I get news alerts everyday from Yahoo for anything that has the key word Korea in it. Being a Korean linguist, I like to stay on top of the news and this is one good way to see what's going on there. Well, I got this news article recently and I thought I'd share it here. You can get the entire article here - [Opinion] Speech Law of Korea and the U.S. . It's a pretty good article about how the laws covering the freedom of speech in Korea have been changed, modified, restricted and opened...

This is the last of the pictures I recently scanned in. I've got more, just not scanned. This is a picture from the Kahukus Training Range from summer of 96. We were moving back from an area we should have never gone to. A couple days earlier, we got orders to move out to a hilltop on the east side of the box. We had reconned that area a week earlier and determined that it was not a good place to go. The roads there were marginal and a good rain could have stranded us up there for d...

Just a quick note before I head off to Suicide Prevention Training. We had some mandatory training on the prevention of sexual harassment this morning. While we were going through the powerpoint slides (powerpoint - is there anything that says Army training more than a powerpoint presentation?), we had a slide that described non-verbal modes sexual harassment. Non-verbal means can include ogling, leering, giving the once over, emails, posters, calandars and even bumper stickers. ...

Yeah, I'm bored today. It's after the second football game and the ALCS hasn't started just yet. So, here are a some pictures from my first tour to Korea. These pics are from the week we spent down in Taegu. Our Platoon Leader (usually a 2nd LT position) was a West Point grad CPT (talk about taking it in the shorts) and was a bit of a jerk. He made us act as if the 'deployment' was under exercise rules. During the drive down and back, we had to be in full battle-rattle. We weren't al...

In my last post in this series, I received my first permanent profile. I had also successfully passed my first Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT) since my injury. Right around that time (summer 01), I was told that I'd be leaving the platoon and moving to the company headquarters. At first I was really pissed. The headquarters section is often where units send their dirtbags. I felt that the platoon was trying to get rid of me. I found out quickly that the company commander had actually ...

Sooner or later, geocities is going to figure out I'm only storing pics on their site so I can direct link to them here... and then, I'll have to find a new place to store images... maybe by then, JU will be open for the subscription service and I'll be able to upload them here... Well, here is a picture of me from Haiti. I spent a little over 3 months there (Jan-Apr 95). It wasn't a very productive place to send a team of Korean linguists, but neither is Iraq/Afghanistan. The Army ...

Here's another picture. It was taken in July 94. This one is from right after Day Zero of Air Assualt School. For those of you that have never been, Day Zero sucks. That's all, plain and simple, sucks. We started by being lined up and loaded onto trucks. They drove us out to East Range where it was raining, as always (we used to say that if you were in East Range and it wasn't raining, you weren't really in East Range). When we got of the trucks, we had to do push ups for being too s...

Today we had another MLI outing. Last quarter we went to Oakland and watched the A's beat the Mariners. This quarter we had lunch together and then went out to a firing range. First, we got together for lunch at the Round Table Pizza in Marina to start things off. They have a pizza buffet and salad bar there. Our Chief MLI called ahead and told them that we'd have a large turnout, but that kind of warning went unheeded and we had to wait 20 minutes before the first pizza came out to th...

I brought home a bunch of the pictures I keep in my office and scanned them in. I figured I'd share some of my favorite Hooah! pics. So, over the next week or so, I'll post them (along with more poems from my younger days). The story on this one. This picture is from Dec 93. I just turned 23 and this was after a graduation ceremony. The man in the center was the Commandant of DLI back then. A realy scary guy. He was a tabbed out Special Forces Colonel and did his best to greet all...

When we last left our hero (that's ME), I had completed my steroid injection and was feeling much better. I spent a few more months going to physical therapy. I completed the how to live with a bad back class and traction therapy was resulting in longer periods of relief. At PT I was walking further and faster every week. In May 2001 (almost 9 months after the injury), I reviewed my progress with the physical therapist and we decided that I didn't require any more sessions at that tim...

I'm sitting here in my living room, watching the ball game and wondering if Mussina has it in him to finish this game out. It's the top of the 7th and he's still perfect. The coolest part? I'm typing this on my new computer. We went up to San Jose yesterday to do some shopping at the Korean markets (the ones up there are much better than the ones down here) and my wife and I stopped in the CompUSA up there. We walked out with a brand new Sony Vaio RA710G and 17' flat screen monitor! ...

During the past month or so, I have been contacted by three people that I attended school with. All of them found me via online classmate finder services. I've been registered with a couple of services for a while now, but I've only used the free memberships. I have a registered profile with classmates.com and reunion.com. I think I'm signed up for another, too, but can't remember the name. I get periodic emails about new sign ups and how many are people that were at the same school ...

I spent some time scanning some old pictures into the computer today. Thought I'd share some tonight. I'll probably share some others over the next few days, turning my blog into a photo blog. In addition to these, I have some Army Hooah! pics, some puppy pics from our first litter, and even some old high school pics to share. These pictures were taken in Aug 96. I went on a weekend trip with a couple friends to the island of Kaua'i. We had an absolute blast. We travelled all over ...

Hello everyone. My name is Chip and I'm a (Korean) dramaholic. I was first sucked into the world of Korean drama miniseries with Innocence Lost back in 1995. I quickly followed that show up with Apartment. Later it was The Bath House Family Men. Over the years, I was able to fight of this addiction for only short periods of time. I always came back. Today, I nearly fell off the wagon. I've been Korean drama free for over a year now and today, I flirted with disaster. I was in the l...

So, in December of 2000, I started physical therapy for my back pain. I still didn't know what was wrong with me, I just knew that it hurt. Everyday. It seemed to be getting worse instead of better. My first appointment at the physical therapy clinic was mostly a consultation with the physical therapist. He was a Captain and seemed like a genuinely nice guy. I described my symptoms to him and he started an exam. At the time, I had pain in the center of my lower back, that got worse...