Paid a visit to the 韓國學 用語/用例 辭典, and entered a simple query. And clicked search. Woops…

1. Don’t use IIS / ASP. They suck goat’s teats
2. Hitting the enter/return key is supposed to submit the form. Not reloading the page.
3. Don’t use EUC-KR. That encoding suxxors big time. And ‘English’ looks crappy in that encoding – not really the encoding’s fault, since euc-kr makes the browser default to Korean fonts, and Latin characters *do* suck in Korean fonts. Use Unicode, dudes. Which is exactly what you are using – sans charset declaration, wherever there is M-R, like here
4. M-R is nice, but be consistant, if you please. shi or si? oe or oi? Pick one each. Oh, and check both transcriptions. 二軍六衛 doesn’t transcribe to either yigunyugi or Yikunyuki. Really…
5. Making the HTML standards-compliant would be nice – and lose the tables, the <font> and other stylistic bits. After all, you seem to use CSS, too. <td class="font12" bgcolor=white align="center"><font face="굴림"> could be replaced with a better ‘font12′ class – or possibly forks of this class…

This looks like an ad-hoc effort handled the good ole Korean way I have learned to recognize, sometimes admire, but usually despise. Act first, plan later [and order lots of green tape and silicon]. Ah well, I still ould have liked something like that when I was a student…

Hat tip to The Marmot.

• 대한민국, 16강을 도둑 맞았다
• 태극전사 ‘부심 판정 하나에 울었다’

Suddenly referees make bad judgments; other teams steal victories; and the competition is fixed. Right.

It’s not about football, really, is it? Just misplaced pride… Sigh…

At least, Seoul is going to be quiet, which is a plus.

Yesterday I was watching 도전 골든벨, a quizz show featuring a bunch of high school kids being eliminated question after question until only one remains. Of course, Korea being Korea it’s all about rote memory and cramming as much useless data as possible into their little brains – doesn’t mean they know shit about life, but the crap they remember sometimes is astounding…

Anyways, yesterday, they were asked to write down 불사조 — 죽지 않는 새 — in sinograms. 13 or so were kicked out after this question, which, well, figures, considering the state of sinograms teaching in Korea [and let’s not get started on things like 베이징 instead of 北京/북경]. I did catch one funny – albeit wrong – answer:

火死鳥

Considering that 火 is [불] 화, this is extremely funny, since that girl had meaning and pronunciation confused. It looked like some old Korean vernacular text written in 吏讀 [이두], where sinograms where sometimes used for their actual pronunciation, and sometimes for their vernacular reading.

Needless to say, I was the only one at home to see this [somehow my family has a tendency to watch TV without really watching, and I am guessing here that it’s not just them… Of course, had I had control over the remote control – firmly held by the head of the family – I would never had watched this show, ㅋㅋㅋ], and the only one I could tell the story without writing it down – like now – was Oranckay…

I had forgotten how noisy Korea can be sometimes, especially on university campuses. My in-laws live right beside Tongguk University, and apparently the students are having a party/concert/whatever on campus, and while both sets of windows are closed tight, and there are a few buildings between the campus and my room, the sound is deafening. I know that Koreans are impervious to noise, but this is quite above just annoyance, it’s a friggin’ assault, and apparently there’s nothing you can do about it but ride it out. Reminds me of my time at HUFS, where such concerts were frequent and a bloody nightmare for the foreign profs living on campus.

I guess it makes that little kid running around in the flat above us in France a very minor nuisance after all…

Busy selling wine – or trying at least.

I just spoke on the phone with a cheese importer, a man I quite like as a person – as opposed to as a client, which he isn’t anyway – and before hanging up I just felt myself bowing to him – as I would if we were face to face… Except this wasn’t a video phone and he couldn’t see me anyway… Let’s hope bowing on the phone is felt the same way smiling while talking is…