OhmyNews.com reports that residents of Boo-Ahn are fighting in the street (Korean) to prevent Korean government's plan to build a nuclear waste processing plant there. Weapons used in protests like this have recently escalated from sticks and occasional Molotov cocktails to more effective tools to keep police at bay or push them out of the way. I don't exactly know where it started, but I think it was when ex-members of a secret military commandos clashed with the police while demanding that government compensate properly for their sacrifices. They used their training to make deadly weapons out of everyday things and other citizens learned from them.  Boo-Ahn residents are using propane gas, burning tires, and bamboo sticks against clueless police who has sticks and shields. Darker side of progress, I guess. You can find more bigger pictures at OhmyNews.com

Yesterday was my wife's 34th birthday.  She is 7 years younger than me.  I was too busy with work so I took her to Isobune, our favorite sushi place.  We don't care about the fancy restaurants.  We just like good food served fast.  That's Isobune.  I don't think I ever spent more than 45 minutes there.  Wham-Bam-Fish-Swam!

You want sushi?  We got sushi!

I had to choose from a good picture of my wife
and a good picture of my son.  My wife won.

One of my favorites: Sweet Shrimp Sushi.  I like Hotate (scallop) more, but
my wife and I ate them all off the boats before I could take a picture.
What does Sweet Shrimp taste like?  It's like fresh squid sashimi.
Does it help?;-p

My father called today to tell me that he will be leaving South Korea tommorrow to visit North Korea.  I assumed he is going via China.  Who knows?  He might have made arrangements to just walk across.  He has been there a couple of times more than ten years ago, but this is the first visit since he was allowed into South Korea.  Why wasn't he allowed into South Korea?  Well, he exercised his Righteous Might a few years ago and former President didn't want him in the country.

My father is one crazy guy.  I mean crazy in a good way.  Frankly, I never saw a more naive person than my father.  When I was young, I used to notice my father going out wearing a good looking jacket and coming back home without a jacket.  He would literally give his shirt off his back to his friends.  His friends weren't taking advantage of him either.  They would accidentally say nice things about his jacket and he would demand that they take his jacket or stop being friend with him.  Yup.  Definitely crazy.

Anyway, North Korea is about to get another taste of my pop.  I am not too worried.  If I remember correctly, I think Kim Jong-Il said some nice things about my father a few years ago.  At least they won't be able to make him disappear.  I have deep sympathy for whoever it is that end up as his guide while he is there.  Last time, he stopped and blocked a major bridge in Pyungyang so he can enjoy the view and take a few snapshots.

I am proud of him, but I instinctively look for a bombshelter when I am around him.  Have you ever met a person who appear to be three sizes larger in person and turns the very air as thick as soup on a dime?  I have met a lot of famous people, but there is only one person who can do that, my dad.  Come back home safely Dad.  We love you very much.

Shawn Matthews' picture of a White Envelope from a Korean movie.  It's fake obviously since people are suppose to give it to the teacher using both hands and the teacher is suppose to place it in a desk drawer after refusing it couple of times, leaving no time for the desktop shot.

High walls of North Korea has a small side door for tourism.  My father went through the door twice to see his younger brother and sisters still living there more than ten years ago.  Here are some more recent pictures taken by Taro (found at Population: One) who lives in Japan but has an English website.

Beware that these pictures show how North Korea presents itself to visitors, not how common North Koreans survive day to day.  Still, one can see the artificial front drilled into North Korean children, turning them into robots.  Kim Jong-Il is a source of extremely violent thoughts for me.

I visit Korean websites daily and I have noticed how their pages load very slowly even after accounting for the limited bandwidth across Pacific Ocean.  Korean webpages use a lot of graphics and animations than webpages from other countries.  So I did some digging because the situation in Korea might show us a glimpse of the future in America when broadband becomes ubiquitous.  This is what I found.

Three columns on the left are American news websites: Yahoo News, New York Times, and Washington Post.  Three columns on the right are Korean news websites: Sports Seoul (mislabel as seoulkorea, sorry), Sports Today (stoo), and OhmyNews.

First thing I noticed was the size differences.  American webpages are 100K to 250K.  Korean webpages range from 650K to 1.8 meg.  Wow.  Language encoding differences is there but that wasn't surprising.  What surprised me was the amount of resources each page used: images, Flash animations, scripts, stylesheets.  Korean webpages used about 400K of images on average.  What shocked (sorry) me the most was the OhmyNews webpage which used well over a 1 meg of Flash animations in its frontpage.

Is this a glimpse of the Broadband Era?

Note #1: Aside from Korean webpages using much more resources than American webpages, I noticed an interesting differences in the number of resources used.  Korean webpages tended to use many internal frames and numerous JavaScript and CSS files.  I have no clue why though.

Note #2: Washington Post seems to have some JavaScript fanatics. *chuckle*

Note #3: It would be nice if similar numbers can be collected for webpages of other countries so we can compare that with broadband availability to see if there is a correlation.  What countries other than Korea have high availability of broadband?

I am not much into sports, but I do enjoy tracking Koreans in sports like Big Choi (my wife is a Choi) of Cubs, Byung-Hyun Kim of Boston Red Sox, Jae Seo of New York Mets, and Chan Ho Park of Texas Rangers.  I feel great when they do well even though news about them are usually buried among all the news churned out by the media.

Michelle Wie seems to be a whole new ballgame, a Star in the making.  Since she is only 13, I'll be able to enjoy her games for years to come.  Wie To Go!

6 feet at 13?  Ah-Ya-Ya!