Friday, June 24, 2005

Seoul Day 4: Made it Home

How do you know it's the 21st century? When you're making reservations for a hotel in Rome on your Japanese wireless laptop logged into a San Diego-based VPN while sitting in a cell phone factory in Korea. Weird.

I made it back safely.. but barely made the flight. There was so much traffic from Seoul to Incheon that I got to the airport as my plane was starting to board. At the ticket counter they said ticketing was closed and I had to get on the next flight the next day! But I said it was important and I didn't have any checked luggage so the called the manager and got me a ticket. Then I had to get through security and immigration in a half hour... with commercial goods (50 cell phones) and of course I got in the slowest immigration line and they tried to make me go to the end of the line and fill out more paperwork and I had to run all the way to the furthest gate to get to the plane, that pulled out as I got on.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Seoul Day 3: Soju

This is what a Korean looks like after a few bottles of Soju.Jhoney and I out on the town. Check out the innovative bar name in the background.
The nice hotel I stayed at, next door to a Starbucks of course.
Street signs...

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Seoul Day 2: Cell Phone Parts

Went to Woojeon's main factory in Yong-In today to check on the faceplates for this phone and settle some processing issues on another.
This is what a plastics molding machine looks like:

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Seoul Day 1: Eating and Tool Making

The machine below is cutting a tool that will be used for molding this cell phone's cover. It's an EDM ( Electrical Discharge Machine) and it cuts without touching the workpiece... sparks remove the material through metlting and vaporization, then the particles are washed away with the dialectric fluid shown.These are my buddies Tiger and Jhoney (not a typo) who I work with almost everyday -- it's good to finally meet them in person.
No chairs in the restaurants--not my most comfortable meal, but very tasty.

Friday, June 03, 2005

Denny's Late Night - An American Pastime

Enjoying a few grand slam breakfasts with our Younglife La Jolla kids.

We even won some good prizes at the stuffed-animal-grabber-thing.