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By Marty, May 9, 2012 10:46 am

I still have the old jobs but recently added a new one. I started a part time job at one of the ship building plants on the coast last week. Just another English teaching position, mostly conversation with a bit of grammar – EduTainment.  But the shipyard atmosphere makes it a little exciting.  Surrounded by huge chunks of hull that lay about the grounds, dozens of men welding on various pieces and hammers, jacks and noise of all sorts makes it a busy place. This isn’t one of the big shipyards that Hyundai owns but a smaller company on the south end of town.  I start work at 6:30pm, which seems to be shift change for several hundred workers. Getting in while so many are getting out is a challenge since traffic laws and lights are routinely ignored in most parts of Korea but at this time and place may as well not even exist.

the view outside our classroom

Yes the air is that dirty. We have had a rash if dust from the Gobi desert in Mongolia blow in this week.

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By Marty, May 8, 2012 9:19 am

Have you heard this one?  A guy walks in to a bar and has a few beers. The bartender runs a tab and on the third beer the guy wants to pay – for one beer. The bartender argues the guy hasn’t paid for any beers and the guy argues he has.  The argument gets louder, curses fly and the bartender orders the guy out of the bar. The guy picks up a bar stool and begins to swing it at the bartender. Two others guys watching immediately jump up, force the guy to drop the bar stool and then unceremoniously hustle the guy out of the bar and down the stairs.

End of story, you think?  Not in Korea.

The guy was a Korean and he claimed that the the two foreigner guys who threw him out beat him up on the way down the stairs.  So he called the police.  Despite there being multiple witnesses who told the police the Korean guy was an ass and, no, no beat him up, the police continue to play out the story with  multiple visits to the police station for questioning.  Apparently the guy self-inflicted a few minor scratch wounds on himself and wants to press charges.

In any other land, they’d run the guy off telling him he should have paid his bill. End of story. Not here in Korea. With no self defense law, anyone hurt by another, even if he started the fight, has the right to sue.  So even though the Korean guy picked up a bar stool and was about to smash someone or something before being stopped, he can claim is owed damages because the guys who stopped him hurt him.  Essentially, it’s who ever is hurt worse gets paid. It’s no wonder Korean middle aged men, are such assholes.  Get in somebody face and start a fight only to lose and collect cash.

I was one of the two who threw the guy out of the bar. I’ve been to the police station once, and not sure if they want me to come back. The Korean guy has no witnesses that saw him get beat up, but he swears it’s true and the police listen. Meanwhile, I have witnesses that swear he didn’t get beat up but simply pushed out of the bar. We’ll see who wins.

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By Marty, April 24, 2012 4:29 pm

Just a few pictures I took while out scouting places for this years scooter inferno

Remnants of a Japanese fortress built in 1593 just on the south side of town.

The fortress overlooks an inlet and a small beach town. But incoming ships can be seen for miles from the fortress which is about 400feet above the sea

I meant to upload this one above rather that the duplicate below. The perils if updating web pages from a smartphone I suppose.

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By Marty, April 21, 2012 1:54 pm

And no time to update this blog, apparently.

At least I have some decent excuses.

I picked up a new website to develop back in March. Two teachers here in Ulsan want to start a ESL (English as second Language) website that provides resources for students who are learning, teachers who are teaching, schools who want to hire teachers, etc., etc.  There are already some pretty big players in that market, but these boys think they want to climb that hill anyway.  They had previously contracted with a company in the UK to construct their website, and they had done an admirable job piecing together some off-the-shelf web applications. They hadn’t, however, bothered to make the website look like a single, cohesive site rather than a bunch of disparate apps thrown together. Clicking from one function to another gave the user little to believe he was even on the same site.

Anyway, the two guys here knew I managed Ulsanonline.com and are frequent users of the site. They asked me if I could take over the work from the boys in the UK and I agreed — for a couple thousand bucks, sure.  So, beginning in April, I’ve been hard at work trying to make their site look like a single website with multiple functions.  Check it out and see what you think. Still not quite done and it’s not ready to launch (they’ll pay me more money to add functionality they has yet to be developed, such as online video classrooms) but at least it looks like a single website. The site is ESL Heaven.  I redesigned the front page and just put in some garbage text, but we’ll fix that…I think…these boys aren’t terribly web savvy and likely haven’t even read it.

I’ve also embarked on a “Best Of Ulsan” campaign for my own site, UlsanOnline.com.  I’ve modeled it after the “D Magazine” articles they did every year for best and worst of Dallas. I had to create a few forms for people to vote, a backend database to record all the votes and then tabulate them and then stay active online with trying to get the couple thousand or so foreigners here to fill it out.  Once voting is done, we’ll write multiple articles on which restaurant has the best x, which service provides the best y, etc.  But that’s just an add-on to the continual, on-going efforts of our very popular website and I write articles for it weekly.

June is our annual “Ulsan Inferno” event in which teams of motorcycles and scooters compete in a scavenger hunt/race/adventure challenge around the city and surrounding areas. I’m part of the planning committee on it this year, having won 1st and 2nd place in the event in 2010 and 2011, respectively. It’s a lot of fun and get’s people who sometimes don’t get out of the city much to see the smaller, lesser known points of interest in this beautiful country. We’re in the middle of planning for this event and that takes a few hours per week.

And if that weren’t enough, I’ve officially been inducted into City Hall’s newspaper efforts. They started last winter with a quarterly newspaper, printed both in Korean and in English. I had a loose arrangement where Ulsanline.com would supply a few articles for each issue but now I am on a team of eight in the paper’s planning committee and we’re setting out the strategy and content for each issue.

I think that’s all the work related things I have going on.  The rest of what keeps me busy is riding the bicycle and rock climbing.  With spring finally here, climbing is back on the agenda as is riding the bike. Gotta stay healthy.  And reading – I still love to read and since Jessie and Teri bought me a Kobo reader last year for my birthday I’ve consumed enormous amounts of text.  My physical bookshelf has been emptied and I gave all the paper books away to friends and some foreigner bars who stock books for lonely newcomers. But my virtual bookshelf of the books I’ve read continues to grow.

I’ll close with a few recent photos of me, just in case anyone forgets what I look like. The beard is gone.

Me and my dogs Sparky (r.) and SaTang on Munsu Mtn.

Sparky doesn't like to be too far away wherever we go. I'm belaying long-time climbing bud, Dee

The Three Amigos, From left Spark, Satang and litter-mate Corker

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By Marty, April 5, 2012 11:52 am

Just this past week it feels like spring might be here. Might. Just maybe.  While the end of March was warm, the first week of April turned bitter cold and windy again.  It’s usually warmer than this in April. Anyway, I took advantage of a decent Saturday afternoon and rode the bicycle out to the coast.  This time, I took the industrial section and rode along side the Hyundai Motors automobile factory.  With a few other, smaller factories in the middle, it then runs along side Hyundai Heavy Industries, which is the massive shipyards.  It’s really tough to portray through pictures the awesome perspective of this place, where factories sprawl for miles on end.  But, being the geek that I am, I am inclined to try.  First, my route, as outlined by Endomono, the application I use on my phone to track my cycling workout. It uploads my path to the internet so I can see where I am, or like now, where I was.

my route, from home on the left. About 38km but with some serious hills on the southern end

I’ve marked on the map the four spots where I took photos.

A.

The first place I stopped has always fascinated me. This is the loading area for Hyundai Motors, where the 1000s of cars they churn out every week are loaded onto ships for destinations around the world.  These ugly-ass, boxy ships are floating parking garages.  They are strictly car carriers and move, depending on size, from 1,200 to 8,000 cars per trip.  Hyundai Motors is  #4  in car production behind Toyota, GM and Volkswagon.

A Eukor vessel being loaded at the factory's seaside gate

teams of men drive cars in an endless stream onto the ship

While this ship is being loaded, other ships await their turn. I travel past this point on my motorcycle regularly and every day a different ship or sets are in port getting loaded. The number of cars  loaded and shipped seems mathematically  astronomical.

Three more ships wait in line to load cars

Meanwhile, across the highway from the bike path, the Hyundai parking lot is jammed with 1000s more autos, each awaiting their turn to being carried off. Although there really are a disproportionate number of white cars, this photo only makes it appear they ALL are white. Protective covering is laid on to hoods and tops and even parts of the sides to keep the sea salt and industrial pollutants in the area from tarnishing the vehicles before they ever hit the showroom.

This is a panorama view, so run your mouse across the image to slide it left and right.

Since this was a Saturday, traffic was fairly light. So was the bike traffic on which I rode. On a week day morning or evening, the paths are filled with bicycle-riding factory workers.

B.

Just around the corner from the car factory, the shipyard sprawl begins.  Just beside the bike and walking path, enormous sections of hulls line the way.

A large hull section is waiting to be placed in a berth

The ships are assembled in chunks, with each chunk being built in smaller covered buildings and then carried by massive cranes to berths where they are welded, bolted, glued and otherwise attached to form a ship.

The berths, beyond this building, are where ships are laid out in chunks and assembled

C.

To get those hull sections into place takes some massive gear. Enormous cranes carry hull sections, equipment and workers    around these incredibly large structures. Even on a Saturday, this place was bustling with workers, small trucks, jeeps, forklifts and equipment cranes.

These smaller cranes service the ships that are in for repairs or modification

These cranes, however, are the largest in the world, carrying 1,600 tons each as they drop hull sections into place

D.

They didn’t really like me taking photos. In this panorama, the security guard tried to wave me off and tell me I wasn’t allowed to photograph. Being the butthead that I am, I merely told him I was on a public road. High walls surround other parts of the shipyard, but the truck traffic in and out at this gate is just too much to deal with to have large gates open and close constantly. I took a few shots and then rode on.

This still photo panorama was belies the amount of activity going on here. Trucks, scooters, forklifts and people swarm the area as raw materials are brought in, unloaded, stored and ships are built.

On the far southern tip, a huge sea wall encloses large parts of the shipyard. Partially for protection from the weather, partially to keep out prying eyes (like mine) and partially to just keep the sea out, the walls form a huge ring for miles. Just another public road at this point, as fishermen are plentiful on the seaward side, where large numbers of ships await business in port.

I rode a long way on this seawall. That's a lot of concrete.

Outside the seawall, Koreans fish while ships wait their turn in port.

Inside the seawall, more huge hull sections line the path as they await the cranes that will place them in a berth

I could have ridden for hours longer around this place, but I was 20km from home and the afternoon was getting cool. I took my photos and headed back around the peninsula, back adjacent to the car factory and across the river to home. A relatively short ride, but I hope to get some truly epic rides in this summer.

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By Marty, March 22, 2012 12:09 pm

Newly armed with a repertoire of Android smart phone apps and a popular website of semi-slick programming, I’ve been marketing myself as a software developer.  My resume says nothing about teaching. My latest job merely says Ulsanonline.com, and that’s no exaggeration as I routinely spend 10-15 hours per week working on it in some capacity, whether it’s programming, maintenance news gathering or marketing.  And since I posted my resume on the job boards, I’ve begun to get responses. I get about two emails a week from recruiters with potential jobs. Not all are good fits for my skills, but it’s only been a month.  One will turn up.

As I mentioned when I was home, the plan is to come home in 2013 and find a techno-job somewhere in the US.  Dallas would be nice, but anywhere in the continental US would be far closer in distance and timezone than I am now.   But coming back to America earlier is an option – under certain circumstances.  What circumstances?

Here’s the deal:  because I have an existing social infrastructure in Dallas, moving there would be far less costly than another city. I could find a place to live while staying with a friend or relative. I could possibly even find a roommate among my friends there. Moving to another city would be an immediate outlay in hotel costs with almost no possibility of finding a roommate (I don’t do random roommates well).  So, I either have to save enough cash to make the move to a new city, or move to Dallas and gradually build (figuratively, not literally) a home.  MyeongHee will still stay here in Korea another year, but if the right job comes along I’m outta here.

That certainly puts a little umph in my get-along.

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By Marty, March 16, 2012 1:58 pm

We’ve had a couple of nice days of weather and I took advantage of them with a little hiking.  Just behind our apartment is a nice park surrounding a smallish mountain and a pond. On nice days I take the dogs out and let them run on the many trails.  One day I decided to take my video camera and show off the city.

My video camera couldn’t zoom in enough, but I caught MyeongHee while she was on the phone
to me on the mountain. Anyway, just a little live action from here on the peninsula.

With the placement of the mountain I shot the video from and it’s position just south of the city, it blocks the majority of the petrochemical complex (Mordor!) from view. We still get a lot of its haze and funk, even if we can’t see the smokestacks because of the park in between.

A lot has changed since I first came to Ulsan, South Korea. That was eight years ago in April 2004.  None of the high rises were there. In fact, I still have a panorama photo I took of Ulsan in 2004. This photo is hazy, but that’s typical Ulsan air in the summer. It’s gotten quite a bit better since these hazy days, but this is the armpit and industrial hub of the nation and it is still funky and the brown streak is still visible in the video above.

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By Marty, March 3, 2012 3:17 pm

I lost my job last week.

I had been working at an “After School” in a regular school teaching English.  That’s a school run by a private company that holds classes in the school after the regular classes are finished. Koreans do that. They send their kids to school, and then they send their kids to another bunch of classes. Why they do that is a) either the regular   school sucks and kids need more learning or b) education is very competitive, even for 1st graders and parents aren’t satisfied being anything less than best in the class.  You decide.  I digress.

As I said, I’d been working in an After School program and I lost my job. The private company did a horrible job of managing their money. To fix that, they had to sell new books to the parents more often to make up the shortfall. Rather than wait until the students understood one book before moving to the next level, it was sell a new book and reap the profits. Nevermind that the kids didn’t understand the last book and the new book assumes they learned it already.  So, as you might imagine, when the contract was up for renewal, that company lost out and another “After School” company was brought it.   I wasn’t a big fan of that approach, but I made good money and only worked about 20 hours per week.  Call it the “Golden Handcuffs.”  I didn’t like the job, didn’t like that I could not get my students to utter more than a word or two, much less a full sentence and didn’t like that I felt personally ineffective at teaching. But I got paid well and had lots of time off.

Just before the contract winners were announced, several competitor companies contacted me to come work for them.  I waited, thinking the company I was already at would have schools to send me to.  They didn’t.  And when I went back to the competitors to see if they needed teachers still, I lost out. They’d already filled their needed slots. Oh no! No job! Whatever will I do.

That was on Thursday when the schools all signed new contracts. By Thursday evening, it was clear I had no job as my company lost more contracts than they had teachers for.

So, Friday morning I set out, determined to find a job.  I got a cup of coffee and sat down at my computer and opened up Facebook.  ”Hey! That’s not looking for a job,” you say. “That’s loafing!”  Not here. There’s a rich environment of jobs available for native English speakers such as yours truly and the traffic on facebook is thick with them.  Just in Ulsan we have two facebook groups dedicated to jobs, whether it be part time, full time or just substitute.  A few emails and phone calls and I’m off and running.

By 9:30am I had an interview set up for the early afternoon.  By 11, I had another company job asking for a resume.  Both of those came to fruition and by mid afternoon I had two part-time gigs.  At 8:00pm another company called looking for a part time teacher. I took that one, too.  I went from 0 jobs to 3 in one day.  I’ll be working 16 hours a week (oh, poor me!  the hardship! the agony!) and making more than I was before at 20 hours a week.  It’s going to suck when I come back to America and have to work a full 40 hour week.

And that’s the way things go here. There are just too many jobs and not enough people to fill them. Not always, of course. This week is slightly different since school began yesterday. The Korean school calendar goes from March 2 until February with a summer and winter vacation thrown in.  This week all the schools are gearing up for the new year, so there are a lot of jobs on the table. Still, a fresh job is usually less than a week away in even the biggest of vacation periods.

Throughout the years, you may have read about my life in Korea as sometimes good, sometimes not so good. But this is one thing that makes it really good – I have never worried about finding a job here.  Given the global economy, that’s a rare thing to day.

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By Marty, February 24, 2012 7:42 pm

It’s done.  My game, that is.  I published Triominoes to Google’s Android Market this week and made the game available to everyone with an Android Phone.  Of course, something like this is never “done” as there are future enhancements to work on, bugs to fix, etc.  But stage 1 – getting it out into people’s hands – is at least started. If  you’ve got an iPhone, don’t bother. But if you have the other smart phone, then please, download it, play it, comment on it, rate it – in short make my game look popular.  It’ll help me get a job if I can point to a semi-popular game I’ve programmed.  So even if you’ve got an iPhone or a stupid phone, help me out by telling your friends to download it.

By the way, this is the first game I’ve ever created. I’ve done a lot of programming over the years, but never a game. I’ve done smart missiles, office automation products, simulators, security applications, and dozens of web thingamabobs and whatnots.  But never a game.

OK. Back to American Idol. Or X Factor or whatever is popular these days.

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By Marty, February 21, 2012 2:14 pm

It’s been a while since I wrote here.  I used to write several times a week and then it got to be just once a week.  Seems like that even went south as I haven’t written since well before my trip to the USA.  Sorry. My Bad.

But it’s not like I have been using the computer this blog sits on.  I pay hostmonster.com  a few bucks a month for the privilege of having a computer always on the internet.  I figured I should use it for more than just blogging…..so I do. And I did.  Just before leaving for America I started a technical resume for myself.  Everyone has one. Artists and photographers have something else, though  - a portfolio.  I wanted one to show off my techno-work.  So I made one. I put in the bare bones but spent a lot of time getting the programming right since my portfolio is also one of the things I programmed.  Check it from my front page  you can click on the computer for my technical work.  Or go directly to the computer image and the portfolio and see what I’ve done.  That’s a short list, but now that I have it all I have to do is add in a description of each piece of work I’ve done. I’ve got a dozen or so more to add.

But wait, there’s more!  One more piece of work I have to complete but is nearly done – TriOminoes.  I bought a wooden set of TriOminoes while in Thailand and really liked the game.  Everyone I’ve played with liked it, too.  So I decided to make a TriOminoes game for smart phone. Each player has a board and pieces to play and this computer at hostmonster.com does the phone-to-phone data communication.  In other words, if you play the game, your phone talk to this computer. When I play, my phone reads what moves you made from this computer and then your phone reads what I played.  Sounds slick?  It was way more complicated than I thought, and I’m still working on a few nasty techno-issues, but I WILL prevail and TriOminoes will be out and available soon.

I started the just three weeks before my vacation and it’s been two weeks  since. That’s a total of five weeks but will be six when done. I had to design a lot of stuff from scratch, but my next game, because I’ve already got the basics done for this game, will go much faster. I just don’t know what game I’ll do.

Why all the games?  We’re back to that portfolio again.  I’ve been teaching English for a living and would like to get back into writing computer programs. The portfolio and the games and things for the ulsanonline website are all just resume builders.  Oh, and I like doing it, too.  It’s fun to program and make computers do my bidding. But there’s money to be made, too, and I intend to get back in that saddle and ride.

As for home, well, it’s was great. I really enjoyed seeing everyone. I wish I could have spent more time with people.  Wish I could have seen a few more friends but that’s fine. Plenty of time later.

That’s all for now!   TTYL!

p.s. for all you Android users….I hope to play TriOminoes with you soon!