Strength

Today provided a few interesting things. I've finished planning my trip for Japan, I've thought a bit about web-design, and I've learned a lot about computer localization. The latter being the bulk of my day today... and being a big source of annoyance. I've also been a little out of touch with my family. So, I'll begin with my trip.

I have a plane ticket to leave January 28th and return February 25th, but I'm going to be returning on the 8th, by ferry. This may seem a bit odd, especially to my father who doesn't like the idea of any money being wasted. However, I bought the ticket to have enough time to see everyone of my friends that I should see, but the length of time to actually live in Japan for the amount of time is too long. I could pull it off, but I'd end up losing more money. So, I decided to show my friends the honesty of wanting to see everyone, but use the reality of money to keep me under budget. For my Dad, Money talk:

Plane ticket (round trip): $430 + tax and insurance
Expenses (food, trains, etc): I'm not sure, but I want to keep it as low as possible. If I don't go to Tokyo, then I could probably keep it under $100. If I were to stay for the whole time this would be an amazingly high cost.
Ferry (cheapest ticket): about $90 + 20% student discount = about $72
Total: Under $700 for a 2 week vacation in Japan.

So, after I thought about this, combined with risking being away during important school related issues (housing payments, class lists), and being away for Valentines day and Susan's birthday led me to opt to do what I've done.

Now, for my actual planes, I will be leaving by plane from Busan on January 28th at about 11:00 AM. From January 28th to either February 1st or February 4th, depending on if I go to Tokyo, I'll be staying with a friend from America who has an apartment in Osaka. Then, if I go to Tokyo, I will be staying at a friend at made while abroad here from the 1st to the 4th. Then, I'll be staying with my friend Haruka until the 6th in Osaka. Now, I may just decide to come home on the 6th, or I may stay for an extra day or so, just to have a little more fun. Returning by ferry takes about 19 hours (depart about 3:00 PM, arrive about 10:AM) and I'm honestly looking forward to it (although that sentiment may change when I'm actually on the boat). Upon arriving in Busan, I plan to meet with Susan and Basil and spend the night in Busan and return to Gyeongsan the following day.

That's my vacation, Mom and Dad, you probably wont care too much about anything else I write about; I don't mind if you stop reading.

I stumbled upon an older website and realized how insane web design has gotten. Actual content isn't even a concern for most websites. It seems the most important thing is having everything being very mesmoizing and filled with eye candy that makes you want to come back to see the pretty things rather than something more purposeful. It caused me to make some minor changes on this site here. Easily loadable text and images allows people to see what you are actually doing more, I think.

In a similar note (and a convienent segway into my third topic), I changed my vista to look more like Windows 98 today. It was a nice nostalgic moment, but after not being able to do what I wanted to do on Windows (because I was having difficulty on Linux to begin with), I switched back to my Linux partition and learned some interesting things.

No one put any thought into internationalized computers for a long time. This makes it very difficult to run old programs that are not in the language your entire operating sytem is in. I found out you have to emulate the environment of the localized version of the operating system! This isn't just something that you have to do on Linux to get it running. On Vista as well, I had to emulate the localized version. This was a pain to do, and it made me really think how difficult it must have been to communicate inbetween languages using computers just 5 years ago. It also really shows me how English became so internationalized, it was the language that worked on all computers. Everyone had to use English in order to communicate between each other!

In the end, I got the program I wanted to run... just not fully functioning. Oh well.

Mom and Dad, you'll be more interested in this part now :P

I'm really enjoying myself these days and things are really great with Susan. She's sorry for being shy to speak to you Mom and Dad! I hear Katy did well on some running event, that's good to know. And Mom, are you getting better? Is Michelle getting the transfer she undoubetly wants very badly? How's Molly doing in school? Most funnily, what's it like with Michael being a cop?

Which reminds me, Andrew told me he saw Michael giving someone a ticket a little while back! Speaking of Andrew, I forgot to tell everyone. There ended up actually something being wrong with him. I can't remember exactly, too much or too little of something. He plans to go back to school and really appreciated having me in Naples for the summer.

For Dad, don't let the money situation in America keep you down so much. I'll help out in any way I can upon returning. Just don't get too caught up in the money that you forget other things as well.

I'll end with a Korean world map. Just a reminder that in some places America is not the center of the world. ^^