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Seasoned Sausage (for meat sauces or pizza)

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1 pound ground beef/pork
1/2 tsp sage (if you have)
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp basil
2 minced garlic cloves
1/2 onion minced or 2 T dried onion flakes
1/2 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper

Mix meat and seasonings in bowl and let set, covered, in fridge for 1-2 hours.

Brown meat in pan with olive oil, trying to keep in fairly large chunks.

Can be used immediately or frozen for future use. Simply double or triple recipe for larger batches.

This is great in Spaghetti Sauce, on Pizzas, or in Calzones.
courtesy the ovenless chef

2.14.86

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HAPPY ANNIVERSARY M&D!
Captiva, Florida March 2010

be mine busan

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A rather unannounced snow storm left Busan under a thick layer of fluffy goodness this Valentine's day. Students, staff...singles alike took to the streets as if nothing had changed. Really, the ever so brave Korean women were still sporting their stacked heels, tights and denim cut offs. For my chickadees, this was their first experience with a true snowfall.
a man covered in snow
and it was a ball
Kindly our principal let us out early to bounce around the playground. Everyone kept asking me if the weather reminded me of home, it did somewhat, but mostly I remembered the magic that follows the first flakes.
Hyunhee and I stepped out
 The quiet calm of winter that falls over you, ignites a craving for a cup of tea and a good book, perched before a crackling fire.
Yas and I join the effort to make Jemm more creative. We ended up leading the project start to finish.
Of course there was no fire to be found so I settled on fun with my students, pasteries, chocolate, tea and crafts with some girlfriends.

Happy Valentine's Day to you and yours!

Public Schools vs. Hagwons in Korea: The final showdown

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hagwon public school korea

In Korea, there are two major types of schools that hire native English speakers to teach English: public schools and private academies (hagwons). Public schools are represented by government organizations like SMOE and EPIK, as well as countless smaller recruiters. Hagwons, on the other hand, number in the thousands and come in all shapes and sizes. Mega-hagwons like CDI and YBM hire thousands of English teachers every year, while small mom-and-pop operations may employ only one lonesome foreigner. Inevitably, the debate arises over which kind of school is better to work for, and “keyboard warriors”–as they are dubbed in Korea–spill thousands of keystrokes defending their preference. I’m not pushing any opinion of my own in this post (my disappointingly bloodless answer is “it depends”), but here’s my take on the benefits of both:

Round 1: Reliability

Because public schools answer directly to the government, they have the reputation of being less risky in terms of being paid on time and having the terms of your contract honored. And while the  dangers of the shady hagwon owner have diminished over the years, the risk of getting a job with a badly run organization is real. Of course, you can minimize this risk to almost zero by doing your due research beforehand and/or choosing a major employer with a good track record. Who wins this round? I’ll give it to public schools by a hair, but it really depends on your specific school.

Round 2: Paid Vacation

Public schools typically give more paid vacation than hagwons but with less flexibility. The EPIK program, for instance, allots 18 days per year which can only be taken during winter and summer breaks. Most hagwons, on the other hand, offer a standard 10 days that can be taken at your discretion. Most hagwons do have blackout periods during which you won’t be allowed to take your vacation, but they are nonetheless more flexible than most public schools. Who comes out on top here? I say do the math: 18>10.

Round 3: Salary

Hagwons on the whole pay more than public schools. According to the standard payscale set by the public school system, a first-year teacher with a bachelor’s degree will make 1.8 million KRW per month. You can bump this up a bit by having other qualifications or taking a position in a rural province. With a hagwon job in Korea, newbies should be able to make at least 2.2 million per month, unless there are other benefits that justify a lower salary. And if you are a good candidate and can negotiate with finesse, you can often talk your way into a little more. I say this round goes to hagwons hands down–especially if you are  first-year teacher.

Which one do you think wins?
Teachers in Korea: if you could do your first year again, which would you choose?
Did I miss any big benefits or drawbacks of either?

Hacked and back to good – preventing WordPress from getting hacked again

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UPDATE 4 – In case you’re looking for the Cliffs Notes on WordPress security – or, what I learned from restoring a site:

Step 1: until you’re off of the default settings, assume that every hacker is circling like a herd of sharks. You might think that a hacker cares about how popular your site is, or how many posts you have. I’m here to say if it can happen to me, it can happen to you too. The way these things are written, they’re looking for backdoors, workarounds, and any other vulnerability they know about. Your Alexa ranking has nothing to do with the bot’s decision-making process.

Step 2: see what your viewers see. I didn’t get an e-mail alert or a notice that something was awry; I noticed a link leading to a pill site, which led me down this whole rabbit hole.

Step 3: the sooner you start, the sooner you’re done. I’ve been told you can’t plugin your way to security. That may be so – but then again, perfect security is impossible in this world. Haven’t you seen Die Hard 4?

There are many many security-related WordPress plugins out there – I certainly couldn’t vouch for them all – but these are the ones I’ve come across and/or played with during the last couple of days. Geek level 1 is turning your computer on; geek level 10 is writing machine code for hidden operating system files inside a command terminal.

  • Exploit Scanner brings back lots of false positives, but appears sensitive enough to catch hacks on a number of levels. Good for seeing whether you’ve picked something up. Geek level: 3 to run, 6 to understand the results.
  • WP Security Scan is relatively helpful for checking your current security status. There’s a built-in tool to change the prefix of your database tables (from “wp_” to something else), but I couldn’t get it to work. See update #2 for a link to a manual way that worked for me). Geek level: 4.
  • EZPZ. This is actually a dead-simple backing up tool – exactly the sort of thing you might need to do before you’re hacked, and after you’re sure you’re clean again. If self-hosted, your cPanel or other back-end server tool has some backup tools as well. Geek level: 2.
  • Login LockDown – prevent someone trying to brute force guess a password by locking them out after a number of incorrect attempts. Geek level: 2.
  • Search & Replace – a very powerful way of finding something across your blog – front end and back end. For the more geeky among us, it executes a standard SQL query, so backing up your database before starting is a good idea. Works as promised, although the result is only as strong as your input (tell it to find ‘blog’ and replace it with nothing and you’ll be finding yourself in a heap of trouble. Geek level: 4.
  • Secure WordPress (HT to Simon) fixes a lot of small, almost invisible options that only the geeks and hackers would notice. They seem like the equivalent of changing your bike lock from the default combination of ’0000′ to something a bit more random – at best, it looks to make things a little more difficult for something to hack. Geek level: 3 (the plug-in does the work for you).

A couple other tools I’ve made use of or looked into:

Step 4: it starts and ends with you. The plugins are tools – it’s how you use them that determines their effectiveness. If you haven’t been hacked, now is a great time to generate a new password and put a clean backup in a couple of different places. If you see any unusual activity, there’s quite a bit of talk on the internet about nipping it in the bud.

____________

UPDATE 3 - OK, the site is back to normal. Carry on with your normal viewing :) Older posts may have a larger-than-normal thumbnail – not sure how that happened, but it’s been manually corrected with the newer posts. I’ll be keeping a close eye on the site to see if anything else pops up, but for right now it’s time to get back to writing.

____________

UPDATE 2 – One common way to tighten up your WordPress site is to change your database table prefix. By default, it’s “wp_” – and apparently easy to hack because no one ever changes it. I owe thanks to Semfer Fi Web Designs for providing some excellent directions for accomplishing manually. The geek scale is about a 8 1/2 – somewhere between editing theme files and writing one of your own.

The bottom line: changing your database table prefix to a random string of numbers and letters is equivalent to ripping out that crappy window lock and installing a brand-new deadbolt. It doesn’t clean up the mess in the house, but it prevents someone else from getting in without a lot of work.

_____________

UPDATE 1 – I’ve done my best to nuke the offending links (and most of the text) through searching-and-replacing on the backend. If you see anything wonky, let me know ASAP. If this happens again, I can always nuke it altogether and re-upload what needs to be uploaded. FWIW, this sucks.

______________

Well, folks, it looks like some nefarious hacker has had their way, and my site has gotten hacked. Thanks to a vulnerability in WordPress, PHP, some other coding thing, or the guy sitting behind the keyboard, virtually every post from the beginning to a couple days ago has a randomly-inserted link to an online pharmaceutical website. I’ve gone into full-cleanup mode, changing password, disabling things, yadda yadda yadda – so bear with the site for the next few days. If you see any weird links, DON’T CLICK ON THEM. Your feeds are fine, your computers are fine (well, at least my blog didn’t infect it with anything), and your visits are fine. If you see anything exceptionally wonky, e-mail me at chrisinsouthkorea AT gmail DOT com. I’ll try to have everything sorted out in the next few days to a week.

Creative Commons License © Chris Backe – 2011

This post was originally published on my blog ,Chris in South Korea. If you are reading this on another website and there is no linkback or credit given, you are reading an UNAUTHORIZED FEED.

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What's a "gyopo" anyways?

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For those who are not Korean, "gyopo" is a strange sounding word
Simply put, gyopo is someone of Korean descent that originates outside of Korea.  This LA Times article, written almost exactly a year ago, describes a writer's view of what being a gyopo in Korea is like.  Personally, I found the article very different from my own experiences.  Here is what I found.

Native Koreans Aren't Angry That Gyopos Aren't Fluent in Korean
In the LA Times article, this quote appeared.
Kang said many South Koreans expect gyopo to possess considerable cultural and linguistic competency. As a result, he said, "the number of culture clashes and number of taxi drivers yelling at these kids is legendary."
I never found this to be the case in many years while living in Korea.  Instead, I simply said, in broken Korean, something that translates to "I am sorry but my Korean is not good.  I am an American, and studied Korean."  Most frequently, the answer I received was "Your Korean is good.  (It isn't)"  The notion that taxicab drivers in Korea are more rude than in other nations is a strange one:  Korean cab drivers are the same as any other countries' cab drivers.  Some are nice, some are not.  Uh, that sounds like Korean cab drivers are humans.

Certain Natives Are Jealous Which Looks Like Anger
Native Koreans less confident in themselves may seem condescending to gyopos.  In this respect, the article is quite true.  However, I would suggest that it is really due to the fact that many Koreans, especially Korean ajummas, are particularly sensitive due to the fact that a gyopo has lived outside of Korea, which is where they want to send their children.   I have been talked about (in Korean) by certain people in Korea, who mocked my broken Korean, with comments like "I have a degree from the U.S. also."  Those people are in the minority.

Gyopos Are Unfairly Treated By Hagwons/English Education Providers
Now this, I cannot understand.  The article is correct:  gyopos are disqualified from many English teaching roles.  My post regarding this topic is here.  It merely points out one thing:  Korea still has a long way to go to be a true meritocracy.  While no nation is perfect, this is a societal issue, in my view. 

Why Does Any of This Matter?
Korea is small geographically, and has a relatively small population.  Therein lies the problem.  As many people know, Jewish people around the world influence a great amount of financial capital throughout the world.  One day, I was asked by a Jewish friend of mine, "How many Jews in the world do you think there are?"  Embarrassingly, I believed the number was approximately 50,000,000, similar to the population of South Korea.  WRONG.  At that time, there were 7,000,000.  Do you think that this amount of clout was earned by 7,000,000 people all acting independently?  WRONG AGAIN.  Does this mean that all 7,000,000 are friends?  Most definitely not.
Why would I make a comparison to the Jewish population?  Well, the Jewish population is under constant threat of extinction and has survived many threats throughout history.  Holocaust survivors (yes, there was such a thing) are still living today.  Jews have been subjected to prison based on race, and lived through war. Does this sound like any other group of people?  You bet:  Koreans.
Of course, there is competition among individuals.  That is natural.  However, the fact that there is this stigma of being a gyopo, and that it would potentially prevent cooperation amongst a people that are already small in population, is another example of how Korea still hasn't reached its full capacity.

Conclusions
The debate about the quality of a gyopo's life in Korea isn't going to end anytime soon.  For each anecdote, there will another, contradictory one.  To stereotype however, is dangerous, and limits Korea's progress. Surprisingly, I get asked the question "What is it like to be a gyopo in Korea?"  If you look on the internet, you will find that same question.  That it is an issue should tell readers that some gyopos have felt unfairly treated.  Even though I have not felt, overall, that this is the case. Unfortunately, it is clear that some gyopos have been.


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www.seoulgyopoguide.com www.twitter.com/thelostseoul

in a year things change yet stay the same

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Once upon a time, almost a year ago, a girl moved to Korea to teach. She escaped one of the harshest winters of her life, yet somehow managed to bring the snow with her only a week into her stay.
Now the girl's mother has come to visit from the same place, only to bring the snow again. The only thing that seems different is that some of the buildings have been torn down.

Best part though, is that I didn't have work then and I didn't work today. Best Valentine ever, thank you!


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