The picture above is one of the buildings at Korea University, which I currently spend most of the day studying. The campus is especially beautiful at night, because the lights from the buildings provide artistic illuminations. I just took that picture five minutes ago, and it is getting a little late.

I had some fun video chatting with my friend Shaayk during the day. I am not sure why he is up at three in the morning, but nevertheless the short conversation was a great study break. We had some “interesting” discussions.

It also has been raining all day in Korea. We are in the middle of a rainy season, and temperatures are expected soar up once this rainy season ends. I am not looking forward to the post-rainy-season in Korea, because the temperatures can be brutally hot here.

It has been just an ordinary day. I will be picking up my repaired Cowon P5 tomorrow. The external speakers and the USB Host were not working.

Jetlag is still bothering me, but I have managed to stay awake for most of the day by drinking coffee. I expect the jetlag to fade away in a couple of days.

Now, I have been enjoying a lot of Korean cuisine as I traveled to different restaurants for my meals. So far, I have been having a lot of noodle based dishes, and I love it! The greatest part about Korea is that food is cheap and plentiful. You can count on the restaurants for serving with the freshest ingredients and quality, because there is a steep competition in the food district.

The featured picture is my lunch for today. It is a noodle dish with Anchovy based soup. With Kimchi this dish is a perfect meal, and it was only about $3 (You can also “supersize” it for about $4). I will feature more Korean food in the coming days!

I have decided to write a daily short writing entry to record my stay in Korea. I will be staying for about two months, and I will mostly be studying the LSAT during my stay. Titled “Hitting the Waves”, this writing series will cover little bits of my daily life in this beautiful, yet horrifyingly humid, country. The writings will be about 150 words, and it will be accompanied by a picture, which hopefully would be related to the writing topic.

For this first entry, I will like to mention the terrible jetlag I am suffering. I have been drinking some coffee and listening to active music to keep myself awake, but fighting a 13 hour time difference is a tough battle. On a brighter side, I was able to sleep well last night without any problems. Hopefully, I can fight the jetlag and concentrate on my studies soon.

I am taking a lot of classes that require a LOT of reading. Most of the readings are from academic journals or books, and thankfully my professors distribute these reading materials as scanned PDF documents (I am not going to reveal which documents my professor has been distributing – for the spirit of learning!). The convenience has been remarkable, because the file is portable enough to be downloaded anywhere on a computer with an internet connection (Opposed to carrying your textbook every time you try to study the material), and you can even print the documents as many times as you need fit!

The problem for me, however, is that these readings are long (We are talking over 50 pages per reading assignment), and I feel I am wasting a lot of paper by printing all of them. There are conveniences for having a hard copy of the document, such as the ability to take notes or highlight sections right on the spot. But as the academic semester moves on, I accumulate stacks of these printed PDF documents on my desk, and it creates a mess. Also, I rarely revisit these documents unless an assignment or an exam requires me to do so.

So, most of these readings are in a way one time use products, and there is a lot of paper waste resulting from the printing. I try to save paper by printing two or four pages per side on both sides, but the paper waste still accumulates nevertheless, and it’s hard to read when the text size is so small!

Initially, reading on a computer did not seem to be a quite attractive option for me, because first, I have a small laptop screen, and second, I find myself not productive when I try to read long documents on my computer. However, I have decided to find a way to make reading long PDF documents as comfortable and productive as possible.

[To be continued!]

So, it has been a couple of weeks since I visited this blue website, and I realized that there needs to be some reorganizations to get this website back into shape.

One of the problems I see is the lack of principle. DS NETS is a website of mine that focuses on current events and news commentary. View Focus aims to provide a platform for all types of opinionated discussion. Then, what is Day Mind XPression? 

I remember creating this site to get into the blogging fever bandwagon. It really did not have a specific purpose in terms of content orientation, but nevertheless I treated like an open repository of things. It could be writings, such as a short story or poetry, pictures, and moving pictures (Another fancy way of saying "movies"). If there was a principle of creating the site, then it had to be allowing myself "space" to express my innate artistic self. I think I wanted to create a personal online artistic magazine back then....

But the website started to get a little mushy. Without legitimate reason, I began adding a lot of tangential content that had less to do with expressing my innate self and more to do with featuring external content with an addition of my small critique of mine. I think this destructive trend began with the intention of creating online content for the sole purpose of getting short term burst traffic. I began losing my original voice, and Day Mind XPression started to lose its shine.

So, we have this nicely templated website that lost its identity, and I have decided to bring it back to light. It will be a slow process, because I manage two other websites. But I am going to invest some free time during off work hours in getting ride of stale contents and reorganizing the categories, so that I can put this site back on track. In the end, you will see a moderately updated website, full of artistic and expressive elements.