Category: Korean

Digital Typhoon Hits Korea

South Korea is undergoing amazing changes brought on by endless waves of new technologies and trends.  This New Zealand News article provides a good glimpse of what is going on in Korea:

The country has become a hot-bed of free music downloading as fans take advantage of MP3 file-sharing services, including Soribada, South Korea's version of Napster.

In a country of 48 million people, Soribada ("sea of sound") has drawn more than six million users since it launched in 2000.
…Since the launch of these sites, domestic CD sales have nose-dived nearly 50 per cent.
…There were 8000 CD stores in South Korea five years ago, but now we have only 400 left.
…Although the advent of free MP3 files has also devastated music publishers and other retailers, the future of music retailers looks particularly bleak since they also face cut-throat competition from online shopping.
…Sales of music for cellphones alone have outpaced traditional CD sales since 2002.
…"It seems like brick-and-wood music stores like us are nearly doomed, unless the Government comes up with some financial measures to help us stay alive. It may soon be the end of an era for us."

Unfortunately, I don't see a workable solution emerging yet.  If the Lawrence Lessig's so called Free Culture folks have some ideas, I would like to hear them.  Note that people running these businesses in Korea are not idealists nor technologists but people buried neck deep in the new reality trying to stay afloat.

<

p dir=”ltr”>Some are adapting fairly well to these changes though.  For example, book publishers hit hard by rampant booksharing online are publishing books written by amateur online serial writers.  As I mentioned before, decent amateur writers receive publishing offers even before their serial reach the halfway point.  This is because the serial itself is the primary marketing vehicle for these types of books.

Jonah

I had an amusing thought today.  I thought, if America was a ship, shipmates would look upon Bush as a Jonah.  While he may explain away every accusations leveled at him, even he would have to agree that he presided over a lot of bad luck.

Unreasonable?  Yes.  Unfair?  Absolutely.  But what would you do if your ship is half wrecked, stuck in the middle of the ocean without a trace of wind nor passing ships, and running out of food?  Superstitious sailors would toss the Jonah overboard and keep their fingers acrossed.

I have met people who had extraordinary strings of bad luck.  Everything that could go wrong would go wrong.  Car accidents, illness, failing business, ruined reputations and relationships.  Koreans believe bad lucks are brought upon by bad karma.  If you or your ancestors did bad things, bad luck will visit you and your offsprings.

One way to ward off bad luck and ensuring good luck is to find good gravesites for your ancestors and good locations for your home or business.  If your family or business has been suffering a string of bad lucks, bad feng-shui (poong-soo in Korean) is usually suspect.  If it's not feng-shui, then it must be the spirits so a moo-dang (voodoo doctor or channeler of sort) is called to to shoo the bad spirits away.

I doubt many people in Korea still believes this stuff, but the prevailing attitudes are 'what else can we do' and 'why take unnecessary chances?'

Maybe Bush should call in a moo-dang into the White House to see what pissed our founding fathers off.  Heh.

Feeds out of service

FYI, my RSS feeds are out of service temporarily.

It's related to compression and HTTP headers.  For some reason, gzipped feed content is showing up as garbage for some people.  On my desktop, IE can read the feed just fine but not on my laptop.  Turning off compression on the server-side (by massanging metabase.xml) doesn't quite work either because the compressor is slipping in somehow after a while.

Update:

Feeds now seem to be working although IE on my laptop still thinks the feeds are bad.  I think that IE's configuration is screwed up somehow.  Unfortunately, I don't want to reinstall it because that will cause too many annoyances.  Oh, well.

Another problem is that sometimes gzip encoded response is received although gzip is not in the Accept-Encoding.  I have yet to figure out if this is because a proxy is serving up cached copy without honoring Accept-Encoding header or simply IIS behaving erroneously.

Korean USB Memory Startup

A Korean startup with a line of patented USB memory stick products is looking for US partners.  Their product is selling well in Korea but they don't know where the cluetrain stops are in the US so they need help.

I get a lot of requests like this but this is the first time I posted about it.  Why?  Because it's one of those father's friend's son type of thing.  Not as thick as blood but near enough to motivate me to move a few more extra muscles than usual.

Taekwondo Rising

I thought above shot was the best Athens Olympic photo so far.  Chu Mu Yen, the guy in blue coming in for a landing after after delivering a brutal counter-kick, won Taiwon's first Olympic gold.  Nice kick and nice form during landing.

<

p align=”left”>Taekwondo was added as an official Olympic sport four years ago, but rules discouraged spectacular attacks and was hampered by distrust of judges.  For Athens, they changed the rule to encourage head or knockout attacks and made extra efforts to shore up quality of judging to good effect and Taekwondo is starting to become one of the most exciting Olympic events to watch.

Korean Archery

South Korea's continuing dominance in archery is amazing but, like the effect of monopoly on economy, I think overdominance is starting to hurt international archery competitions.

IMHO, countries overdominating a field of sports should share it's knowhows and training programs with rest of the world, particularly with those countries that never had a chance to win an olympic medal.  For example, South Korean archery association should offer archery scholarships for amateur archers from third-world countries.  I am sure Korean companies like Samsung and LG will be glad to sponsor such scholarship programs.

Imagine the joy everyone will feel when those athletes win their countries' first olympic medal.  I also think such programs are far more rewarding than traditional international aids and foreign relation efforts.

Child of Koguryo

My father's family root lies north of the 38th parallel, somewhere near the controversial nuclear plant.  I never been there but I will have to someday when my father dies so he can be buried next to his parents and ancestors.  While I was born in Seoul, Korea, I have always thought my father's home village was mine also.

Likewise, I have always thought I was a child of Koguryo, an ancestial Korean kingdom from the past because of my father's family roots and, as silly as it might sound, how we look and behave.  I also liked that Koguryo was a warrior's kingdom, much more so than the kingdoms that followed like Chosun where Confucious scholars introduced a caste system and placed themselves at the top.  Well, pen proved to be of no defense against swords when Japan invaded.

From Austin Ramsey's Times Asia article Rewriting History:

In A.D. 612 an Imperial Chinese army of more than a million soldiers marched on the northeast Asian kingdom of Koguryo. Though vastly outnumbered, the soldiers of Koguryo—whom many modern-day Koreans see as their ancestors—routed the Chinese in a victory that is still a source of pride on both sides of the DMZ.

Now, almost 1,400 years later, Chinese scholars are attempting a subtler land grab, claiming that the ancient kingdom of Koguryo was a part of China—a "regional government founded by an ethnic group," as Beijing's state-run Northeast Asia Project put it in June. The argument isn't just academic.

This feud over history is very important to me because Chinese scholars, sponsored by the Chinese government, are threatening an important part of who I am.  My feelings are shared by most Koreans and there has been an upswelling of anti-Chinese sentiments in Korea, particularly among the young.  A good indication is an increasing number of amateur future history novels in which united Korea invades China to take back the land it lost over the years.

While the Koguryo part of me wishes the same, I would be happy if China just left Korean history alone before wishes become future bloodshed.

Enbee.com – Upcoming Korean Blog Service

Blogging is hot in Korea right now and Enbee is a hot Korean blogging service provider which will open it's doors in September.  While they are planning to provide a wide range of blogging services, including a feature that allows bloggers to publish their own newspaper (sounds familiar, no?), their link blogging feature has been getting some notice lately.

Suman at Enbee setup an example link blog for me to take a look.  Frankly, I don't see myself using it (too lazy to keep up two blogs), but I think substantial percentage of bloggers will prefer to have link blogs over the kind that requires them to express their personal opinions.  In Korea, young folks are not encouraged to speak their mind in front of elders because a) it's immodest, b) it's what elders are suppose to do, c) they don't know jack shit, and d) they are more obsessed with saying the right thing than saying what they think.

So, I think link blogs in Korea will do well since link bloggers can be helpful to others without the danger of saying too much.  As for me, I consider my blogging habit a sort of mental exhibitionist fetish so link blogging won't deliver enough juice to me.

A Wife, A Son, and A Mountain of Luggage

On Sunday, my wife and son returned from Korea.  They also brought a mountain of luggage, two full carts worth.  Since my wife and I already had more than a decade of arguments over her seemingly unbreakable habit of moving mountains across oceans, all I could do was sigh and hug.

My wife and I are on the extreme opposites when it comes to luggage.  I despise luggage so I travel very light.  For a month long trip to Europe, I would take two underwears, two pairs of socks, two T-shirts, one jean, one slack, one jacket, and a pair of running shoes.  Since I am going to be wearing one set of everything plus the jacket and the shoes, the spares could fit comfortably into a small carry-on.  If the jacket has big pockets, I could travel without any bags but I use the carry-on to avoid getting grilled by immigration officers.  And on my trips, I rarely buy anything I have to carry.  If it's something big, I ship it. 

My wife, on the other hand, carries everything.  Her annual trips to Korea usually starts with increasing shopping activities a month or two before the trip.  In buying her gifts, she ignores logic completely.  I have seen her buying goods made in Korea as gifts to take back to Korea.  On this trip, she brought back goods she bought at Costco in Korea, goods made right here in California.  She said they were on sale over there and saving a few bucks on pots and pans made perfect sense to her.  Oy.

And much of the luggage was food.  For example, she brought back two boxes of ramyeon, dry noodle in a cup.  Of course, our local Korean markets sell them by boxes too but my wife said these are fresher.  Fresh instant noodle?  Arghhhh!

When I was growing up in Korea, I frequently saw a Korean women carrying heavy stuff while her husband walked ahead with hands behind his back.  Until I got married I didn't understand why Korean husbands weren't helping their wives.  Why?  It's because they already had their decade of fruitless arguments and all of them reached the same compromise.  As for me, I help out despite my frustrations but also try to avoid travelling with her to Korea.

Between Mars and Venus lies an impenetrable astroid field of luggage.

Philippine Bows to Terrorists

First Spain and now Philippine.  Are they out of their minds?  At least South Korea managed to hold steady despite all the noise from the selfish peace and justice loving liberals.  They are selfish because they are ruining the country to satisfy their emotional and ideological needs.

I believe that the war against Iraq was unjustified but it's insane to give in to terrorists' demands regardless of circumstances.  Even if Philippine was going to pull out troops anyway, it should have waited to avoid appearing as if they were pulling out because of the terrorist's demands.

As to saving the lives of kidnap victims, I wonder what the Philippine government would have done if the terrorism and kidnapping took place within Philippine?  Give in?  Rewarding terrorists will only encourage more terrorism.  What will they do when terrorists start popping up everyewhere because terrorism offers better result than demonstrations?  What?  Tell them to stand in a line so you can service them properly?

Is a civilian's life more sacred than a solder's life?  Bullshit.  On war against terrorism, everyone is on the frontline.  I am on the frontline of war against terrorism alongside my 10 year old son, my wife, my parents, my friends, and collegues.  We are fighting in our homes, neighborhoods, freeways, shopping malls, restaurants.  And the war is on 24 hours a day every day.  Terrorism can step in anywhere and any time if they think they can scare people into giving them what they want.

Giving in to terrorist demands, even if it's just for an ice cream cone or a few dollars, amounts to feeding a beast that can breed like rats.  Giving in to demands of terrorists far away amounts to thinking that one can run away from terrorism.  What a silly idea.  It's as silly as trying to build a wall around Middle East or banning Islamic religion.