thedarren

More stuff about becoming an aerobic beast that didn't fit in the last post . First, a few people have asked me how much cardio I actually do. The answer might surprise you: on average, I've been doing between 2.5 and 3.5 hours of low-intensity cardio per week. That's it, and that's all it took to see the massive benefits. That's not a lot, people. I'd like to get that up to around 5 hours per week (I don't think 5 hours is necessary for health - I just want to see if my aerobic pace will improve), but it's tough to do that along with the lifting I do. However, I do walk a ton . I live in a large city, and I love walking. My gym is a 15 minute walk away from where I live, and the nearest subway stations to me are 7 and 10 minutes away. So along with the targeted cardio, the constant movement also needs to be taken into account when analyzing your own fitness regimen. That being said, I was walking a ton before I got healthy, so while I'd say cons...

I've been watching the media firestorm over Dennis Rodman's recent visit to North Korea, and I gotta say, I'm solidly on the pro-Dennis Rodman side. This post is not satire - I seriously think the media should give him a break. First, let's talk about the press conference. It was obvious to me from the get-go that he was drunk (which doesn't excuse anything - just an observation). His "spokesperson" should have pulled him away from the mike before he said anything dumb. But if you listen to what he did  say, he actually made a reasonable point - Chris Cuomo from CNN probably doesn't know a damn thing about North Korea, whereas Dennis Rodman has actually set foot in the hermit nation four times in the past year. Yeah, what he said could easily be interpreted as implying that Kenneth Bae did something wrong, and that's why he's in prison, but what he actually said was (courtesy of CNN itself), "Do you understand what he did in this count...

It finally happened - I got a cold.  For the first time since I drastically reengineered my health half a year ago, I found myself coming down with something. Since temporary setbacks are often a good time to judge your progress, I decided to take this opportunity to write an update on my personal journey through health and fitness reinvigoration. Last time, I wrote about how low-intensity aerobic training had completely upgraded my health . My sleep schedule normalized, my digestive issues completely disappeared, my energy and mood both skyrocketed, and I generally felt "good" for the first time in my life. Since then, I've realized just how drastic a change I've actually made, but the real eye-opener is that I had never seriously considered that there was anything wrong with me - although my baseline was shitty, I never knew anything else, so I just wrongly assumed I was normal. Well, there is nothing normal about getting cold after cold in the winter, having one ...

Recently this article about 10 things that South Korea does better than anywhere else  has been making the rounds on social media, but when I first read it, I couldn't tell if it was sincere or satire. A few of the items on the list are not very positive, such as "overworking" and "using credit cards". So, I thought I would try to put together a better list. Here are 10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else: 1) Small side dishes, a.k.a. " banchan " (반찬) Banchan are by far my favorite aspect of Korean cuisine. Rather than the "appetizer and main dish" approach of the West, a Korean meal is essentially built around small dishes. Even a 5,000 won (about $5 USD) meal at a mall food court will come with two to four banchan in addition to the "main", and often people will actually choose restaurants based  on the banchan (e.g., seolleongtang , or beef bone broth soup, places tend to have the tastiest kimchi). Ther...

Learning Korean as a non-Asian foreigner is an exercise in masochism. Note that I specify "non-Asian". Why does that make a difference? Simply because Koreans possess a deeply-ingrained belief that non-Asians are incapable of speaking Korean. The self-fulfilling prophecy of it is that since Koreans expect you to be incapable of speaking Korean, due to this mental block, they are likely to not understand you regardless of your proficiency level. Additionally, they won't respond to you with normal Korean like they would respond to an Asian person, because they assume you couldn't possibly understand. You will rarely ever have an opportunity to hear natural Korean, because Koreans simply won't speak it with you unless 1) they are open-minded and awesome (meaning they have probably lived abroad - thank you to all of you), or 2) they have known you long enough that they've gotten past the odd sight of a foreigner speaking Korean. In short, nearly every time you o...

(cross-posted from  https://medium.com/p/34c91eeb56 ) 언어는 공기다. 어떤 문화를 알려면 그의 언어를 못 한다면 모자란 스쿠바탱크로 숨쉬 듯이 몸부림칠 거다. 아무리 좋은 번역이 있더라도 그저 똑같지 않다. 언어는 햇빛이다. 지난 주에 첫 한국어 된 소설을 다 읽었다. 시작했을 때 모르는 단어가 너무 많아서 불가능한 일인 줄 알았다. 조금씩 읽던 스토리에 빠지며 더 쉽게 읽을 수 있게 되었다. 다 읽었는데도 난 아직 한국말에 갓난아기다. 그러나 이제 커튼을 젖혀서 이른 아침의 햇볕에 쬐는 갓난아기다. 언어는 감정의 정혈(精血)이다. 수백만명 사람의 마음을 움직이는 다른 방법이 있나? 음악도 있고 언어도 있다. 음악은 바로 언어의 한 종류다, 단어 대신 순 감정으로 만든 언어다. 음악을 감상하지 않거나 언어능력이 부족한다면 어떻게 인생의 굉장히 다양한 감정을 맛볼 수 있을까? 언어는 상대편이다. 나는 언어랑 늘 특별한 관계가 있다. 어렸을 때부터 말할 때 말을 더듬거린다. 다른 사람들이 자주 “나도 그래. 긴장이 될 때 말을 진짜 더듬거려”라고 관계를 맺으려고 노력하기는 하지만 정말로 어떤지 완전히 모른다. 상상해봐 — 말하고 싶은 걸 아는데 아무리 애써도 못 나온다. 조롱에 갇져 있는 종달새가 아침마다 자유를 이루려고 날개를 괜히 파닥거려서 감옥에서 못 달아나는 걸 깨닫다는 것처럼 — 그게 말더듬거리는 느낌이다. 그게 내 상대편이다. 그 상대편이 항상 옆에 있어서 그런지 언어를 너무나 좋아하게 되었다. 언어는 창조의 정수(精髓)다. 대부분의 문장이 적힐 때 인류사상에서 처음 쓴 거다. 그게 언어의 본질이다: 겸손한 연주자들이 모여서 훌륭한 교향악단이 되듯이 평범한 단어들이 모여서 감동적인 표현이 된다. 언어는 미움을 만들 수도 있고 사랑을 만들 수도 있다. 언어는 장인(匠人)의 인생 내내 쓰던 불완전한 도구다. 언어는 활기(活氣)다. 언어가 없는 인생은 색깔이 없는 세계와 같다. 언어는...

View from top of Dobongsan, north of Seoul. Sept 4, 2013. (cross-posted from https://medium.com/better-humans/dcc36325c2d ) It’s all Ueli Steck’s fault. A couple months ago, I happened across some Ueli Steck videos that I had already seen a couple years ago. I think they resurfaced after he got attacked by a mob of sherpas while ice-climbing without ropes on Everest . For those of you who don’t know, Ueli Steck is a Swiss alpinist that sets speed records on extremely technical climbs, without any ropes. He literally runs up mountains . For some reason, when I saw the videos this time around, I decided that I also wanted to run up mountains. In one of the videos, he explains that his training relies heavily on heart rate monitors, which intrigued me. I’ve tried a few times in my life to “make myself” into a runner. I read Born To Run on a plane a few years ago and decided that I, too, could be a runner. Just like that. So I started running again, but just like every p...

How do you become a better person? How do you uncover your faults, and once found, how do you know where to focus your energy in order to improve them? How do you even know that there's something wrong in the first place? The answer lies in self-awareness, an absolutely critical life skill that most people spend a lifetime avoiding. Ever since I was a little kid, I've been possessed of the notion that the world is overrun with people who tramp through life in a nearly unconscious state. I can clearly remember going to the store one day as a child and watching a middle-aged woman pushing a cart while muttering to herself, not like she was crazy, but more like she was just going through the motions of life. She was an NPC , and she was not alone. I was probably three or four years old. Growing up to be the engineer and scientist (and philosopher?) that I am, I'm constantly searching for elegant solutions to the problems around me. My friends know that I very often start ...

Okay, six months of 한국어학당 finished (20 weeks x 20 hours per week = 400 hours of instruction), so I figured I should self-assess my Korean progress. First, the positives: - I speak better Korean than most foreigners here, which isn't saying much, since the bar is embarrassingly low. That is, if you can properly order food, say hello, goodbye, thank you, and pronounce (and remember) Korean names properly, then you are already ahead of probably 95% of foreigners, and Koreans will call you a "genius". It's 2013, people. This is sad. - I can get around Korea just fine. I have no trouble with daily life. - I can have conversations in just Korean about various topics, sometimes for hours. - I can read and write better than I can speak. - Occasionally, I can express complex concepts by mashing together words I already know. Now, the negatives: - My Korean is nowhere near "natural". The word and grammar choices I make are decidedly strange, and I don'...

One of the most liberating and terrifying things you can do is to accept responsibility. For everything. Many of us grow up with the incredibly limiting belief that anything that doesn't go our way is someone else's fault. It's your teacher's fault, your friend's fault, your boss's fault, your partner's fault, the world's fault - whatever, as long as it's not your fault. There is no surer way to hold yourself back than blaming your life and your setbacks on other people. A particular pet peeve of mine is people who blame their character flaws on something out of their control. This takes a lot of different forms, such as, "I've got a bad temper, so he had it coming", or "Yeah, I'm just not good with responding to messages", or "I'm no good at talking to girls", or recently the popular anti-social excuse "I'm just not comfortable around people". Yes, I know that there are biological propensit...

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the barriers that we create for ourselves as we go through life. Most of them aren't our fault - we learn them as we grow up. But more nefarious is the fact that we don't just learn  them; we're taught  them. Society seems designed to constrain our lives into neat little boxes, and the more that I've come to realize this, the more I want to shout at the top of my lungs and tell everyone that the boxes aren't real. They're imaginary, and if you don't want to spend your life constrained to one of these nice little boxes, you don't have to. But it's up to you, and no one else. Yesterday, in Korean class, our reading of the day was a letter from a student to one of his old teachers, about the day when his teacher told them that everyone has a special talent. That day resonated in the student's mind, because at the time, he said that he had no dream. Hearing someone simply tell him that he wasn't desti...

"I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it." - Morpheus, The Matrix A typical Lunar New Year custom is cleaning the house from top to bottom, both to literally get your house in order, and metaphorically to symbolize a "clean start" to the New Year. This year, how about doing a Spring Festival cleaning of all the unexamined thoughts and buried feelings that have relentlessly accumulated over the last year? Let's start with a simple question: When was the last time you really stopped to think? I'm not talking about taking a break from obsessing over work, or relationships, or the latest news and gossip. I'm talking about stopping everything and pondering the mind itself. I mean stillness. Let me give you a hint - if you're not sure, then you probably haven't done it in a really long time. 2012 was an interesting year for me. It was the first year since fourteen ...

지난 블로그 포스트의 번역이다! 틀린 한국어 죄송합니다! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 나는 엔지니어와 디자이너이기 때문에 좋은 디자인이나 즐거운 경험을 우연히 발견할 때마다 기분이 꼭 좋다. 그래서 작은 지역 항공사의 비행기에서 굉장히 매력적인 비행을 보내니까 진짜 놀랐다. 티웨이항공은 서울에서 여러 가까이 있는 도시까지 (타이베이, 방콕, 후쿠오카, 제주도) 가는 작은 항공사이다. 주말엔 티웨이항공으로 계획하지 않게 제주도에 다녀왔다. 비행은 55분쯤이라서 불편한 한 시간일 줄 알았는데 정말 귀엽고 편했다. 우선, 승무원들이 매우 친절하다. 한국의 항공사라서 놀라지 않았는데 보통 짧은 비행에선 기내서비스가 별로 좋지 않다. 하지만 티웨이의 승무원들은 내 평생 모두 비행 중에서 가장 친절하고 매력적인 승무원이였다! 그리고, 제주도에서 돌아오는 길에 안전벨트 착용등이 끈후에는, 안내봉송이 들렸다. 승무원이 플릇을 불려고 한다고 했다. 정말로 굉장히 귀여웠다. 플릇 연주자가 아닌데 자신감 있게 충실도가 높지 않는 비행기 스피커로 노래를 2개 연주했다.  좀 긴장이 되게 보였는데 연주가 끝나고 나서 손님들 다 박수를 쳤고 승무원님은 수줍게 미소 지고 비행기 뒤에 가서 다른 승무원들에게 칭찬을 받았다. 안아 주고 싶었다. 좀 후에, 승무원들이 통로에 걸어가면서 손님들하고 얘기했고 사진을 찍고 손님에게 이메일로 보낼 수 있다고 제시했다. 이런 행동이 있었는데도 음료 서비스를 능숙하게 주었다! 티웨이항공은 분명히 잘 한다. 이륙한 후에 기장님이 소개할 때는 “감사합니다. 사랑합니다. 티웨이!”하고 소개 방송을 끝낸다. 우리도 사랑합니다. 또 티웨이로 여행갈 거다.

Update: 한국어 번역:  http://thedarren.blogspot.kr/2012/10/blog-post.html As an engineer and designer, I'm always delighted when I come across great design or delightful user experiences. So when I happened upon a wonderfully charming experience on a budget regional airline , I was a bit taken aback. T'way Air is a small airline that flies between Seoul and a few other nearby cities (Taipei, Bangkok, Fukuoka, and Jeju). I took it roundtrip to Jeju on a last-minute trip over the weekend. The flight is only about 55 minutes in the air, so you would expect it to be an hour of suffering and then over. But instead, T'way has the cutest hour of flight possible. First off, the flight attendants are amazingly friendly. This is not a big surprise for a Korean airline, but as a general rule, service and friendliness are compromised on short flights. Yet instead, I can honestly say that the flight attendants on T'way were among the most friendly and personable from any flight I...

I'm not sure why it took me so long to figure this out, but the last people you should take Korean language advice from are kyopos (foreign-born or raised Koreans). That being said, if you do  follow their advice, you will get many laughs from Koreans. Some of my personal favorites, all of which actually happened to me: - When I first got to Korea, I was at some open-air event, and during a break I started talking to one of the hosts. He said he was only a part-time host, so I asked him what his full-time job was, and he said "백수" (which is slang for "unemployed guy"). I asked him what that was, and he replied, "Comedian". So then the next few people I met, I proudly told I was a baeksu. (Edit: Actually, this guy was Korean Korean, not kyopo.) - Next, a kyopo who lived in the apartment I moved into back in 2010 asked me what I was doing in Korea, and I told him I was starting a company, and asked how to say that in Korean in case people ask. He tol...

I finally got around to looking up the lyrics to Psy's "Gangnam Style" last night. I couldn't find any English translations that I liked, so I decided to make my own. Disclaimer: I don't speak Korean. It's not my first language. It's not even my second or third language. But I did used to live in Gangnam, and the Internets abound with dictionaries, so I decided to give it a go. Incidentally, this is also my first foray into Korean-English translation. The translators out there will know - translation is as much art as science. If you translate directly, you end up with overly awkward constructions. But if you vary too much from the direct translation, you risk losing the original intent. So, in some places below, I've taken some poetic license to make the translation sound better. For example, "놀 땐 노는 여자" literally means "a girl who plays when it's time to play", but I changed it to "a girl who knows how to get down"...