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Conception Dreams

My mother recently asked me if I had any strange or memorable dreams when I became pregnant. I then recalled that Koreans believe a woman begins her pregnancy with a 태몽 (tae-mong), or a dream about the conception of the child. (I thought this was unique to the Korean culture but apparently not - J just confirmed that the Chinese believe the same thing!) When my mother first became pregnant with me, she dreamt that she was caught in a terrible thunderstorm. To escape the rain, she sought shelter in a dilapidated building. She looked up at the ceiling and was horrified to see a great number of snakes writhing and squirming on the roof beams. While most of them were a dull...

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Can Bloated Code Be Beautiful?

The answer is YES. Last month, I saw a screenshot of the Fujinon Binoculars website source code. Filled with seemingly endless <FONT> tags, I couldn't help but laugh.   A snippet of the code. Take a look at the original to get the full effect. THIS is the reason I never use an HTML editor, I chuckled as I scrolled down the overly bloated code. But alas! Today I found out that there was a reason behind this madness! According to b3ta.com, this is what you get when you zoom out and flip the code on its side: It almost looks like a landscape, doesn't it? Now, when we travel - via Google Earth - to the top of Fujinon’s corporate headquarters in Saitama and face Mount...

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The Mobile Phones of My Past, Present, and Future

One of my favorite things to do while battling insomnia is to make lists. Endless, pointless lists. Last night I did a mental rundown of all the cell phones I've had since my first purchase during my freshmen year in college in 1999. (Before then was pagers. Having access to Korean import stores, I had some sweet pagers - ones that always made my high school peers green with envy. Now, kids don't even know what pagers are.) Can you believe that I have owned TEN ELEVEN different phones since then? Nokia 6190purchased in 1999, carrier: AT&T My very first cell phone. Back in 1999, not too many people in my freshmen class had cell phones and if they did, almost all had the Nokia...

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