On Wednesday, March 25th, we’ll record the one year birthday show for the SeoulPodcast.  Funny.  We don’t feel much older.  Actually, we have no idea of what to do for the show, so I’m putting it out to you as to what we should do.  You can also send messages, written or recorded, to sejong_at_seoulpodcast.com to be read or played on the show.

A long overdue addition to the SPC site is an events list on the sidebar showing upcoming shows and panelists.  I hope this relieves some tension in your day.

Oh, and if you just can’t get enough, I’ve started doing a regular food segment on TBS eFM’s “Soul of Asia” every Friday or every other Friday around 11:30 a.m.

Mark your calendars for April 7th.  Daniel Gray of Seoul Eats and the famous Eun Jeong will be amongst the folks downing gross crap when “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern” features Korea on the Travel Channel (and on Discovery Asia, too, I think).  Being one of the instrumental fixers for the program, I’m in the credits somewhere.  If you miss it you’ll likely see it over and over again, knowing how Discovery Networks repeats programming.  You can also order the episode for CHEAP on iTunes after it comes out.

Speaking of which, Dan Gray will be on the Korea episode of “Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie,” which airs on PBS stations in the U.S. at different times in April.  It may show up on iTunes as a free download in two months.

We’re going to have a live show Wednesday night, February 4, at 10.  Joining us will be Bart Schaneman (The Korea Herald), “Skinny” Steve Ward (Seoul Steves), Stafford Lumsden (The Chosun Bimbo) and Robert Koehler (The Marmot’s Hole).

We plan to talk about the relevance of the English language media in Korea, along with a good slew of news, views and other ways to waste your time.

Grab your favorite beverage and join us in the chat room.

The Golden Klog Awards, hosted by Hub of Sparkle, have settled on nominations and have opened the voting.

CLICK HERE.

Listener Kevin reminded me of something that a few have brought up.  They want to show their appreciation for the SeoulPodcast, but they either don’t trust, feel uncomfortable with or don’t have access to PayPal.

I’ve set up a very Korean solution for those of you who live in Korea.  You can send donations through direct deposit the next time you stop by your friendly neighborhood ATM.  Most all the businesses do it, so why not we?  Here’s the info you need:

Bank: Kookmin Bank
Name: MCPHERSON, JOE
Account #: 236901-04-055413

This past podcast I went on a rant about using web technologies to their fullest, particularly Twitter.  Twitter is one of those new things that everyone is jumping on board but hasn’t figured out how to make useful.  On the content side of things, I have been able to make it useful by hooking it up to feed headlines instantly to King Sejong’s followers.  Yet I hadn’t found it useful on the client side.  I found it inconvenient to go to the Twitter site and read all this stuff and try to figure out how to make it work.

So I looked for a client-side program.  Researched a bit and settled on Twhirl.  It’s a standalone program that you can have running in the background and works a lot like instant messaging software.  Unlike IM, though, you don’t have to worry about people pestering you (there always is that one person who always wants to talk while you work).

Like email notifications, when you get a tweet, it just pops up on the lower right hand of the screen and goes away.  You can configure whether or not you want it to make an alert sound.  I keep it in the background, and when I reach a break in working, I just pull it up and quickly scan what else is going on.  Depending on who you follow, it’s a great tool for information junkies like me.

It makes responding to folks a lot easier, too.  I know, I know.  The geeks just yelled at the screen.  “All you have to do is time @ plus the person’s user name.”

But I tend to misspell user names, and I’m L-A-Z-Y.

So, if you haven’t already, do the following:

• Open a free account at Twitter.com
• Click on the following links and then click the “Follow” button
  twitter.com/kingsejong
  twitter.com/zenkimchi
  twitter.com/chosunbimbo
  twitter.com/hubofsparkle
• Download Twhirl and link it to your Twitter account. 
  NOTE: It’ll likely install Adobe Air first, which is perfectly safe.
• Enjoy.

The Midnight Runner is back, and he’s sounding GREAT!  He was also kind enough to let us put a promo at the beginning of the show.  Take a listen!

I’m cross-posting this one.

We have some big shows coming up in the SeoulPodcast, and we want your participation.

Week of January 28th: Tony Hellman, Association for Teachers of English in Korea

This is a chance for skeptics and supporters to ask questions or give their opinions about ATEK.  If you have anything you want to say please leave a comment or email sejong_at_seoulpodcast.com.  We need to have all questions in by Wednesay, January 28th at 9 p.m.

Sunday, February 1st at 4 p.m.: LIVE Show about Controversial Expat Deaths

Stephanie White returns to give us updates on the investigation of her son’s mysterious death at a Korean spa, her efforts to sue the government and other controversial deaths you may not have heard about.  Is there a pattern?

Join us at SeoulPodcast.com and join in the conversation in the live chatroom.

Wednesday, February 4th at 10 p.m.: LIVE Show — The Marmot and More

Robert “The Marmot” Koehler joins us, along with Bart Schaneman of The Korea Herald and “Skinny” Steve Ward for what promises to be a great time.  Pour a drink and join us live.

The live show was a success, but we’re still deciding whether or not to incorporate it as a weekly feature.  The main kink is that I need to figure out how to get rid of the echo in my headset.  It’s difficult to speak normally with that going on.  This next show won’t be live, if you’re wondering.

Nonetheless, would you like to make live shows a regular feature?  Do you enjoy hanging out in a chat room with other listeners, interacting with the hosts and panelist on the show?  For those of you who were there for the New Year’s Eve show, did everything go smoothly?  What would you change?

Please vote and leave comments.

We’re going LIVE tonight!

11 p.m. Seoul Time.

Click here to go to the LIVE page.

A little perfect storm blasted through the SeoulPodcast HQ this past week.  Our account on our host was suspended for going over the CPU usage limit, and I couldn’t fix it for a few days because both the motherboard and cooling fan on my computer got fried.

I got the parts on Tuesday, got most everything up and running on Wednesday, and I’ve moved ZenKimchi back on to the old server so I can go under the hood and figure out how to fix these problems that have been gaining on it.  I’m loading up all the producing software at this moment so I can get the next show out, which we recorded a week ago.  It’s a good one with our friend Mike “The Metropolitician” Hurt.  We’re also planning a little Year in Review show and a big semi-live New Year’s Eve bash.

I’ll hopefully have the next show out this weekend.