More on the Skype Outage and its Implications

koreainformationsociety

Like millions of others around the world, I experienced the disappearance (see the previous post) of my normally dependable Skype service.  It was out of order all day yesterday (December 23), but by this morning I was able to log on normally.

The media are full of stories about the Skype outage.  As The New York Times “Bits” column noted, Skype will struggle to restore not only its service, but its reputation.  Skype has announced that its problem was with “supernodes,” computers among its network of 124 million users that serve as phone directories and help connect calls.  For unknown reasons, they were taken off line.  Although unknown, Skype did know and announce, according to the BBC, that the fault had been caused by a “software issue” on critical parts of its network.

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Social Networking Trends in Korea

koreainformationsociety

More on Social Networking Trends in Korea

The Joongang Daily has an interesting article today dealing with the problems of security on social networking sites in Korea.  It quotes a Facebook representative in Korea as saying that Koreans have a relatively low awareness of social network security.   I would suggest that this is part of the broader cultural differences in thinking about and using social networking sites, as discussed in earlier posts.   Cyworld is dramatically different from Facebook with the latter being introduced over four years later in the U.S.
According to eMarketer, 61.4 percent of Internet users worldwide have an SNS account, up from 51.4 percent in 2009 and 45.1 percent in 2008. And it turns out that people spend more time on social media Web sites than they do e-mailing or Web surfing. Those surveyed spent 4.6 hours a week on SNS sites, compared to 4.4 hours for e-mail.    Here in Korea, according to the Korea Communications Commission, 65.7 percent of the population uses SNS sites.

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How to write and say “Happy New Year” in Korean

mahalodotcom

The School Lunch

Thanks to Thirtheen (13)

I’m been meaning do a post about school lunches for 10 months now.  I think between being embarrassed to take pictures in front of my teachers, the school administration, my VP, principal and not wanting to explain myself I’ve put this little project off for a long time.

Lunches always consist of rice, soup, (various types of) kimchi, and two side dishes.  Water is available but its usually consumed after lunch.  If its yummy treat day (!) we’ll have a side of fruit or a packet of seasoned laver to pair with our rice as well.   We usually have different types of rices.  Often its a color, green, yellow, red, purple, or cooked with red beans, chestnuts or sweet potatoes or its mixed with veggies typically carrots, par-boiled spinach and bean sprouts and sometimes we have fried rice.  The fried rice is always the wild card, last time it had carrot, egg, the brown root veggie and octopus.

Todays lunch was not the greatest.

Plain white rice

Fish-tofu-green leaf-bean sprout soup boiled with go-chu-jang.

Go-chi-jang is the very popular chili paste used is almost every dish.

 

Side dishes!

Kimchi and veggies in kimchi sauce.