Repatriate Me!

Last night I took the family out to see Christmas lights. In Korea this is a little different than in Canada as there are very few individual homes and no one decorates the outside of their house. Instead, here, businesses and the city, will put on light displays. We went to the city center and took a lot of pictures.

I also shot some video on my new HD camcorder (Canon Vixia HG20) which once it’s been edited I’ll upload and share here. I’m planning on adding a video blog section to show different areas around the city. That’ll be a little delayed due to being very busy with end of the semester work and client work at the moment.

updating to include a video now (full size HD version here.)

Enjoy the video below.

Seoul Christmas

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On Sunday December 6th at 6:40 in the morning my father-in-law passed. He was a good man who had lived a hard life. He lived a good portion of his youth in Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea where he was forced to take a Japanese name among other things that I was not privy too , but that a good history book will enlighten one on. He is survived by his wife, eight children and thirteen grandchildren.

Due to my poor Korean language skills I did not get to know him well but I had a lot of respect for him. He was kind, loved his family, and had a quick mind. He will be dearly missed by his family and friends.

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I’ve started running again after two months off due to a debilitating injury. In mid September I hit one of my goals of running 10km in 50 minutes. My log in Voomaxer reads:

10.23km Mission accomplished 10km in less than 50 minutes! Yes! Yes! Yes! 7km 30:29, 10km 48:30

.

However about 10 minutes later I couldn’t walk due to excruciating pain in my hip and ended up going to the hospital and limping for weeks. Finally a couple of weeks ago I started running at slow speed for short times a couple of times a week.

Anyhow I’m going to be building up my endurance and speed slowly. Though this time I’m going to be using the incline feature on my running machine. Today’s run 3.4km in 23 minutes 12 of which were at a 5% grade and 3 more at 3%. Hopefully running on the incline will increase my calorie usage and help with weight reduction – I want to get down to 80kg from my current 86.

Voomaxer is a great way to log your exercise; running, cycling, or swimming. If you allow it to, your logs will be automagically added to your facebook status and twitter feed. I use this and it’s great, however I would really like a way to import my logs to my blog. Yes Voomaxer has a badge, but that’s not what I want. I want voomaxer to create a blog entry for me. If they exported to RSS I could easily accomplish this with an ExpressionEngine plugin – ExpressionEngine is what I use to power my blog.

I wrote an email to the voomaxer guys about this. Hopefully they’ll set up an RSS feed. I also asked if they have an API as I’m going to be learning php shortly and if there is an API then I’ll be able to create a plugin for ExpressionEngine that will accomplish everything that I want to do.

Here’s a screen cap of my current voomaxer graph of my logs.