Sleepy Cousins

A salute to my cousin Yeong-un, who can manage to fall asleep just about anywhere. You have to appreciate the first picture in particular. She actually got up out of bed early in the morning so that she could plant herself on the couch.

SPAM in Korea

Most of my mainland friends have difficulty understanding Hawaii's love affair with the pink meat. Still, as someone who grew up in Hawaii, seeing this sign in the food court of a Korean department store brought a smile to my face. 

My Attempt at a Phone Keyboard

The OpenMoko project was announced recently, and I'm really hoping that it heralds a future where phones aren't lobotomized by service providers in order to sell users $2 ring tones. A fully programmable, open source phone is such a beautiful thing, and I can't wait to start hacking on it when it comes out.

Anyhow, I was so excited about it that my mind kept on wandering to different applications to write for it (when I should have been concentrating on my Korean language studies). One of the ideas I had was a new kind of text input method. It's really hard to know what it will feel like without some physical device to test it with, but I do have a small demo page up to illustrate the basic concepts. It's just a quick thing I punched out to play with ideas until I get back to the states next month and can prototype it out on a physical device.

I'm also really, really looking forward to playing with the GPS features. Ah, life is good.

Cold Classrooms

Our class was observed by a number of Korean language teachers-in-training, one of which took this photo. As you might have guessed, Keimyung hasn't turned on the heat in its classrooms just yet.

As is usually the case when we're being observed, much amusement was derived from my frequent lapses into the local regional dialect.