Category: mini-blog

A couple years ago we organized a major 200-person conference style event. I wanted to put up the materials on our website, but there was serious concern that this could tank attendance, as people would read the materials and not come to the conference.

I think the opposite is the case. People would read the materials, find it super interesting, understand that the event is not some BS event, and come to the conference to be part of this important discussion.

There are so many potential unique benefits that an in-person attendance to an event can provide. Networking, connecting with the presenters, sharing your perspectives, digging into logical gaps, asking for source materials, getting a feel of the room on a divisive opinion, etc.

I think even streaming an event live can help with attendance. If I was local to an event city, and was watching a conference via streaming, and found it to be super valuable, I would actually turn off the computer and come to the conference. I don’t go to conferences because I have attended enough and found most of them to be completely useless. Live streaming is one of the closest things to getting a feel of the event before the event takes place – I would totally go to one if I could see that participants actually know what they are talking about.

If an event has zero benefits to offer/lure live participants, from the many possible benefits, then that event really doesn’t deserve to be held as a live event. Just pre-record the thing, and distribute the video to subscribers/payees (if you have such a model) or release it on the internet.

Heh she looked so genuinely scared

In the KakaoTalk Korean/English exchange group, the idea of doing audio conversation practices came up, and we have been trying to work out times that worked out for everyone. We had participants from Korea, U.S./Canada, and England. We thought that this would be pretty simple, but at the crux of the problem is this phenomenon:

1. The more participants join from Korea, the more lively (and fruitful) for everyone it will be, since there will be more Korean language speaking, and also more to be gained from the English.
2. Best time for people in Korea is evening time (7pm-12am)
3. Turns out that during this time, people in the other two countries are either mostly sleeping (U.S. 3am-11am) or working (England 11am-4pm)

We could find two workable time periods for Saturdays, and squeeze out limited opportunities for weekday early morning or late evenings, but that’s about it.

Another interesting thing is that the bulk of participants are not in the U.S./Canada, and instead in England. The unfortunate thing is that England’s time and Korea’s time are very much not compatible. The way it has been turning out, Korea and England gaspingly scratch the edges of the normal day (midnight/early morning) between the two of them, and the western hemisphere sits very comfortably right in the middle of that arrangement, during the ideal golden time (6pm-9pm)

This finding runs counter to my experience calling Korea. Calling Korea has been actually pretty easy. Call them in the late afternoon from LA, and it’s morning there. What’s the difference?

Well, those calls were for work, so I could do them during the 9am-5pm window. Once the activity is for hobby, it is no longer possible to have them during work hours, and the window of opportunity narrows down significantly. Could we extend this thought to claim that the earth was (unfortunately) shaped to foster corporate global exchange across the Pacific, but not so much individual exchange/communications, and more acutely between Europe and the Far East?

Sound like a stretch? Yeah, sounds like a stretch.

omg so sad… don’t cry daisy.. 🙁

Every single cutscene in Scandal’s season finale was a “omg who is doing what now?”, “oh poor X, they are so Y”

I saw Jeremy’s video “Why is Learning Korean So Hard? – Language as Mind” and found many of the ideas presented there to be very intriguing, and wanted to continue this conversation. Here is my take three on this video response.

I need this debated with all the pseudo doctors in my life. Especially the Korean ones.

The Korean singer Lee Juck wrote the below poem when he was in Junior High. Apparently he was a good kid who always bought birthday presents for his mom using the allowance money he received. (What! I never did that!) This one birthday however, he had spent up all his allowance, and he didn’t have anything for his mom.. so he wrote this poem, hoping that it would cover up his reproachable behavior(?). The poem made mom cry, and it ended up in her book later.

got Windows Live Writer working with WordPress Multisite. did these steps. don’t know which are the ones needed:

1. added “IP address yokim.net“ (and also the pre-mapping subdomain) to /etc/hosts
2. when adding blog, followed these instructions:
   With my main blog WLW works normally but with other blogs (not main) I do the following trick: initially I select URL:http://nothing and at the next screen I select WordPress 2.2+ provider and URL=http://.developernote.com/xmlrpc.php and at the final screen select my site again.  (from dmitirano comments). Instead of the pure domina developrnet.com, I used subdomain.maindomain.com
3. It works.
4. I can’t select my posting language as in WPML.

Season 5 Episode 20 of Scandal was just perfect. Drumpf Doyle goes down in flames, Edison calls out all the MF racists, and Ross has a koala affair. Fans agree.

Jake has a Cold War spy level double play, I have no idea what he’s thinking of. “Tell Liv that I want to live, that I am chasing the sun.” Is that a trap or a call for help?