Seoul Hero

Well, last night we had snow that stuck–the first of this extremely mild winter. You can see the buildings of Hongik University in the picture above, taken from my window.

Grading Herculean and Faustian
It has been an unusually long time since my last post. What has happened? For one thing, my computer crashed again, this time permanently. This was a blessing in disguise, as it meant I had no options but to focus on grading my backlog of essays, something I had to do before the winter session starts tomorrow. I finished marking all the essays I had to grade, together with all my finals, over the last week, culminating on Friday in an 8am-10pm grind in my office at Sookdae (because I needed my office computer to input my grades; actually, that computer, and a few of the other teachers’ office computers–crashed, too!). There was construction outside my office, and some of my roof tiles were missing, meaning a steady amount of dust was wafting in and settling on everything. At 10pm on Friday night, I finished inputting all my marks. I always hate grading, because the university, like many, uses a curve that arbitrarily prevents some students from receiving the grades they deserve. I had a number of students who deserved A’s or A-’s who had to receive B+’s, and the same thing at the next level down. In two cases, two students received exactly the same percentage, and they were both very deserving of A’s. In each case, one student received an A-, the other had to receive a B+. I ended out making my judgment based on the level of improvement I saw over the course of the term, especially taking into account the marks on the final assignments, but I always feel like I’m selling my soul to the devil at such moments.

My Advanced Classes
See the next post.

My Computer
My personal computer crashed again a few weeks ago, but I was able to reformat the hard drive from my backup CD. I lost all my data on the hard drive, but, fortunately, I had backed up all my documents and pictures (and grading spreadsheets!) on an external hard disk that I bought in Yongsan’s electronics market a few months ago. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to back up my Outlook Express emails, and so I lost all 10,000 of my emails, plus my address book just before I was going to start saving addresses manually. Brian, Rob, Thomas & Insoon, and anyone else reading this, please email me, as I always just typed the first letters of your name in the “To” section of the email forms. Then, as I mentioned above, it crashed again some days ago, and this time I was unable to use the backup boot CD to boot up the machine. Unfortunately, I hadn’t backed up the most recent photographs, meaning that I lost the original pictures of Bongeunsa–thank goodness I posted the best ones here, albeit in reduced size.

Yesterday my good friend Ian and I each had to perform an errand at the Technomart electronics market by the Gangbyeon subway station. I took my laptop to a Toshiba dealer, and the sales agent/technician immediately diagnosed the problem as a hard disk that needed to be replaced. For 150,000 Won, I now have a laptop computer with double the physical space on the hard drive (80 gigs) and double the RAM (about 900 megs). Best of all, I don’t have to worry about having to buy a new computer with no money in the bank! I had always felt the hard drive was wearing out. Also last night, I purchased a firewall and anti-virus software, and ran a check of the back up hard disk. The result: no viruses, just as I had expected. I think my newly-added RAM memory and the extra space on the new hard drive will prevent a similar recurrence for some time.

My Financial Nadir
$10,000 on my “line of credit loan”
$2,000 on my Visa card
$Anniversary and Christmas coming with little to go around
$Student loans and their repayments

A New Hope
On Friday Sookdae told me I would be getting two courses for the winter session, which starts tomorrow. Over the last several weeks, I had to pester and cajole various people and generally make a nuisance of myself to get that second course. I even brought the Little Hero to a faculty meeting to remind the Powers That Be of my obligations to my family. Thanks to these winter courses, in early January I will be able to wire home about $3000 (after meeting my Christmas/Anniversary and various medical expenses), eliminating my Visa debt, and knocking down my line of credit debt by 10%. I will post further updates on my financial situation later. What I really need is a progress thermometer like the one used by my friend Kevin of the Big Hominid’s Hairy Chasms blog. My schedule for the next three weeks will be a busy one: M-F 9am-3pm, with no spare between classes. On the other hand, I’m delighted at the compactness of my day for the money earned!

The End Is Near
I hope. After three weeks, and some editing work on one of the Sookdae textbooks, I will have most of January and all of February off. I hope to fly home on March 1st or 2nd, if all goes well with Chae Young’s immigration paperwork.