The beginning.

Pictures look better with a border and captions.

For the next 2 weeks or so, I’ll be on the radio every day doing the domestic news. Anyone who wants to listen to me should tune in to TBS 101.3 at around 6:30 PM Korea time. If you’re not in Seoul you can listen over the internet here. I think it requires that you use internet explorer.

If I can prove myself during this short period, you might see more of me after wards, but a program shuffle is in the works.

If you watch the Kill Bill movies backwards…

The greatest doctor who ever lived!

They are about a miracle doctor who reconstructs a wealthy man’s heart using pressure points on his chest and returns his daughter to him.

She then travels to Texas performs split second eye surgery on a blind woman, and buries herself in the ground. The other woman uses her mind control powers on a magic snake that removes the poison from another man.

He then digs the doctor out of the ground, unties her and takes her back to his trailer, but tells her she has to sleep under it, slamming the door on her.

The doctor instead goes to California, to do heart surgery with a knife on a little girl’s mother. The mother and doctor then clean up her kitchen and living room.

She then decides to go to Japan to perform her greatest miracle yet. She first goes to the hospital and reattaches a lady’s arm and stuffs her in the trunk of her car after telling her about all her other miracles.

She goes to a restaurant that was recently hit with a terrible disaster and reattaches a woman’s scalp, saves 88 amputees, and performs brain surgery on a high school girl using a broken table leg with two nails sticking out of it. The two of them fix the table together with the girl’s magic fix it all ball and chain.

After fixing everything in the restaurant, lots of guests come to eat dinner. The Doctor reattaches the arm to the woman who was in her trunk. They go to the bathroom together. Everyone is so happy that they decide to have a party.

The doctor then goes to Okinawa and returns a sword to a man who melts it down as scrap metal. She goes back to America, gives her car to an unconscious nurse and performs emergency brain surgery on him using a door. She then takes a nap for 4 years. Later all the people she has helped find her near death at a church and heal her. They too are miracle doctors.

She then travels to China to hang out with an old man. The wealthy guy picks her up and they go camping.

Edit: Oh yea, somewhere in there is an animated story about a woman who uses a strong gun shaped magnet to do brain surgery on the president of Mexico, and a bunch of other people till one day someone comes along and does surgery on her dad.

Binoculars work just fine no matter how you’re supposed to hold them

South Korean media is making a big deal about Kim Jong Il’s son, shown on North Korean TV holding a pair of binoculars upside down.

Is this really news?

I don’t know why the Korean media continues to talk about Mr. Kim’s “serious blunder” or suggesting that he’s unfit to rule a country because of the way he holds binoculars. For one, they work no matter how you hold them. Next, there are a million other ways that they could suggest he’s unfit to rule a country.

This isn’t news.

I’m now a part of the Korean Blog List.

Yea it's random, but I like to add a picture for every post....

I had actually forgotten about this when I did the migration. I went and tried to reroute all the places that were pointing to the Seoul Searcher and point them here. So I tried to change my registration on the Korean Blog List. I didn’t think it would take so long for it to go through, but I am told now by e-mail that I am now a member…. (I guess they should add “again” to the e-mail.) I wonder how they determined my blog was Korea related. If they’ve been checking the past 6 weeks it’s been all about geeky movie and TV watching stuff.

I’m listed in the section Koreans in Korea. I guess they didn’t want to make a new category for Gyopos, and there would be few “actual” Koreans (I think the popular blogging term for citizens of Korea who were born and raised in Korea is KoKos…..? I forget..) blogging in English. Anyway that means I am easier to find. It’s better to be listed here than in a sea of Foreigners in Korea blogs. I only have to compete with 20 or so, and I’m #4 in line. If I were in the FiK listing I’d be up against like 80.

Well, I hope that this leads to a traffic increase so I can get more customers.. haha.

Oh, and if you don’t like my posting schedule.. check out their list and find someone else’s blog to read to satiate your Korea blogging demand…. you freak.

Almost all of TV is the imagined universe of an autistic child.

When surfing the net, you come across a lot of geeky theories… such as an analysis of time travel movies… .  Well, I’ve become aware of an interesting theory about a lot of the TV shows out there being in the same universe.

I repeat... The 50s were cool.

I’ve known about this theory for quite some time…  I just never thought that so many shows were connected with each other.  Probably the first time I even thought about it was when I saw an episode of Happy Days which featured Laverne and Shirley.  I didn’t know that the shows were connected until I saw this episode.

Well it turns out that Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley crossed over with other shows, which had characters show up on other shows, which had more characters showing up on other shows… to the point that Star Trek, LOST, Leave it to Beaver, and Dennis he Menace all took place in the same universe.

Here’s a graphic which shows all of the TV shows connected.

So how come the people on Star Trek never found ALFs home planet?

Well, it also turns out that all of this universe is the imagined dream of an autistic boy named Tommy Westphall.

Tommy Westphall... Creator of Worlds.

Decades it would have been cool to have been a teenager in.

A TV show about the '70s made in the '90s and '00s... starring the guy that played the villain in Spider-Man 3 and his father played by the guy who played the villain in Robocop. Okay I'm a geek.. but if you're reading my blog, you probably like that kind of stuff.

My days of unemployment are soon to end, but I did a lot of TV and movie watching in the 6 weeks or so that I have been unemployed.  I watched almost the entire run of that ’70s show.  It was a show that ran from 1998 to 2006, but took place between 1976-1979.  (That averages to 1 year every two seasons, but I suspect that time was running faster in the earlier seasons than it was in the later ones, as the characters go to see Star Wars towards the end of season 1, indicating that season 1 itself spans 1976 and 1977.)

Anyhow, watching this series got me to thinking about a lot of things.

First… I am starting to think that 70′s fashion wasn’t really all that bad.  When I was growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, it seemed like everyone was making fun of the poor kids who were coming to school in bell-bottoms because they had either inherited the clothes from their much older siblings or from thrift stores.  I had a few pieces of inherited clothing that I’m not really sure where my mother got them from… but I remember that I avoided wearing those clothes and hoped that I would grow out of them soon.  In retrospect, I should have worn those instead of what I had actually chosen for myself.

What do you mean?

I found this pic on the internet... but this looks like what I was proud to be wearing to elementary school, forsaking the cool '70s clothes that I dreaded wearing. '80s fashion looks stupid.

Bell-bottom pants and a nice pointy collar button up shirt would have been a lot better than jams and that ugly net tank top that I chose for myself.  My acid washed jeans with deliberate holes in them were kind of stupid as well.  When I look back at pictures of myself as a pre-teen, I cringe.  Now, keep in mind I was following fashion trends of the time, so I was actually fashionable for a kid at the time.  But 80′s fashion in general was terrible.  I don’t know what the people who cooked up ’80s fashion were smoking, but ’80s hair, ’80s clothes, and ’80s makeup is all terrible.  The only thing good that came out of the ’80s is lots of good music, and some really good movies (The Empire Strikes Back, Terminator, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, ET, to name a few).  Oh yea, the Nintendo Entertainment System is also another ’80s thing I really really like.  Let’s not forget the Transformers… and Spider-man in his black costume…  Wow, there’s a lot I like about this decade….

But a long with that there was lots of BAD music and terrible TV shows and movies.  I’m so glad that I wasn’t a teenager in the ’80s because I wouldn’t want my peak years of childhood to have been in such a ridiculous time fashion wise.

Then again the time I was in Junior High and High School (1991-1996) was pretty ridiculous also.  Things like the brand of your shoes mattered more than the look of the shoes themselves.  Starter jackets seemed to be all the rage, along with Nike Air shoes, Champion brand sportswear and stuff like that.

This shows the fashion of the '90s. It's also a rare occasion where I am posting a picture of myself. I'm not in full grunge gear because it's summer, but you can see what we were wearing back then.

Then suddenly grunge style came around, and it was more fashionable to wear button up flannel shirts and old jeans, and those cheap Chuck Taylor converse shoes.  I’m sure my parents were relieved that our fashion tastes were now no longer as expensive as they had been.  At the same time, I think I totally missed the point of the grunge era, because most of the clothes that I wore to fit this mold were actually new.  It sounds silly, I know.

Sometime towards the end of high school,  I stopped really caring about the clothes I was wearing, and developed my own kind of fashion, where I kind of mixed and matched clothes to my taste without following any particular trend.  And then I was free!  I now never wear shorts, a habit I picked up in college.

Well now, I didn’t mean to go off on a fashion tangent, but what I wanted this article to be about was which decades it would have been cool to be a teenager during.  Keep in mind, my perception of those decades comes not from experience of having lived through them (mostly), it comes from TV and movies.

We already know that I think it would have been great to have been a teen in the ’70s, and that it wouldn’t have been great to be a teen in the ’80s.

Let’s start with the bad.

Who is the most famous Korean person you’ve ever met?

This will appear to be a somewhat strange article, but it should be at least entertaining.  One thing about Korea is that it is a very very small place, and therefore peoples’ degrees of separation from celebrities is very small.  The Korean (from Ask a Korean) once wrote that he “can get the phone numbers of a number of celebrities right now by using less than 5 phone calls/emails“, it’s pretty easy to encounter Korean celebrities.

To tell you the truth, I’ve met quite a few, but I’ve only really ever hung out with two.  Read about it after the jump.

I’m not doing this for you!

"Update your blog more often! I have no other joy in my life than to read your blog!"

So I got a message in my inbox from a reader of my blog who actually had the balls to threaten me for not updating with more content.  He’s apparently planning on moving to Korea soon, and my Seoul Searcher blog was apparently his favorite resource to prepare for his move over.  But since I have not been updating as often he sent me this:

 

If you don’t update more often, I’m not gonna read ur blog no more and I’ll tell all my friends not to read your blog.  You will lose a lot of customers this way

I can’t say I ever thought of you readers as customers, but one thing must be made clear.

 

I’m writing this blog for ME, not for anyone else.  If other people find the information useful or entertaining, then fine.  If not, then don’t read it.  If I’m not updating on a schedule that you would prefer, with content that you want…. READ ANOTHER FRIKIN’ BLOG!

It’s true, my numbers are down lately, but I’m not writing posts every day and I really don’t have that much to complain about (which is my strongest impetus for writing).  That means that when I do write, you can expect some quality material rather than garbage about water filters being awesome.

ALLLLL righty then..

I (unfortunately) like to try to fix things by myself.

Not really my hard drive, but might as well be!

It’s been a while since my last update. Right before the lunar new year my computer went into a tizzy and decided it wasn’t going to boot anymore. (This was when I was in the process of copying all the important files onto my wife’s ipod so that I could format the thing as the computer had been acting up all week.) Well suddenly the computer shut off by itself and wouldn’t boot. It said that there was no boot.ini file. Previous IT experience told me that all I needed was a boot disk to boot up the computer, continue removing my files, then reformat the thing.

 

So, as we traveled to Jindo for lunar new year, we made a stop in Gwangju at her sister’s house. There I made my boot disk. The problem lingered on and on in my mind for the entirety of the Lunar New Year holiday. When we got back to Seoul, I popped my boot disk into the computer and… and… and…?

And it still wouldn’t boot. I figured that I had made the boot disk incorrectly and decided to take it to a professional.

Today I took it to the same place that has fixed my backlight 3 times since I have been in Korea (once for free because it broke so quickly after I had had it replaced.). Immediately the guy working there said my hard drive was broken. He could tell from the sound. If I had known that from the beginning I wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble of worrying about how I am going to re install the OS AND get my files out. I got a new hard drive installed.

Luckily for me he said that I could still be able to get the files off of there by taking it to a data recovery center. They will basically take apart my old hard drive and put it in some new casing and attempt to remove the important files and burn them to a DVD for me. I hope that they can do that. I’ll find out tomorrow.

Not my DS ( I have a DS lite) but this is kind of what the problem was like.

While I was waiting for my new HD to be installed, I decided to try and tackle another problem, since I was in the Electronics district. My Nintendo DS had a screen with blotches on it, because the machine was dropped by a running toddler, cracking the top screen.

At first, the screen had some tiny blotches along the crack, and was still playable.  By today (months later)the blotch took up the entire upper left sixth of the screen and was growing.  Games were still playable provided no reading was required.  Today I decided I was finally going to get it fixed.

I got several quotes from game stores for the cost of fixing the screen.  The cheapest was about 90 bucks.  A new DS lite is probably $150.  There was no way I was going to spend more than half of the cost of a new one to repair my old one.  So, I bought only the screen for $25, and a special screwdriver to remove screws that were made specifically so that they would be hard to remove ($3).

When I got home I started to reinstall my English OS on my computer and get to work on fixing my DS (without the benefit of any tutorials).

I’d done this kind of thing before, with no tutorials, fixing  buttons on my Super Nintendo controllers, replacing the pins on my NES, etc.  Back then my house was messy and I often lost screws in the shag carpet that my house had.  The result was that my things always got fixed to working order, but they looked a little incomplete.  I remember my NES actually had no grey top half by the time we were done playing it regularly.

Anyhow, I began to take out all the screws in the bottom portion of the DS (because I figured that his is where the motherboard was housed.  Removing the bottom part was not at all difficult, and I could see exactly where the top screen connects to the mother board. So I removed that part, then got to work on opening the top part.

As I got the top part off I made a disappointing discovery.

The DS lite’s speakers are soldered to the top screen.

It makes sense now that I think about it, to have as few wires as possible coming from the bottom part to the top part.  The speakers get their signals and power from the cable that connects the screen to the motherboard.

I was far too into the process to turn back now.  I decided that since I don’t have a soldering iron, I’d replace the screen only and save the speakers for another time that will probably never come… that or I will cannibalize a broken DS, that still has a functioning top screen.

So… I put everything back together and…and..

 

It works.  Sound is still available with earphones, which I tend to use anyway.