In a few short hours I’ll be jetting off to South Korea; my sleep experiment to avoid jet-lag has felt like more of a lesson in self control and trying to concentrate on work whilst pretty fatigued. Somehow I’ve managed to get up successive nights 1 hour earlier each day (this morning was 2am) and attempted to sleep 1 hour later. I’m not quite sure how well I’ve managed to fool my body clock, the next couple of days should be interesting!
Since I’m flying via Dubai (20 reasons not to move to Dubai) I wont arrive in Seoul till later tomorrow - I’ll try and post an update here when I do. Since Korea is the king of consumer electronics I’ll leave you with a few titbits of life on the other side:
Update (02/09): I made it ok to Korea, this time without any drama’s!! This morning I’m feeling pretty jet-lagged (aching all over) so it doesn’t look like my sleep experiment did much good. Hopefully it will pass in the next 24 hours. More soon
I came across this picture of a rather insane book store earlier today and it immediately reminded me of the residence of a certain Yomiko Readman of “Read or Die” fame. The similarities are striking but goodness knows how they get away with the health and safety aspect of having thousands of books stacked this way
The film and tv series are well worth watching; of course reading the manga would be even better! More pictures of the crazy shop can be found here.
In unrelated news I’ll be starting my rather rigorous jet-lag avoidance experiment tomorrow whereby I’ll be getting up and going to bed an hour earlier, progressively each day pushing my body clock closer to Korea time (GMT +9). By Friday I should be getting up at 2am, ouch!! If you’re in the UK, enjoy the bank holiday tomorrow!
This time next week I’ll be at Heathrow airport about to embark on a rather epic journey (for me anyway) to the other side of this small world of ours. My previous visit to South Korea only lasted 4 days so I decided another dose was required, hence I’m heading back for a further 10 days exploration! The actual journey there is going to take a tortuous 20 hours going via Dubai which will be a good excuse to read the final Harry Potter book (stolen from my younger sibling ).
Click for larger version
During my stay I plan to spend around half my time in Seoul and the rest in the southern cities of Gyeongju (the ancient capital & UNESCO World Heritage Site) and Busan (also know as Pusan, the largest port city). Drop me a line if you happen to be in the vicinity!
The Japanese apparently have a saying for people who aren’t much good with technology - “Analogue Person“, literally translated. Futurologists have long predicted that eventually an underclass of people who do not have access to/do not want to use/don’t know how to use technology would evolve and some even go as far as to say that this would cause the human species to split into two sub-species of the elite and the digital underclass. Whilst this isn’t predicted to happen for thousands of years if this isn’t an early sign I don’t know what is!
Of course there is another line of thought which says this has already happened in Japan. You don’t have to look far for the evidence:
This twelfth generation android from Sony Robotics dubbed “Sony-san” is a particularly disturbing example of the future anthropomorphisation of humanity! Sony-san has appeared in music videos, variety shows, the occasional advert, and reportedly “lives” in a Buddhist temple (so much for secularity of science!).
1984 was a turning point in many ways (think Apple Computer, George Orwell, Linux, the Space Programme, Terminator, my birth…) and a mere 23 years later the world has been revolutionised by technology. But this revolution is not like it’s predecessors; it has no end. Like it or not things are not going to move at an ever accelerating pace. Don’t look back in 50 years and say I didn’t warn you!
My innocuous little post yesterday about the Skype Outage had some quite unexpected effects - within a few hours I’d had thousands of hits and nearly 100 comments from frustrated users around the world. It quickly became the most popular post on RandomWire since I started the blog over five years ago.
My Wordpress hit stats went through the roof and the post was the no. 1 hit on Google.co.uk for “Skype Outage” and “Skype Down” as well as being on the first page of results for Google.com. I’m rather please that my post even comes above an article by The Times (one of the UK’s largest newspapers)!
It quickly became clear that the downtime was a pretty big deal with both individuals and businesses suffering as a direct result. 24 hours later and although some regions are slowly coming back online the network doesn’t seem to be in a usable state yet. My favourite comment so far…
“Finally… I see 3 million folks online. Relief, at last… with a realization that we’re so ardent slaves of technology!”
Worryingly it’s so true, perhaps this is the first time that the dependencies we have on IP based communication technologies today have been demonstrated on such a large scale. It will be interesting to see how this effects Skype’s competitors and any other knock-on effects that may come out of this.
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