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Original: Uploaded to Instagram on March 5, 2020

Originally posted on Instagram on September 26, 2021

Not long ago, Nupjuk! passed 1,400 active users. Assuming only a small number of them are graduate students, that means about 40% of KAIST undergraduates are using it. To mark the occasion, I wanted to share a few stories about Nupjuk! today.* [4] As of the 21st, the record for active users is 1,420. The user count has grown by about 50 over the past month. That’s much, much slower than in early March, when it was growing by 100 a day, but it’s still climbing steadily. [5] Whenever a new version comes out, the program updates on all those computers within a day or two. Another interesting thing about this graph is how regularly the number of launches drops sharply and then recovers. Sure enough, those dips are weekends. There was barely a dip on the weekend in the third week of April, during midterms, while the following weekend saw the biggest drop. [6] Macs account for about 13% of the computers on campus running Nupjuk!. That’s much higher than their share nationwide (about 8%), but lower than I expected. Linux accounts for a full 2%—roughly three times its nationwide share. [7] In March, I got an email from someone overseas asking me to sell my extension. Nothing in the email specifically identified Nupjuk!, so it seemed like a mass email sent to the developers of promising extensions. I had no intention of selling, so I didn’t reply. Thinking about it now, though, I should at least have asked how much they were offering. [8] I haven’t made any money from it, but I’m grateful that a few people have sent me gift vouchers. Some sent them just after version 2.0 came out to say how much they enjoyed using the program; others sent them to thank me for adding features they’d requested. Thank you for all the vouchers—I’ve enjoyed them, or will soon! [9] I also got an email from the student council. They were planning to gather students’ complaints about the new LMS and pass them on to the university, and asked whether they could include Nupjuk! as a reference. Of course I said yes. They also asked if I had any other feedback. I’d been so disappointed while looking into KLMS that I wrote back with something bordering on a complaint. Now that I know who’s developing KLMS, I regret that a bit. I’d assumed some outside development company had been paid a lot of money to build it; I never imagined two university staff members were handling the development themselves. I hope the student council softened my feedback before passing it on, and that the university takes the LMS project more seriously going forward. [10] Finally, here’s one of the reviews Nupjuk! received. It’s the greatest compliment of my life. * For anyone who doesn’t go to our university: Nupjuk! is a Chrome extension that makes KAIST’s LMS easier to use. KLMS was revamped this semester and still has many unfinished parts. It will gradually improve, but students who use the system every day have to deal with the inconvenience in the meantime. So I added the features shown in [2–3], along with color themes, vectorized icons, and more, to the KLMS VOD Controller I’d developed late last year, hoping to minimize that inconvenience. I renamed it, too: the new name comes from Nupjuk[1], KAIST’s mascot. Originally posted on Instagram on May 21, 2021

Last fall, after my exchange placement was confirmed, my friends and I made plans for our time abroad. We said we would visit a nearby town every weekend. But one week it rained, another week we couldn't be bothered, and we kept putting it off. Nearly two months later, the only place we'd been was Albi, about 70 km from Toulouse. Depending on the visitor, Albi might not seem like much of a travel destination. Its sights are a riverside view with an old bridge, a huge cathedral, and some strangely pruned, cube-shaped trees. I'm not religious, so even the cathedral didn't leave much of an impression on me. But I found Albi's appeal somewhere unexpected. Like many towns, Albi has a river, and it makes its sharpest bend around a lake. The park by that lake was the place for me. Calling it a park might be a stretch: the only signs of people were a path worn down by foot traffic and a few picnic tables. But that was exactly the point. It was hard to tell whether someone had made it into a park or simply left it as it was. Anyone who has seen the stories I post from time to time will know that I really like wandering around on my own. There are plenty of places to explore in a city—among the buildings, through markets, along the river—but parks are easily my favorite. Whenever I stay somewhere new, I tend to go from one park to the next, checking them off one by one. Along the way, I've developed my own ideas about what a park should be. Looking at parks in Korea, I sometimes get the feeling that the people in charge of city planning can't resist tearing out the grass and trees. They cover every flat surface with paving blocks or rubber flooring, add a few pieces of outdoor exercise equipment, and call it a park. Those facilities really can help older people, but we need parks full of greenery too. After spending my days at home or school, it's a joy to travel a little farther now and then and encounter all sorts of plants and insects in the woods. It makes me think, ‘These things exist in the world, and somehow I've been living as if I'd forgotten all about them.’ Growing up, I had a garden at home and a large lakeside park, so I had chances to learn about nature. When I think of people who haven't had those chances, living in a city where the only parks have rubber floors and perhaps not even knowing what they're missing, the feeling becomes more overwhelming. With all that on my mind, Albi's park felt like rain after a long drought. Thankfully, the friends who came with me felt much the same way, so we spread out a picnic mat by the lake and stayed for about an hour. We sat and watched the quiet things happening around us: a half-submerged log, dense shrubs with ducks gliding between them, and a dog that spent ages deciding whether to get in the water before finally plunging in, while its owner looked on. It was every bit as enjoyable as rushing from one tourist attraction to the next. The weather was still chilly then, so we talked about coming back near the end of the semester, when summer would be closer and everything would be greener. I'm a little sad we never did. Exchange Semester in France, Ep. 4 Originally posted on Instagram, June 3, 2020

This might be the weirdest thing I've ever posted. One thing that had been on my bucket list for a long time was to experience complete darkness. Whether I was in my dorm room at KAIST or my bedroom at home, whenever I lay still in bed, there was always light coming from somewhere. Right after I turned off the lights, I couldn't see anything. But a little light would creep in through the gap under the door, between the blackout curtains, or from my laptop charger's LED. My eyes would eventually adjust, and I could make out the objects in the room. I'm not so sensitive that it kept me from sleeping, but it always made me wonder what it would feel like to be somewhere so dark that I still couldn't see anything after my eyes adjusted. I could have tried sitting in a windowless bathroom with the door closed, but spending ages alone in there waiting to see whether I could make out anything around me didn't really appeal to me. The more I write, the weirder this sounds. Anyway, while I was thinking about this, I discovered that the blinds in my SUPAERO dorm room blocked out light completely when lowered. You turned a handle and they came down like shutters. Thinking back, maybe they were necessary because the region is farther north than Korea and the summer days get so long (I have no evidence for this). At night, with the hallway lights off, I lowered the blinds and even unplugged the power strip and microwave. That shut out not only all the little LEDs but also the light from the streetlamps. The room was quite literally pitch-black. After feeling my way past the desk and mattress and somehow getting into bed, I still couldn't see anything, even minutes later. When I lay there with my eyes open, staring blankly, it felt as though my field of vision was being sucked into an empty void. My hearing and sense of touch grew much sharper, as if trying to make up for my lost sight. But at night, there was no one around making much noise, so all I could really feel was touch. My brain seemed to get sucked away along with my vision, and I lost all sense of my stray thoughts and the passage of time. Doing this too often would probably be a good way to go mad, but as an occasional experiment, it was fascinating. Exchange Student in France, Ep. 3 Originally posted on Instagram on May 18, 2020

The dorm at ISAE-SUPAERO cost about four times as much as the one at KAIST. Even accounting for the relatively high cost of living in France, it was hardly cheap. Having a private room with its own bathroom was certainly a plus, but the inadequate heating (I slept in a zip-up hoodie and a lightweight puffer jacket for about my first two weeks there) and the laundry room in another building were definite drawbacks. Still, I didn’t mind the dorm much, thanks to its shared kitchen. Because room assignments weren’t based on nationality or gender, I could always meet a variety of people in the kitchen around mealtimes. Watching what they cooked and listening to them talk, I enjoyed wondering where they were from and learning what their staple foods were. Sometimes we’d strike up a conversation and end up greeting each other when we crossed paths on campus. Cooking itself was even more fun. At first, even when I shopped with a recipe in hand, I’d inevitably forget an ingredient or two and run into trouble while cooking. But over time, dishes I’d made a couple of times, like aglio e olio or kimchi fried rice, became second nature. I knew which aisles to shop in and what to cook at the same time, and everything came together smoothly. Adding dishes to my repertoire felt as satisfying as leveling up a character in an RPG. By the time I was about to return to Korea, I was even planning meals strategically so I could use up every last ingredient. Now in my sixth year of dorm life, I’d forgotten how happy it makes me to cook whatever I want whenever I want. Living in France reminded me, and I don’t think I can go back to life without cooking. If circumstances allow, I think I’ll live off campus at KAIST starting next semester. Exchange Student Life in France, Ep. 2 Originally posted on Instagram on May 18, 2020

There were a lot of planes in Toulouse. Whenever the sun was up, I could look up and see two or three contrails streaking across the sky. I figured it was a combination of the city’s location roughly halfway between Paris and Madrid and its role as a hub for the aviation industry. The latter was also the deciding factor in my choice to come here on assignment. Of all the planes overhead, one in particular caught my eye: the Beluga (Airbus Beluga XL). With its oversized head, shaped like the whale it was named after, the plane was developed to transport other aircraft’s fuselages and wings. Over time, I realized that seeing a Beluga fly over Toulouse was fairly common. Even so, the strange sight of a whale seemingly swimming through the sky—and the thought that I might never see one anywhere else—made me stop in my tracks whenever one appeared and watch until it disappeared from view. Exchange Student in France, Ep. 1 Original: Posted on Instagram on April 21, 2020

Original: Posted on Instagram on January 27, 2020

Original: Posted on Instagram on January 23, 2020