Cars have been on my mind a lot recently. So far in the decade I’ve been licensed, I’ve owned three. My parents gave me an Eagle Vision when I was in college, and I bought a Saturn LS2 from them a few years later after returning from Japan. Both were sensible, practical, well-maintained sedans firmly [...]
Command has been promoting the K-16 summer fest for over a month now. Come to summer fest! It’s a Friday off! All the cool people from not just this base, but Yongsan and the surrounding Seongnam community will be there! Naturally, the day arrives and there is rain. This isn’t just any rain, though: it’s [...]
x + y = (x XOR y) + (x & y)
Last year for the fourth of July I sat in the apartment most of the weekend, emerging briefly to see the on-base fireworks display. This year I plan to top that: I’ve got a four-day weekend, an off-base pass, and a well-stocked debit card: I am travelling. Right now I’ll sleep a few hours, then [...]
There’s a small howitzer, almost a mortar, on the helipad at Camp Casey. I’ve seen it a bunch of times, but never at 1700. At 1700, it seems, it gets set off with a blank charge daily. When this happens, there are a few consequences. A 20-foot fireball shoots briefly out the muzzle. A shower [...]
The paradox of excellence is that for doing good work, your reward is more work to do. Actually, it’s not much of a paradox unless you assume that a fundamental goal at work is to earn the most pay for the least amount of trouble, which seems a very reasonable goal. It’s not quite the [...]
Reading Albert Camus’s book. So far, I can’t say I’m impressed. He’s got a big vocabulary. So do I. I’ve experienced often enough the fact that people assume that this implies intelligence far beyond what actually exists. Now I have evidence: this book, which I’m reading because of a recommendation saying it was quite profound, [...]
I’ve been reading books about North Korea since I got here to the South. I think that by this point I’ve got a fair sense of what the nation is, and what it might do. Given that, I think that the US, S. Korea, and as many of the UN as we can convince should [...]
Cyrano de Bergerac was the first rapper. What? Most rap is the singer bragging about their accomplishments. The most frequently bragged about accomplishments: The ability to compose verse on the fly. The ability to seduce women with the aid of said verse Proficiency with a weapon Cyrano was accomplished in all of this, before the [...]