Thomas Ross Hallock

This post covers September 23rd and 24th of my 2012 trip to Asia. Start with part 1 if you want the whole story.

Flight 5848 from Busan to Tokyo arrived at Narita Airport at 4:30pm JST. Elena got in touch with me through Facebook when I was in South Korea and wanted to meet in Tokyo during my 14 hour return layover. I was happy to oblige. I know Elena from Hojeong’s group of friends that she had when I hosted her in New York City in early 2011. I rented a phone for the day for only 300 yen (about $3.80USD) at the airport. It was a simple phone, but worked well for voice and email. Most importantly, I was no longer burdened with finding a rogue WiFi signal for communicating, which was a nice improvement over the situation in South Korea. I sent Elena my phone number over Facebook.

My connecting flight was from Haneda airport at 6:30AM, so I had the rest of the day and the whole night to explore Tokyo again. My first stop was the Tokyo Sky Tree, which had only recently opened it’s observation deck to the public. At the time of this writing, The Tokyo Sky Tree is the second tallest man-made structure in the world. For this reason, the Sky Tree is on my things I saw on Wikipedia that I want to see in real-life list.

The lobby for the Sky Tree hosts an unnecessarily large number of very polite and friendly ushers guiding people through the whole process. The elevator was massive and fast; it took only 30 seconds to lift our group to the 350 meter high observation deck. I was treated to an expansive night view of the city of Tokyo and surrounding areas. Clearly visible from this high up were the many lighted streets of the city and the endless urbanization that flowed far out into the horizon. I paid a little extra for admission to go the 450M high observation deck. The view was much the same higher up, but at times you could see ghost-like clouds blowing past just a few feet outside the window.
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This post covers September 21st and 22nd of my 2012 trip to Asia. Start with part 1 if you want the whole story.

Before I caught the bus back to Pohang, I snapped this representative photo of a deluxe spam kit for sale in the Busan bus station. The price tag on the center one is 28,000₩, roughly $25 USD. Wikipedia informs me that Spam in South Korea is actually of higher quality than spam in other countries.

The bus ride back to Pohang went smoothly. I had enough time to shower and nap a bit before joining Hojeong and her group of about 20 eclectic friends for dinner. We had yummy Korean BBQ at a sit-on-the-floor restaurant, then took a city bus across town to a beach shot Roman candles. This beach had vendors down by the water that will sell you all the fireworks you want, regardless of your sobriety. I can only assume that most beaches in Korea also have fireworks vendors. The view of all the illuminated buildings and oil refineries lining the inward-curving coast was particularly stimulating.

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This post covers September 20th and 21st of my 2012 trip to Asia. Start with Part 1 if you want the whole story.

My first waypoint in Busan was an island park called Taejongdae. Google Transit said it would take two hours to get there, so I opted to take a taxi instead. (Taxis are really cheap in Korea, by the way.) I was starving when I got there, so I had some lunch at a really dirty-looking restaurant where as far as I could tell, the only person working there was an old lady who was preoccupied with shucking some sort of onion on the sidewalk out front. The only customers were a party of old Korean guys eating and smoking up a storm. I got some kind of soup with a whole fish body in it… I discarded lots of bones and fish eyeballs, but the soup was actually really good.

Taejongdae park has a hop-on / hop-off train that shuttles people around to points of interest on a loop through the park. I had a lot to see, and the train was cheap, so I took it. I only made two stops: one at the observatory for a few minutes, and another at the lighthouse, where I hiked down to the rocky cliffs, took some pictures, and made a new friend.

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This post covers September 19th and 20th of my 2012 trip to Asia. Start with Part 1 if you want the whole story.

“포항 공대 여자 기숙사 앞으로 가주세요. 제 친구가 한국말을 잘 못합니다. 제가 데리러 나갈테니 조심히 데려다 주세요” — That’s the message Hojeong emailed me and said to show to the taxi driver once I arrived in Pohang. According to Google, it says something like “Please forward a female dorm Pohang University of Science and Technology. My friend can not speak Korean well, Please take careful I’ll get her.”

I got to the city via Korea Train Express (KTX) and transferring in Dongdaegu to the slightly slower but just as nice Saemaul train. Hojeong was my excuse for visiting Korea in the first place. I hosted her in my apartment in NYC a couple of times back in 2011; once on her way to live in Mexico for six months, and once on her way back to South Korea. She’s an amazingly eclectic and adaptive person, and always fun to be around. In fact, every time I’ve been around Hojeong, she always has an intensely diverse, interesting, and fun group of people around her, and this time was no exception. No sooner than I arrived did her Brazilian friends start giving a presentation on their country and its food, people, and culture.

I came to Korea giving Hojeong almost no prior notice, so I didn’t fault her for prioritizing her time for classes classes and tests. Since she would be in class all of Thursday, Hojeong recommended that I visit Busan overnight from Thursday to Friday. Busan is Korea’s second-largest city and is situated on the coast in the country’s southeast corner. It has lots to offer tourists: beaches, food, hiking, temples, spas and the like. Hojeong and her friends gave a few tips on how to get there and what to do. So, the next morning I took the non-stop bus directly from Pohang to the bus station that lies in the northern outskirts of Busan.

Continue to part 8 – Busan…

This post covers September 18 and 19th of my 2012 trip to Asia. Start with Part 1 if you want the whole story.

I got back to Seoul from the DMZ at about 5:30 on Tuesday, and it was time to get in contact with the next host from CouchSurfing. His name is Tim and he lives in Itaewon, Seoul’s official “international district.” I’ve also heard Itaewon referred to as a foreigner slum, a red light district for the nearby United States military base, and an easy place to meet attractive Korean women who prefer westerners. Tim, like just about anyone in Korea that speaks fluent English, teaches English to Koreans for a living. I was eager to get a first-hand perspective of the expatriate, English-teaching lifestyle, since at times I’ve considered doing it for a year just for the experience.

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This post covers September 18th of my 2012 trip to Asia. Start with Part 1 if you want the whole story.

On Tuesday, I took a tour of the DMZ area between North and South Korea through the PanmunJom Travel Center. I found the tour enjoyable and educational, and was overall surprised at how hopeful South Korea’s attitude is towards the possibility of uniting again with North Korea. I recommend taking the tour if you ever visit Seoul and have a day for it.

The bus ride from Seoul to the DMZ was down a large highway that got more and more vacant the farther we went. The DMZ area is known for its quality ginseng crops as well as an abundance of natural wildlife because of the unusually low human population.
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COEX is Asia’s largest underground shopping mall. I got there early Monday morning, just as the shops were just starting to open. I had no intention of buying anything, I just wanted to see what it was like as I had never been in any underground shopping mall at this scale. Along with hundreds of shops, there is also a Kimchi museum, but unfortunately it is closed Mondays. I wandered around, playing with the newest line of 3D Samsung and LG TV sets, eating at the bakeries and restaurants, and feeling hopelessly underdressed. Gangnam is often described as the beverly hills of South Korea; several establishments advertise plastic surgery.
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This is part three of my Asia 2012 trip report. This post covers September 16th. Start with Part 1 if you want the whole story.

The flight to Seoul was about two hours; a quick hop compared to my flight from NYC. I didn’t have much time to plan and research for this trip, and one of the false assumptions that I made about Korea was that getting a prepaid wireless voice and data 3G sim card would be a non-issue. You see, everybody knows that South Korea is the most wired country in the world because they skipped the whole plain old telephone service thing and went straight to broadband internet and smartphones. However, the Korean government requires that everyone in the country accessing the internet be associated with a resident registration number, which is fine if you are a citizen, but if you are a clueless tourist, you are kind of out of luck. There are ways to get cellphone service if you are a foreigner, but those ways take a bit of preparation and paperwork, and the processing time takes longer the duration of my visit…. so lesson learned. I’ll be prepared for this next time I visit Korea. For the meantime, I relied on accessing random open WiFi signals, of which there are many, so I wasn’t completely out of luck.
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This is part two of my Asia 2012 trip report. This post covers September 15 – September 16th. Start with Part 1 if you want the whole story.

I used the trains.jp iPhone app to figure out how to get to Haneda, which included a transfer in Tokyo Station, a endless multi-story complex that might as well be a subterranean city.
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I took all of the following photos in a small sidewalk-accessible and visible bike parking garage in the Roppongi shopping district in Tokyo.

Look closely at this one and you’ll notice that the lock on this bike isn’t actually locking anything. With the right maneuver, you can just slide the lock over the bike and wheel:

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I’ll be publishing posts from this trip in digestible installments at a rate of one per day, roughly in latent real-time with the actual trip. This post covers 14-September through 15-September.

I only had a week, weekends inclusive, for vacationing between my old job at Roubini Global Economics, and Kaplan. I structured my itinerary so I would leave my old job three hours before my outgoing flight, and would arrive back in NYC 3 hours before starting my new job at Kaplan at 9:30am Monday. I would need to maximize the amount of sleep I got on the 14 hour flight to Tokyo, so the day before my flight, I visited a doctor to see if he could do anything about the symptoms of chronic insomnia I would tell him I was experiencing. After learning a little from the doctor about how to maintain good “sleep hygiene”, I got what I came for: a prescription for Ambien.

The first leg of my trip was between JFK and Narita airport for Tokyo in a Boeing 777. I’d never been on a 14 hour flight before, and fearing that the seats in economy would be too small for my tall Texan legs, I upgraded to premium economy at the airport. The aircraft was so big inside that I could comfortably stand up in the aisle. Service from the attractive japanese stewardesses was top-notch, and the in-flight entertainment system had some version of Tetris. I slept, ate, and played. It was a good flight.

I would have 14 hours on layover to transfer through Tokyō to Haneda airport to catch my flight to Seoul, which would be a sufficient amount of time to get out and see a couple of the districts in Tokyō, at night. I got some funny looks from the immigration officials when I told them that I had no hotel arranged and would be wandering the city all night. They let me in anyway. Since the Tokyo subways stop running at about midnight, I would be getting around the city by foot and taxi, with a preference for being on foot since I was traveling light and the taxis in Tokyo are rather expensive.

Continue to part two…

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Today I was selected to be a juror on a criminal case in New York City. I can’t say much more than that at the moment. I’ve never been a juror and have found the whole process enlightening. I am missing some important days at work as we are right on the verge of releasing a new website feature. I find this circumstance a bit frustrating, but I’m still going to give this my full attention and be the best and fairest juror I can be. When the trial is over, I’ll post more.

Immediately after my jury duty is complete, I have a trial of my own at NYC housing court defending my lease at 310 W. 47th Street against my landlord’s holdover petition aimed at evicting me upon false grounds. I’ll probably do a write-up on this soon as well; it is a long and funny story.

UPDATE: 19-Aug-2012

Jury duty lasted just three days; it was over by the afternoon of 30-March. The trial was for a kid who was accused of :

1. carrying a firearm
2. intent to use a firearm
3. possessing a stolen credit card

We found him guilty on all three accounts. I held up the jury a bit because I wasn’t convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that he possessed the firearm. His defense made the case that he was framed by the police that had originally patted him down and found nothing. On the second pat-down they found the firearm underneath his rotting, smelly colostomy bag. The defense’s explanation was that the firearm was dropped by one of the defendant’s accomplices who fled the police after him and three others were stopped for questioning, then the firearm was then planted on the defendant. That seemed like a possible scenario, but there was no conclusive evidence suggesting that is what happened. My decision came down to the definition of “reasonable doubt,” which I had to stretch a bit. Nobody else on the jury seemed to struggle with this issue, which I found a little disturbing. It was interesting to have a debate over this sort of an issue with a very well-rounded cross section of the population with whom I would otherwise never have had this sort of interaction. I do feel bad for causing the judge to sentence this kid to at least several years in prison. Well, I did my civic duty, that’s what counts, I suppose.

Okay, the real reason I went to Seattle was to interview at Amazon for a developer position on their Kindle Cloud Reader project. I should preface this by stating that I am actually quite comfortable working at RGE, however I do not see my position with them as having much potential for making great web applications, which is my current career objective. That is the only reason I am looking to work elsewhere; otherwise, I am quite happy there :) Here is the lowdown on my experience with Amazon’s recruiting efforts:
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Last time I was in Seattle was about 13 years ago for the launch of the 1998 GTE Big Ride Across America. I visited last week-end (Thursday to Sunday) for a completely different reason (I’ll post on that much later), and enjoyed seeing the city again, but with a little more financial freedom. I finally got to take the Seattle Underground Tour, which I’ve been wanting to do ever since I heard about it from someone on the Big Ride. Here are some observations about Seattle from this trip:
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I just started treatment for Invisalign braces and thought I’d share this video of how my teeth will be moving around inside my mouth over the next year. If you know me well (in person), you’ll probably be surprised at how well the computer model resembles my teeth. In the videos, the “.5″ numbers on the bottom teeth indicate that the teeth will be filed down by 0.5mm to so they can pass by each other while shifting. The red marks indicate the locations of the clear handles that will be affixed to specific teeth to help the Invisalign trays grab them.

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(This write-up was extracted from an e-mail I wrote to my grandmother shortly after I returned from the event.)

Burning Man was a crazy and amazing event; words aren’t the best way to relate the experience, but I’ll do my best here.  Also, I was separated from my phone almost as soon as I got there, so I wasn’t able to take any pictures myself, so I’ll link to whatever I can find from searching on Google as I write this.

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North: 12 prongs
+---+---+---+---+---+---+
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+---+---+---+---+---+---+
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|   | O | O | O | O |   |
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+---+---+---+---+---+---+
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+---+---+---+---+---+---+
|   |   |   |   |   |   |
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|   |   |   |   |   |   |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+
|   |   |   |   |   |   |
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+---+---+---+---+---+---+
|   | | |   |   |   |   |
|   | X | X | X | X |   |
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+---+---+---+---+---+---+
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+---+---+---+---+---+---+
South: 11 prongs

On the heels of last week’s post of my implementation of Tonobeb for the web, I bring you another board game blast from my past: back in 2001, I wrote a simple minimax AI in Haskell for a board game called Octi for Kids, a simplified version of Don Green‘s OCTI board game.

I finally had some time this morning to recompile the Haskell code into a binary that runs on my webhost, so now you can play against it while it thinks:

• three moves in advance
• four moves in advance
• five moves in advance

Inspection of the url in the links above will reveal how to arbitrarily increase the look-ahead level.

The code is available here on github.