sirius반 of 2nd and 3rd grade elementary students, I have a student named Andy, who is somewhat hyper. He is always wiggling. He never stops. He often is contorting himself in strange ways, like an incompetent ballet dancer who drank too much coffee. Yesterday, another student, the much more staid and laid-back Chloe, was sitting in her chair and doing this weird routine of leaning forward and leaning back, swinging her legs. In Andy, I would over look it, but with her, it was out of character. "Are you OK," I asked.
Her simple answer was: "Andy style." Everyone laughed – it was clear what she meant.
Today, in my Honors반, I was pretty upset. They were goofing off and refusing to answer the speaking questions we were doing in the book. I guess the questions were boring, and after the long holiday, the kids were still in "play" mode. They would just make fart noises or shake their head or say no no no. I got mad – I said there's a time to play and a time to practice speaking questions, and now was a time to practice. "I'm really angry," I said. I was frustrated. But even when I'm annoyed, like that, I don't really yell or carry on – I tend to just get serious, stop joking around, and push the class harder.
A student complained. "If you are angry, why don't you yell at us like a normal teacher?"
Thus I received a remarkably insightful encapsulation of how the Korean education system works.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
Over the little mini-vacation I had the last five days, I let my beard grow out. I was curious to see if I could do it – because of the radiation treatment 16 months ago, I lost most of the hair on the left side of my beard, but some stubble had me thinking it was coming back.
I was wrong. I grew half-a-beard, basically, with a few spots. It looked weird. I shaved this morning and went to work.
Moving forward, this is going to be a hellish couple of weeks, now – the vacation time is over. We have the regular end-of-month stress, compounded with physically relocating the hagwon next weekend to a new building. Ugh.
Unrelatedly, everyone needs a robot-writing-on-whiteboard clock.
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]
What I'm listening to right now.
Modest Mouse, "Lampshades on Fire." The lyrics made me think of one of my favorite books of all time, the children's classic [broken link! FIXME] The Wump World. Music by Modest Mouse always makes me remember driving across New Mexico with my brother in… hm, I forget what year that was. 2006?
Lyrics.
Mmm buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh-duh-dah
Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh-duh-dah
We’re all goin’, we’re all goin’
Well, the lampshade’s on fire when the lights go out
The room lit up and we ran about
Well, this is what I really call a party now
Packed up our cars, moved to the next town
Well, the lampshades’s on fire when the lights go out
This is what I really call a party now
Well, fear makes us really, really run around
This one’s done so where to now?
Our eyes light up, we have no shame at all
Well you all know what I’m talking’ about
Shaved off my eyebrows when I fall to the ground
So I can’t look surprised right now
Pack up again, head to the next place
Where we'll make the same mistakes
Burn it up, or just chop it down
Ah, this one's done so where to now?
Buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh-duh-dah
Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh-duh-dah
We're all goin’, we're all goin’
Well, the lampshade's on fire when the lights go out
This is what I really call a party now
Well, fear makes us really, really run around
Ah, this one's done so where to now?
Our eyes light up, we have no shame at all
Well, you all know what I'm talkin’ about
The room lights up, well, we're still dancing around
We're havin’ fun, havin’ some for now
Pack up again, head to the next place
Where we'll make the same mistakes
Open one up and let it fall to the ground
Pile out the door when it all runs out
Buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh-duh-dah
Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh-duh-dah
We're all goin’, we're all goin’
We have spines in our bones
We'll eat your food, we'll throw stones
Oh, this is how it's always gone
And this is how it's goin’ to go
Well, we're the human race
We're goin’ to party out of this place
And then move on
Tough love
We'll kill you off and then make a clone
Yeah, we got spines, yeah, we have bones
This is how it's always gone
And this is how it's goin’ to go
As our feelings are getting hurt
Ah, we want you to do the work
Our ass looks great inside these jeans
Well, we all just don’t wanna’ clean
Oh, this is how it's always been
And this is how it's goin’ to be
So, you just move on
The air’s on fire so we’re movin’ on
Better find another one ‘cause this one’s done
Waitin’ for the magic when the scientists glow
To push, push, push, push, pull us up
Spend some time to float in outer space
Find another planet, make the same mistakes
Our mind’s all shattered when we climb aboard
Hopin’ for the scientists to find another door
[daily log: walking, km]
I am a bit of a cartography nerd – this is known by some people. I have been spending some of my vacation time playing around with some pretty elaborate map-drawing software. The tools I'm using are JOSM on OSM files (OSM is from openstreetmap.org, but you can create offline map files using that format, which is transparently xml and open source). They have created a completely open-source world map that rivals google maps in quality, and being open-source, the data-sets are queryable and downloadable, which is fun for cartography nerds. OSM is a pretty elaborate scheme – there are whole websites dedicated to explicating the intricacies, including the official OSM wiki.
Most of what's on the wiki is strictly informational, and dry, reference-style prose, often evidently written by non-native-speakers of English (OSM's user-base seems to be in continental Europe and former Soviet bloc, as is true for many successful open-source platforms).
All of the preceeding, however, is merely by way of introduction. I ran across a very excellent bit of humor today in surfing the OSM wiki: a guy proposing a data standard for mapping clouds ("tagging" is the term of art for this type of data standard). His proposal begins as I quote below:
Tag:natural=cloud
Used to tag an area of clouds. Clouds are very prominent landmarks which can obscure the sky for people living underneath them. They also cause a loss of precision in the mapping of the area they cover, because they hide the surface of the earth on aerial imagery.
Under "related tags," he mentions:
rainy=yes/no – is used to indicate if the cloud can cause rainfalls.
My understanding, in perusing the comment threads attached to this entry, is that the author intended an April Fool's joke. In any event, it appealed to my sense of humor, especially to find it so well-done in such a normally dry and unhumorous context as a software reference website.
I guess I spent the day vegetating in front of the internet. Not really a way to feel I was using my time positively. I'm need to stick to my "no internet rule for Sundays" tomorrow, I think.
[daily log: walking, 13 m]
A Paradise of Poets
1
He takes a book down from his shelf & scribbles across a
page of text: I am the final one. This means the world will
end when he does.
2
In the Inferno, Dante conceives a Paradise of Poets & calls
it Limbo.
Foolishly he thinks his place is elsewhere.
3
Now the time has come to write a poem about a Paradise of Poets.
– Jerome Rothenberg (American poet, b. 1931)
[daily log: walking, 2 km]
Oops, I almost forgot to post to my blog. I have 10 minutes until midnight, and if I don't post to my blog, I will turn into a pumpkin.
On second thought, that doesn't sound so bad.
Anyway.
Having days off discombobulates my sense of time. I was hacking something. Sometimes I am puzzled at my compulsion to solve useless problems on my computer in the least efficient means humanly conceivable. I think my family will recognize that I come by that tendency legitimately.
Goodnight.
[daily log: walking, what, on Lunar Newyears day? Where would I walk? I heard the Chinese released a special newyear's smog at Beijing, I'm sure it's headed this way – it can't be good to go outside and breath that, can it?]
Here is a deliberately anachronistic approach to the World Wide Web, in celebration of its 25th anniversary. The WWW dates to 1990 and the work of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. However, in this video, a rather deadpan presenter uses much older equipment, including a 1960s vintage teletype terminal, a rotary dial phone and an acoustic-coupling modem.
I will date myself by saying that even this older equipment is not entirely unfamiliar to me, for which I credit the fact that my uncle, enrolled in computer science classes in the early 1970s at the local university, took me along with him to learn about computers. Thus I have actually operated terminals quite similar to the ones shown, including doing some BASIC programming when I was 8 or 9 years old. I think it was on the DEC "mini computer" at the university ("mini" being a relative concept – it occupied a largish, excessively air-conditioned room in the computer science department, and had blinking lights on the front, just like in the movies. Its computing capacity was probably about the same as a modern "dumb" cell phone – not a smartphone, which exceeds the computing capacity of even supercomputers of that era.
I remember making a text-based "slot machine game" where it said "PRESS ANY KEY" and it would give an apparently random assortment of slot-machinish results, e.g. "BAR CHERRY LEMON" or "BAR BAR BAR". But I made it so that I could manipulate the results to increase my chances of winning depending on which "ANY KEY" I chose to PRESS, in an utterly undocumented way. It was a kind of rudimentary "easter egg" (a term of art among programmers and hackers) wrapped in a pointless game. I would press the various keys for hours, watching the statistical variations in the output. I suppose it gave me a good intuitive grounding in statistics, although it wasn't until university that I realized that's what I had been doing.
I also enjoyed playing a text-based "Star Trek" game that was wildly popular in the 1970s on mainframes (many javascript "ports" of the game are available, for example here), in the pre-home-computer era. Later, when my uncle acquired an Apple ][, I believe it had some version of that Star Trek game, too, but I moved on to Hamurabi, and later Space Invaders when he shelled out for a graphics card for the Apple.
[daily log: walking, km]
Well, Curt must be getting generous or something. Korean Lunar New Year's day (설날) falls on a Thursday, this year – the day after tomorrow. By Korean tradition, this means Wednesday and Friday off. In past times, when this kind of holiday happened this way, on a Thursday, I would still have to work Saturday. This year, we're getting Saturday off, too. I feel surprised. I don't think I've had so many days off in a row since I was getting radiation treatment and was too sick to work.
Well, so, everyone is always so disappointed with my disinterest in "doing anything" for my time off. What would I do – get stuck in traffic travelling somewhere? No thanks.
I'll be a hermit. Practicing for my career in the monastery. Updates coming soon.
Anyway, I have to rest up, since next week, after the holiday, I have to work through the weekend, because Karma is moving to a new location, and the big move will be on Sunday, to minimize disruptions to the teaching schedule.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
My phonics student Jaehui and I had a collaborative drawing session on the whiteboard when class started today, because – due to the rain, I guess – the other students were late.
It was fun. More fun than the TEPS-M반 that came later, because they are a bunch of knuckleheads and put me in a bad mood.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
