Friday March 14
 
18:40
 
Just Kill Me Now

My company suddenly blocked logmein today, which I was using to get around the ban on Gmail, and to get access to my home PC.

It shows that they must be analysing the log traffic in closer detail than I thought they were; I’m pretty sure that no-one else was using logmein, so it couldn’t have shown up in huge amounts. Mind you, with the creation of Lick The Lard, the update of The Korean Blog List, and the movement between hosting companies, I have been using it quite a lot recently.

It reminds me that nothing is private when you use company internet. If they’re looking at that level of detail, who’s to say I wont suddenly find my own websites banned because they find I’ve been logging into Wordpress and posting during the day?  Still, they’ve not blocked blogger or Wordpress.com yet, so hopefully blogs are OK.

Life is going to be mind-numbingly-boring without unrestricted internet access again… <sigh>

I have my own laptop at work, which I used to connect to a free Wifi network before discovering logmein. That free network is now gone. I’m thinking of signing up to EM Mobile broadband for 3.6Mbps or 7.2Mbps mobile internet - but that would involve a 1 or 2 year contract, and I have no idea whether I’ll be in Japan that long. I don’t like commitment ;)

Friday March 7
 
18:13
 
Eyes On Speed

Training again today - and entire day of speed reading training. You wouldn’t think that a course on reading would be hard work, but blimey, when you push yourself, it is.

I improved from about 230 words per minute and 60% comprehension to 410 words per minute and almost 90% comprehension. Pretty good improvement, I think.

The trainer recommends the Rocket Reader website for further training. Unfortunately it’s only free for 10 days. There must be some free sites out there.

Wednesday March 5
 
17:57
 
Passion and Fire

When someone talks with passion and talks from the heart, you can feel it.
 
When they can talk with passion and from the heart, and they know how to drive knowledge into your mind such that you not only get it, absorb it, and internalise it, but you don’t even realise the process is happening - that’s motivational and inspirational.
 
That’s the kind of person I want to be.
 
I forgot that for a long time, but recently I’m remembering it. It’s why I started Lick The Lard, to get people who want to lose and maintain weight but are failing, to look at their lifestyles from new angles and have “Eureka” moments, because I have presented thoughts and ideas in ways that strike home to them.
 
That desire was fired even further today, when I attended a training course. It wasn’t a boring “let’s sit in front of books” passive training course, but an active, involved session, using a variety of techniques and analogies to drive messages home. I remember sitting at break time thinking: “Damn it, do you remember when you had a plan to be a motivational speaker, Alan?”
 
And then suddenly I realised: It’s not outwith my reach. I’ve done something about it.
 
I am starting to be someone that motivates others.
 
Lick The Lard may not seem much at the moment, but I have written (on paper) pages and pages and pages of techniques, ideas, stories, angles to make people think differently, and succeed where they have failed before - assuming they want to succeed, that is. It is the start. It is a seed.
 
My plan, until today, has been thinking as far as the website only. In the other side of my brain, I’ve also had the thought of wanting to create and do something that will become an alternative career to me, something that I enjoy. I realise now that they are one in the same.
 
Done right, I can take Lick The Lard - and some of the other projects I’m working on - forward to motivate, and develop motivation into a career that fires me inside, and fires others into action.

Side not: I never realised that “outwith” is Scottish English. Just shows that I’ve not lost all of my Scottish roots ;)

Thursday February 28
 
13:10
 
A Slice Of Lemon Soju History

Searching to see whether Google has picked up on the fact that I’ve started writing again, I came across a webpage with a link to one my old posts).

Curious, I re-read the post.. and it made me smile. Ahh.. those were the days in Korea ;)

Since my old blogs are no longer public, I’m going to reproduce the post again here. A piece of Lemon Soju history.

28th July 2003: Do Koreans really have smaller penises than Westerners?

A week or so ago an American girl approached Mike and I in a bar on the pretense of interviewing foreign teachers about their experiences in Korea to ask the question: Do Koreans really have smaller penises than Westerners?

You may remember I wrote about it before. Again, why she should think Mike and I would know the answer to this, I don’t know. A bit of simple active market research would have given her her answer.

Well I think I’ve have found her answer. And thankfully it didn’t even involve looking at any guys penises. Maybe she had some intuition about approaching us after all.

Every day I receive about 100 pieces of junk mail.

In that junk mail guaranteed about 20% will be adverts for Viagra or for some online pharmacy offering Viagra or for some way to add an inch to your penis.

Every single one of those junk mails has one thing in common. They all originate in America. They are all targeted towards Americans.

I’ve never seen a single email in Korean or English offering a natural or unnatural way to extend your penis, or a way to keep it up, to Koreans.

I can only draw one conclusion from this. It’s not the Koreans who have the small penises.

Now I’m sorry if that’s offensive to any Americans, but lets look at the evidence.

Every day 20 pieces of junk mail about extending or keeping limp American penises hard.

Every day no such mail about Korean knobs.

Now you could say that America is a larger country, so would generate more mails. On the other hand, Korea has the highest internet penetration (pun not intended, but I like it anyway) of any country in the world, so you would expect a lot of junk mails in Korea.

However, even ignoring internet penetration, we can see the population of the countries is irrelevant. The USA is the third largest country in the world, with a population of about 280 million. South Korea is the 25th largest country in the world, with a population of about 45 million.

So South Korea has 6 times less people. Let’s even up the junk figure by multiplying the 0 of South Korea by 6.

Still 20 v 0.

You could also say that Korea doesn’t yet have Viagra. Fine. But even before Viagra, the ratio was the same. Now the herbal cures have been replaced by Viagra.

You could say that I don’t have a specific Korean email address. But one of my emails has ’soju’ as the domain. The other is a dot com and isn’t specifically American. I have a Yahoo Hong Kong (.com.hk) email yet I don’t receive Chinese junk about small dicks, only American Junk. My friends with Korean email addresses experience the same ratio as above.

I can come to no other conclusion than Koreans don’t need Viagra or penis extensions. Maybe it’s the Kimchi working its magic again.

And I have one piece of advice for Bush. If you don’t want the world to think that your country is full of people with small limp penises, do something to stop America’s junk mail polluting the world. Something a bit more effective than what you’ve done to stop America’s pollutants polluting the world.

Thursday February 28
 
00:24
 
Portishead Are Back

I’ve just found out that Portishead will have a new album out in April. Fantastic news.

“It’s more evil,” they say.

Can’t wait.