I may not have found the time to blog about the whole thing, but I did managed to put (nearly) all of the images from my trip up on my imager. Here they are by broken up into sets:

• Seoul
• Tokyo
  • The Meiji Shrine
  • Shinjuku
  • Shibuya
  • Asakusa
  • Tsukiji
  • Chiyoda
• Kyoto
  • The Imperial Palace
  • Gion
• Okinawa
  • Churaumi Aquarium

I'll try to post an actual recap soon.

I'm going to participate. I'm not really concerned about the effectiveness of that single hour's darkness on energy consumption as a whole, rather I'm more interested in taking a moment (or in this case, an hour) to reflect on our habits and maybe even convince others to slow down a bit. Besides, who doesn't love a party in the dark?

As always, Toronto is having a party in Nathan Phillip's Square while Vancouver still lacks any real public space capable of such an event. If you know of anything that Vancouver is doing that's interesting please let me know.

Details of the Japan portion of my recent trip are coming, but I found this link today and thought that it'd be a good idea to get it circulating somewhat first.

The idea is called work sharing and it works like this: in tough times companies large and small can apply to have Canada's employment insurance program pay (all or or a portion of) an employee's salary for one day each week, the employee then takes that day off. It gives companies facing layoffs another option that allows them to retain talent while saving anywhere between 10% and 20% on salaries.

If you're interested, check out the details at Service Canada.

You know, I intended on updating more often than this, but frankly my life here in Seoul hasn't been all that "epic" :-) I guess a post every 5 to 7 days will have to suffice.

Shawna & Friends

Even with Emily-Jane's poor timing in her moving back to Toronto only a week before I arrived, I've still managed to spend lots of time with friends in Seoul since Shawna moved here from Yeosu (여수시) at roughly the same time as Emily-Jane left.

At the end of my first day in Seoul, Jeong-Yeon and I were quite tired from our wanderings as we headed home.

Shawna and I messing around at the restaurant where I had the kangaroo.

Yes this says what you think it says. It's a little clothing store in Itaewon.

Paul is Shawna's really cool neighbour who babysat me for a day and speands a great deal of time with Shawna. He's a cool guy and it was nice to have met him.

Seoul uses a turnstyle system for it's underground. You can buy a Tmoney card and charge it up with Won, which is later automatically debitted by these two-way machines. Billing is based on distance travelled rather than Toronto's one-price-for-all or Vancouver's zone system.

This is Shawna's washing machine. If you had only a week's worth of clothes to your name, could you be sure that you knew how to operate this thing?

My first night here was shared with Shawna, her new English-teacher neighbours and an old friend from high school, Jeong-Yeon (whom I visited last time I was in Seoul). We ate pizza, talked about Buffy and got along swimmingly. As the week has gone on, Shawna, Paul (one of her neighbours) and I have spent a great deal of time together -- pretty much every evening has had the three of us doing something. Paul got off work early and took me around town to buy some tailor-made shirts and pick up a loner phone (call me or txt me! 011-82-10-8686-6551) and Jeong-Yeon did some wandering with me as well. Everyone here has been really helpful and supportive.

Some of you had expressed doubt as to my ability to survive in Korea due to my horribly picky eating habits, so I thought that I would mention that I've yet to consume any traditionally Korean food this week :-) Instead, I've enjoyed unlimited steak at a Brazilian steakhouse, some incredibly good kangaroo at a high-end restaurant & winery, french toast at a cafe down the street and ice cream at Cold Stone. Paul even brought over some gelato last night :-) Shawna has assured me though that tonight we're going out for real Korean food. I hope it's BBQ :-)

So yes, Seoul is very much an international city. Not nearly as foreigner-friendly as Berlin or even Florence, but you can see that they're making serious efforts. Unlike Yeosu, where white-folk are extremely rare, I've noticed a rough ratio of 1:40 in the subway system. Some neighbourhoods like Itaewon (이태원동) are more westernised but anyone navigate the awesome underground thanks to the excellent way-finding signs and maps throughout the city.

Quest for the Spatula

It was based on these observations that I decided to go out wandering on my own yesterday. Armed with about 60 000 원, (won) (about $52 CAD), a phrasebook, a cellphone, and some rudimentary phrases like "hello", "thank you", and "I'll take that", I went for a walk with the intention of getting lost and finding my way again. Turns out it wasn't all that hard to do both.

The plan was to return home with a new power strip for Shawna's desk, a plastic spatula (she only has a metal one for her Teflon pan) and some groceries. The power strip was tough. I walked into a hardware store to find someone who spoke just enough English to tell me how much something cost but not enough to figure out what I wanted. She handed me a pen and paper and we played pictionary for a few minutes while she bounced around the tiny store pointing at things to see if that's what I was looking for. Eventually we got it though. She asked for "one, two" and I handed her twelve-thousand won.

The rest of the trip was far less fruitful. I would walk down a street for 20 or 30 minutes passing a pharmacy, then a phone store, then a office supply store, then another pharmacy, then another phone store... repeat until exhausted. Then I'd turn a corner and it'd be the same thing, only this time with furniture stores. Who would have thought that finding a cheap plastic spatula would be so difficult? I spent much of the rest of the day just strolling through zig-zaggy streets, stopping in to corner stores looking for some salt & pepper for Shawna's kitchen or some cooking oil but nothing was more elusive than that damned spatula... so I gave up and got on the subway, deciding to favour the entropy approach: I picked a station that didn't look to be too far away (I was getting tired) and hopped on.

서울

There wasn't much at Nakseongdae Station (낙성대역) either but as I was sitting there waiting for the subway I started to realise that I understanding Korean writing really isn't all that hard. The name station name Nakseongdae was written on a support beam just above the Korean and without thinking I began sounding out the script. Once you understand the basic composition of the vowels and syllables, everything seems elementary. Once on the subway, I began scanning the map looking for other station names I could pronounce -- it was awesome. I can't say that I understand Korean yet, but it's a hell of a thing to feel that click in your brain when you at least start down that path.

Software

My only regret so far (and frankly, this isn't that big of a deal) is that I've not had much time to work on my own technical stuff. I wanted to finish my password-tracking program so it could handle groups, or learn more about Django but neither of those have happened. I've done a lot of relaxing though and that, more than anything else is what I've needed lately.

Susan is arriving from Daegu (대구) tonight and she'll be staying here at Shawna's with me and Soomi. This tiny little place is going to be a full house, but not for long -- Susan and I will be getting on an early flight out of here to Tokyo in the morning. Then begins the really foreign part of my trip :-)

I know that I'm in Korea and I "should" be out seeing the sites, but I have to explain that the primary reason for my visit here was less to see Seoul and more to see Shawna and just... relax. Since Shawna works during the day, I took the morning and after noon off to just do nothing yesterday and today I'm catching up on my crazy-sized email backlog. I'll be going out around 11am though with a friend of Shawna's to do some exploring and pick up a temporary phone.

For the moment though, I just wrote a rather long email to my uncle to help him with his Google ranking and figured that since this was the second time I've had to go through all of this with someone, that it might be a good idea to post it all here for future reference. If you think that I've missed anything, please let me know and I'll update.

Google bases your page rank on a few things: linkage, content, and formatting. I believe that it's even in that order. I'll explain one at a time.

Linkage

The number of links to your site and the ranking of the origin sites. So for example if "Bob's blog" links to you, that link is worth significantly less than if it were from Amazon.com or Slate etc. More links is better, and Google will even attribute the content of the origin site to your own. In other words, if a site about Pizza links to you, Google will assume that you have something to do with Pizza. So the best links to get are things *within your field* rather than from anywhere lest you run the risk of diluting your rank with non-relevant rankings.

Content

This is the easiest, but a lot of people miss it. First of all, so-called "rich media" isn't recognised by Google (and pretty much all other search engines too). Flash, Youtube, Silverlight etc. won't get read by Google so don't make your site dependent on such formats. Instead, lots of relevant content with links to other sites and proper use of keywords with which you want to be found.

For example, on my dad's site, he wanted to be found with the keyword "optical" but we never once used it on his site. Instead, we used "optician". As a result, he was #1 for "optician Kelowna" but had no mention for "optical".

It's also important to note that grammar is important. You can't just fill up the page with abnormal uses of keywords you for which want to be indexed. Google pays very smart people a lot of money to write code that will recognise poor-grammar-as-planted-keywords so don't mess with a good thing. The truth of it is that if you have a good site with relevant content, people will find you, link to you and your rank will improve over time.

Format

Back when I was in school we were taught that the format of your code was relevant to your search ranking. I'm not sure of how true this is anymore but it's a good practise nonetheless. Do put headers in header tags (<h1>..<h6>), put text in the alt="" portion of your <img> tags and don't try to screw with them by putting a bunch of keywords in a text block and then hide it by making the text the same colour as the background or by hiding the box altogether. They hate that and their scripts catch you, you risk being delisted.

Lastly, a handy thing to do is to install Google Analytics. It will do fun stuff like track page hits by hour, week, and month as well as give you country of origin stats, search engine references etc. It's awesome and it's free (as in beer, not Freedom).

So I landed in Seoul last night, so I thought that I'd post here to let you all know that I'm ok, baggage arrived etc. and Shawana was waiting at the airport for me. Let me just say that this trip was considerably less stressful than my last visit to Korea -- even the jet lag was less painful.

For those interested, I appear to have avoided the worst of the jet lag by being sure to take a mid-afternoon flight out of Vancouver. I arrived at ICN after a 12hr flight at about 6pm local time. By the time I got to sleep Shawna's I was exhausted but still mobile as it was only 4am-ish Vancouver time. Today, I woke up around 8am local time and I feel relaxed and well rested. All is good.

Well there is some bad: Shawna's internet connection here doesn't seem to like my laptop. There's a flaky unencrypted wireless connection around here called "default" but I've only be able to get on that once and her hard-line connection... I'm not sure if it's DSL or cable or what, but it doesn't like me. I'll poke Shawna's brain some more when she gets home but until then my laptop won't be online which means no shell access, no email and no Skype. For now I must blog on Shawna's Windows laptop (ew).

Jeong-Yeon and I are about to go out for breakfast, so I must go, I just wanted to check in and say "hi" to you all :-)

Sharpied in green onto the paper-dispenser in a YVR bathroom:

"Why can't the world learn to get along?"

A response, scrawled in black next to it:

"Too many people"

It's true. I'm still alive, though I couldn't blame you if you'd considered otherwise. I've been neglecting this blog of late. Actually, I've been neglecting most of my life lately but soon, very soon, I shall have a break and I wanted to get this Long List of Stuff out of the way before that happens so here goes:

Carmen

A little over a month ago, I attempted to expand my cultural horizons by taking in My First Opera at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. I accompanied Margaret, Dianna, and Aisha to the show and like good opera-goers we dressed up pretty for the night, then quietly mocked the yahoos who felt that jeans and a tshirt was appropriate.

For my part, I can't say that I really enjoyed the opera. (Sorry Diana). I didn't hate it either though. Frankly, it didn't do much for me at all. I found much of the music frustratingly simple when compared to a symphony or even broadway show, and the characters completely unbelievable. The emotion they conveyed (quite brilliantly I admit) didn't make any sense when the story seemed so trivial. I guess Opera just isn't for me.

I still have trouble getting over the fact that they would hold something like an opera in a venue that doesn't really lend itself to acoustic projection. The QE Theatre, while quite functional as a normal theatre, doesn't hold a candle to the acoustics you find in The Orpheum, yet they hold rock concerts in the latter and opera in the former. This makes no sense to me.

Choir

Not too long after my night at the opera, I went to my first choir practise in years. Simple Gifts, a local amateur choir run by Ieva Wool and for the most part, I liked them. The people I sang with had talent, the director was patient and helpful and overall everyone in the room seemed to really enjoy the whole experience. The only negatives were the average age of the singers (~50ish) and the fact that the practise was held on Tuesday nights... I had no idea how tiring a regular weekday practise from 7:30 - 9:30 would be, but it was.

I had the opportunity to try out the choir for two practises before I decided whether or not I was "in" or not, and the decision of whether or not to keep going came down to a simple gut feeling: I was just too tired. That is, the idea of going to choir on Tuesday felt more like a responsibility ("you're going to like, this so you have to go") as opposed to a joy ("yay! choir!"). I chalked it up to the general energy level of the choir (dear gods I miss Mr. Rhan sometimes) and my own energy reserves at the end of my work day. I just couldn't give anymore, so I declined to join.

If my situations changes for the next "term", I'll drop in again and give it another go, but for now, I just didn't feel like I was getting what I needed out of it.

The Super Secret Project

My father is an Idea man. Much like myself, he has new ideas all the time, though the difference between us is that his ideas are usually profit-driven while mine remain the betterment of mankind-types. His latest idea however has been snowballing into a full-blown project and will likely launch this year. Through the life cycle of his this beast, he's been coming back to me asking questions about how he could do "x" and I would work out with him roughly how everything would work... well it's time, now he wants me to build it.

I've done some research and it looks like I'll be installing Gentoo Linux on one of these running a really cool Python script I wrote that captures mouse clicks and logs stuff to the database and then pushes said data over the Internet to a master server via one of these things. It's gonna be fun.

Korea and Japan

And now for the big one: I'm going to Korea on Saturday and then to Japan on the 14th, then home by the 22nd. It's gonna be frickin' cool. My friend Susan, who's currently teaching English in Daegu, Korea was looking for company for a Japan trip and I jumped at the chance (finances be damned!). The way I see it, Japan is too foreign a country for me to be comfortable exploring on my own, and frankly, few of my friends have the money or the interest in making the trip. This opportunity was too rare to pass up... and so I go!

It looks like th total cost of flights, trains and accommodation will be in the neighbourhood of $3000CAD which may sound crazy high but you have to remember that it is the other side of the world -- the two trans-Pacific flights alone make up 50% of that sum.

It'll be fun to hang with Susan though -- we never spent enough time together when we were both in Toronto, so this will give us time to catch up :-) She has her heart set on a traditional costuming thing that they do regularly in a park in Tokyo, and I'm really stoked about both riding the subway in there and visiting the Nintendo headquarters in Kyoto... no, I don't know if they have tours, but I don't care. I just want my picture in front of the Nintendo sign :-)

I'm currently taking orders for stuff people want me to bring back, so if you want on the list, just drop me a comment. Also, if you think that there's something I should see out that way, let me know and I'll try to add it to our itinerary. The cities I'll be in are: Seoul, Daegu (maybe), Tokyo, Kyoto, Okinawa City, and Naha.

Alright, I figure that makes up for my rather long absence. I'll try to be more studious when I'm blogging on the other side of the planet :-)