long story short, caletucker.com is no longer. it's www.roykim.net. i'm doing well in korea. i got back from vietnam okay... i'm working on making a website for my summer travels like i did for my nyc/dc trip.

man, i'm so broke. i need to get back to working. if i could just wire up my laptop to the web here i'd be okay. oh well. i need a break from work anyway. :)

i'm taking some rockin' pictures... i got 8 rolls of the velvia back from a local place (costed me $50 for development/mounting... pretty cheap by US standards), and i got about 20 of them which rock. YES! the rest are pretty good.

by the way, i changed the color scheme to demonstrate my "feminine" side. or something like that. yeaaahhhh... right.

it's one for the money and the free rides
it's two for the lies that you denied
it's three for the calls you've been making
it's four for the times you've been faking

blue - all rise

with nothing better to do (and with a big hole in my wallet i may add), i went to COEX at samsung to drop off 20 slides i selected last nights to get prints done. i quickly found out it was about $0.90 per print (ouch). double ouch especially since i wanted doubles. oh well. what can i do? i love photography =). now if i could frickin' wire my laptop to the web here so i could do some frickin' freelance webdesign i would be perfectly content. but as it is i can't even power up my laptop (incompatible power source). that should be solved when my mommy and my lil' sis come in tomorrow (they bringing me a converter thingamajig).

i soon realized after i left the store that i hadn't asked if i would get the internegatives from the slides. i'm sure they will... i hope at least.

anyhow, i decided to kill time at COEX (i didn't really want to come back to the apt). i went to the arcade and spend about $3 on games there. there were some wacky koreans doing DDR... i mean these guys are mad fast. they look kind of funny, actually.

afterwards i went to the bookstore and the music store and did as much free reading and listening to music as humanly possible. i flipped through a bunch of design books at the book store... there's a lot of fresh good design ideas in asia.

i quickly found out that blue had another single (all rise, which was actually their first single off their album) which is pretty good.

argh. i'm still torn. i have so many interests... i just can't commit myself to one thing. but i must. either that or i need to stop being lazy. i still consider myself quite a lazy person; i don't work that hard. people say otherwise, but i know better than them :P

anyway, with so much time on my hands i'm not sure what to do. i feel unemployed, and there really is nothing i can do... doh!

i found out from my semi-inebriated friend that usa won against mexico (i called him up to see if he wanted to catch a flick at coex)... rock on. go usa!

now if korea would win tomorrow that would be wacky. tomorrow gonna be a better day. i get about 9 rolls of film back from the photo store (all provia 100f i believe), so i can do some more archiving/examining. except i'm taking my loupe to the store and using their lightbox because i'm too broke to buy my own lightbox. haha.

man, i'll be spending another 70,000 won at that store over the next two days (~$55). they better give me some nice service. or some kind of discount. punks!

So about 845 pm I get somewhat bored of surfing the web so I decide to go drinking with my buddies who had been drinking since 330pm. I don't plan on doing much drinking at all (if at all... those who know me in real life... the current count for drinking has been 1). It takes me an hour to get up to the bar by Sinchon (by Yonsei University). I was told there were two of my friends drinking and one dude I hadn't met yet. Let's call my friends A, B, and C. Apparently by that time, C, who also happened to the most smashed of the group, started hitting on a table of 4 girls (3 korean and one japanese). So basically all three boys were sitting with the girls. I must stress only B and C were "macking" on the girls while A was sitting there and smoking a cig and drinking. A's korean isn't that great.

Anyhow, what am I to do? There's no way I'm going back an hour, so I decide to chill out. I decide to play the part of "american who can't speak korean" to avoid any possible entanglements. I am simply there to observe.

Well after about half an hour of bantering, the group decide to go to a karaoke room. Greeaaat. The guys in their drunken state don't do the best job in keeping the girls entertained. So after a few hours... the girls are like "we're going to leave." it's obvious they hadn't had a good time.

C, who has taken a liking to one of the girls, asks for a phone number, and gets shot down. Of course, a simple "no" would of sufficed for him, but apparently the girl felt it necessary to use the excuse that she "lost her cellphone." Oh, wonderful. B had asked them a few minutes earlier if they wanted to watch the soccer game tomorrow... he was shot down.

Now i learned the hard way that inebriated guys who had been "macking" (aka led on) for a few hours don't take rejection likely. Me and A, who was pretty much sober, had a fun time keeping B and C their voices down. They were walking around yelling curses and kicking stuff over... oh boy. We got some food. Seeing as to how we were all about $40 cab fare away, we decide to go to a DVD bang, rent out two rooms, and sleep the night off. I actually ended up watching the DVDs that were played (Blue Streak and Vanilla Sky.. that movie only gets better as I watch it more and more!)... Afterwards B told me that two people in the room down the hall from his were having loud sex.

Oh wonderful. Anyway, C was still incredibly pissed in the morning... oh well. When the subways started runing at 530 am i had a fun hour subway ride back home. I got in about 630am, took a shower, and fell asleep. But I needed this night out.

Funny thing is I'm heading up to City Hall to photograph the World Cup fever today. I might run into them. Would be interesting.

But the thing is I could see how the guys (in their drunken state) were coming off as the "assholish weird guys you meet at bar/club" type. Hmm.

Oh well. Lessons learned... let's move on! I gotta run to COEX now and pick up about 8 rolls of Provia100F. Rock on. Then I'm going to go out and start photographing people. YES!

i have just been to the world's biggest party.

i was up in the center of seoul doing some late-night photography when korea beat italy ...

... might i mention korea is ranked like 50 in the world and italy is 5?

... huge party ensued... i just staggered in from it. i burned through 5 rolls of film (another $25, sigh).

the united states has nothing that is even comparable to what happened tonight. the closest thing i can think is maybe times square for new years... but take the innocent revelers and make them into soccer fanatics. and multiply by a ton more. and add fireworks. rock on!

man, my webserver uses apache. infighting causes problems for the computer security industry.

what else is new? man, my l00nix knowledge is getting rusty. i almost forgot the shutdown command... muhaha (/sbin/shutdown -r now) ...

i also managed to ssh into the box and make mysql backups of the forums on my server. it had been about a month and i was getting uneasy about not backing them up so often.

perhaps it's time i learn crontabs? ... naw.

first it was the whole "ricky/sung/korean people" group that shut down their personal websites due to privacy intrusion. now one of the few websites i actually enjoyed reading, confessionalism has shut down due to a lack of privacy.

oigh. why can people not get a life and stop harassing people with personal sites? for the longest time, i was worried about the effect that documenting my life on the web would have on my life, so i created an alterego (caletucker)... soon i gave that up because i got tired of living a double life.

now i'm torn again. i know that it's not fair to my friends that i document everything i do on a site such as this. so i've been debating moving over my "personal" pictures to my school account.. and leaving this website as it is.

on one hand i would really like to inspire people with my mediocre works, but then again i don't want my friends having complications because of this website. so for now i'll remove up the "personal" pictures and leave everythign else up here.

btw i'm working on new layouts for everything. i'm so bored here. my mom also brought my physical chemistry book here; might as well get a head start on that this summer. and start studying for mcats.

by the way, make no mistake as to what country i hold ties to. i am a full-blooded american. people find it weird that i don't really root for korea. i mean i want korea to win, but if a usa v. korea match ever comes up, then i'm rooting for usa. koreans have too much extreme nationalism ... that is never healthy. plus i hate how koreans hate the united states after everything the united states has done for korea. but you know what? it's probably that attitude that's making korea hate us.

so "b" from my story below has commented saying that he only was conversatin' for the sake of "c." allllright. whatever you say.. haha. anyway.

yesterday basically chilled out. my mom and sis got into korea. we went out to dinner with some relatives, then i came back early 'cause i was exhausted from the soccer game the night before. i'm just chilling right now... going to visit my grandparents in a little while... then going over to coex to pick up prints. then i be hanging out with joonk, seong youn (noona), minh, and drools (mebbe drools, dunno!). i wanna head over to apgujeong or something. that would rock. joonk is leaving for hong kong on saturday. dag i'll miss that boy.

anyway, now that i have my laptop i've begun to just do some photoshop (dag i'm rusty or something). i had all these "fresh" ideas but i forgot most of them.

i can type in korean now. check this out.

똥

haha. my chopstick skills have also increased since i've been in asia.

soo anyway. yesterday i had to wake up at 6 am to go visit my grandmother's grave outside of seoul. i got back around noontime, and i wanted to sleep, but i decided to each lunch instead. then i was going to sleep before the korea/spain game, but SY called and told me we were meeting in gangnam to watch the game. long story short on THAT, it took about an hour and a half to get there. we were at this bar called "little tokyo" where we watched the game. honestly it was a boring game because spain has a tough defense and without raul their offensive power was ... crappy. plus we must remember these guys have been playing hard core soccer for weeks now and everyone was tired.

any how, after we (surprisingly) won on penalty kicks, i rushed back to daechi in a taxi to pick up my camera. i took a subway up to sinchon (by yonsei university) to join the party and take pictures once again. since we won early, there were a lot of people out, but the general atmosphere was a lot diferent until about 9 pm, when the slightly inebriated started to join the party.

the police came by around 10:30 to shut down the party. aww, nuts!

so i wasted another ... 6 rolls tonight. that means i've got about 10 rolls (maybe 11?) ... i gotta get them developed. speaking of which i need to go find a scanner to scan in about 19 prints i got developed from slides ... for some reason they came out slightly underexposed as prints (? i'm guessing it's the paper... the slides are perfectly exposed).

the day before i met up with joon and louis in apgujeong and watched the usa/germany game ... there were some ASSHOLE koreans there... an expanded story of that will be on my website later.

ok so i managed to use the scanners here at $1 a scan to scan in some pictures. note:
1.) i had to scan from the prints...
2.) the scanner sucked
3.) i have no photographic skills (haha)

therefore these pictures don't look as great as they do on slide. these are just a temporary stopgap anyway; the real high quality ones'll come out once i get back to chapel hill.


the rest are at www.roykim.net/viet_pics

comment which ones you like the best (filename). uh yeah. cool.

(fyi: each print cost me $0.90. scanning/editing/uploading these pictures cost me $4.00. so these pictures cost me $20 to get up here. that's how much i love you guys (collectively). hahahaa.)

vincentcarquest: i don't like condensed pictures
vincentcarquest: in general
thug4life royboy: ah
thug4life royboy: you like them ... big
thug4life royboy: and fat
thug4life royboy: like butts
vincentcarquest: er
vincentcarquest: and long
vincentcarquest: oops
thug4life royboy: uh
vincentcarquest: i didn't mean that
thug4life royboy: gross dude

This picture was taken on December 13th (2001, duh!). I was about to go to bed when Yum (floormate) told me that north campus looked amazing; a recent rainstorm had left behind some lovely fog. I had originally gone up to phtograph the old well on north campus, but on my way back, this scene drew my attention. I have no idea why I took this picture... guess why I like it so much. It took the least energy to take. Haha. Just kidding.

On a side note, this picture was selected to be published in some book, but I got lazy and forgot to turn in the copyright release form. Doh. Haha. I still have the release form... that still counts, right? I *could* of been published in a book? ... Oh well.