William Chong

Check out my Korean phone’s alarm clock. It literally woke me up with laughter!

Guaranteed to pick you up (imagine waking up to it) n.b.: it’s a m4a file, you’ll need Quicktime or equivalent to play.

Lots of work, will update soon. Missing you all!

Good-morning-korea

I’ve got a couple of minutes in my hotel room so thought I’d write to say I’m safe and well. 12 hour flight = read through half of Oliver Sach’s “Musicophilia” (it’s a fantastic book!)

Also thanks to body clock woke up at 5 am Korea time (9 am NZT) so got my training run in this morning, hurrah!

Here’s some preliminary observations about Seoul, Korea:

• There’s a surprising amount of signage in Chinese around here: Koreans refer to it as hanja. Perhaps its close proximity to China makes the use of Chinese beneficial for business and tourist travellers from there.
• Being in a foreign country tip #1: Don’t show off your 3-and-a-half-phrase Korean vocabulary until AFTER the person you’re talking to knows you’re a foreigner. I tried being clever by greeting the chauffeur driver with a well-pronounced “annyeong haseyo” (thanks Farm Cove Intermediate Korean classes)… but had to sheepishly shrug my shoulders and revert to English once he started asking me to fill out my hotel check-in form in rapidfire Korean! O why o why Towel of Babel….

OK off to a meeting. Will talk soon. Missing you all already!

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… for a work trip next week. The good thing is that I was able to take a couple of days of leave, so I’ve got a chance to explore the place and do some tourist stuff. So far I’ve booked myself for a demilitarized zone (DMZ) tour, and will definitely pack my running shoes to explore the city on foot. Any other sight-seeing recommendations?

I’m normally very careful in keeping my posts on this site away from work-related affairs. I work with hundreds of confidential documents and with commercially-sensitive information, so it’s generall unwise to blab about my office-time writing endeavours.

However I think it should be OK for me to tell everyone a bit about my current project. Our company’s basically been hired to fix up another agency’s bad work, some of which I’d like to share – for laughs, for serious criticism, and for a general sense of bewilderment.

Bear in mind the copy should be written for a medically-literate audience, and should normally be in a formal, scientific tone.

On the topic of diets:

“People do not have too [sic] eat as much on an organic diet as it contains more (e.g. nutrients) and tastes better.

There are zillions of diets available … Unfortunately, no successful programmeme [sic] for primary prevention has yet been established. …”

On drug adduction:

The brouhaha surrounding addiction is probably anecdotal. As the drug is a CNS stimulant like caffeine, ephedrine and amphetamine then there is the potential for people to become addicted or dependent on that feeling…

On weight loss programmes:

Calorie or point counting and weight loss programmemes [sic] (e.g. Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig) work because they are successful in restricting the calorie intake by providing tools, meals, weekly visits and support in reaching weight loss goals.

These were just a few of the many painful-to-read examples we found. I was also disappointed to also find that of the content that wasn’t purely rank opinion, poor spelling and wild conjecture, there were entire sections that were not-so-subtly plagiarised from published journal articles.

For example, the following paragraph was puzzling because it didn’t seem to be written with the audience (pharmaceutical reps) in mind…

Prevention is the first choice. It has to be our first commitment, particularly to our children and adolescents. Unfortunately, no successful programmeme for primary prevention has yet been established. We have a pervasive culture, reinforced by powerful commercial forces, that promotes eating and physical inactivity. To challenge this established culture will take strong political will and a multidisciplinary approach.

… until I discovered it was word-for-word from the first page of this article.

You could conceivably turn a blind eye to that sort of thing for primary-secondary school essays, but for paid agency work? It was worse than Noelle McCarthy, that’s for sure.

The moral of the story – don’t pay anyone to give you half-baked, plagiarised writing. You might just have to hire someone else to fix it!

Am at Sydney International furiously tapping something brief out, just before boarding call. It’s been a hectic two days and I’m on about 5 to 6 hours of sleep at the moment. The plus side is that I’ve been getting intense training to improve my writing. Discussing run-on sentences, pronoun errors, appropriate apostrophe use, writers block, the inverted pyramid, ad so on.

The minus side is that I’m tired and full-on church camp is tomorrow.

Nevertheless, I got the chance to ugly-run around the Sydney Botanical Gardens; catch the morning harbour breeze; pace fruitlessly through the tiled mezzanine layers of QVB’s toy shops; gaze slowly at the Apple store facade (mmm… candy); and eat happy Sydney food.

Happy.

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Lots of people having exam stress at the moment. I can’t say I envy any of you, though I myself seem to have caught something from one of my students. Should request they all wash their hands before class or something! So for some reason I ended up staying home on Monday and today. However, I actually did more work at home than in the office yesterday, thanks to the ability to access my work email.

It’s when your sinuses clog up that you appreciate their role in giving you a voice that doesn’t sound idiotic. Am enjoying reacquainting myself with this large music collection at home though. And I can’t say I don’t enjoy saving that driving-to-work petrol money for a better cause.

A couple of movie characters making appearances in cinemas, they all sound interesting: Prince Caspian, Zohan, Kung Fu Panda, etc. I wonder if I’ll have the time/health to go see any of them.

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Have been a little busy with work, worked overtime most every day last week to finish a big job. Consequently felt under the weather Saturday and had to cancel all my classes… but at least I’m a bit better rested now. And this week has dropped back in workload… so much that I’ve been able to catch up on mindless TV series, heh. I can safely inform everyone that Lost is pretty exciting but totally hard-to-follow if you’re not clued in on basically every season before it…

The church visits have been pretty good so far – I’ve been keeping in touch with all the people that go to different churches, and pretty intrigued by the differences in visitor treatment, doctrine and general church stuff. It’s very exciting to worship with people you don’t normally see on a Sunday, and to share and learn why each church operates the way it does.

As you can tell I’ve tried to do write-ups of the places I’ve been, though I apologise because one visit could never totally encapsulate what a church is about. Also, rating a church is never a particularly easy thing to do, since it is to some degree a subjective approach. The best compromise I could think of was to include the “You’ll like/not like this church if…” sections, giving a more balanced view. Ultimately giving an A, or an AA or whatever is a reflection of my inherent bias (as is every review), so don’t take them at face value – visit the church if you want to find out more. At the end of the day, every Christian is trying to build God’s Kingdom in some shape or form – you can either lament the fact that his Kingdom is so disparate and divided, or you can embrace what you do have in common: the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Kim’s got exams at the moment, which is pretty stressful… and everyone around is harrying away at work or study or other lifelong pursuits.

Take care everyone.

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Some tidbits:

•  Kim is learning to drive. And pretty well too, I might add – getting the hang of turns and corners and hills and valleys and parking.
• Richard had a blast in Tokyo. I still haven’t seen pictures, so I wonder if it was all a dream, or a conspiracy theory (like those people that believe the Apollo moon landings were fake).
• Haven’t done too much music aside from Saturday classes. Life is quite busy, it’s fair to say I haven’t been able to be totally selfish for awhile. Still deciding if it’s a good or a bad thing in the long-term, but so far so good.
• Having no homework is great. Don’t miss uni life. I can leave my work at the office, and so in the evenings and the weekends I can focus on things at home, catching up with friends, going out to dinner, etc.

Hopefully we can start up a weekly family dinner.

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You know,

I’ve been back in Auckland for two weeks. Settling into the double, no quadruple life as a medical writer, violinist, songwriter, and maitre d’ of the home (at least until Richard returns on the 24th.)

Some highlights:

• Running under an eclipsed sky in Cornwall Park, chasing for the control I need
• The dezoning nature of long summer evenings spent on a congested motorway
• Dinner dates with my sister over gentle Mando-pop
• Reading AJ Jacob’s interesting, thought-provoking Biblical living book (makes you question literalism)
• Friends and family, ebbing and flowing

Anyways, will try to update when I have the time. Not dead! Not dead!

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More silly names in Sydney: Ali Barber, Thai tanic, Thai Foon.

Went to lots of different places in the weekend, despite the rain. Gerald and his registered-partner Karen were kind enough to take me out and about, despite the rain. We changed the temperature by trying our luck with the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney: very, very foggy. I think one of the Three Sisters was visible for about five minutes while we were there. Also had a look at the Sydney Olympic Park, Darling Harbour on a Saturday night (think Auckland Viaduct, except much bigger and a wider selection of Floats, Loaded Hogs and Provedors). Had dinner at a place called Mamak, which served Malaysian food that I have craved for a long time. Price difference aside, if I lived in Sydney this would be a local haunt, nestled snugly in Sydney’s Chinatown area.

You know when I mentioned there were mentally uneasy people around the city? One of them, a short squat man with a backpack and a pair of DJ ‘phones, approached me whilst I was on my lunch break yesterday. The conversation was mostly one-way and made no sense. He was in essence responding to triggers in our discourse and detailing fabricated side-stories as we went along.

“Here, I’m giving you this. It’s a travel magazine, I flew there yesterday. See? That’s a bargain, $400 for 5 nights. Would you dare to that in the picture? I don’t need to jump, I can fly. You have to be careful. Where you from? Vietnam? I went there last week. Working for the Secret Jewish Police, keep it hush. You have to be careful. I tried to tell him he dropped his wallet, and got it for him. Wouldn’t listen to me, they’re all watching you, you see? Look that those two. I’d love to **** it into them, but I bet those black**** are on it, gotta watch out. Where do you work? Yeah, I work round here too. I’m the President of the company there. Those guys work for me. OK, I’m gonna see.”

I’m glad I left my wallet in the office that day, heh.

I’ve just found out our church’s missionary pastor is leaving for the US for 9 months. This is big news in a congregation of say, 10-15 people.

Might meet up with a few Aucklanders here in the next few days. Going indoor climbing with a few colleagues after work today, not long left in this city. Wonder what happens next in Prison Break.