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I have made a temporary office in what used to be Young Stumber #2's room. One problem was the ceiling fan. On low speed, it vibrated. On medium speed, it shook the ceiling and made horrible sounds. High speed was forbidden. Well, we finally got a replacement fan and installed it.



The box advertised this fan would only take 5 minutes to install. It should be a breeze, right? Well, no breeze until almost 2 hours later (well, that did include a 1 hour nap while the battery power drill charged up). But finally there is a nice and QUIET breeze in the office.

We went used car shopping this weekend. Young Stumbler #3 needed a car, which she will share with me when I'm in town. We went to the "sell your own" car lot, and considered several models. There were Toyotas, Mazdas, Hyundais and something called a Ford Focus. We finally settled on this Hyundai Sonata. It was somewhat unusual, it had very low mileage for a good price. Either we got a good deal, or the car is a lemon. So far, so good.





Young Stumbler #3 reports that the car smells like an "old man" inside. Maybe I need some air freshner...

We had a delicious dish last night, grilled scallops on the half shell. This was prepared "fushion" style - a spoon of sweet and sour sauce was put in each shell, then another spoon of shredded cheese was put over the top. Grill on a fire. Scoop it all on a spoon and eat. Delicious. I hope I can visit Young Stumbler #1 this month in New Orleans and have her cook this for me!

Literally. In the new office building, you see, there is an unusual elevator system. Going up from street level, or going down at all, you have to choose either the ODD or EVEN elevator car, depending on your destination or departure floor. There also is a third elevator shaft, serving the basement parking lots, which is really unusual. Coming UP from the basements, you can to directly to any desired floor, odd or even numbered. But going DOWN to the basement, you have to take the appropriate odd or even elevator to the first floor, then transfer to the basement elevator (the basement elevator serves ALL basement floors, whether odd or even). What a system!



Let's consider my colleague CH, and say he parks on the B4 level. Coming to work, he can just use one elevator, going from the basement directly to our office on the 5th floor. Going home, he must use the ODD elevator to take him to the first floor, then change to the basement elevator to go to B4. Got it?

At least the Korean words for ODD and EVEN have been forcibly driven into my brain now, after I unknowingly got on the wrong car. I'm pushing the 5-button, and wondering why it wouldn't light up. I was traveling well past my floor, when finally by pushing random buttons I got the elevator to stop. I got off, and had to take the stairs back down to the fifth floor.

Reminds me of a logic puzzle one of my friend's mother told us once in grade school. There is a man who takes the elevator from his 25th story apartment to the street level every day to go to work. But at night coming home, he takes the elevator to the 18th floor, gets off, and takes the stairs to the 25th floor. After a LONG session of asking only true/false questions to her, we learned that the apartment dweller was a midget who worked for a circus, and could only reach as high as the 18th floor button in the elevator.

T-Money, that is. I wrote about this special device that is used for subway and bus fares (some taxi's reportely will accept it, too) back two years ago. Well, yesterday this two-year old widget (it attaches to your cell phone) broke. It wasn't visibly broken, it just refused to work. I took it to the station clerk, and he tried it on his machines, and confirmed that it was dead.

You know what's coming... Engineer, broken electronics item... You guessed it. I dismantled the thing to see what's inside.



Here is the main brain. Attached to a wire loop antenna and what I'm guessing is an inductor used for impedance matching.



The cool thing is that I could see immediately what was wrong. One of the antenna wires had come unsoldered. I think I know why it broke, too. You'll notice there is a small pocket in the body of the plastic case, which is where the electronics should be located. In fact, it looks like there was some adhesive holding it down. I say was, because when I opened up this unit, the whole thing was rotated slightly, so that the electronics was at the edge, or slightly outside of that pocket. I believe the resulting stress broke off the antenna wire. I simply soldered it back, and hopefully it will work and I won't lose the $6 or so remaining value.


I'll test it tonight and report back.

EDIT: It works! All those years of Engineering school finally paid off!

I saw an advertisement the other day on a post, it was promoting "HOT YOGA". I was wondering what exactly "HOT YOGA" was, until yesterday when a large banner on the next building.



It explains is that the Yoga class is held at a temperature of 38 deg C, or 100 deg F, the humidity is held at 60%, and they provide fresh Oxygen! And the official name? "THE HOT YOGA". Not for me, thanks.

Toilet seat, that is. When I moved into my apartment over a year ago, the toilet seat was partially broken. Well, the inevitable happened and it broke completely last week. I wasn't quite sure how to get new toilet seats in Korea, but some friends suggested I look at the "mart" first (think K-Mart or Walmart). Sure enough, they did sell some at the mart. Quite a large variety, in fact. However, 90% of them were either baby toilet seats or seats for small toilets. My toilet is large (think oval, not circle). There were only 3 that looked like they would fit, and they all three looked unusual. Two of them looked so feminine, I just couldn't bring myself to buy either one (and one of those was about $50!!!). I settled on one that is barely tolerable - I would call it sparkling, and it set me back about $25:



They are very proud of the hardware and hinge construction - you can see those are made from stainless steel:



Sparing you a photo of my dirty toilet, here is a photo stolen from their website (as were all these photos) here's a photo of the installed seat:



Here is the one I couldn't bring myself to buy, even ignoring the high price:



Two final points... in the literature which accompanied this seat, they had a nice diagram highlighting all the features of this toilet seat. Althouh not fluent in Korean, one caught my attention - basically it said this seat will not be cold in the winter. I am not quite sure how they do that - I'm aware of ELECTRIC toilet seats that are heated, but I have no idea how this ordinary seat could stay warm in the winter.

And I can't end this without pointing out that the toilet seat manufacturer's name, DITTO, actually stands for something. According to the corporate introduction on their website:

"infinite Designs and Imiginations for Total Toilet-ware Organization"

The Konglish just doesn't get any better than that, folks! In case you're wondering about a "Total Toilet-ware Organization", they've provided a chart to explain it clearly: