Graduation!

Young Stumbler #3 graduated from High School this week! Congratulations!

Wednesday night we had a small dinner for her at The Stumbling Parents' house. Hamburgers with corn-on-the-cob, roasted garlic, red peppers, potatoes, and many more...

Big, red, peppers. In Korea, these are called 오이고추, or literally "cucumber pepper":


Here we roasted whole garlics with some olive oil in the oven. Really soft and delicious.


The Stumbling Dad preparing hamburgers:


and cleaning the grill:


Oven-roasted potatoes:


Here is the grill ready for the hamburgers, with the corn on the top shelf:


I made a fusion dish - kimchi burger!


Oh - yeah, this post was about Young Stumbler #3 graduation! I got distracted by the food...

Young Stumbers #1 and #3,


and Young Stumbler #4 (#2 was working this night)



After dinner, we were treated to a concert by Young Stumbler #4 - she has been practicing a song for several months now, and was ready to show off:


The graduate played for us a little on her new keyboard graduation gift:


The next night was the graduation ceremony itself. I was seated behind the band, with 9 tubas and 20+ Trombones! It was great:


Here is Young Stumbler #3 receiving her diploma:


After a final and unnecessarily long second speech of the night, the principal declared the class of 2010 officially graduated. And off came the hats:


Based on previous years' experiences trying to find a restaurant after graduation, this year I made a reservation. However, we arrived at the restaurant to find it mostly empty! Not quite sure what happened. Here is The Proud Stumbler and the nw graduate:

Handkerchiefs

Ever since discovering them in Japan years ago, I've always carried a "towel-style" handkerchief with me. They were especially useful in Japan, where they don't usually have towels in the bathrooms, to dry your hands. In Korea, too, bathrooms don't often have towels, but this style of handkerchief is not popular and I can't buy them in Seoul. So when I had a short layover at Tokyo's Narita airport on my flight to the USA on Monday, I stocked up on 6 new towel-style hankies:



Let's see, we have bicycles, goldfish (The Stumbling Mother had to explain that one to me), beer mugs, watermelons, elephants, and finally penguins! May I continue to have dry hands. And my pants legs will stay dry, too, since I won't be wiping my wet hands on them...

I had a trouble-free but long journey home. Flew Monday into Atlanta, and took an onward short flight to North Carolina for a meeting. Then flew back to Atlanta Tuesday morning, rented a car, and drove 4 hours back home. Whereupon we almost immediately attended the Baccalaureate Service for The Stumbling Daughter #3's High School graduating class, and finally ate dinnner at 9pm. Busy, yes, but in a good way. Plus, I didn't give in to the normal jet-lag-driven desire to fall asleep in the afternoon for two days straight.

The Stumbling Mom surprised me with two Korean foods on the table, kimchi and dried seaweed (Kim, or Laver). The latter she bought only for the free Lock-n-Lock storage container:

Logic

SUPER GEEK ALERT

I don't normally write such technical posts, but this is the exception.

Recently I had a problem with a circuit board here in my electronics lab. I needed a logic analyzer to troubleshoot. These are usually pretty large, expensive pieces of test equipment. If I had to guess, I would say $10K or more. I started thinking, from who could I borrow one? Finally, I decided to look on the internet, and see if there were any low-cost options. Well, there was:



This little box cost $500, plugs into your computer, thus turning it into a logic analyzer. It arrived Monday morning, and in 30 minutes I had it runnng, connected to my circuit, and found the problem. Even though I've used logic analyzers before, it was very simple to operate - I think a novice would learn quickly.

Note - thus I get in trouble with new regulations I've read about, I was NOT compensated for this post by the manufacturer in anyway. I'm just a satisfied customer excited about the product. But, if they WANT to compensate me, I would be happy...

River Habit

I've started a new habit - walking and resting along the Han River on Sunday. Yesterday I brought my new lightweight folding director's chair with side table to the park:



First I took a one hour long walk along the riverside, listening to my Car Talk podcast along the way. Then I settled into my chair for 3 or so hours of reading, sleeping, reading, sleeping, etc. Here are some views from my chair.



I sad directly under the Dangsan Railway Bridge, moving my chair about every hour to stay in the shade!



This photo has three points of interest. First, in the foreground, you can see a tandem bicycle. I saw several of these going by. Next, way out near the riverside, you can see a dark square on the concrete. I couldn't tell exactly what it was, but some old lady took a large package down to the river, laid out a small bamboo mat, and proceeded to spread something over the mat. I'm guessing she was drying something in the sun, but I don't know what. Finally, also near the river, you can see a couple of fishing poles. I spent 4 hours at the park, there were numerous fishermen, and I didn't see one single fish!



I was a little nervous when I left my chair to go to the toilet and buy some water bottle and fishcake soup - fortunately my fellow park-goers were honest and nothnig was stolen.

This was so enjoyable and relaxing, I think I'll try it one evening this week. But I need to consult the internet and find when sunset, or else reading my book will be difficult in the dark. Which reminds me of this quote from Groucho Marx: "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read".

Football Match Not

Today I went to the World Cup Stadium in Mapo-gu to meet Tuttle to watch the FC Seoul football match. In all this time here in Seoul, I've never gone to a football game. And I still haven't. We met outside the subway station exit, where my friend JI and Tuttle's friend J joined us.

A problem was soon evident. The place was JAM PACKED. Today is Children's Day in Korea, so public places, especially parks (and apparently ball parks, too) are very crowded. Further thwarting our efforts was that today children were being admitted free to the stadium.

We started out trying to find the end of the line to buy tickets. It wrapped over half way around the World Cup stadium! Along the way, J gave up and left us (in hindsight, he was the smart one). We decided at this point to give up on getting in the stadium on time, and came up with an alternate plan. Go eat lunch, wait for the crowds to thin out, and join the ball game in progress.

Alas, we weren't the only ones with this idea. We walked around the underground of the stadium, in what must be the largest Home Plus I've ever seen. Both the food court and other restaurants were so crowded we gave up, and returned to the GS25 where we originally met! Even the GS25 had a long line just go get inside. We found a table, had a simple lunch listening to the crowds yelling from the stadium. The game was about halfway over, and we could still see a long line to buy tickets, so I just gave up and came home around 4pm.





However, I'm going to try again. I'll be out of town the home game, but I can catch the one after that. I'm looking foward to it.

EDIT: I heard on the radio station this morning that the attendance was nearly 61,000 fans at the game, smashing a 2007 record of 55,000. Considering that the stadium only holds about 68,000, it was indeed a crowded day at the soccer field. Well, it probably wasn't too crowded ON THE FIELD, just the rest of the stadium!

Sunday Stroll

The weather was perfect for a long walk along the Han river Sunday. Lot's of people were out, flying kites, fishing, picnicing, just enjoying the weather.





This fellow had a bicycle attached to floats, and the pedals were attached to flippers which propelled it in the water. Sorry, but my finger got in the way on the last photo.

Ten of One

I ran out of rice this week. I always hate buying rice, because there are over two dozen brands to choose from. I asked a friend for advice, and ended up ordering rice online! I ordered the usual 10kg of rice, but to my surprise when it arrived, there were ten each one kilogram bags!!!



I guess it doesn't matter, I'll dump them all in the same rice storage box. Just seemed strange. And boy I can better appreciate losing 10kg, after lifting that box full of rice!

Electronics Market

Well, I neededto buy a very small, inexpensive audio connector this week. I knew I could get it at Yongsan, but didn't want to go that far. On a whim, I decided to go to the nearby Wholesale Electronics Market. I've been there several times before, and have been amazed at the size and wide variety of available products. In my haste, what I forgot was that this huge complex suffers from a complete lack of organization. Unless you know exactly which shop(s) to visit, AND WHERE THEY ARE LOCATED, you might as well be shopping for electronics at flower shop.

I arrived, walked around about 15 minutes, and decided to eat lunch first before doing further serious searching. I ate some soup and rice in the numerous small restaurants in the basement, then went back to search. I decided to just start in a random building and walk systematially through the shops. Well, after 15 more minutes, realized this wouldn't work either. There are probably 40 or 50 "wings", each one wih 3 floors! Finally someone suggested I look on the main floor (basically outside on street level), so I spent another 30 minutes walking around looking without result.

Don't get me wrong, I had a GREAT time. This is the perfect place for an engineer to go window shopping. There are so many different things concentrated in one place (random though they may be). Unfortunately, finding a specific item is a challenge unless you have a skilled guide with you. Eventually, I ended up going to Technomart where I found the connector in less than 5 minutes, efficient but boring.

Here are some random shots of my "walk"

View down the main, center street.


Wire and cable, anyone:


Steel Cabinets for your next project?


Copper bars?


Or perhaps an industrial sized can of WD-40:


It was lunch time, and the waitresses were scurrying everywhere with carts full of lunches for all the shop owners:


Air compressors:


and LOTS of screws, every size imaginable:


Finally, as I was leaving, I saw this store, where you can buy fireproof clothing (or are these alien costumes?)

Mexican Feast

Even though I'm eating almost entirely Korean food these days, I've made a new habit to cook something "Western" on every Thursday night. This week, I had a craving for Mexican food, and began preparing the ingredients and searching some recipes online. Here is the resulting meal, enough for six people:



The dishes were made entirely from food I can get locally, with one exception - a package of taco seasoning mix which The Stumbling Mom sent me, which it probably way past its expiration date. I don't think I've ever made Spanish Rice nor Refried Beans before, it was both fun and tasty, if I do say so myself.

I wasn't entirely happy with frying the tortillas to make taco shells and a few nacho chips. While they tasted good, they weren't quite as crisp as you would get in a restaurant. I think this means my temperature wasn't quite right. I read in one recipe to fry them at 175 deg C, which I checked with my thermometer. However, I'll try a diffrent temperature if I do this again. Not to mention all the newspaper and paper towels I needed to drain off all the grease - not something I'll do often.

My only real complaint is there was too much cheese. In the past, I would always say "you can never have too much cheese", but for some reason these days I prefer to eat smaller quantities of cheese and other dairy products.

By the way, mashing the beans was really fun! Test for my Spanish speaking friends - what does "refried beans" mean? I discovered, while searching for recipes, it does NOT mean twice-fried beans.

Is Spanish Rice from Spain? I prepared the rice in the skillet as instructed in the recipe. Interesting fact - hot rice in the skillet will start to jump, similar to popcorn! Then I actually cooked the rice in my rice cooker. It worked just great:



And finally, out of curiosity, I tried a little Korean-Mexican fusion. I ate some kimchi along with the enchillada. It was DELICIOUS! Also with the refried beans! I might be onto something. These days we have the Taco Truck folks in California with their bulgogi tacos. How about a kimchi chicken enchilada anyone?

Fountain

I've been walking at lunch time these days, along a "street park" in front of my ofice. Last week, I noticed they dug a huge rectangular hole about 4 or 5 feet deep, lined with concrete. I thought, this must be a fountain, although it seemed pretty deep for a fountain. Over the next couple of days, they filled in the "pool" with a steel lattice work, completely baffling me. I was about to give up on my guess that this was a fountain, when suddenly they posted this large sign. It will indeed be a fountain, completely with a light show!

K-Popular

The Stumbler Meets As One


Through a bizarre set of circumstances last week, I was invited to a phone interview on a local radio program K-Popular hosted by the K-Pop duo As One. Shortly after that phone call, I was invited to come to the studio today for a live segment at lunch time. I was asked to present three of my favorite K-Pop songs, and explain the story behind each selection. It was really tough to choose only three songs. But I finally selected these, becuase they had the most interesting stories.

채연 / Chaeyeon: "위험한 연출" / "Dangerous Presentation"
(1) It's My Time (Aug 2003)

나얼 / Naul (Browneyes): "귀로" / "The Road Back"
Back To The Soul Flight - Remake Album (Jan 2005)

마야 / Maya: "친달래꽃" / "Azaleas"
(1) Born To Do It (Feb 2003)

Here is a CD I had from 2004 that they signed for me:



After the interview, I met a couple of friends who work there at the station, then headed back to the office. But, I stopped along the way at a small place which served pork soup (되지국밥). I didn't take any photos, but found these pictures on someone's blog which is exactly what I had for lunch! (I just had to sneak something about food into the post).

Old Cow, New Cow

GEEK ALERT - THIS POST IS ABOUT OLD COMPUTERS



An unusual set of circumstances found me needing to ressurect a VERY OLD computer that has been in storage for 5 years. And it was already too old 5 years ago! The brief and simplified story: there is a very special (expensive) circuit card in this computer that I need to use, and it won't work in a modern computer. Let me introduce the Gateway 2000 DX2



(well, the CASE of the computer - it's still dismantled). I wouldn't have remembered it was from 1992, except for the date code stamped on the case:



From the press release announcing it:

Personal computer mass marketeer Gateway 2000 Inc of North Sioux City, South Dakota, has introduced a new local bus system based on Intel Corp's 66MHz 80486 DX2: the 4DX2-66V is the first AT-compatible personal computer to use AT&T Co's custom-designed Ultra local bus video board: the system, which is scheduled to ship in mid-September, has the company's first implementation of the VESA VL-Bus local bus specification which uses a 32-bit data path running at processor speed; the computer comes with two VESA-compatible slots at $3,000.

Well, after vacuuming 5 years of dust from the inside and outside of the computer, I tried to make it boot up. No dice. Finally, after a MUCH more thorough cleaning (which involved removing many circuit cards and even chips), I was able to get it to finally boot up. Alas, the two ancient hard disks in the computer were a bit flaky, and I had lost some data (cause unknown). So, gave up on the hard disks, and replaced two hard disks witha single 2GB compact flash card.





Yes, that purple thing is a floppy disk, for you young readers. If you zoom in, you will also see a 5-1/4 in floppy drive!

It has a whopping 16MB of RAM. The date on the BIOS is later than 1992, because at some point in time I upgraded the BIOS for some reason.





Well, end of geek post (I am an engineer, after all). Now I have a vintage DOS computer with almost no moving parts (only the power supply fan). Yeeeeee-ha!

EDIT: Okay, the floppy disks and CD have moving parts, but now that the computer is working, I could unplug them if I really wanted to.

Right Tool

I've been making another lab bench recently for a new project. Got a good, strong table from the used furniture store. Covered it with anti-static mat, and finally I found some "shelves" at Homeplus. Actually, they are small, cheap (low-quality) student's computer desks - but they are plenty strong for my purposes. As I was assembling them this morning (some assembly required), I noticed that my screwdriver was EXACTLY the same tool as shown on the instructions.



I know, I'm an engineer, and never read instructions. I wasn't actually reading them, I just happened to notice the picture of the screwdriver as I was about to throw away the instructions! Here is the finished product:



EDIT 1: I needed to show the clean lab bench, because in just a few weeks time, it will end up looking like this:



Well, that's not entirely fair, this photo was taken on a really messy day for the lab bench - usually is isn't quite so cluttered.

Finally, I am quite proud of myself for solving a problem. It's a little difficult here in Korea to connect to the building's electrical ground. In the USA, our plugs and outlets both have a fairly easy way to connect to the earth ground. But in Korea, two factors work against me for this purpose. First, the ground connection isn't a prong and socket, but rather a springy "finger" which wipes against a small metal strip on the side of each power plug. It is not easy to connect to this (I've tried). Secondly, there are not many electrical outlets in a room. In the USA, it's relatively easy to connect to ground at the outlet, but in my office here the outlets are under the floor. Accordingly, everything is powered from plastic outlet strips. The first lab bench I connected to ground, I did it by taking apart the plastic power strip and soldering on a long ground wire to the internal ground bus. It was clumsy, and I didn't like the result very well.



This time, the outlet strips I got for the new lab bench didn't have screws. If I wanted to take them apart, I was going to have to break something. Therefore, I came up with my new idea. I bought two power plugs at the store. I then took them apart, removed the main power prongs for 220V (just to make it safer and clearly something special). That left just the grounding prongs. Now I can connect my lab bench to ground very easily - just screw the ground wire to this special plug, and then plug it into the outlet strip (The Stumbler says with a big,proud smile).

EDIT 2: My super grounding invention wasn't so super after all. Turns out the two main power prongs also provide the main force that holds the plug in the socket. Without these prongs, the plug is only held by the spring wipers of the ground, which isn't very strong. In the end, I just taped the plug to the socket using duct tape, which isn't very elegant.

EDIT 3: Why do we call it a lab bench? You don't sit on it. Several Korean friends were confused when I mentioned lab bench, and thought it was a kind of chair.

Bibimbap

My first attempt at bibimbap.



I think I put too much hamburger, but it was still delicious.