(South) Korean Army: Ooops?

The Army has come under some criticism this week after a third North Korean soldier made it across the DMZ, pretty much undetected. Worse still he couldn't even find anyone to surrender to, and ended up knocking on the door of a (South) Korean barracks and asking to give himself up:

The North Korean soldier whose defection last week across the heavily armed border revealed serious problems with South Korea's border defense turned himself in at the barracks of a front-line unit after his knock at the entrance of another unit went unanswered, a top military official said.

(Yonhap)

Ooops.

Gen. Jung Seung-jo, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a parliamentary audit of the military Thursday that the defector showed up at the barracks after he "got no response when he knocked on the door" at a nearby unit some 30 meters away.

According to the JCS chairman, the North Korean soldier left his unit about 50 kilometers north of the border around 4 a.m. on Sept. 29 before arriving at the border around 8 p.m. on Oct. 2. He then crossed the Demilitarized Zone, a 4-kilometer buffer zone between the two sides, and reached the South Korean border fence around 10:30 p.m.

He slipped past the South's border fence before turning himself in around 11 p.m.

Hello...? Anybody home?

I am not sure about Yonhap's use of the phrase "Some 30 meters away), like 30 meters is a great distance or anything. The phrase becomes a little more loaded when taking into account the overall tone of the piece seems to be in the vein of shit-stirring, in a week when people started to think that there was an attempted cover up of the whole incident - Yonhap notes:

The absence of surveillance camera footage from the time has also spurred speculation the military might have deleted it in an attempt to cover up the mistake. Officials later said the camera was malfunctioning at the time.

Officials also said the initial account of what happened was incorrect because a noncommissioned officer at the unit reported details of the incident based on his "assumption.

The report was later corrected, but a JCS officer ignored the corrected report, officials said.

In a very Korean move, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) have come out and said sorry.

Riiiight.

However president Lee Myung Bak (Dude, eye etc...) has seen fit to censure the Defense Minister over the breaches.

This will be the third defection of North Korean personnel over the DMZ into the south in as many months. A (possibly disturbing) trend perhaps? Probably not, but it hasn't gone without censures north of the DMZ either. The Chosun Bimbo Ilbo reports:

[T]he North Korean Army chief has apparently been demoted in the wake of several defections by soldiers across the heavily armed border. 

Hyon Yong-chol, the chief of the North Korean Army's General Staff, is seen in a photo carried by state media wearing only the insignia of a general during a visit to the embalmed corpses of nation founder Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il to mark the 67th anniversary of the North Korean Workers Party on Wednesday. 

Hyon succeeded Ri Yong-ho, who was sacked in July, and was promoted to vice marshal. A North Korean vice marshal wears one large star, while a general's insignia features four small stars. That means Hyon was demoted again just around two months after his promotion.

(The Chosun Ilbo)

I would certainly prefer smaller stars over being sent to the gulag though.... However, if Hyon has an ounce of patience he should be right:

Some experts believe Hyon will not have to spend long in the doldrums. Last year, the head of the Operations Bureau at the General Staff, Kim Myong-guk, was demoted from four-star general to three-star general, but returned to his original rank months later. 

Late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il "often demoted his military officials in order to enforce discipline and they returned to their original ranks a few months later," said an informed source.

This is of course all serious stuff. One of the defectors in fact shot dead 2 officers in his unit before making an escape to the south. However I can't help but think that the movie JSA (Here's the whole thing on YouTube) has more of a baring in truth than I first thought.

Wouldn't It Be Great if the Same Logic Was Applied to English Teachers in Korea?

“This is part of politicians’ strategy to gain attention because the presidential election is approaching, which is to be expected and there will be more moves to come. I truly wonder whether any of them have an understanding of the telecommunications industry or consulted an expert before releasing these rash statements and allegations,” he added.

(Korea Times)

So I Thought Of a Name

Thanks to Joy I have thought of a name: "Anticipating Chosun".

I like it, and has an interesting tone to it. It retains the word "Chosun" linking the blog to Korea, but also keeping things at least a little tongue in cheek. Chosun being the name given to Korea by North Koreans.

It might also have something to do with people anticipating a post... that may or may not eventually come.

I should also add that I now have a gallery page, which I have added a few photos to. Have a look.

Changes Afoot

It is a sad day.

After four years I have decided to retire "The Chosun Bimbo". Well the name anyway. The amount of blogging I have done since October last year has been dismal. The drop off came at about the end of 2010 really, and there has been a couple of months when I haven't posted anything at all....

Which is not to say that this (not so) little chronicle of the last 4 years is going away anytime soon.

I just felt like it was time for a change, The Bimbo moniker had grown a little long in the tooth, (Hell I wasn't even 30 when I came up with the name, a play on The Chosun Ilbo) and its time to do something a little more productive. (In all honesty the name never did me any favours when used in a professional sense.)

However I have upgraded my Squarespace Account, and am contemplating moving to the new version - squarespace 6. Bear with me as things change a bit around here in the coming weeks, when finally, I will have some time to return to what it's all about. 

Writing.

New Toy: Samsung Galaxy Note II

In mid-September I fell for the hype and upgraded my iPhone to iOS 6. Overall it is a good upgrade for the iPhone and given it is all but the same version that ships with the new iPhone 5 not a bad option for 4S owners not looking to upgrade their hardware.

But two things proved problematic. More than problematic. Annoying, with the new operating system.

The first was dealing with podcasts. I very much bought into Apple's move away from wired syncing and with an unlimited 3G data connection the Apple podcast app seemed like a goodun'. But the Apple podcast app is arse. It crashes incessantly sits there saying "preparing to download" but does nothing and then won't download new podcasts over wifi. Instead downloading over 3G. Which, with an unlimited connection, is OK, but in the two weeks I was using iOS 6 I churned through about 4GB of data. having come from my Samsung Nexus S and the relative ease of Beyond Pod - my pod catching app of choice, it was a wee bit of a downer.

The second fail should come as no surprise to anyone following these things. The removal of Google Maps on iOS and its subsequent replacement with a piss poor attempt at mapping by Apple was pretty much the last straw. Particularly irking was the lack of public transport information. OK I get Apple's idea of letting other apps deal with PubTrans but not even marking the subway lines on your map? Nah-uh! The good work done with the camera (The panorama works extremely well), mail (unified inbox, tagging etc) and even the Passbook App, which has great potential in Korea when you have a bajillion different loyalty cards, all undone by the most useless maps in the world.

Will maps improve on iOS? Sure, give it time. Hopefully they will also look at the dreadful English transliterations of Korean street names, but it leaves me in something of a quandary in the meantime, given that Google Maps has improved exponentially in Korea over the last 12-18 months.

So on Tuesday I found myself at the KT store in Gwanghwamun pawing over the display model of the Samsung Galaxy Note II, and eventually convinced myself to get one.

Now I am not one to bitch about Korea. But there are two institutions that I loathe dealing with. the first is the bank. (More on that soon) and the phone company. For a long time foreigners and phones have been an uneasy coupling in Korea. And once upon a time KT (then KTF) used to be particularly difficult to deal with. Nowadays not so much. And despite a 45 minute wait to actually get to the counter the whole process of paying off the rest of my iPhone, cancel one plan and get another only took about 20 minutes.

Minus the spanner I threw in the works.

As mentioned above, I use a lot of data, and despite 3G being somewhat slower than the new 4th generation LTE is more than adequate for my constant Twittering, Facebooking and occasionally tethering my computer to the network for a bit of Internet on the go. So I (somewhat hopefully) asked if I could get the Note II on a 3G plan. There is no technical hurdle to this sorcery, indeed I considered getting the 3G version of the Note II on the grey market. The 4G model itself defaults to 3G when it's outside of a 4G area (albeit a rare occurrence in Korea) so why not?

Simple answer - KT wants your money!!!! (Not that I am totally against that). When getting an LTE handset you have to get an accompanying LTE plan. Unlimited 3G connectivity is available on a 4G device for an additional ₩10000 a month but doesn't cover streaming of video and audio content. (No Google Music for you!)

So not happy about that. I ended up settling for the 6GB plan and will end up paying about 15 bucks more a month (including the ₩1000000 for the handset over 30 months). I have been paying attention to my data use very closely over the last three days as you'd expect - 120MB over that time so I think 6GB should be sufficient.

And golly it's fast! Opening the Facebook app for instance is great with content appearing almost instantly.

Overall the process of going into KT changing plan, paying off a handset and getting a new one was pretty easy, customer friendly and much smoother than it used to be. Unfortunately the staff don't seem overly knowledgeable about the phones their selling or the technology involved. The whole 3G/4G thing was a bit bewildering to the poor girl who had to deal with me. I dare say that is a symptom of the customers they usually deal with (i.e. normal people), and not necessarily ineptitude.

So there's a 823 word rant without actually getting to the phone....

The Galaxy Note II is a beast with a giant 5.5 inch screen, 2GB of RAM and a quad core processor. That's better specs than most low end laptops and something of a step up from Apple's A4 and whatever under powered processor is in my Nexus S. In terms of performance it's fast and responsive, the display is fantastic and despite all these power hungry elements the enormous battery lasts the whole day.

Despite its exterior being plastic it has a cool brushed metal look, and should prove more durable than the iPhone which, after I took it out of its OtterBox enclosure I was constantly panicking about scratching, denting and ultimately smashing either the glass on the front or the glass on the back. (I originally thought about getting the white version but because its plastic it does look a bit cheap. The granite titanium adamantium unobtanium (or whatever it's called) blue version looks much nicer.)

Which is not to say there aren't a few things that I am still getting used to. First of all, one-handed operation is pretty much out of the question. I don't exactly have dainty girlie hands, but my thumb doesn't stretch all the way across the screen, and there's no hope of my thumb making it anywhere near the top of the screen. In addition I purchased a Samsung NFC back and cover which means I have to open it like a paper notebook to use it, engaging both left and right hands. (Plus I when I lift the cover I expect it to turn on like the iPad Smart Cover.)

Then there is the UI. the Note II comes with the latest iteration of Samsung's Touch Wiz. He majority of my Android experience has been on fairly "Vanilla" versions of Android. HTC's Nexus One, The Nexus S, CyanogenMod 10 and Asus' ever so slight massaging of Ice Cream Sandwich on the Transformer 101. Touch Wiz has a few eccentricities that are difficult to overcome (at least after 3 days). To edit the home screen you need to first hit the menu soft key choose "edit" and then muck about with your icons and what not. The extra step there is a bit annoying. It looks yummy on the big 5.5 inch screen on the homescreen and looking through apps, but dig deeper and stuff starts to look a bit Windows 3.1. Something that looks particularly terrible is the SMS interface. Yellow and Blue on black. Yellow!

I dunno. I have a feeling that it actually looks OK in Korean but when it's in English it just looks gaudy. But after only three days I am yearning for the muted blues and grays (and occasional greens) of the iPhone's message interface.

Likewise what's with the constant pop ups of help text. I have yet to find a way of turning these off, but every time I do something like turn the device on it gives me a big long box of help text talking about data charges etc. (Something I am acutely aware of).

And in a stroke of Irony, the giant homescreen fits one less row of icons than the much smaller Nexus S. I am a wee bit anal about my android devices - they all have the same wallpaper and same arrangement of google search box, weather widget, two rows of folders containing my most used apps and then the dock at the bottom with phone, message, contacts and Camera apps. Despite the size I have to forgo my weather widget!

W.T.F.!!!??

Much touted by Samsung the Note II also include the new S-Pen, Samsung's stylus. Despite Apple's best efforts I have been a long term user of a stylus with the iPad. The S-Pen is a little cheap feeling compared to the Bamboo Stylus I use for iPad apps like Paper and Moleskine's new app. That being said, the Note II has a really cool feature, when using note taking apps you can toggle the screen input to only the stylus, thus allowing you to rest your palm on the screen and write a little more naturally. It is going to take me some time to get used to writing with it though, the Bamboo's thick rubbery, squishy nubbin being replaced by a hard plastic one.

When you pull the S-Pen from the phone it automatically pops up a note window above whatever else is open which is pretty cool. And if you take the phone and leave the pen behind it sounds an alarm after about 3 feet. That's pretty cool. What I would like to see is Samsung come out with a metal version of the S-Pen users can swap out with the standard plastic one. It may add a bit of weight, but for its size the Note II is surprisingly light.

The camera on the back performs pretty well, 8 megapixels works nicely in good light and not too shabby in low light conditions. The iPhone still beats it but compared to the Nexus S it's much better, and viewing images on the screen? Devine. Apparently it shoots 720p video at 30f/s. who cares. No one shoots video on their phones except teenagers and edgy hipsters pointing their phones at cans of PBR.

Given the data cap, I am going to have to go back to putting my music on an SD card rather than streaming Google music. Samsung's built in Music (and video) players look promising and there are some neat effects possible by hovering the S-Pen over the screen, but I have settled for a warm return to Beyond Pod for my podcasts more than anything else so far.

In a side note, the Google Play Store is now very full of content in Korea. Having launched the Nexus 7 tablet in Korea last week there is now music (shitty K-pop mostly)!and a whole bunch of movies for rent (and buy) on the Play store for between ₩1000 - ₩4000. I am very tempted to rent The Avengers to watch and test out this screen. (Then again I guess I could also just steal it, I mean acquire it through other means).

Finally the neatest feature, which is totally useless but endlessly cool, and which took me ages to figure out, is the screenshot command. To take a screenshot one simply swipes one's palm across the hole screen. Very cool... (I know, I'm easily entertained).

The Samsung Galaxy Note II is available from KT (and SK Telecom I guess) for a smidgen over 1000000 on a 30 month LTE contract.