nanoomi

By Mijin Yoo

Get off at the Daecheong metro station, in Gangnam-gu. Walk behind a gigantic elementary school nearby, staring the bright neon lights of stores and cafes, and find a tiny shabby Chinese restaurant and its signs. Now you face a few delivery scooters in a familiar background. Right, here is “The Delivery Angel’s” last work place. You might have seen this scene from his TV interview once, at least.

Read the full story

Sure there are Internet geeks, film geeks, even sports geeks. There are geeks – or people extremely interested in something – for almost any topic or category you can think of. I think I have mentioned previously my passing interest in stationery for instance, and I have found a cool little geeky service that deserves to be shared.

Rad and Hungry.

Rad and Hungry is one of those boutique Internet stores that specialize in, of all things, pencils. Each month they gather a set of pencils and other assorted stationery from somewhere in the world and offer them up for sale at reasonable prices.

Each kit is available for a limited time – and once its sold out its gone forever.

BUT as a side note Rad and Hungry has also set up a PencilPals service – the pencil Geek’s version of pen pals. Members join up and receive 2 pencils from another member somewhere else in the world. Then they send on two more pencils to someone else, the address provided by Rad and Hungry.

Look what landed in my letterbox this week:

And the pencils and a neat little note (appropriately written in pencil) explaining why these pencils were chosen for me:

Now I have to find a couple of pencils that someone else somewhere else in the world might find fun to receive.

In the mean time check out Rad and Hungry and join up as a Pencil Pal!

To celebrate moving into a new building, Pagoda teachers, students and staff cleaned around Cheonggyecheon for an hour yesterday. The hagwon obviously thought that the deed was in and of itself worthwhile, and did nothing to draw attention to the participants or itself.

Read the full story

The New York Times published an article last week looking at the reaction to the film “Dogani” (“The Crucible”):

At an appeals court in the southwestern city of Gwangju in 2006, a school official was convicted of raping a 13-year-old deaf girl and sentenced to one year in prison. When the verdict came, an outraged middle-aged man, also deaf, let out an incomprehensible cry from the galley, signaling frantically with sign language.

“It was clear that the man was shouting, ‘This is wrong! This is wrong!”’ Lee Ji-won, a newspaper intern, wrote in her blog later that day under the subject line, “I saw the foul underside of our society.”

The man was forcibly removed for disrupting the courtroom. And that might have been the end of it. Except that the intern’s blog inspired a best-selling author, Gong Ji-young, to write a novel based on the sexual assaults at the Inhwa School for the hearing impaired, the school’s attempts to conceal the abuses and the victims’ struggle for justice.

Now, a film based on that novel — “Dogani,” or “The Crucible” — has roiled South Korea.

Read the full story

I was thinking just yesterday when writing my last post that with only 112 negative articles about foreign English teachers this year (up to yesterday), things had improved a lot over last year, when there were over 280 380 negative articles by year’s end. I actually thought to myself, “There would have to be some big event to push the numbers up to the level of, say 2008.” Needless to say, it’s arrived.

Read the full story

As noted at the Marmot’s Hole Monday, another Korean-American wanted for (attempted) murder has been found to have worked as an English teacher in Korea, and in this case even ran an SAT hagwon. Here’s what the Joongang Daily had to say about it:

Read the full story

Last night I sat down (virtually speaking) with Jeff Lebow of Koreabridge.net and freelance web designer Mattew Weingard, and discussed the state of the Internet here in Korea.

On the table, Google’s most recent run in with the Dongdaemun Police Station Cyber Crimes unit, a surge towards responsible web design, a merging of the way Korea and Koreans use The Internet with the way the rest of the world uses The Internet, The Galaxy Tab 10.1 and my new watch.

Of particular interest, aside from the topics discussed, is the voodoo that Jeff has put together to allow him to record interviews etc on Google+ using Hangouts, Live Stream, some chewing gum and Gaffer Tape, the results of which you can see below:

In April this year Apple came clean and said that its iPhone and iPad collected a whole lot more location data on users than it was letting on. As nefarious as it sounds the huge amount of data collected by the iPhone / iPad was sent to Apple’s servers and used to help the device zero in on its location for use with location aware apps. Read the full story

These five Korean bloggers offer the latest on the Korean tech scene, if you’re bold enough to brave a different language environment.

I like to think that I am reasonably up to date when it comes to technology. I am an early adopter of new technology, often going to long (and expensive) extremes to acquire new gadgets and other tech goodies.

But my efforts pale in comparison to a hardcore cadre of Korean bloggers who get their hands (and cameras) on the latest and hottest technologies, sometimes before the general public does. And while these blogs are written in Korean, they’re still worth the effort, even if it is through the filter of Google Translate. Many of them link to English-language sites, their basic information is generally easy to discern, and the care they take in presenting their finds and accompanying them with high-resolution images makes them worth reading.

Read the full story

On July 11, 1971, the Korea Times published the following story about an incident in Pyeongtaek which occurred July 9.

Read the full story