GoogleMaps has been one of the coolest things to come out on the internet, in my humble opinion. Long gone are the days of ‘Mapquesting’ things so grudgingly. I hated that freaking website, though they have recently updated things to be like Googlemaps, with the scrolling and whatever.

Anyways, one cool thing that has come out of GoogleMaps is the advent of GoogleMaps Mashups. People take GoogleMaps and customize it to their own liking. I’ve heard of a New York Subway system mashup. Businesses make mashups to show where their locations are.

This one particular mashup called Wikimapia takes the concept of a WIKI, made popular by Wikipedia, and applies it to GoogleMaps. Why is this amazing?

Pretend you’re in South Korea teaching English and you live in a city you don’t know very well but wish to venture out sometimes. Occasionally you meet people, but where the hell do you meet? There’s no street names in Korea! So you use landmarks. Restaurants, bars, large buildings, bridges, subway stations, whatever you can find.

Wikimapia lets you create labels, anywhere on the map.

For example, I live in DongChungDong, in Chilgok, Daegu, South Korea. I’ve labelled it here.

I love this thing.

March 23rd, 2007 | Life | 3 comments

I’ve gotten on more than one occasion from students that I look like this guy Sam Hamington. After a bit of searching I found a YouTube clip of this Korean show where they have all these Korean speaking non-Koreans on a panel talking about cultural differences and stuff. Sam is in the clip sitting in the front. The Nigerian guy is explaining how they greet someone of importance. The other guy says “Do you mean the Police?” Everyone then laughed. And I laughed too, because *gasp*, I understood.

Could it be? I’ve come to a point in my Korean language speaking career that I can watch TV?

I kind of have this plan in the back of my mind to become famous in Korea. Because being famous here is being normal elsewhere and you don’t have to deal with all the bullshit. I figure I could end up on this TV show, or if I was real famous I could be on X-MAN with my favourite Korean celebrity, Chae Yeon.

This show XMAN, by the way, is this game show with celebrities. Some famous for other reasons, and some famous because of game shows. There’s two teams and they do a whole bunch of challenges, all the while there’s one person who’s the ‘XMAN’ sabotaging their own team’s efforts. It’s pretty popular and one of the only things I watched on television during my first 3 weeks in Korea…mainly because I think the girls are gorgeous.

This particular game is called ‘Ofcourse’. They’re supposed to diss eachother or say things that would be embarassing for them to say ‘ofcourse!’ to. But the rule is they have to say ‘ofcourse’ without cracking up ..or something.

Anyways, an episode of the with subs, starring my own Chae Yeon.

March 21st, 2007 | Life | 1 comment