Seoul Players RSS feed

If, like me, you love:

1. RSS readers
2. The Seoul Players

You'll want to subscribe to their RSS feed. It's not featured promenantly on their website, but you can find it here:
http://www.seoulplayers.com/feed

UPDATE 1: the website is updated infrequently, and this is reflected in their RSS feed. For more up-to-date news, subscribe to their Facebook page RSS feed, which you can find here:
https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=atom10&id=168275539886268

Here also is their Twitter feed, if you're into that sort of nonsense:
http://www.twitter.com/SeoulPlayers

UPDATE 2:  If you fancy the Seoul Players, you may also be interested in the Seoul Shakespeare Company blog.

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korean trolling: shutdown

Let it never be said that Koreans don't understand that trolling is a art.

This is a cute comic illustrating how one would make an icon on the desktop that apparently launches Internet Explorer, but actually makes the computer shut down. Nice troll. Also illustrates the sad fact that so many Koreans use IE...

Source: https://twitter.com/Dajal01/status/312402042603851776/

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Monthly doses of K-boob exposure

Here's a tip: bookmark this search to keep "abreast" of the past month's Korean indecent exposure pics! This link will pull up all the slow-motion animated near-nipple titty shots that lonely netizens have pieced together from the past month's TV viewing. Give it a click, then don't forget to do so once-a-month. Better still, set up a Google Alert for it so you don't miss any near misses.
Note that you can also customize the URL if, like me, a month is too long to wait and you need a daily dose (or, a girlfriend).

https://www.google.com/search?q=%EB%85%B8%EC%B6%9C&safe=off&tbm=isch&tbs=qdr:m,itp:animated

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VICE "Motherboard" says Baidu top in Korea?

On principle, I don't support tourist travel to North Korea, when its a useless quirky luxury that does nothing to help the impoverished people there and only lines the pockets of a corrupt regime. Nonetheless, the videos shot by VICE while there was fascinating, even if their condescending neo-colonialist attitudes were not. Seriously guys, if you're going to play along with that whole facade, then don't act like you're above their whole game. When you're there, financing that corrupt system; you're not whistleblowers, you're their temporary pawns; especially when you dress like hippie bums and speak/act with arrogance, providing fodder (like Dennis Rodman does) for their propagandic notions of WhiteMen™. Yet at the same time, I feel there's a certain value in engagement, if it's done right. The people of NK should see that they are not forgotten, not fighting for survival on their own: that the world is watching and encouraging. That's why I'd much rather spend my time/money (were I as generous away from the keyboard as I am in front of it) on efforts like these. 
 
But anyway, back to the point. VICE's magazine feed "Motherboard" a few months ago ran a piece on the dominant websites in countries around the globe. It's a fairly interesting piece, with one glaring misstatement, easily spotted to anyone with the remotest familiarity with Korea (emphasis mine):

A second map shows the same data but the countries are drawn according to population instead of geographic size. Viewed through that lens, it’s clear that Baidu, which dominates super-dense China and South Korea, shouldn’t be discounted

Since when does Baidu have any but a negligible presence in Korea? South Korea is dominated by its homegrown search portal Naver, a simple fact discovered by any web search. Some estimates place Naver's dominance at between 70~80%. This, in addition to the presumably obvious fact that the article's author, Meghan Neal, seems to have overlooked: Koreans speak Korean, not Chinese. Granted, international behemoths like Google provide localized language versions, but Baidu has only limited resources available in English (notably, a blog in English and a developer-only site), and as far as this author can tell, does not provide any Korean language option.

Now, the Motherboard article is essentially a puff piece, reprinting the results of a study apparently undertaken by Information Geographies at the Oxford Internet Institute.These guys (smarty pants Oxford scholars that they are) were awake enough to catch-on to this, and offer this caveat:

The situation is more complex in Asia, as local competitors have been able to resist the two large American empires. Baidu is well known as the most used search engine in China, which is currently home to the world’s largest Internet population at over half a billion users. At the same time, we see a puzzling fact that Baidu is also listed as the most visited website in South Korea (ahead of the popular South Korean search engine, Naver). We speculate that the raw data that we are using here are skewed. However, we may also be seeing the Baidu empire in the process of expanding beyond its traditional home territory.

I for one indeed suspect the data to be skewed. Unless Korea's population of 조선족 has somehow overwhelmed the internet savvy native Koreans, there's obviously something amiss. Perhaps data is being misinterpreted from undersea cable lines between China-Korea? I'm certainly no data network analyser, but as a longtime resident of Korea, I do know that Baidu's "dominance" of South Korea is a highly questionable claim.

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RSS feeds from specific Wordpress / Blogspot searches

PROBLEM:
You love RSS and use a reader like Feedly to keep up with your favorite blogs. But, you only want to see posts with a specific label (Blogspot) or posts from a specific search (Wordpress).

SOLUTION:
It turns out, you can subscribe to specific RSS feeds just for the posts with those particular labels or from those search results.

For results from a Wordpress blog search, subscribe to this sort of RSS url:
http://blog-or-site-name.com/?s=SEARCHTERM&feed=rss2

For results from a specific Blogspot label, subscribe to this sort of RSS url:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname


Check these sources for much more on this:
https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/97933?hl=en
http://thedeadone.net/blog/wordpress-tip-get-an-rss-feed-from-a-tag-and-from-a-search/

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McRib (not) in Korea

As far as I know, the famed McRib sandwich is so far unavailable in Korea, although some other "tropical" sort of possibly-pork product was available last week at a competing restaurant. This went by the name "Hawaiian Baby" and I can vouch for it indeed tasting like what a baby born of those islands might taste like.

That the McRib itself is nowhere to be found here is based both on my own personal observations and the McRib Locator app, the comments for which are particularly enlightening on the subject:

Love this. Never had one, but F^<# Michelle Osama and her food. Commie b!↑c#.

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Android Gmail count out of sync with Desktop Gmail

PROBLEM:
Gmail on your Android phone shows there are 5 unread messages in your inbox:

Inbox (5)

But looking at the message list, no matter how many times you refresh, you still only see 1 or 0 unread messages. Meanwhile, messages you deleted from Android Gmail may show up again as unread on desktop email. This is not a big deal, but annoying.

SOLUTION:
So simple, I felt dumb for not thinking of it sooner.

1. Disable the sync feature of the phone (Settings -> Accounts and sync)
2. Go to where you can "Manage" the Gmail app (for me, it's Settings -> Applications -> Manage applications) *NOT* the settings inside the Gmail app
3. Press the "Clear Data" button.
4. Re-enable sync.
5. Done.

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