Proving to Naver Maps that I am human

I tried to sign up for Naver Maps last week, in preparation for my trip to Korea.

I had already found out from my research that navigation with Google Maps doesn’t work as well in Korea as in other countries, because Korea doesn’t allow much information to be stored on international servers (for security reasons…due to the threat from North Korea). But I still planned to just use Google Maps, because I’m not someone who wants to just follow what my phone says when I want to go somewhere. I prefer to just explore the streets on my own, while having a map as a reference. (and Google does have the locations of all the tourist spots and subway stations)

But…last week when I tried to download Google’s offline maps for the areas that I will be visiting, Google told me that offline maps were not available for that area.

Now that was a deal-breaker. So I checked out Naver Maps, and it looks like they allow downloading offline maps. The maps are selected by region, though…we can’t really zoom in and select the boundaries of our map. So even if we only need the map for one small town in that region, we have to download the map for the whole region. (After I downloaded them, it still felt like the maps didn’t work offline…I’m not sure whether I need to actually access the maps online first or something. Still checking it out)

Anyway, this post is mainly to share how Naver Maps verified me when I signed up.

Last week it asked me the price of broth kelp.

I responded, but the server was down somehow (there was an error message saying “sign ups are not possible at this time”).

This week, I tried again and managed to sign up (on PC, without such questions...strange!), and when I signed in on the app, I received a different question, more mathematical this time!

Tell you what, if you can't read or can't count, you are prohibited from using Naver Maps. :P

A wet morning

After a spell of extremely hot weather, some rain was very welcome...

This photo was taken last Saturday when I went out to buy some breakfast. (No, not from the shop in the photo :P )

Multiple colours

After a long while, finally I have an early Photo Friday!

Guess what this is?

This week’s theme was color.

It so happened that I received this pen for attending one of the International Women’s Day events at the office. And there are six colours on it!

A better look at the pen and its colours:

A flight in flight

I think this picture makes it extremely clear that Photo Friday is not my top priority... :P

The photo theme was flight. I managed to spot a plane while stuck in traffic on the flyover one day, but due to my phone camera's flash being set, I took a few moments to switch it off before taking the photo (which I slightly regret now), and the plane was moving away by that time.

And then traffic moved, so I needed to move too...

I thought of taking a different photo, but there was no longer a chance of taking a photo of a plane in flight, so in the end I decided to stick to this one.

It is a flight, and it is in flight (as in getting away), so I think I am still well justified in using this photo. (trying to convince myself :P )

Ground level perspective

This week's photo theme was ground level.

I initially thought of snapping a photo of the ground floor of our office car park.

But I forgot all about it every time I was reaching or leaving the office...

So here's a photo taken from ground level instead.

Copy-paste at its "best"

There was an event at work, and they sent out an e-mail asking us to register if we were interested to attend. The e-mail says that the event will be held at Location A.

After registration, the calendar invitation comes, with Location B as the venue, but in the event description, they ask us to be seated at Location C 45 minutes after the start time (let's ignore the start time here...I expect it was a typo and it was supposed to be 15 minutes before the start time)

I send back an e-mail to ask whether it was supposed to be Location B or Location C. No reply, but later we get an updated calendar invitation, with the venue changed to Location A, the event description updated with the venue as Location A, but still asking us to be seated at Location C...

I was going to contact the organizer again, but decided to do a last check on the actual calendar event (they can update it without sending us an e-mail notification), and finally the location is all set to Location A (no more conflicting information!). Whew! (Note: Even the time was updated at this point, asking us to be seated 15 minutes before the start of the event)

That might have been the end of it...with copy-paste mistakes taking a long time to be fixed. But unfortunately, the worst was yet to come.

I received a reply to my e-mail just a bit before the event, in which they told me that I could go to Location C (where they initially asked us to be seated), but that the venue was Location A. ......... *speechless*

I can't even make sense of that response. It's not like these two locations were right next to each other. People going to Location A might not even pass Location C...

For those in the know (and for myself in case I wonder in future): Locations A, B, and C are the Demo Theater, Yoda room, and the Innoplex cafeteria, respectively.

Pretty things for Women's Day

In past years, sometimes there have been handicraft workshops at the office for International Women’s Day.

This year they held a beading workshop, where we could make a charm for our phone. (I didn’t know it before, but turns out that these charms are supposed to be for you to hang the phone on your wrist. I had seen them around, but I thought they were just for decorative purposes…)

We were given an assortment of beads to select from, and it was up to us to design our own charm. I love the teddy bear beads! I had selected some other designs at first (we could select only a limited number of "special" beads), but once I spotted the bears, I had to take two. Pity I couldn’t make a charm wholly of teddy bears :P

See the teddy bears?? :D (You can click on the photo to see a larger version)

I selected only transparent beads because I liked that they were all sparkly… but later I noticed that some people didn’t mix all the colours (there were shades of white, purple, and green); instead they mixed white and one other colour, and mixed transparent and non-transparent beads. Those designs looked pretty good, probably better than what I did.

They helped us tie up the end of the charm after we had completed the beading. So we didn’t learn how to do it ourselves…

For the actual day of the celebration (yesterday, 8th of March), they sent out e-mails a few days earlier, promising us heart-shaped donuts. I didn't expect the donuts to come from J.Co!

Psst...my box had the donuts in a different orientation, which didn't look as nice, so I snapped a photo of my friend's box instead.

I wondered, was this a special order? I doubted that J.Co would specially churn out a heart-shaped production just for our company... 

So I did a search on whether J.Co had special donuts for IWD, and instead found this: they had heart-shaped donuts for Valentine’s Day!

I suppose someone remembered this, and decided to order the same set for IWD! Not bad... *clap clap*

I’m putting the donut descriptions here in case that link gets taken down later:

Introducing Knitted Heart, a heart-shaped delight filled with strawberry cheese cream, dipped in white chocolate, and adorned with strawberry chocolate. If you prefer classic romance, savor Ma Cherie, another heart-shaped donut filled with strawberry cream, dipped in strawberry milk chocolate, and garnished with white chocolate & sugar sprinkle.

The donuts were given to everyone…and as usual there was a gift just for the ladies. The surprise gift is a twilly...it’s the first time I'm hearing this name, even though I’ve seen the item before. Basically it’s a long strip of cloth like a tiny scarf.

It came with a small pin on it. I don’t care much for the pin, but I like the colour and pattern of the twilly!

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the gifts this year! (as you can deduce from my post... :P )

Side note: They gave a cup of coffee together with the donuts. Not my thing...I gave it to a colleague. :P

Dustproofing with hair

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was dustproofing a cabinet.

The photo theme last week was hair, so it is the moment to share an item that I used:

The hair blocks the door gaps!

The woes of bad English

It is so hard to reply yes/no to a poorly-worded question.

For example, A is correct while B is wrong.

Someone asks whether B is correct, however you are 99% sure that they actually mean A instead of B. If you reply yes, you are the one to be blamed if they really mean B. If you reply no when they mean A, they will blame you later when they find out that A is correct.

Such a headache…

So don’t blame me if I need to re-clarify and re-clarify!

Futuristic taps

Some time ago, I noticed that one of the sinks in our office cafeteria had something special attached to it.

At the time, I couldn't figure out why we would need something that just lets water through...

But then my mother mentioned that the water flow could be adjusted to different parts of the sink.

Aha! It is useful after all!

Some time after that, all the sinks were equipped with the same mechanism.

So when last week's Photo Friday theme turned out to be futuristic, I decided that this would be a good photo subject!

(There are five sinks; these are four of them. The rightmost sink happens to the the first one fitted...so it was the one in the photo above!)