Korea In My Heart

Since I stumbled across "Cruel Love" on my TV late one night, I've been a fan of Korean drama shows. The more of them I watched, the more I liked it. My timing was perfect in that two shows began running every weeknight, and they are still my favorites. The first one was "Likable or Not", which really translates better as "I hate you, but it's okay". Definitely the best drama of all time. The other was "Unstoppable Marriage". The second one was a great mish-mash of some serious episodes, comedy episodes and a continuing story-line. If you are sick and tired of regular television, give Korean dramas a try. I think you'll like the stories - they are usually warm and thoughtful, with a good moral story, or at least you see people who try to better themselves and are shown as heroes. Definitely worth your time.   After this, I bought Pimsleur's Korean Levels I and II. Kills me they never offered a "III", but the ...

My first electronics job right out of TSTI (TSTC/Waco) was to work for Tandy Computer Assembly in San Antonio, Texas. They were putting together the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 4 computers when I arrived, and production was in full-swing. My first months of the job was working in 'the back' which had a sign over the entry "Engineering". Actually, the engineering group was to the right as you came into the cavernous and claustrophobia-inducing board repair area. We spend days back there; they'd bring a box full of Model 4 boards to your desk, which was equipped with two screens, a 20MHz oscilloscope, and a Weller soldering station. Each board had a while 8-1/2 by 14" card with it describing all the test areas it had been through, and what area it had fallen out of with a scribble of the error the board produced. We'd pry the Z-80 microprocessor off the board, slap the 40-pin ribbon cable into it (which was a TRS-80 Model III board which had been massively mod...

Sadly, I'm not in  Seoul, or even better - in 안양시 Central 공완 - to enjoy this view. In this part of the world where I am from, usually there is about one week of leaves changing colors before a huge cold wind-storm blows them all into the streets - leaving trees everywhere bare as if they were dead. And there is this teeter-tottering of the temperatures between a typical Summer day and full-on Winter. I seriously want to replace my thermostat with one which can activate both the air-con and the heater within the same 24-hour period, because here it goes with the territory. But as I watch the weather broadcasts from Seoul, I can't help but watch my imagination take the trip over the ocean to where the stone sidewalks are surrounded by trees of brilliant reds, yellows and other hues signalling the change of the seasons. The images of brisk, beautiful mornings and the sounds of joyful voices taking to the streets as the day begins is just on the edge of my senses, it seems. ...

Recently, there was a student at Texas Tech who shot an officer in the face. And only a few days before that was the sniper in Las Vegas who killed 59. The media always comes back to the guns. "It's a gun control problem." Reporters ask questions almost as though it was part of a trouble-shooting flow chart. "What is a student doing with a gun on campus?" "How did he manage to smuggle so many firearms into a hotel room without being noticed?" And other such bull crap. Those simply are not the right questions at all. But here's some interesting questions: Why was a convicted drug seller still a student at Texas Tech? Why was he still living in the dorms among impressionable young people? Or better still, "What causes someone to take the life of another human being?" That's a hard one to figure out, and so the media won't try to get to that one. But what bothers me worse is that a large percentage of peopl...

Hi and welcome to my blog. I do everything, and I'm involved in everything so expect different things to show up.