A Look at the Cool New Layout of my Room

Yes, my room is as cool as it looks.  (I'm a little disappointed that I have nowhere to display my pimped out (pimped out or up? Or in?  I'm not sure which is correct) PS3 though)

No, it isn't cool.  With all the electronics, my room runs about six or seven degrees Celsius higher than the outside ambient.  It's very hot.

Yes I am very tired.  I woke up at 2 AM today, so I'm going to bed now. (7.45PM)

Yesterday I woke up at Midnight, so was very tired also.

Two of my colleagues have taken a 1,000 won (50p) bet with me, each taking a time when they think I will wake up tomorrow morning.  I took 3AM, one took 3.30, the other 4AM.

In other news, my bag was weighed by baggage people at the airport, and came to twenty five kilogrammes.  It was subsequently labelled heavy, as it presumably posed a health risk to those throwing it around.

So It's Come to This...

So I have to explain some internet terminology first. (In my own style)

Flamewar - When two competing sides of an internet debate (see: argument) get so inerged in the fantastically insignificant details of a petty (or sometimes not so petty) argument; that virtual blood is spilt.  For a brilliant example of this (in the sense of it being archetypal flamewar material - not in the sense of this ludicrous behaviour being brilliant, because, quite frankly, reading any forum for more than five minutes gestates suicidal thoughts within me) see any 'mac vs PC,' 'debate.'  Obviously the PC is better, so I don't know why everyone is so worked up over such a thing.

Secondly, another brilliant example would be the five yearly console war, between Nintendo fans, Sony fans and recently, Microsoft fans.  (What, people actually support Microsoft in one of their endeavours?  Perish the thought.)  People literally cry when a new console is announced.  Most fanboys cry twice.  Once when their company announces an amazing new console; and once again when the enemy announces theirs.  The astute will notice a glaring mistake, three's a company right?

In this case, the three companies in question are usually divided by: Most loved.  (Cue tears.)  Most hated.  (Cue tears of rage.)  And the 'meh,' category.  Time for another definition:

Fanboy - Someone so blinded by their irrational love of _________ , that they cannot see the virtues of competing products, or in some cases, anything else at all.

All this arose from a couple of comments on my previous post about what to do with a broken bone.  I maintain that you don't ice breaks, but let's get the flamewar started!

So my internet geekology lessons aside, what else is happening?

Well I'm glad you asked Sam, because I get paid tomorrow.  For the last four days I've been living on the meagre contents of my fridge.  This meant eggs every day (usually more than one.  How unhealthy is that?  Seriously I need that question answering) with leaves of some description, onion, garlic (contrary to popular belief you can never have too much garlic, and it makes everything taste better) rice, bread, butter, some spreadable cheese and water...

All I can say is, I hope vitamin pills do work.

Joking aside, four days of living a terrible diet isn't too bad.  As far as is humanly estimable, every other person on the planet orders takeaway four or five nights a week, and that's unhealthy.  That's unhealthy in more ways than I can describe in a lifetime.  And as mentioned, vitamin pills are surely good for you.  In the future all our meals will be consumed in pill form, so I'm merely working ahead of everyone else...

So this weekend was a complete scrub.  I did some marking, went to the gym for an hour, (it's amazing how much a crippled finger can destroy plans) and that was it.  The rest of the time I phoned home, slept and was hungry.  It was absolutely, fundamentally the correct decision to bring my ps3 with me, exactly for weekends such as this.  Unfortunately I don't have the right cables for it.

It's 1AM here, and I'm really not sleeping well.  The problem of having nothing to do, is that you think.  Thinking can only take two forms, invariably these are thinking about the past; or thinking about the future.  One is littered with stupidities, oddities and mistakes; the other is scattered with the possibility of mistakes, stupidities and oddities.  Which to choose from?  It's a tough decision; so tough that I wish I had enough money for beer, a well enough finger that I could go to the gym and wear myself out, or a working playstation.  Remember, these things exist for this very reason:  Living life in the now is hard.

Just for this weekend, I really wish I'd had an 'opt-out,' button.

Wow, It Rained

So today was a relatively fun day.  I took a rugby ball into school, and the kids were suddenly transported into an alien world they'd never seen before.  It was fun, but also tinged with some regret that they'll never get to play properly.  I hear that there is a team here, but one team on an island this size, means that exposure is awfully low.

I broke a new personal record for squats at the gym today, and subsequently fell over a plug socket in the floor, prompting everyone to laugh; behind their hands or towels, obviously.  Koreans are generally not as polite as some other countries, but they still stifle a laugh when it's at someone else's expense.  The ways they're rude include barging you out of the way when walking, although this usually results in them on their backside, and shouting at you for no real reason.  They don't shout at each other, so this is presumably an anti-foreigner defence mechanism.

Talking of foreigners, this area is teeming with them.  The shipyards have bought in people from all around the world, and it often feels like there are more foreigners  in this particular part of Goeje, than Koreans.  When you step outside this little bubble however, it's normal (in that it's abnormal, if you catch my drift).

Every time we head past the docks in the morning, my brain explodes as to the size of the lifting machinery they use here.  They don't make the super tankers you see on these 'how do they make something so freakin' huge,' programmes, but the things they do make are pretty big in my world.

You occasionally hear them drop something colossal in the yards, and (bearing in mind they're ten minutes away) you think to yourself someone has crashed their car into a lampost.

In a similar vein, I saw construction workers outside, clambering around scaffolding (with no flooring, just great big squares, created in two dimensions) with no safety harnesses.  They were moving round ala ninja warrior, on the obstacle with two walls but no ceiling and floor - for those who don't know, you have your left hand and left foot pressed against one wall, right hand and foot pressed against another wall.  It was pretty awesome, especially considering they were high enough that a fall would be fatal, no questions asked.  And one was using an electric saw of some kind, while balancing on a single scaffolding pole.

The flip side is that they're hellishly efficient.  The road outside was dug up, down to the underlay (hardcore?  Hardcourt?  I don't know  how you spell it) and resurfaced in two days.  It's roughly 250m long, including all the odd pieces of side-street they've done.

The building outside that's being built gains a storey every week.

I recently got the opportunity to use a Nikon D90, which was tons of fun.  I'm waiting on the owner to send me the pictures, and hopefully I'll be able to upload some on here.  It was pretty handy, and the pictures looked to be of high quality (at least on the viewfinder) so maybe a couple came out  okay.  I was forced to primarily use the automatic modes, which essentially make it like a (frickin' expensive) point and shoot, but I did also manage to take a few snaps with the aperture priority mode, (to make the backgrounds all cool and blurry) only time will tell if they worked out or not.  It also had a pretty cool zoom lense, ranging from quite a strong wide-angle to a low powered telephoto.  I don't know the exact specifications, but it allowed for a varied range of shots without switching lenses, which is cool.

Anyway, we'll see if any came out.

In the meantime; bye.

Teachers Day

So Korea has a teachers day once a year.  Like mothers day, only for teachers.  Some of the students give presents, some give little letters and things of that nature; generally thanking you for your hard work and the fifty-odd detentions you gave them last week.

I've been working for a week, and I got a coffee mug, a percolator (plunger thing to make coffee with?), some chocolates (they didn't last long) and best of all - a pair of socks.  Awesome right?  I've only been there a week and one of the students gave me socks.  I guess I have an advantage  because they don't yet know what a hard-ass I'm going to be.  They pretty much all have tests next week, so I'm glad teacher day came up this week.

Socks aside, I've had three excruciating days in a row now.  Todays morning was terrible, there were dozens of things that went wrong.  The afternoon was okay, however I didn't get out of the office until 6PM, due to lesson planning.  To put this into perspective, school starts at 8.30AM and lessons end at  2.50PM.  Three days in a row.  That's not cool.  The overtime pay is pretty much illegal too, so there's no financial incentive, only the guilt tripping kind.

The gym closes at midnight though, so I managed to get in with plenty of time to spare, which is nice.

Anyway, I'm mega-pooped, so I'm off to bed.  Goodnight.

Let's fall asleep!

So I've no idea what time it is. I'm literally clueless on that front, and on the front of where exactly I am. I might be in Dubai, or I might be in the centre of Holland, I don't really know. I am looking around for Korean looking people, and Korean sounding people, but I can't seem to find any. Normally this would trigger alarm bells in my mind, but in this instance, as I'm flying on Emirates airlines from Dubai, I won't run around screaming; yet. As portals into the (un)known go, this airport is rather vulgar. I know they're only building on desert that has none of the usual environmental costs associated with, say, Runway 5 greenbelt – but the whole endeavour is something of an exercise is vulgarity. The shopping area is the size of Heathrow terminal 3 in its' entirety, the check in areas have more x-ray conveyor belts than the whole of Heathrow terminals 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5; and the people are completely humourless.

This is the american dream! Oh wait, wrong continent. Well the idea lives on, and is as strong and vibrant as ever.

On a lighter note (sic) the A380 is a marvel of modern engineering. The wing width is fifteen rows of seats, the dangle of which means you can't see the anti-air-disruption fins at the end of the wing. You know, the raised plates bolted onto the ends of the wing to reduce drag and increase efficiency. Well you can't see them when you're on the ground because the wings droop too much.

When you're in-flight, and the wings have resumed a position of relative normality, the wing has ripples in it, akin to a calm ocean, where certain areas are reinforced and others sag. Needless to say the whole experience is rather disconcerting, as are the myriad noises the plane emits while flying. I'm unsure whether the noises are due to my proximity to the various gears (due to being completely and entitrely encompassed in cattle class) or whether everyone can hear the noises. The various bumps and grinds do lend the craft an intangible mechanical feel however, and I'm rather fond of the mechanical in general.

It holds six hundred people, (both decks are identical in size, but the top deck houses rich people, with extremely long legs and even longer budgets) and roughly fifty screaming children. I think the children come as part of the plane, an optional extra along with the alloy wheels and booming sound system.

Those Damned Crazy Kids...

I'm sitting here with the mother of all headaches, at 5:30Am on Boxing day; having decided in my (in)finite wisdom to not sleep.  This, on the back of a christmas eve that heralded a sub-par sleeping performance also.

Man I'm tired.

I'm so tired I learned how to say 'I'm tired' in another language, in order to increase the number of possible recipients of this amazing fact.  'わたしはすごくねむいです。’

I can't even find the headache pills in the foreign land that is, the house of another person.  Imagine that last bit in an americanised movie trailer voice, and you are approaching the thoughts that are going through my head right now.  Tiredness does some amazing things to the brain.  It stops mine working properly, for one.

I just got sent this  little puzzler:

I would like to point out that I didn't get a single one; but to point out the banality of this particular exercise, number eleven is 'neon light.'

I have to also highlight some of the other guesses I made.

Number sixteen is 'six feet under.'  My guess:  Stomping ground.

Mine is better, I feel.

Number eighteen is somewhat difficult to see, but it says 'He's/himself.'

My guess was Emo.  This one takes a little explanation:  An emo is someone who pretends to be depressed, and likes cutting themselves.  Therefore, He's/Himself becomes He's (slashing) himself.

Again, my guess is better than the answer, that of 'he's beside himself.'

I should write these things, not just commentate on them.

I'm not going to tell you the rest of the answers, because some of them are just pathetic.

I include this one, not to insult your intelligence as it may at first appear, (this one is seemingly designed for post-labotomy recuperation) but to point your attention in the direction of the bottom left of the picture.

This one is supposed to be 'Brain wave.'

The truth is that the architect of these questions had one of these while drawing them up.  That is to say he had a 'brain fart.'  The act of your brain throwing up a completely unrelated artefact akin to me saying:  When I was walking down the road I ostrich was quite cold.

The designer drew a hand with four fingers and no thumb, or one thumb and three fingers.  And the hand is drawn to resemble that of a three year olds' drawing.  These factors make the picture both a brain fart, and of one.  Gadzooks batman, my irony detector is about to explode.

I'm filling in the tags for this post, and I can't remember what the word for chronic sleeplessness is.  I really want to type in anorexia for some reason.  Maybe I'm hungry.

Goddamnit what is that word?

Today is a 'down' day.

So today I'm determined to get everything up and running, and update my blog with all the information from the last four or five days.  I've been neglecting my  faithful audience!

The short version is that basically I've not had enough time, and the internet here is awful, it takes five minutes or so to upload a single photograph; cumulatively that's a lot of time spent sitting doing nothing.  However, I've managed to find an ethernet cable directly plugged into the internets which is making the process a lot faster.  Hopefully I can get it all done today!  Then I'll be up to date.

Ok so I've added these posts!  Whew!

I'm about halfways done, but I'm off to eat some sushi now so I'll do it later...

• Yokohama Day Two
• The Trip from Minamisenju to Yokohama
• Ueno Park, The Second Outing!

Doing everything in the order it occurred is turning out to be a pain in the backside...

がんばて

Finally Here.

Finally managed to have a shower and lie down. Luckily I'm not tired so I'll hopefully sleep well tonight. It's 1 o clock, which is plainly a lie because my body is telling me it's some other completely different time.

I'm going to go explore, take some pics etc.