And my ?? name is ?, ??.

*You would need to install East Asian language to make this post readable, :-)

I’ve memorized nearly all of the characters and know that I would need to continually learn the language before it’s permanently rooted into my brain. Now, I’m working on my ?? vocabulary words.

When the year turned 2005, someone asked me what’s my new year resolution. I thought about it and I realized that it’s nearly the same as every last year—get into a better shape, read more books, eat healthier foods, stay in touch with my parents more often, don’t go to bed too late, don’t oversleep, and so on. I realize they were not exactly very inspirational so I looked around other people’ blogs to see what they say about theirs. One actually read a book every week and blogged about it. Someone actually ran at least a mile everyday. Someone else wants to watch Oprah and Dr. Phil shows everyday. There were many good ideas but I’m not that ambitious or have no desire to do that kind of thing. Fast-forward to April 6th, 2005, I found my new year resolution and that’s to learn Korean language, Hangul. My textbook arrived yesterday, so I begin my self-education now.

After flipping through the textbook, I realize something. There is no way am I gonna learn this all by my own. To keep my motivation high, I need to find someone or a group to share it with, someone who can help guide me and recognize my mistakes. It is fruitless to learn a new language if you don’t have someone to chat. It’s like learning a new magic trick and you don’t have anyone to show to. Again, I go to the web and to my surprise, I found some good websites. korea.banoffeepie.com. Actually, their tagline is “Korean-related weblogs written in English.” Simple. This website is like a webring that contains the list of blogs that relate to Korea. I just submitted my blog there but it has to be approved first before it goes into the list. Next one I found was the meetup here in DC. I joined the group and hope to meet some of them!

Like being a teacher, I have to make a lesson plan. First week – memorize the 21 vowels and 19 consonants. Make index cards as flash cards. I feel so like a kid in elementary school!

That’s right. I got a little surprise for you…for visiting my website. :-) I found this $50 dollars coupon off a $100 purchase at Guess. If you don’t care how you look or don’t bother try to look good, you can fuggedaboutit!

Go to the www.guess.com. Add items to the cart that totals 100 dollars or higher. Then check out and use this coupon – SHPCRD – copy and paste into the promotion code to get your 50 dollars off. It expires on April 17th, 2005 and items are running out fast. Happy shopping!

*update* – thought I’d add a little graphical action to this post, :-)

I just found a perfect way to make a good use of my overrated Sony digital camera. I found this website where bloggers choose a theme, then submit a photo that matches the theme every week. There are really many good photos and I find it very fascinating to see how a theme is portrayed by a photo as there are so many different ways to capture the theme. I suggest you to check it out especially if you want to take your camera out more often!

This post is a sequel to my previous post about having a sandpaper in my throat. Know what? That damn sandpaper just refused to go away after taking three medicine cups, equilvalent to six tablespoons, of Tylenol Severe Cold syrup, four Nyquil liquid gels, two Advil pills, and 13 straight hours of sleep. I did have a fever and I got better but my throat still hurt as if there’s broken glass inside my throat, so I knew I had a strep throat and had to get antibiotics. Where to get the antibiotics? I wish I could pretend to be a doctor and write myself a prescription and just get over to CVS pharmacy and get it. I tried calling around DC to get an appointment but most of them are full till next week. I can’t wait that long so I had no choice but go to the hospital. I called the Howard University Hospital (the closest to where I live) to see if they have an interpreter on call and they said yes. So I got myself there, signed in and I waited, waited. And I waited. About four hours later, they finally got me into a patient’s room. Turned out there was no interpreter but on tv, like VP except it was a poor quality. The interpreter had a hard time understanding what I wanted to say. What’s more, prior to that, the nurses spent a half hour just to get the TV working and get the interpreter to answer. Then, a black doctor came and he didn’t even look at me at all, he looked to the TV interpreter to talk to me. He asked me what’s wrong with me. I said I had a strep throat so I need antibiotics. He said “Uh-huh, we’ll see about that.” We went through normal routine and I must admit, it was kinda funny having a TV presence in the room. Then the doctor said, “Mm-hmm, you probably have a strep throat”, and said thank you to the TV interpreter, then he just left the room. I waited for like a half hour in the room and I was like “WTF is going on” so I decided to get out and checked what’s going on. A nurse saw me and waved at me, “come here.” I came to the desk and the nurse said “here’s your checkout form”. I thought “Oh great, why didn’t you just pass that under the door while I was waiting?” I signed my name as fast as I could and the outside was already dark by the time I got out.

I was so exhausted when I got out of the hospital and I had to take the metro to get back home as I didn’t drive to the hospital. As I was waiting for the metro subway to come, I see two kids standing next to their father. The subway opened doors and I went through the doors and was about to sit down on a two-seat empty row. As I was sitting down, I immediately noticed that every other row had already been taken by either one seat or two and I got this instinct feeling that the two kids wouldn’t want to sit separate, so I got up and walked to the next empty seat, leaving the entire row open for the kids to sit down. I sat down opposite side and I felt something was looking behind my back so I turned my head. The little girl was looking at me and she had this happy look on her face. I turned back and thought “Even if I’m having an awful day, it doesn’t mean you still can’t do a nice thing for someone.” The doors closed and the metro subway started to move forward.

P.S. Don’t ever go to Howard University Hospital, which actually means “HUH?”

And I don’t mean it in a manical way or I’m a psychopath. You know, I mean as being sick with flu-like symptoms or common cold. It all started last Friday morning when I woke up and felt an itch or like having a tiny sandpaper in my throat, making it a bit uncomfortable for me to shallow. I can’t lie but admit that I do have a male ego (it’s a good thing that I admit it, right?) so I refused to believe that I was getting a sore throat. It’s probably cuz I was slombering, not keeping my mouth shut while sleeping (how male that was). I figured that a cup of Listerine will clear up everything in my throat and have a little Coke in my throat to fizzle them away. I got ready to go to work and when I got into my cube, the “sandpaper” in my throat just won’t go away and I decided to get myself a glass of water in a second attempt to free up the sandpaper’s coarseness in my throat. However, the sandpaper wouldn’t just get smoothed up and continued to become rough. Now, I was beginning to realize that maybe I do have a sore throat and in the defense of that, I popped a Hall lorengze into my throat and hoped that it’ll melt everything away.

All of the sudden, I don’t feel so good and started to feel a little hot despite I was wearing only a short-sleeved shirt. I had this imagination that my body was collapsing like an old building that was destructed into pieces by a set of intelligent bombs around the concrete columns except it wasn’t that rapid. If you still don’t get it, well, imagine it like the two WTCs crashing down on 9/11 but in a slow-motion and you get the idea what I mean. As I reached for the kleenex right before I sneeze, I suddenly thought—I’m having a dreadful cold and coming down with flu-like symptoms. And my thought said to me, “Yes, Nathan, you’re sick.” So much for my male ego.

While I was going through all that, I was reminded by this short story I read a while ago during in the college. The story is called “The Death of Ivan IIych.” by Leo Tolstoy and you can read all about it at this. It talks about a guy who refused to believe that he was sick till it was all too late and he learns how to deal with inevitable dying. Then he discovered something worse than dying, if that’s even possible, was the frustration that people can’t understand or fathom the pain he was going through. This struck me particularly because the little things you do could have an impact on your life. Here’s what I mean…

The Slip

He was so interested in it all that he often did things himself, rearranging the furniture, or rehanging the curtains. Once when mounting a step-ladder to show the pholsterer, who did not understand, how he wanted the hangings draped, he made a false step and slipped, but being a strong and agile man he clung on and only knocked his side against the knob of the window frame. The bruised place was painful but the pain soon passed, and he felt particularly bright and well just then. He wrote: “I feel fifteen years younger.” He thought he would have everything ready by September, but it dragged on till mid-October. But the result was charming not only in his eyes but to everyone who saw it.

What did he say about his slip

“It’s a good thing I’m a bit of an athlete. Another man might have been killed, but I merely knocked myself, just here; it hurts when it’s touched, but it’s passing off already — it’s only a bruise.”

They were all in good health. It could not be called ill health if Ivan Ilych sometimes said that he had a queer taste in his mouth and felt some discomfort in his left side. But this discomfort increased and, though not exactly painful, grew into a sense of pressure in his side accompanied by ill humour.

The pain prevails

She [his wife] said he had always had a dreadful temper, and that it had needed all her good nature to put up with it for twenty years. It was true that now the quarrels were started by him. His bursts of temper always came just before dinner, often just as he began to eat his soup. Sometimes he noticed that a plate or dish was chipped, or the food was not right, or his son put his elbow on the table, or his daughter’s hair was not done as he liked it, and for all this he blamed Praskovya Fedorovna.

At first she retorted and said disagreeable things to him, but once or twice he fell into such a rage at the beginning of dinner that she realized it was due to some physical derangement brought on by taking food, and so she restrained herself and did not answer, but only hurried to get the dinner over.

The realization of his condition

After one scene in which Ivan Ilych had been particularly unfair and after which he had said in explanation that he certainly was irritable but that it was due to his not being well, she said that he was ill it should be attended to, and insisted on his going to see a celebrated doctor. He went. Everything took place as he had expected and as it always does.

The so-called male ego

The pain did not grow less, but Ivan Ilych made efforts to force himself to think that he was better. And he could do this so long as nothing agitated him. But as soon as he had any unpleasantness with his wife, any lack of success in his official work, or held bad cards at bridge, he was at once acutely sensible of his disease.

The coming of the pain

The pain in his side oppressed him and seemed to grow worse and more incessant, while the taste in his mouth grew stranger and stranger. It seemed to him that his breath had a disgusting smell, and he was conscious of a loss of appetite and strength.

The inevitability of the pain

There was no deceiving himself: something terrible, new, and more important than anything before in his life, was taking place within him of which he alone was aware. Those about him did not understand or would not understand it, but thought everything in the world was going on as usual. That tormented Ivan Ilych more than anything.

Well, read the ending of the story to find out what happened to him!

This is something what I would call a “Butterfly Chaos Theory” that the flutterings of a butterfly in the East (China) can acculumate to a hurricane in the West (Florida). As he had a small slip that led to his dying. So, what is exactly my point? My point is that I realize I’m sick and I’m gonna do about something. Any suggestions?

One month and seven days since I turned 24 years old, I’ve arrived at a point where I feel I’m in middle of nowhere. It’s hard to describe how I feel but the best I can explain is that I feel like a fifty years old man who’s having a middle-age crisis. So, likewise, I’m having a mid-twenties crisis. It’s not like I need a Viagra to help boost my life or spend my retirement money on some miatas. It’s more like arriving at a dead end and which way should I go? I’ve graduated from college last May and have settled into a government job with steady paychecks. I didn’t go to a graduate school like most of my friends do. My friend told me that I should consider myself lucky ‘cuz I have a job while those who don’t—don’t have anywhere else to go but a graduate school. Yet my other friend said they want to go to graduate school cuz they want to advance in their major or that their undergraduate majors require them to go further in their fields. Like even being an elementary teacher requires you to have masters degree in deaf education, child development, or the likes. Or they just want to add Phd. degree to their names. I suppose I didn’t go to graduate school cuz I was tired of pulling all-nighters to cram on homework or projects and that I want to see some $$$ and spend it while I’m in my twenties.

Now, my job isn’t exactly the greatest job in the world and it’s catching up on me—was it worth the decision? Well, I’m an optimist and I didn’t write this post to whine about my standpoint in this life. I’m gonna do something about it. As you can see the subject above, I’m gonna self-educate myself. After all those years I’ve attended schools and colleges, I’m going to take learning into my own hands. What am I gonna teach myself, you wonder? Somewhere in my blog archives, I’ve said that I’m a descendant of Korean lineage. And I’ve been meaning to learn Korean or Hangul language since I found my real family 3 years ago. You might wonder.. why now? why not 3 years ago when I discovered my family? Well, my excuse was that I couldn’t find anyone who can teach me. Lame excuse, huh? That was my excuse and rather being stuck at the dead end, I’m gonna teach myself to learn Hangul.

It’s interesting. For the last 3 years, I have been expecting my family to learn English so we could communicate in English and my brother has been learning tediously. Now I realize…why should I expect them to learn English? Who says everyone must learn English? Even English isn’t the most used language in the world; that’s Mandarian, which is spoken more than 1 billion Chinese people. I have a brain, I have a degree in IT, so what am I doing here, waiting for my family to learn English? It’s never too late to learn a new language—I’ll be like an infant–absorbing every new word and form sentences in Hangul. That’s my goal and I’ve made the first step toward that goal. I’ve ordered an introductory textbook from Amazon.com. You can find this below:

My possible regret about this is that I could have done this 3 years ago and by now, I probably would have been fluent enough to write a letter and happily keeping in touch with my family–with my biological mother laughing at my little errors in writing like an infant falling down while trying to walk. And I’d have a several pen pals from Korea, learning all about the culture and reading news in Korean effortlessly. Neverthelessly, I’m gonna start now and I’ll be posting my progress here and maybe along the way, I’ll bump into someone who can help guide me.

*signing off*

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brevity/6625994/in/set-146801/

Wow, this is really cool and new idea in photography art. What you see in this pic is a blend of 50 different pictures using same tags: shadow and self. You can click on the link above to see how this was done. It certainly takes an abstract form and looks like 19th century’s impressionism.

In the past two weeks, I’ve been running and I thought it’d be cool to sketch out my running route and show to you what my route looks like. The route involves some downhills and uphills, which actually makes it more fun and challenging too. There’s a heavy traffic at the intersection of Florida Avenue and New York Ave and I would often have to stop and wait till there is a clear path to get across the intersection. My average time seems to be approx. 35 mins and is almost 4.5 miles long. Well, you can imagine me running along by that red line on the map. :-)

See the subject above? I’ve stuffed my stomach with buffet foods (courtesy of Korean foods) in the two days span. One on Friday night and last Sunday. There’s something so American about buffets. If you wanna know why more and more Americans are becoming obese, look no further than buffet places.

We love the idea that we can EAT for all we want and with that psychological effect, we CRAM as much as we can into our stomachs so the money we paid for the buffet would be better spent. We love the word—unlimited—so we have unlimited data plans for our pagers, and remember when AOL starts offering unlimited hours plan? We all jumped on this bandwagon and remain logged till computer monitors get burned.

So, buffets also means unlimited foods and we pretend we have bottomless stomachs and fill them in. As soon as we realize our stomachs are no longer bottomless, we start spitting out comments like “I’m gonna throw up!”, “My stomach is gonna burst open!”, “Oh, I gotta make a dump! Where’s the bathroom!?”. Isn’t that sound sad, doesn’t it?

One pro thing about the buffet, actually two things, is you can try a small portion of the dish and see if you like it or not instead of blind-order the dish and pray that you’ll like the dish. Second thing is that you don’t have to wait for your order to arrive and you can quickly look at all the foods and decide which one you’ll eat first. My dad would often fall victim to a bad dish or wrong order—maybe it wasn’t large enough or it simply tastes awful—and you’re basically stuck with your order unless you’re bold enough and demand another order.

So, what’s my point? While buffets may be a convenient way to “preview” choices of dishes, it lies at the root why Americans are becoming heavier everyday.

Tonight, I gotta hit the gym and burn those buffet calories to avoid becoming into yet another obese American.

As you can see, I’ve redesigned my website after working on it for a few days. Now, it’s ready for showing. I’m a big believer in simplicity so I feel that this design suits my style well. I’ve added another page to the website–about me. I’m currently working on a contact form but I’m not sure if I should add that page because we have emails and comments as a means to contact each other. If you want to learn on how to drive traffic to your blog, visit www.lucidcrew.com for more details. I guess when I happen to be in the mood, I’ll add the contact form to the navigation menu, :-) I think I’m going to give it (the redesign fiddle) a rest and focus on blogging more often so you guys will have something more to read. To help you and your business attract more clients you need a full technical support and you can find it in this blog Tech to Us.

WordPress is really starting to take off (it has been already downloaded one hundred thousand times) and more users are contributing to the development of WordPress. One is a theme switcher and there’s a theme contest. Some of the themes are quite good but I think I’m going to stick to my own design, at least for now. I’m becoming addicted to plug-ins that give more features or help enhance your website, like I used Crossianga to automatically post in Xanga for those who are members. Now, I’m gonna have to wipe off the dust on my practically brand-new Sony camera and start populate my website with images and snapshots of who I am. When you want to create your won personal website without html knowledge, you can hire http://www.webdesign499.com/pompano-beach-web-design/.

http://www.davenetics.com/2005/03/stay-in-theater.html

Wanna know what is the average time before major motion picture finally hit on the DVD shelves from the big screen? Four months and half.

You’ve probably heard this word, horsepower, many times before to describe the acceleration power of a car but have you ever wondered how that is figured? I’ve always wondered about that till I saw this mathemathical formula to calculate your car’s horsepower. Here it is:

Power = 2piN * T*1, 34*10-3/ 60

where P = Power, or horsepower
N = Rotational shaft speed or RPM
T = Torque, NM

I need to test this formula myself since I own a Honda Civic Si 2004 and its horspower is 160.

Abiding by this tip to make your blog a worthy time to read, here’s my movie review for Open Water DVD.

For about the first time in my life, my parents actually watched a movie before I did. I often would be the first one to say “Did you see that movie?” to my parents or vice versa and I would always reply “Yes, I’ve already watched that.” Sometimes my parents would get frustrated that I’d already watch the movie and lose some family quality time. Anyways, my parents suggested me to watch this movie and they said very good movie. So, I decided to take their suggestion after all. I thought it was going to be some kind of “Jaws” movie, from the look of the cover. But it never was one, far from that and wasn’t even done professionally. What do you call that movie with high-quality film? Panavision? Open Water movie was shot with a DV camera with only four people mostly. Two characters (husband and wife), director and his assistant, apparently. That’s what I learned from reading one of the reviews on the www. It was like a documentary movie but wasn’t shot this way, like you would see in the 9/11 Fahrenheit movie.

I guess I’m a little lazy to tell you the whole story as you can find all about it on other sites but I do want to make this point so that you can appreciate the movie somewhat a little more. At the end of the movie, I wasn’t even happy with the movie and thought I wasted a good five bucks that I rented at the blockbuster. (Yes, I haven’t jumped on the bandwagon to subscribe monthly yet). Before I reacted too harshly, I decided to read some members’ reviews around in the www to get a better understanding of the movie somewhat. That’s how I learned that this movie actually took two years and was shot with only four people. Two in front of camera and the other two in the back. What sets this movie apart from the Jaws movie was they interacted with REAL living flesh sharks. They weren’t fake or made up with CGI or have any kind of special effects. I suppose that’s what made this movie a bit special, if you will. Also, I think Americans aren’t used to this kind of movie that is too realistic and doesn’t have a happy ending. So, when you watch this movie, please keep in mind that it’s a documentary movie (meaning no awesome special effects like Jaws or CGI effects like the Perfect storm), was shot with real live sharks, and the constant up-and-down shots (like the Blair Witch project) to make you feel like you are in the sea with the actors. All in all, it’s no Oscars-award winning movie but it does teach you a lesson. Be SURE that you’re known to your tour guide and that they know you’re here so they won’t forget if you get missing. :-)

I’m a big-time tech freak so I surf tech webs regularly and saw this new vacuum from Dyson. This vacuum was awesome because it could also be used as a car vacuum cleaner. I’d already promise myself that I would buy a Dyson vacuum as soon as I buy a house but that’s like 5 years away from now. Now, this guy Dyson just released a new vacuum called DC15 with the ball movement. It’ll allow you to vacuum more efficiently and getting the work done more quickly. Seeing the pic has made me hardly wait to buy my first Dyson vaccum!