Tuesday, February 02, 2010
It is cold here... How cold? I'm having to develop a scale for coldness and I think we are currently somewhere between
"spray a cat with a hose and it freezes in place" cold
and
"threat to external genitalia" cold...
To be honest, I'm not sure which is worse....
Why was I out in all of this frigidity? Remembrance of girlfriends past? Suicidal ideation?
Visa extension.
And, did I find the place to do it. At the Omogyko immigration building they have a special room for professors and other special people. It's like.. like ... well, I never was a fan of strip-clubs, specially since my genitalia froze off in the "Big Seoul Cold" of 2010, but it's like the champagne room.
It has a TV with a remote control, couches, a FREE computer and fax machine, and staff who speak nearly flawless English. Even better? When I came in they were on #26 and my ticket was #28. I sat down, read the English newspaper they provided, and was in and out in about a half an hour, including some social yammer with my immigration representative.
Just amazing how being a professor changes the treatment you get... and you can look right across the lobby and see the laborers/hagwon teachers/Canadian dope-smokers struggling with the enormous queue.
Brilliant!
Monday, February 01, 2010
LOL.. no Korea hate....
Immigration is where every country sends the employees it doesn't want to deal with itself.
And some truly special people (I've always loved em, but I'm dead white)
We will find the right person...
The Wedding that Fate Hated!
LOL..
now immigration is fucking with Yvonne..... she can't change her visa status until the 15th... ooh.. sorry.. the 16th as the 15th is Seollal....
because they are afraid if they change it before her contract expires she will work in Daejeon all day until 6:30 pm.. then hop on the KTX at 25 bux both ways.. and race up to Seoul at about 9 and..
and...
teach classes at Dongguk, which doesn't even offer classes for this month....
stupid petty officials...
so tomorrow I get to go the the Immigration "Champagne Room" for E1 folks, and they will tell me if Yvonne actually has to surrender her passport after she applies for visa change...
if she does...
no wedding...
Which is why, today, I love Korea. ;-P
Friday, January 29, 2010
The Limits of Psycho-Lonerness?
Living up here alone may have tested the limits of my psycho-lonerness. I'm listening to podcasts in the background just to hear English language spoken!
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Morning Calm Moves!
To completely avoid all the hassles of the upcoming wedding, I spent all day today setting up a new website, Wordpress, and then migrating Morning Calm to the new site. The old site was visually fine, but because of the way it was set up it did not get well searched by Google, and its internal search function was also asploded. It also had a pretty gnarly URL and I want to be able to say the URL and have people remember it....
For all these reasons I moved it to www.ktlit.com, which should be easy enough to remember. In the course of all this I discovered that the nitwits at Wells Fargo had blocked my credit card, apparently having forgot that I moved to Korea. This would have come up inconvenient when it was time for me to buy my ticket back to The Empire.
Oh well.. got the site up, did the export/import from Blogger to Wordpress, then dorked around figuring out how to change the templates. The last bit was to go to Feedburner and Google Analytics and get them hooked up... it seems to have worked, although there is a lot more I'd like to do to the template....
Tomorrow I'll have to find the sites with hard-coded links to my page and email them with the changes...
But for now.. go take a look and give me feedback.... www.ktlit.com,
For all these reasons I moved it to www.ktlit.com, which should be easy enough to remember. In the course of all this I discovered that the nitwits at Wells Fargo had blocked my credit card, apparently having forgot that I moved to Korea. This would have come up inconvenient when it was time for me to buy my ticket back to The Empire.
Oh well.. got the site up, did the export/import from Blogger to Wordpress, then dorked around figuring out how to change the templates. The last bit was to go to Feedburner and Google Analytics and get them hooked up... it seems to have worked, although there is a lot more I'd like to do to the template....
Tomorrow I'll have to find the sites with hard-coded links to my page and email them with the changes...
But for now.. go take a look and give me feedback.... www.ktlit.com,
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Some People are Too easily Bored
Registration is now open for the 20th World Conference of GLBT Jewsso.. yeah.. a majority likely can be bored, in one sense or another...
But the best thing about that site is the vanilla stock photos they chose...
nut... er.. uterus up!
the page begins:
Welcome to Los Angeles 2010, the 20th World Conference of GLBT Jews!
and thank god you get past the rainbow and the bad stock
photos...to bad photos...
still.. that's real..
l
y
bad...
Friday, January 22, 2010
Anti-LOLZ ... our Wedding Hall decclared seismically unsafe..
Nice, eh...
With just less than a month to go, the wedding hall is shut down for seismic re-fitting.
Scramble is officially in the "ON" position....
With just less than a month to go, the wedding hall is shut down for seismic re-fitting.
Scramble is officially in the "ON" position....
Thursday, January 21, 2010
End of Short-Term Whites
aah..classes ended Tuesday, so I've been living the life a professional man of leisure. Wednesday was all about finishing grades and purchasing a new printer. I had to go out to Hongdae in the rain, to get the printer.. and lug it a couple of kilometers in a plastic bag. It started out a nice, light 30 pounds, but by the time I had walked it to the tube station, through the transfers, then out and up my hill, it seemed to weigh about 3 tons. Still good to have, since being able to print out things I am writing speeds my writing process up considerably.
Then it was a quick hack at grading - all done and sent off by 5 in the evening.
Today was light-housecleaning and laundry. Sat down with the two book reviews I'm supposed to finish and, by dint of having printing in the house, have finished one and am at 1,000 words on the other. Amazing what having a printer does for that process.
Now I'm avoiding doing what I really need to do to finish the second review; reread the book now that I have the outline and much of the text done... So I spent a lot of time watching clips of the Leno-Conan-Letterman-Kimmel kerfluffle they seem to be having in The Empire.
Funny stuff...
Now, I suppose, off to reading... ;-)
Labels: seoul
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
My infamy grows!

Way at the back of this picture? That little man standing up and addressing the crowd? That's me singing at the KBBA (Korean Something Bloggers Association) in order to win our table free chicken.
Labels: seoul

