Lofbomm.com

I had a good night. First, I went to a dance class at 7:30 on campus. A great advantage to working with a lot of performers, there are some great dancers who are teaching free dance classes so they can keep up their skills. I went to a jazz class, and it kicked my butt, but it was great. I danced for many years growing up, but as I got older, I had to narrow my focus, so I chose choir. I’m glad I did, but I have really missed dancing in the last couple of years. I’m glad to have the opportunity to dance again. Adam said he’s even going to come with me next time.

After jazz dance class, I came back to the apartment to find that my ill husband had returned from his day in Seoul. We have both been sick for a while. I’ve been sick for over 5 weeks, but I’m almost totally better now. Adam has been sick about 2 weeks, but he’s got the worst of it. He normally doesn’t get sick at all, so he’s really worn out. Someone here highly recommended an acupuncture clinic that Adam is going to visit tomorrow. I hope it helps him. He’s very hopeful. I don’t know much about acupuncture, but for how long it has lasted as a viable treatment for ailments of many kinds, there’s got to be something to it. We’ll let you know how it goes.

After we shared a snack of raw vegetables cut up in a bowl with oil and seasoning (I’m so excited that that’s appetizing to me now), Adam went to bed and crashed. I took out my guitar and practiced, trying to immitate the guitarist on my CD. My friend Jonathan who played on my CD did such a great job, and I’m such a hack on the guitar. I am going to be singing in the chapel services at an international school on Tuesday, and they want me to use guitar and not my album tracks, so it’s practice, practice, practice for the next few days. I’m really looking forward to singing at the school. It’s not a huge deal, just a few songs in a few services, but I’m really looking forward to it. It’s my first big chance to share my music in a brand new country, and it’s for kids and teachers from all over the world. Our new friend Joe Cho lined this up for me, and he’s finding me some other opportunities too. He’s great. I’m best at practicing guitar (and singing, for that matter) when I have something to prepare for. I’m a procrastinator through and through. It felt really good to pick up my guitar again. I go such long stints without playing at all. If I practiced, I know I could be good, and then I wouldn’t hate playing. So, I should practice.

We’re also trying to make our plans for the Chuseok holiday, which is the biggest holiday in Korea coming up in October. We have a week off, but since we arrived recently, we didn’t have much time to plan ahead and get plane tickets and stuff. We hoped to go to China to visit my friend Joy, but tickets were just more than we could justify spending. We keep reminding ourselves that we’re here to pay off debt. So, we’re going to stay in Korea for Chuseok, and we don’t know what we’ll do yet. Some things that we want to do are visit an orphanage and love on some kids (I REALLY want to do that), visit some of the beautiful temples that are around here in the mountains, spend some time with a few friends that are sticking around including our friends Kyle and Cynthia, maybe go camping, and it would be great to celebrate a little of traditional Chuseok with a Korean family. That’s our brainstorm. I’m sure we’ll find a way to enjoy the week even though we’re not going far from Paju.

I’m going to go to bed with my coughing Adam now. Take care. And we miss you, dear friends and family.

-Jessica

I was going to come in and make fun of Adam’s two previous posts, but instead, I’ll just “make light” of them. :). I think he’s cute, and I am also glad that he has gotten into sharing this blog. I also think it’s funny how the things he thinks are fascinating and gets all excited about are often over the heads of many people, including my own sometimes. Although I’m catching on.

That was going to be all, but Adam is sitting beside me, and he says that I need to do a better job “making light” of him. So, here goes. Ever since we got to Asia, he smells funny. Well, he actually smelled funny before, but now he really smells funny. Actually, he doesn’t smell so funny, but it’s something mean to say. And now, he’s chomping on his gum like a horse. But, have you ever seen the boy ride a horse? What a sissy-girl. And he laughs like one too. A girl, not a horse. And, he doesn’t even know what his favorite color is. Maybe it’s brown. How exciting. Brown. For real, y’all. Brown.

Adam, is that better? He says it’s still kinda weak. Here’s more.

hmm.

It’s weak, but it’ll do. I like him, and I want to say nice things. Like, he’s cute and stuff. Ew, but he just snorted.

-Jessica

I can’t believe that I’m just now finding out about this. LibraryThing is a way cool web service/community/social networking thingie for geeky bibliophiles. If you know me, you know that I no doubt qualify. I found it on a site called MoMB that my buddy Daniel turned me on to, that lists the newest and hottest 100 Web 2.0 sites on the scene.

A quick aside: For those of you who asked me what Web 2.0 means in response to my last post - As I understand it, it basically refers to a internet paradigm shift from static and owner-created web content, toward more dynamic and user/community created content. Web 1.0…think checking the weather forecast, or reading an article in the New York Times. Web 2.0…think dynamic content driven web apps like GoogleCalendar or Netvibes and user/community driven content of MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia, or my personal favorites, Flickr and del.icio.us.

(If you’re still confused, a nice, extensive treatment of Web 2.0 from tech guru Tim O’Reilly can be found over here.)

Anyway, I’m just loving LibraryThing. It’s a mash-up of several things I really enjoy: books, thinking about books, looking at my books, talking about books, meeting people who like the same books I do, and leveraging internet technology to engage in our real-life passions and interests in new, dynamic and global ways.

Adding books is as simple as looking for a book on Amazon, since LibraryThing is actually tied in with the search englines of Amazon & The Library of Congress. Once you find your book, you can choose to edit or add information, such as date purchased, date started & finished reading, and so on.

You can tag your books by topics covered and then see which topics define the nature of your collection by displaying your ‘tag-cloud’ (some pretty strong themes emerging in our still small library here in Korea, as you can see in our tag-cloud below). You can also use these tags to see what other user’s books share the same tags.

Other users with similar interests can be found in the topical Groups and Talk sections, and in the Zeitgeist section, you can get your fill of statistics to pull out at parties such as top 75 authors, top 25 books, 50 largest libraries, 50 lowest-rated authors and so on.

There’s even a book swap option built in, which is tied-in with swapping communities that have appeared recently, such as BookMooch and Bookins. I don’t suppose that option would work out so economically from the other side of the world!

I think this would also be a great way for friends to see what the other is reading or what may be collecting dust on the shelf that they might borrow. They make this part really easy by offering the javascript widgets like you’ll find on our Welcome and Connexions pages.

In short, I think LibraryThing is a well thought out technology for bringing freshness into an old relationship for people who really love books. Feel free to visit my library and let me know if you end up using and enjoying LibraryThing as well!

—A.

Some of you know that I am a little bit computer geeky. I haven’t shared any of this sort of musing here publically, so unless you and I happen to have chatted about Web 2.0, RSS feeds, OSX, HTML or what-not, you may not even know I care.

I actually spend quite a bit of my time exploring the internet, trying out new software and technologies, and thinking about the impact of emerging technologies on our lives in the decades ahead. I get really excited when I consider the massive, global changes that I have witnessed/been a part of in the last 10 years since I first typed ‘www’.

Oh, and it’s very important that you understand I am completely, totally Mac-centric nowadays. My CTRL-ALT-DELETE reflex hardly functions any more, thank heavens.

I don’t profess to know much, or have anything really valuable to say, but I do enjoy this stuff, and I decided today that I will begin blogging from time to time about things I feel are worth sharing.

You are, of course, free to ignore them. As always.

That being said, I thought this chart I found at SkyHorse.org was a very clever and accurate little diagram treating the current state of Web 2.0 services with a healthy dose of tongue and cheek. I found it helpful to see the different ingredients broken out this way. I’ve used all three of the example sites at some time or other (though Flickr is the onl one that has proven indispensible for me), but I wasn’t aware of the underlying technologies they were using, per se.

How to create your new Web 2.0 startup company

Looking at Lofbomm.com, that has been revamped to integrate several Web 2.0 platforms would go like this: It’s a PERSONAL site that uses AJAX, STREAMING, TAGGING, RSS, JAVA and FLASH to do PUBLISHING and RECCOMENDATIONS in a BLOG. We call it Lofbomm.com.

That’s all for today, folks.

-A.

IMG_0716.JPG
Originally uploaded by psykologik.

I had to stop and hug him.

By the way, I love my husband, I love my family, and I love DOGGIES! We have begun a “Doggies of South Korea” photo set which we will update all the time with the beautiful and pitiful doggies we see all around us here. I’m going through doggie withdrawl, and this is my fix.

Heather, if you’ve ever gotten onto the net and you’re reading this, hug Genesis for us.

Ciao. Bow wow. I go now.

-Jessica

I just thought I’d say hi. Adam and I had a lot of fun on Monday and Tuesday exploring on our motorcycle. It feels so good to have the freedom to go. I think we’ll have to always have a motorcycle. I love it.

We had our discussion group tonight. Yes, this is the “book study”, but since our books have still not arrived, it’s a discussion group. We had good discussion. I really like Angela and Renee. Adam printed out an excerpt from Rob Bell’s “Velvet Elvis” book, and that took us all kids of directions.

This evening, I chatted online with my friend Elizabeth for a while. She’s a good friend and encouraging. She taught me how to cook a little when we were in Nashville, and recently I’ve been putting my cooking lessons to use. I’m really enjoying it. Adam and I are seeing how creative we can get with rice, vegetables, eggs and curry powder. Pretty creative, I must say.

Adam has caught the cold that I have had for almost a month, and now I’m catching it back from him (without ever having fully recovered from the last bout). I’m sure it has to do with the change in weather as well as the change in everything else.

Anyway, there’s a little disjointed mind dump for you.

I’ve been thinking about my Grandma Rau today and how grateful I am for her. Adam and I have been talking about spirituality. I never thought of Grandma as a particularly spiritual person, but there are few I would like to emulate more than her. I admire her, and I am trying to get into the grace that she lived with and her lack of religiosity. She was very balanced.

If you’ve watched some of the interview segments with her on the media page, you may notice that the sound is bad on some of them (the music is too loud). We’re sorry, and we’re aware of that, and we’ll try to get to fixing that sometime before too long.

That’s all. :). Oh, and if you haven’t gone to my music website for a while, I have some new Korea stuff on there (some dates in October, a Korean distributor listing me on their site, and some other general news). Fun.

-Jessica

We now have our own wheels. We got a motorcycle! Go over to the photos page to see it. Adam went into Seoul this afternoon and bought a little Daelim motorcycle from a Canadian guy moving to Japan. It was a great deal, and we’re having so much fun! Adam had his long ride back from Seoul this evening, he picked me up, then we went out around Paju. Riding in the open air makes me feel so much more like we live in Asia. As we drove, we could smell the spicy food from restaurants and the maneur from the farms. I was much more aware of the local life that I’ve only seen passing by bus windows.

We visited our new friends Kyle and Cynthia who live nearby. Their house is in the middle of a web of rice patties (er, paddies, that is). Riding a bike also makes me feel more vulnerable– like stray bullets from NK might graze my helmet. We’ve been watching too much Alias. While we were trying to find our friends’ house, we went down the wrong dirt road, we set off a sensor and were suddenly engulfed in a heavy mist spraying out from the speed bump beneath us. We freaked out because we thought we had crossed into some military zone and had been gassed or sprayed with acid. It turns out, it was just water. When we finally found our way, Cynthia and Kyle assured us that it was just a farmer’s house, and the sensors were probably for their pigs.

This week has finally turned to Fall, so we had cool/COLD air to top off the experience. It’s beautiful. I had a great day working. I’ve begun my weekend street performance doing educational jazz singing/chanting. It was so nice to be outside in the cool weather. Everyone seems happier and more relaxed– my co-workers and our guests. It was very nice.

And now it’s the weekend for me. :). Adam and I are going exploring on our motorcycle tomorrow. It’s going to be a great day.

Talk to you soon.

-Jessica

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IMG_0522.JPG, originally uploaded by psykologik.

For those of you who were interested to see some photos of my Kumdo training, we’ve got a bunch of photos from tonight’s practice up on our Flickr. Jess shot some video too, and we’ll try to get that up soon.