Arrival In Korea

The flight was long, but I got some sleep, which was good because we landed Saturday afternoon (Seoul time) and had evening plans.

Reunited

We got to my fiancee's place, showered, and went off to the awesome bbq place next to her apartment. After eating, we took off for Itaewon, the foreigner district to a wine bar that had a comedy night going on. When we got there we discovered that it was standing room only, despite our deposit paid reservations. We didn't want to stand there so we got a refund (as they clearly hadn't reserved a table for us), and took off for another bar.

mmmnn, Korean bbq

We hit the "Rock and Roll" bar, which was fairly empty and had a drink or two and played some pool. After that we left for Hongdae, the university/clubbing area, and went to a bar called Bar Gab. We hung out there for a while, drinking their insanely cheap drinks (2000 won for a rum and coke = ~$2). A few people ventured out of the tested drink area for some dirty martinis, one of which I drank when abandoned by its owner.

We then migrated to Go Go's for some dancing. Good times. With our 5:30 am wake up call, and our 17 hour trip from Toronto, we called it a night at 1am-ish and headed home. A good first night.

Heading To Korea

My Korean Adventure Part 2 started today. Korea and Japan! I'm so excited to see my fiancee, who is beyond awesome in everything.

The airport. First off, I was unable to connect to Pearson's free Wifi. Not really sure what was wrong. I hit up the Wifi of the restaurant we were sitting at, but it required pay. Well mostly anyway. Strangely I could go to the UofT webmail interface without being redirected to their payment splash page. Also, it looked like I was able to post to twitter so I posted some funny comments from Branko and Daniel. Branko said something about being the next Scully. With Daniel's blank stare, he continued: "You know, the pilot who landed the plane in the Hudson." Daniel: "Oh, I was thinking the X-files. I thought, well I guess you could dye your bush red." I think you can all now get a taste of what this trip will be like.

At security, I got stopped after the metal detectors (which found nothing) and patted down rather extremely by the guard. Very thorough. He said to me, "I just to give you a special massage." Thank god I was in an open public place or I would really have pretty freaked out. Not too sure why I was stopped. I'm assuming random checks. Either that or I look like a total drug runner. I'll be sure never to get a job as a mule. And here I thought I looked to unassuming and geeky.

After that, the baggage check guy stopped me and opened my backpack to examine both the tin of Gatorade powder (I imagine it would show up odd on the X-ray), and check my skin cream, which was of an allowable size. Between that and the slow moving family in front of me, Branko and Daniel, who went to another line, finished way ahead of me and had to wait, laughing, at my pat down that included examining my waistline to make sure nothing concealed in my pants.

Anyhow, on the plane now listening to Pearl Jam. Will hopefully post this when I hit Vancouver.

Korean Adventure 2!

I'd first like to apologize for my lack of posting. I've moved apartments in the last month, and between that and work and my upcoming trip to Korea and Japan, I just haven't been writing much to post.

Anyway, as I said, I'm heading to Korea again. I get to see my fiancee, and a few of our friends will be tagging along. We're also all going to take a short trip over to Japan while we're in the area. I believe it shall prove to be awesome!

In honour of this trip, I'm going to kick the coverage off with picture of this bizarre hat my fiancee's parents brought back from Korea two years ago. I've been meaning to post it for a while, and this seems like a good time.

They bought an ice cream cake from Baskin Robins, which are all over the place in Seoul (them and Dunkin Donuts). Anyhow, apparently with the purchase of an ice cream cake (yum), they got this free hat.

It's a coonskin hat...sort of. It's blue, and has some sort of animal perched on the front, but does have a ringed tail. So odd. I love it though and think it could be a great talking piece at parties. All bask in it's odd glory, and stay tuned for my Seoul/Busan/Tokyo coverage!

Another Korean English Response

Another golden english response for my fiancee. Here are the last ones.

I think women can't do any job because woman can do job. There are many of man, but woman take every job. So man don't to do anything and I think woman want to go to army.

I think women can't do any job because I has only man can do. Like runing and got a question and making a good academy, can many.

I don't understand quite what he's saying.

An Embarrassing Find

I'm moving this weekend to a larger place. While I was cleaning the new bedroom, I started vacuuming the top shelf of the closet, which is about 7 feet up. I knocked a DVD off of it, and thought, "Wow, someone left a DVD here!" Then I looked at it: Porn. I told my fiancee and friends and they got a kick out of it. I'm sure someone would be embarrassed if they knew they left it behind. It was in a fairly out of the way place, so it could have been the last tenant or even the one before, not that I care if I know. Anyway, I've sanitized the images somewhat so I don't have slap a restricted content message on my blog.

Wolfram|Alpha Is Online

I've actually not been following the crazy hype around last months release of Wolfram Alpha, the "answer engine" of crazy and uncanny data. So, it wasn't until yesterday that I actually sat down and tried some stuff after a coworker showed it too me. It does some fun and crazy stuff. The way it selects and lays out data is pretty cool.

Anyway, after a few minutes, impressed, we decided that this thing must be evil, or at the very least dangerous. So I suggested we ask it if it was Skynet. It actually answered!
It "claims" not to be Skynet, citing the date of Skynet's activation (from Terminator 2) as the date of it's destruction and also saying how it, "enjoys interacting with humans." I'm sure. HAL 9000 enjoyed human interaction too! See what happened! Also, Wolfram conveniently ignores the fact that in the "new reality" of post-T2 events, Skynet turns out to be a distributed internet AI death program, so you be the judge.

Anyway, I started thinking about things and figured that we couldn't be the first ones to discover Wolfram's suspiciously Skynet intelligence, and as it turns out, we aren't.

EDIT: More funny stuff from Wolfram courtesy of Gizmodo.