Climb the Slope of Enlightment and fall into the Trough of Disillusionment

I have been lamenting recently about the uselessness of management at my workplace. I guess like many workplaces we are going through that cycle of clean up after everyone realised that it may actually be a good idea after all to get someone who knows how to turn on a pc to manage IT. (Remember participative management anyone ??)

Anyways .. As my workgroup is moving office we have been cleaning up old paper work and books , and while doing this we stumbled across this little gem ( along with a design manual for Lotus Notes 3.0, but that is another story ). I think this graph sums up the “content free-ism” of my management team in the last 7 years. Thankfully this is now getting better..

You have got to appreciate the genius of this though.. “Trough of Dissillusionment” , “Slope of Enlightment”.. Pure pointy head gold.

Korean Keyboard Overlay.

I am trying to improve the speed of my Korean typing and have finally got around to getting some korean overlay stickers.

The pic at the top shows the keyboard placement. I have to say that the Korean keyboard seems far more intuitive than the English one. On the Korean keyboard all the vowels and double vowels are on one side in nice groupings, and all the consonants and double consonants are on the other. For some reason this seems much faster to pick up than the English “keys all over the place”(qwerty) keyboard.

More T-Shirt Ideas

I have been thinking of more t-shirt ideas lately, It has been some time since I did my first shirt. Here are some more ideas:

Australian themed ones:

Have you ever been to Australia ?
호주에 가 본 적이있어요 ?

Cool Aussie !!
멋진 호주 사람

Drinking related:

I hate to drink alone !!
나혼자서 술마시기를 싫어해요

Is there anyone who wants to drink beer ?
막주 마시고 싶은 사람 있어요 ?

Korean related:

Its difficult to learn Korean , isn’t it ?
한극말 배우기 어렵지요 ?

Korean-only joke, maybe not sure if it translates, asking where Mr kim lives in korea is funny as every third person is called Mr Kim.

Where is Mr kims house ?
김 선생님의 집이 어디에 있어요?

A nice message:

Even though I am old I am young at heart.
나는 나이는 많아도 마음은 젊어요

Humour about the shirt itself:

Is it ok if I wear this t-shirt today ?
오늘 이 티셔츠을 입어도 좋아요? or
오늘 이 티셔츠을 입어도 괜잖아요?

And I am trying to think of some reverse Konglish ones , something that doesn’t belong on a shirt :

Don’t forget to wash your hands:

이지 말고 손을 씻으세요 !

If anyone else has some ideas, then leave a comment and I will translate for you.

Well done Leslie

My wife's cousin just won the Doug Moran Portrait Prize with a nice prize money of $100K. Well done leslie. Amazing work !! and a great picture... I guess I should ask for one of your "not so good" pictures for my birthday.

Korean Adoptee becomes adoptive parent

In case people have not realised yet, I am an adoptive parent, I have a son from South Korea, and I am currently on the waiting list to adopt a second child, and expect to travel to Korea within the next few months. The reason I started learning the Korean language was due to the fact that I knew that I was going to be a adoptive parent of a Korean Child.

Lately the South Korean International adoption program has gone through some internal changes, with the South Korean government attempting to internalise adoption in Korea. To do this they have been offering monetary incentives for people in Korea to adopt children. Hopefully this will be successful, and is a step in the right direction.

Anyway.. while I was looking at eastern social welfare service website, ( this is the social welfare service that I adopted my son from) , I noticed an article on their bulletin board about a lady who was adopted herself ( to America ) and has now come back to Korea to adopt a baby herself.. I personally had never heard of anyone doing this so this was very interesting.

Link to Article

If you cannot read korean then you can see the translation.. But as you can see it is a good laugh ( google korean->english will be in beta for a lot longer yet)

…. Some points of interest are:

The baby’s name is 성민 soengmin

백 씨는 1976년 여름 부산에서 태어났다. 하지만 가난했던 그의 부모는 그를 동방사회복지회로 보냈다. 백 씨는 이듬해 4월 미국으로 입양됐다.

The lady ( Mrs Park ) was born in summer 1976 in pusan. But her parents were poor, she was sent to ESWS , she was then adopted to America at 4 months.

괴물

괴물 (R:Goehmul) "Monster" is the lastest korean movie I have watched. It was a huge success at the korean box office and unlike nearly every other korean movie in this genre was a raging success in korea.

The thing I really love about korean ( and for that matter japanese horror ) is that they are not afraid to kill off main characters and that even includes the children, and even when finally the "evil things" are dead, it still seems like everything sucks for the "good guys"..

I thought the special effects in this movie were not as good as I would expect from a blockbuster, in some scene I thought I was looking at a Dr Who special effect. But having said that it is still a good watch. I give it 3 kimchis out of 5.

For a movie overview in english you can check out hanbooks