Networking

Yet another typhoon came our way. This time it was typhoon Sanba and it was the strongest of the three so far. Well, strongest in the sense that at one point it time it had been a Cateogry 5 typhoon, the strongest there is, whereas Bolaven and Tembin were “only” Category 4 at their strongest points.

Good news is that by the time any of them got up here, they had weakened to about Category 1 or a tropical storm, and all of them managed to avoid Seoul to a good degree. Not saying that we didn’t observe them. Sure, there was wind and lots of rain and out of the three, Sanba was the worst, but nothing extraordinary here. On average, Korea sees three typhoons per typhoon season, so hopefully that was it for now.

Low clouds bringing rain into SNU campus from typhoon Sanba

One interesting thing in Korea comes out during the rain, namely the little baggies for umbrellas. On a rainy day, many public buildings and shops have one of the below thingies near their entrance. Some smaller places might have only a large bucket where you leave your umbrella, but the contraptions below are very common in larger places.

You fold your umbrella and then you insert it top down into the little baggy that is already waiting. You push down the umbrella and then pull it out towards the front. This detaches the baggy from the next baggy and pulls the next baggy in the ready-position. Pretty nifty and there’s usually a small one for small umbrellas and a large one for large umbrellas. The umbrella stays in the baggy while you are in and when you leave, you leave the baggy next to the contraption so that they can be collected and recycled.

The benefits of this is that you don’t get wet umbrellas dripping water all over the place making the floor slippery and possibly dangerous. One down side is that since the umbrella is in a plastic bag, it won’t have any chance whatsoever to dry, so the baggy remains somewhat damp. It beats putting a dripping umbrella in your bag, but it’s not the same as putting a completely dry umbrella in the bag; things may get wet or at least damp. Still, I find this a pretty nifty thing.

I’ve seen similar stuff in other Asian countries, so it’s not just Korea where you can see them. I’ve never seen something like this in Europe. One thing that obviously wonders me is which of the two approaches is more ecological and environmentally friendly. Making plastic baggies consumes resources (sure, recycling helps) but it keeps the buildings cleaner with less risk of accidents should people slip on the puddles left by water dripping from umbrellas. I don’t know which way this equation falls, but until someone actually puts the numbers together, I’ll happily slip my umbrella into the little baggy on a rainy day.

Well, what do you know, I ran into something interesting today. After the conference and a dinner, I and a couple of others went for a drink near the conference venue. We went to Garosugil street, which is a popular area these days. The name means the street that is lined with trees that are next to a street, or so it was explained to me at least. There were a lot of people around, it was a Friday night after all.

On the way I also spotted the shop below.

Yes, I was somewhat surprised to see a Marimekko store in Seoul, but seeing it, I remembered that yes, I had indeed heard of a Marimekko store in Seoul. Later that night, when I finally got home, The Better Half asked me if I had seen the Iittala store as well. It’s supposed to be in the same area, or that’s where she thought it would be. No, I didn’t see that, but maybe I’ll go back to hunt for it. I remember seeing Iittala glasses at the Lotte department store in downtown Seoul on some earlier trips. In case you’re in Seoul, this is near Sinsa subway station. I didn’t go in to check the prices, since that might have been somewhat of a shock.

Today I’m attending the CFI conference here in Seoul. It’s very convenient to be able to attend a conference without traveling anywhere, well, commute via subway. On a normal year, I spend about 7 days worth of time on airplanes, not including the time it takes to get to the airport or times between connecting flights. Putting that into perspective, 7 days equals 168 hours and taking the standard Finnish workday of 7 hours 15 minutes, that means that I spend about 3 weeks of a normal person’s working time just on airplanes, getting to the place where I actually work, whether it’s a conference or a meeting. Obviously, I can theoretically work on the plane, but since the university makes us fly in cattle class, this is somewhat of a dream. This is what my “office” looks like during flights: (bonus points for figuring out the airline; should be easy for anyone who travels enough)

Sure, with that amount of flying, I do have a few funny-colored pieces of plastic in my wallet which occasionally, but very occasionally, result in an upgrade. So far my long-term average seems to be about 1 upgrade per year.

Where was I? Ah, going to a conference in Seoul, which today included taking the bus and subway, dropping off the Little One at the In-Laws on the way. Yes, it was pretty much on the way from our home to the conference site. The In-Laws live quite near to us, only 1 stop on the subway, plus a bus on our end and some walking on their end. Lucky for me, the worst of the rush hour had already passed, so negotiating public transport with a 2-year-old was pretty easy. The area where they live is still made up of small houses, like the picture below shows.

Nearby there are some bigger streets, taking me to the Isu subway station for an easy trip to the Hak-dong station and onwards on foot to the Imperial Palace hotel where the CFI conference is taking place.

There’s a whole week of Internet-related things going on and since I was here, it was very easy to participate.

Of course our university international payment department had, yet again, made a mess with paying my registration fee. Why didn’t I use a credit card? Well, Korean online credit card payment processing systems are not able to handle foreign cards (more on that later) so the options are either a bank transfer or paying cash on-site. I figured the former would be easier, since the second option would entail me racking up ATM charges for withdrawals and messing with receipts, with the ever-so-slight possibility of a receipt going missing and making a mess of the reimbursement. This made me sway towards the first option, even though I know that the university’s payment department bats at well below 0.500 in getting wire transfers right. I’m not just talking about international payments, they once made a mess of a domestic payment in Finland. Seriously, I’m not kidding with the “below 0.500”, since in the 5 years I’ve been here, they’ve messed up more than half of the payments and usually in different ways every time. At least this time I do have a confirmation that the payment has been made last Thursday, but obviously it doesn’t show up here yet. Hopefully this gets sorted out so that I can get lunch here.

As I wrote, one of the main benefits of attending a conference in your own city is not having to travel long distances. However, this still leaves traveling from your home to the conference site, which can also take some time. I learned this the hard way during the Sigcomm conference in the summer. There I also had the added difficulty of being a part of the organizing team, meaning that I had to be there pretty early every day and with a 1 hour commute each way, sleep was sort of an unknown concept. I don’t expect this week to be as bad, since the commute is (a bit) shorter and I don’t have to be there early.

Long time ago, when I still had some free time, I considered photography to be sort of a hobby. I have what used to be a decent camera, well, still is, since it’s a DSLR and the lenses do not get obsolete at the same speed as camera sensors. Not that there’s anything wrong with my camera and 8 MP is plenty for taking photos.

I took my camera and a couple of lenses with me, hoping to find some time for getting back into taking photos and also sharing them on this blog. The former is still in the plan, but the latter has been partly shot down by our friendly blog administrators. They have provided a princely 30 MB of storage space for files. No, that’s not a typo, 30 _mega_ bytes, which in the modern age of petabytes and cameras producing 5 MB+ images is more an insult than useful. (I suppose I should be grateful, since the instructions for the blog server mention each user having 10 MB of storage, so it’s been worse before.) Uploading 1 lousy photo ate about 15% of my storage allotment and I just don’t think I’ll be able to make it through the year with 6 photos. (Yes, you can ask for more storage, but would it really kill anyone to give a bit more storage? After all, it’s not like there’s tons of blogs hosted on our server…)

Which then brings me to Flickr, which I’ve been using for many years now and where I’ve uploaded lots of photos in the past. You can check out my photo stream, the set of photos from Korea from my past trips, or any of the other photos. I’ll also keep on uploading photos from this year on Flickr. Some of them will be used in the blog, but not all, so there’s more stuff there than you’ll find here

Yes, so this posting was a shameless plug for my photos on Flickr. And? Just click on those links, all the photos are SFW. 🙂

First week is almost done and I’ve just come home from my Korean language class. I’m enrolled in an evening class at the university language center to brush up on my language. I have class twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, both from 18:30 to 21:20. But more on that later.

Daily routines are falling in place quite quickly. I have an office where I can work in peace and quiet, but we’re also starting to work on joint topics with my collaborators here. Our apartment also has a small office corner where I can set up my laptop, get connected, and keep on doing things. Showing a considerable amount of foresight, I had purchased Apple’s Airport Express, so that I can connect it to the wired network of the building and share the WiFi with all of our phones, laptops, and tablets. It works quite well and in case of problems, all the rooms in the apartment also have an Ethernet port. I only have one cable, but getting one more should not be too tricky.

The campus is rather large, but not too large for walking from A to B. The only problem relating to walking is that it’s built on a hill, well, a mountain actually. Seoul is pretty much surrounded by relatively high mountains, so almost anywhere you go, you need to go up or down. (Our home being towards the second entrance of the campus means we’re “low”, so every day starts by going “up”.) Then again, weather has cooled from the sweltering 30+ degrees to a much nicer 25 degrees, so walking is actually quite pleasant. And going up and down is obviously good exercise. The campus used to be a golf course, but, amazing as it may sound, given Korean fondness for golf, the light of knowledge triumphed over money. Then again, that happened in the 70’s, so maybe that explains it…

This is my home office, taken when we had just moved in, so that explains why it’s still empty.

Here’s my real office, which I share with another person, but as I’ve understood, “he might show up on some Tuesdays” in practice means it’s mine to use. Yes, I play Angry Birds and The Better Half bought me that bird.

And the view from my office is to a small field, where every late afternoon, kids come for football training.

I can’t help but think of Ron Manager’s comments about kids in the park, jumpers for goalposts, marvelous, isn’t it? And on the topic of Ron Manager, I just can’t resist posting his comments about Gary Lineker… 😉

Ah, I’m sitting on the balcony of our new home (well, temporary home, but you get my drift), sipping a cold one, and enjoying re-runs of MacGyver from Finnish TV. Does life get much better? Technically, I’m also enjoying the view, but since it’s dark, I can’t verify that what I saw in the morning is still there, but the picture below shows the view how it was this morning, our first morning here.

Seoul in the morning

Yes, we left the safety of the in-laws, and moved into an empty apartment at the university guest house. Well, empty is technically not true, since there is a fridge with a freezer, a bed with a mattress, table in the kitchen (sort of part of the fixed kitchen, so not sure if that counts as separate furniture), 3 chairs in the kitchen, and one chair in the little office corner. There’s tons of storage space though, making this probably the first place I’ve lived in where I have more storage space than stuff. Obviously, lack of stuff helps quite a lot in making that impression. 🙂

Today has been the re-boot day. As anyone who’s moved to foreign countries, the beginning is like putting your life together from scratch, piece by piece, starting with the eternal questions, such as, what brand of toilet paper is good? Globalization has made this much less exciting, at least when moving within Europe, but coming to Korea is a lot bigger jump into the unknown. I do know the alphabet and basics of the language, but that’s not really enough. Lucky for me, I have a native live-in interpreter whose interests in getting the life into order align with mine.

Getting the basics together involved shopping for home appliances (microwave, rice cooker, hair dryer, iron and ironing board), then getting something to fill the empty fridge. Because the contents of the fridge also need to provide adequate nourishment for the Kids, beer is probably not the best way to fill it, tempting though it might be (and my doctor would also disagree). The in-laws have helped a lot, by giving us frying pans, utensils, etc. to get bootstrapped, so that meant a little less shopping for us. There is a reasonable market at Nakseongdae station, about 5 minutes by bus from here and as usual in Korea, they also deliver your purchases (at no extra cost, but assuming a minimum purchase of 20,000 KRW). The home appliance shop obviously also offered delivery so out of the 5 things we bought, 2 are still on their way.

Tomorrow is then the big day when everything finally starts. My daughter starts her kindergarten and I go to the office to meet my collaborators, so I should make sure I get enough sleep. But before that, one more beer and one more MacGyver. 🙂

As I wrote in the last post, I’ve been busy running around getting things sorted out, but two little things have one some days kept me home, namely typhoons Bolaven and Tembin. Bolaven came closest to us on Tuesday, but it was far enough out to sea when it was near Seoul that all we got was some strong winds and rain. Tembin came a little bit closer, although by the time it was near us, it had degraded into a tropical storm and all we got was a whole day of continuous, occasionally heavy rain.

In 2003 I got to experience typhoon Maemi, one of the strongest ever to hit Korea and I was not too far away from its path. At the time, I was visiting Gyeongju, the historical capital of Korea, and Maemi made for an interesting night. Wind was blowing extremely heavily, it was raining, and my hotel room was right at the end of the building, so the wind was actually blowing directly on my room’s wall. Nothing bad happened, but the following morning was quite interesting with lots of uprooted and fallen trees all over the city. TV also showed interesting footage of the damage Maemi had done on the southern coast, with beached ships, fallen cranes in harbors, etc.

Today was a clear, and not so hot day. That was a nice change from the weather so far. Hopefully it’ll get a little bit cooler, although given the choice of the weather here or the +16 C currently in Helsinki, I think I’d go for the warmer weather. 🙂