Geek Mecca, old and dusty

Yongsan electronics market can safely claim the title as the center for geeks and tech-heads all over Korea. Encompassing several buildings in differing states of cleanliness, I tend to think the hub of the whole place is in the Seon-in plaza building. It’s older than the other buildings. Inside, it’s crowded and hot but, it has a pulse. It buzzes of activity and people. Appealing to the male dominated buyers are singers hawking goods of the the electronic variety.

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Now what does SNDS have anything to do with Intel chipsets? In fact on most laptops showing some sort of movie, you can see K-pop bands strutting their stuff. Oh, and they sing too. Seon-in plaza is not only where new tech can be bought but is also where old tech goes to die too. Corridors full of gutted computer cases while the innards await for harvesting for parts. Eventually when no-one wants it, it’s bagged up and sent else where for recycling.

Looking past all the gloss of  the adverts, Yongsan has it’s selection of bums. On a triangular piece of land (next to the railway tracks no less) is what could be called ‘bum city’. Fenced off, it has an assortment of trees and tapoline for tents.  Seen for a long time, a man sold only novelty silicone pigs. The odd thing is that the stuff that he’s selling is obviously crap. The last time I was up in Yongsan, he’d gone, obviously seeing the error in his marketing plan.

Old and grey, old and dusty

If it was, then it was a shadow if it’s former self. Found in the western blocks from the main Yongsan electronics town after Ben and I  had decided to kill some time by walking around the lesser seen parts of the Yongsan-gu area. Previously seen was the seedy part of Yongsan. No, not the area where they sell over-priced cellphones*, but Korean’s version of  a shop front from Amsterdam.

Walking through the grey-washed buildings containing even more uninteresting techno junk. ‘Electronics town’ was all of two buildings opposite each other. We only went inside one of them, the sign on the other building proclaimed it had PC related products inside. Ben resisted the idea to go inside claiming it’d be “too boring”. So we continued to wander through the landscape seeing businesses of the online nature. One building seemed to mirror that of the electronics town one except that it also had Chinese characters on it. All told this could have been like radio street, the seed germ that Japan’s Akihabara got started on.

We finished our walking tour of the lesser known areas of Yongsan electronic market, ending at one of the newer buildings that contained a movie theatre, household goods, camera and notebooks, second vinyl LPs and other obsolete stereo equipment. This stuff was brand new and definitely tailored towards a niché market. The first shop that sold second-hand vinyl their inventory was extensive, with all artists from Spandau ballet to classical tracks. In the basement we came upon specialty shops that sold individual parts. We came upon a shop that sold just switches. Wow.

* Meaning pay a huge price and then bend over with your pants down.

Ejecting a hangover of technology

Somethings stay the same, some anachronisms haven’t changed when everything is being computerised.

Tapes (audio or video) really used to be ejected. It was a physical process; you pressed a button and out spat the tape. Seeing this on the drop-down menu in the computer OS, I fully expected that the USB stick be shot out of the port at great speed. Maybe in the next upgrade patch it would be possible.

A broken monitor, a pleasant surprise

Acquisition and replacement is a funny thing in Korea. Getting back from the week-long Chuseok break, I found to my surprise that the monitor on my old PC had not been replaced, but instead the slowest computer in the known universe (it had an XP OS) had been replaced by a newer computer.

With everything new,  and decked out with a quick chipset but just a sufficent amount of RAM. What does the IT department have against RAM anyway?

It’s a light-year leap in terms of usabilty, and makes multi-tasking so easy!

Unused, only slower

Slower computer

I’ve never been given a computer, to suit my needs. Certainly not suitable for any KOREAN teacher to use. They might complain that it is too slow.

The fact that I actually lie outside of their societal layer cake presents a problem for them, that apparently, is easily solved. Find the slowest, oldest computer that was put together sometime last century for the person to use.

The computer that you actually see above wasn’t being used at the time, so I comandeered it. The computer I was using, ran the scanner, was hopelessly short on RAM, and in doing so, took a full five minutes to get to a point where I could use it. If the computer that you use relates to your status, then I’m at rock bottom.

Slowest computer

Still only software, but, HAL was easier to switch off

Vainly trying to remove some software from a school computer that I use. It’s a legit piece of software, but it’s acting like a piece of spyware, and is vermently resisting removal. It’s an anti-virus programme that was written in Korea. Why so stubborn? Yes, nationalism even goes down to even software. The programme has never detected any viruses or spyware. I installed Microsoft’s security elements, and hey presto! Two trojans, both are removed.

The Korean anti-virus programme is proving difficult to remove, more difficult in fact than when Bowman deactived the HAL 9000 in 2001: A space odessey.

The actual laptop that I use has been used under public domain within the school. No real ownership, so everyman and his dog has installed programmes on it without a second thought for the next user.

No real solutions for the buggy anti-virus programme except that when it does cede, it will sing a Korean rendition of Daisy, and ride off on a carriage built for two. My only hope is that it doesn’t kill all the staff who are in cryostasis, while I try to reenter the school through the airlock without my spacesuit helmet.

Out with the old, in with the expanded

New things take a while for me to use. I’ve been sitting on this piece of tech since I got my new laptop. It actually came bundled with the laptop, but it’s taken me this long to fill up the photo partition on my other external hardrive.

500 Gigabytes of unplundered capacity, this could last me for quite sometime. As far as animation goes, it’s not. All it does is blink at me with it’s green status light.

Gaming on a stuffed lappie, had no money

When my friend (CB) visited Korea a few weeks ago, the question came up of what computer games I was playing recently. My reply was two games, that he’d sent me when I first came to Korea in 2005.  It’s a long story, but over that medium we actually got to know each other. He actually laughed when I told him. These games a re a bit dated, but classics none the less.

They are subsequently, Command and Conquer: Generals, Zero hour add-on and Return to castle Wolfenstein.

In my defence, I would cite that I was playing them on an aged computer, and the games matched the ability of that laptop. In trying to find a link for the product, all I found were websites for parts; nothing stays new with regards to computers.  It’s only been recently that I’ve bought another laptop. I have no games worthy of the new laptop, for many reasons, one of which being money.

Footnote: Command and Conquer: Generals edition is banned in China. As in the game it portraits China as a war-farring nation.

Over zealous, but nowhere near the PC

It’s a classic case of idiots in charge. It didn’t work in the Vietnam war when the Americans tried the ‘leader in the sky’ idea. This got a lot soldiers killed. No soldiers here, but a slight feeling of entrenchment by the higher ups. About a month ago there was a managerial veto to activate the password functions on all the PCs here, and at another school. At this school (the one with the musical loo) I get to use two PCs, with different passwords. They even activated the password on the screen saver too. It’s getting to be a real chore since I keep on forgetting the passwords.

My question to the REMFs in the Office of education is, why password everything if there’s no data to protect? Sure the students know not to use our PCs, so if it’s not them were protecting it from, then who?

Another example of over-zealous PC security is the installation of ActiveX controls, ordered, by you know who at the Office of Ed. That is serious, as I was taught not to install any strange ActiveX programmes. Sort of like your mum telling you not talking to strangers.

No-one is getting killed in all of this over-zealousness. But someone could get serverly hurt, not from a stranger who’s trying to steal their precious data, but from me. When I use a keyboard the same way Vivian from the young ones used a cricket bat on Neil in the “Summer holiday” episode. I may have to look for another job if I do that. :O

New lappy, VISTA was slow to respond

Imagine the great anticipation when Jiang told me My laptop had finally been delivered. All shiny and mostly black (and devoid of fingerprints) it worked perfectly. I even got a choice of language for the OS, (naturally I choose English). Playing games was no sweat for this machine, it’s so nice to have a fast computer. But here the first problem cropped up. The DVD drive on my much vaunted and expensive laptop simply stopped working. It wasn’t ejecting, there wasn’t even an icon in ‘my computer’. A brand new laptop with a busted optical drive and a help desk that spoke a foreign tongue. This was heart attack material.

Desparately seeking a driver programme for it over the internet, I looked high and low though forums, performing a scan which turned up nothing. I went to bed knowing that I had until Monday to ‘fix it’, as Jiang was going away on the Wednesday.

Waking up the next day the laptop had gone to sleep after the newly installed software had finished its scan. It was working again. What ever I’d done the OS had time to sort it self. Or maybe it sensed the evil thoughts that I had ruminating before going to bed and lost it’s subborn streak. Gaming sessions awaits, so does sore shoulders and overuse syndrome.