the World #1 Korean skaters

I've added four different videos here. They are all videos of Korean skaters.
When I started skating, I didn't even know there are elite inline speed skaters in Korea. And I wasn't even interested in figure skating and ice speed skating. Those are just sports I get to see during Olympic games or Asian games.
Now, I love all kinds of skating since Korea has the world top level skaters in all skating sports. They are just good. It's always exciting to see their all winnings and sometimes their failures.
There you go, enjoy the videos.

Korean Short track skaters


A Korean figure skater, Yu-na Kim(김연아)


Inline speed skaters, 2006 World in Anyang, Korea, Junior Women Relay Final


A long track skater- KangSeok Lee(이강석)

A fun indoor practice at Scooter's

It has been for three and a half months since we started indoor skating.
For the first two months I missed some practices and I couldn't really skate technically. It means I didn't really enjoy skating at Scooter's and there was some frustration and disappointment about my skating at practices.
Tonight, I was so happy because I felt really good about my skating.
I am getting better and feeling comfortable with crossover now.
I couldn't finish our long warm-up until last month but from this month, I manage to do so.
I tend to stop skating during the warm-up when I feel that my technique falls apart ,which causes early tiredness. But it doesn't happen to me during the warm up recently and I am also able to push and lean more at the corner. In doing so, it allows me to get steady speed during the whole warm-up with less not-efficient strides.
Last night, the floor was awesome, I always thank to skaters who clean the floor. They know how to do it properly. It's unfair that the same guys do it most of times. I wish I could do it sometimes but I actually try not to do it because I am not good at it, so I try to do something else such as getting cones and pads, putting back benches and chairs. I know that's easy one compared with cleaning the floor but at least we can skate on the better gripper floor when it's done by better guys.

Anyway, I am so glad that I am improving my technique and has begun to enjoy skating at Scooter's. I am not really serious about speed or winning races but it's always good when you feel better about skating.
Hopefully, I can keep improving my technique until the end of indoor season, so that I can enjoy outdoor skating this spring.

It's like free education

Since I stopped working last October, I have no income, so I try to spend money wisely.
In order to do that, I have been looking for free seminars or lectures instead of taking English classes which I need to pay for.
I recall three years ago, I went to a couple of free ESL classes to fill my free time. Now, things are different. My level of English is kind of beyond ESL level. I am sure I can still learn something if I go, but they don't catch my interest any more.
Anyway, I finally found something which can fill my free time. Since Tuesday, I have gone to seminars and lectures open to public in U of T three days in a row.
The first one was quite interesting and entertaining but yesterday's and today's weren't interesting as much as the first one. They were about environmental issues which I am not familiar with. That could be one of reasons I didn't get interested.
I can't actually complain about it because it's free and not ESL. But it would have been better that lecturers knew how to make their presentation interesting. Today's was worse. Some audience left in the middle of the seminar but I was there until the end. It was still helpful for me to pick up some difficult terms which I don't usually hear from my friends.
Seminars and free lectures continues until the end of March like three days every week, so I can go there and get some free education and learn more English for the time being.

Captcha lecture

Today, I went to one of free lecture series in UofT.
The lecture began a bit later than it was scheduled which was good because my alarm didn't go off and I was late. Luckily, I was able to make it in time.
I asked my friend from ISM to go together. He was there talking to a Chinese girl who's doing her computer science PhD in UofT.
The lecturer was the guy named Luis von Ahn, who invented Captcha and is a professor in Carnegie Mellon University. I was surprised that he is very young like my age. He must be smart.
Even though I am not really into computer things any more, the lecture was quite interesting and entertaining. I didn't know This reCAPTCHA system is being used to aid in the conversion of scanned images into digital text. He said that because computer OCR system isn't perfect, so it makes some mistakes while scanning some texts. So reCAPTCHA system makes us finish that job. When you type letters of distorted image, the system keeps what you typed and uses to decode some images which computers didn't recognize.



Doesn't it sound different?
It's usually the other way, isn't it?
Since the computer was invented, it always assists and helps human get jobs done. With that system, we, human being, aid computers with an ability which human only has.
The lecturer told us about another project they are doing. That is image labeling.
If you use image search on Google, sometimes you can see some images which doesn't relate to what you typed. So, the team made an online game to improve accuracy of image search.
You can go to http://www.espgame.org to figure out how people contributes to that.
How the game works is player see images and types words coming to their mind.
I didn't get the fun part of the game but he said a lot of people play that game every day.
The words were typed are being collected and used for image labeling, so you play the game as well as you support image labeling.
I found it very interesting because image labeling itself would be very boring and repetitive job like typing and you also have to pay people for that.
But with that game and the background system, they can collect data for image labeling without paying them and people can also have fun with that game.
What an idea it is.

I thought the lecture was two and half hours long but it turned out it was just for an hour.
So, my friend and I went for lunch afterwards. He said that he's learned new words today since he's not young guy to follow all new computer words.
Sometimes, computer things evolve too fast, so even I can't catch up. But we don't need to know everything about computers. It's just too much somtimes. Haha.

Tomorrow, there are two lectures open to public. I think I will go at least for one. The one which is about environment issues.

Ahn hyun soo and a bit of subtitle work

I found the video of Ahn hyun soo made by SBS, a Korean broadcasting company, on a Korean website yesterday.
Once I thought about making that kind of video and put it on Youtube to let people know how good Ahn hyun soo is but I've been just lazy to do so but not that lazy to download that video and put a little bit of English subtitle in that video and upload it to Youtube.
Here they are.

World #1 Short track skater, Korean, Ahn hyun soo

- part1


- part2


- part3 + subtitle

He broke his kneecap after he hit fences so hard at a practice. So, he had a surgery and is now recovering. The hospital said that he can get back to ice after 3 months or so.
I am disappointed that I can't see his 6 time consecutive winning at World but glad that the injury is not going to stop his skating career.

Subtitle work #2

CEO of Apple, Steve jobs' 2008 keynote address part 1

Subtitle work #1 - MacBook Air

MacBook Air during Steve job's 2008 keynote speech


< part 1 >

< part 2 >