http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/06/02/korean_bloggers.html

What�s with us, the koreans, that are drawn to blogging? The article says there�s over 5 million korean blogs and one of the commenters think Xanga blog is at least 40% asians. Dammit, I am not fluent enough to be able to read korean blogs. Wonder what do they usually rave/rant on about? Also, this article said Korea has the highest penetration to the high-speed internet with more than 12 million subscribers out of 16 million population or 24.9 people out of every 100 have a broadband connection. That is a LOT.

I remember watching a korean movie about the teacher/student rival (the title name is �Lonely Rivals�). In that movie, one 5th grader brought her cellphone which has a camera inside and her teacher got into a bad mood and hand-slapped one classmate (common sight if you watch a lot of korean movies/dramas). You guess it, ofc, the teacher got videotaped by the cameraphone and that 5th grader went home and released it over the internet. Then, the movie got really interesting. So, that part showed me how tech-saavy their culture is and how young they are doing it. When I was in 5th grade, the only thing I carried was my batman lunch box and internet connection didn�t even exist. Boy, am I sounding like my dad, his I-didn�t-have-what-you-have-now lectures.

I don’t recall Korea being a tech powerhouse a while ago so it’s amazing to me to see how fast Korea is gaining in this trend and is starting to become more competitive with other nations like Japan. I wonder how long before people will stop associating Korea with cheap products like Kia or Hyundai and become into a brand quality like Sony or Honda.

Square A and B are the same shade of gray.

And now, stare at the black cross below and purple dots will disappear. I swear!

It seems as if my mind has gotten out of hibernation and is itching to do something. A couple of days ago, I found myself joining the gym membership and worked out on two days. My body is sore especially my triceps but my stomach needs a lot of work, so I’m aiming to pull some good hard cardio workouts this week and try to lose a pound (from 166 lbs) and stay away from rice or carb foods. Now, I look at my own site and well, it’s getting a bit boring and stale, design-wise, so I find myself itching to redesign my website. I look at professional web designers’ sites and their designs are definitely kicking ass in quality. So that got my creativity juices going and I’ve got an idea of what I want my redesign to be. I remember the first goal I have before was just to get this website up and running because it was simply taking forever to be up cuz of my damn obsession with perfectionism. Now, I’ve taken myself well into the blog world and get an idea of how “information” is distributed, and how to make it more useful and presentable. So that’s where the focus will be on the next redesign—with the information more concise, purposeful and yet pleasing.

I tried something new today—I went to a Deaf Korean church in Wheaton, MD—-and I think that’s my first time attending church in 2005. I didn’t even know they have one around here till one girl told me about it. It was interesting to see some “FOBs” who knows only KSL, not ASL. I think there were about twenty people who were in attendance and the best part was the korean dinner that followed. Pork Gulogi, rice, curry vegetables, and no korean dishes can be completed without kimchi. Also, what’s impressive was that they had a full outdoor court basketball with two backboards that are made of fiberglass, not some cheap-ass plastic you would see on driveways. I didn’t even know Koreans are into basketball. We had a little pick-up game and one girl named Min-Hye definitely can play some basketball and she’s only 15 years old, never played on a school team. I told her she should. I had fun today and that’s what happens when you do something new. :-)

Oh yeah, my new sk2 has been finally shipped and I should get it soon this week. Can’t wait! (another reason for redesigning my website)

Sherry and I at the Todai in Fairfax!

Inside the Todai

Food time!

Here we goo!

Sherry showing how to eat seaweed soup!

We had a good time at the Todai, obviously. My belly just expanded one inch bigger after that, not exactly a good start to my workout program!

Browsing thru websites as usual, I found this cool search engine site that combines both Yahoo and Google search engines. You can see two columns on one page and see the search results. Pretty neat. Here’s the link.

Now, try to type “failure” into the search box and see what or who comes first at the top. :-)

Here’s my rough summer workout plan on a five days basis.

Monday – chest and back/shoulders

Tuesday – cardio workout – running or do supersets on weights

Wednesday – arms workout – biceps, triceps, abs

Thursday – cardio workout – running or do supersets on weights

Friday – a follow-up workout – whatever muscles areas that need more work or stretching ( use lighter weights), also, on this day, you can measure your bench press max.

Weekend – do a leisure workout, be it golf, disc golf, a run in the park, play football or basketball, etc.

And watch your diet!
And don’t forget to eat a lot of fiber and almonds too.

Today, I decided to do something on the second day of summer. For some reason, somehow, I lost motivation to go to the gym to work out and gradually became a couch potato (*gasps* even you, Nathan?) right before my eyes, and keeping myself warm from the winter, for almost three months. My best excuse is that I think it’s related to work—too tired to work out when I get home from work and that it was already dark by the time I step out of the cubicle. But, um, that was, like, two months ago and it’s summer now! Get off the couch, Nathan!

So, today, I joined the gym membership here at USDA. They have a fitness center called ECG. Although their equipment sucks, must be from the prison, it only costs me $24 dollars a month, can’t complain abt that price and I can work out during my work hours. After all, can get one of those best home rowing machine if feeling gym is not enough. So, first, I weighed myself and I believe that’s the heaviest I’ve ever been, 4 pounds below 170 lbs. I don’t think I’ve ever been more than 170 lbs, staying steady at 160 lbs but today, the scale said 166 lbs. *ahem* It was like setting off the fire alarm in my brain. “Must work out and lose weight.”. I’m aware that once you reach 30, your metabolism rate goes down and it’ll be harder to lose weight and you may be stuck with beer belly for the rest of your life. I want to get rid of the flab on my belly and stay that way till I meet my own death.

My goal isn’t to buff like Arnold Schwargennzer (sorry, I know that cliche is getting old and boring) but be more toned and leaner. The biggest challenge is and always will be my food cravings and try not to eat more than one serving, meaning not two, three cups of rice, having two whoppers from Burger King, or eating 10 foot-long worth of sushi rolls. Get some great coffee cups at https://ember.com/, they have great style and design. You can see where I get the flab from. :-( Next challenge isn’t about how many reps or miles I should do/run today but simply getting my ass over to the weightlifting room or onto a treadmill. And to do it everyday except for Sundays.

That’s it. That’s the two things I have to do—watch my diet and exercise regularly at this new gym in my area called Sweat Equity Fitness. As easy as it looks, it’s tough and no wonders we have such a word called discipline.

That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.” –Bill Bryson

I’m sure most of you have heard of that a couple of times from your biology teacher, that we’re all related one way or another. You may be rolling your eyes and be like “Yea yea, what’s your f**king point?” Well, my point is that we tend to think in current time frame or at least since we were born, meaning we don’t bother to think what has happened in the last century or longer than that. You say that’s for history majors. You know, if you could go back in time and change one TINY thing and everything after that point will be drastically different than they would be now and it would directly affect us and our existence. How’s that for history?

Obviously we can’t be here without our parents procreating first. And that goes the same thing for our grandparents, then our great-grandfathers. Start to see the pattern yet? Just keep going on and if you go eight generations back, that’s when Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin lived and that took 250 people in order to make your existence possible. Go even further to the time of Shakespeare, you have no fewer than 16,384 couples who f**ked each other. Let’s skip some generations here and go to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your existence depends on has increased to approx. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. So, basically, we’re not just the product of our parents but the product of gazillion numbers that led to our existence. And what’s the most remarkable of them all? We’re still 99.9 percent the same.

Now comes the scary part is this paragraph in “A Short History of Nearly Everything.”

“In late 2000 Nature and other publications reported on a Swedish study of the mitochondrial DNA of fifty-three people, which suggested that all modern humans emerged from Africa within the past 100,000 years and came from a breeding stock of no more than 10,000 individuals. Soon afterward, Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Genome Research, announced that modern Europeans, and perhaps people farther afield, are descended from “no more than a few hundred Africans who left their homeland as recently as 25,000 years ago.”

That’s right, with the DNA’s help, science has found enough evidence to suggest that we descended from no more than 10,000 people in Africa.

So that made me thinking. With the numbers I mentioned above, wouldn’t it be safe and logical to assume that at the pattern it keeps going at, that it traces all the way back to a single couple—perhaps Adam and Eve?

What we know for sure is that we’re all related to each other, no matter how different we may appear to each other yet we have all kinds of problems in this world and cannot be perfectly at peace. I suppose that’s what makes it interesting—our problems—despite the 99.9% similarity between us.

I’m not exactly sure why I’m even writing this post but that’s kind of things my thoughts tend to wander, reflecting on the bits of information I read in books or hear about what people say. One thing about this book that struck me is we didn’t even account for 1% of the entire Earth’s history and that dinosaurs dominated the world much longer than we ever did. The author also said that the extinction for human race is pretty much inevitable; it’s just a matter of when. So I suppose what I’m trying to say is that we all should make the best/most out of our life and don’t worry too much on small stuffs because we are pretty much insignificant to the universe. But remember, we ARE significant to one another. And that’s my point. :-)