HappyKorean is a giant project I have been working on for the past four months or so. It is a start-up social networking site for the Korean community in Chicago (although they are open to expansion in the future), and I must say it was a grueling task to create this site from scratch – I delivered all the graphic components, front-end HTML/CSS/Javascript, back-end PHP and MySQL, not to mention the dual-language support requirement, allowing users to toggle between Korean and English at any time.

I must say, if I were the client, I would have narrowed down its focus a bit – as of now, it serves as a Facebook-like social networking site, a Match.com-like dating service, a Craigslist-like bulletin service, a Groupon-like coupon service, a Yelp-like directory service, a Blogger-like blogging software, and Sayclub/Cyworld-like group activity site. It’s a monster and they know it – I was told that it started out as a dating service, but when the traffic proved unsatisfactory, they kept adding on these features – and now the users have come to expect them. After streamlining it for them as far as they would allow, the project still gave me hell of a time developing.

Here’s my “profile.” You can add people as your “neighbors,” track your “groups,” send messages, winks, and follow blogs. If you’re intrigued or would like to hit on Korean women, feel free to sign up for the free “basic” account. Actually, for the latter, you would probably need to sign up for the charged “premium” account.

On that note, I am looking for new projects and jobs, so if you hear of anything or own a company that’s hiring a web professional, let me know!

I did not expect The Hours to be this good. Nicole Kidman plays Virginia Woolf, none of whose work I had to read in high school, Julianne Moore a 1950′s housewife, and Meryl Streep a 21st century lesbian poet. That sounds like a bad T-Rex song, but bear with me.

The movie runs three parallel plots, jumping in and out of all three until the end. Virginia Woolf, in her manic-depressive self, writes her famous Mrs. Dalloway while Moore’s character is inspired by it to attempt suicide, while Streep’s character is somewhat of a real-life version of Mrs. Dalloway. As always I’m going to stop myself here before I bore myself describing the plotlines, but the movie is chalk-full of metaphors, parallelisms and concurrent motifs – it is a great thinking movie. Every line is painfully meaningful, and when the movie finished I had to devote a good amount of time just thinking about all the elements. It is a wonderful refreshment for all of us who feel like we were forced into lives quite different from our desires; obligations and responsibilities that the adult life represents. In the face of death, one can appreciate life so much more, and the themes are well-contrasted in the three plotlines, each in its own social frame.

I forgot all about Nicole Kidman winning an Oscar for her role in this, but all acting in this film is superb. All the requirements of a great movie are there: script, acting, cinematography, and score. The eerie, Danny-Elfmanish music runs consistently through all three plotlines, and gives otherwise neutral images a somber air. A must see, and I’m glad I got to.

Perfume is a Japanese technopop group made of three girls, each one uglier than the next. Listen to them once, you’ll hate it. Listen to them twice, you’ll hate it. Listen to them a third time, and they will get stuck in your cerebral cortex and come back to haunt you every time your neurons are idle. Their music is really what their name suggests: hypnotizing, volatile (as in high vapor pressure) and frankly, a little bit annoying.

Asia has always been at the forefront of creating no-talent pop groups based on looks alone, but with Perfume, they failed in even that. The girls are not even close to being as attractive as say, Wonder Girls (of Korea), and from what I can tell from their interviews they’re dumber than my left toe, but whoever’s writing the songs for Perfume is a synth genius. It hasn’t been too many years since I started appreciating processed music (largely in thanks to Daft Punk and Infected Mushroom), but man, the vo-coded harmonies of Perfume will get stuck in your head faster than Come On Eileen.

Which makes me wonder: how did they pick these girls? Perhaps they had to pick the most bland voices so they can vocode them more easily. Now that would be quality casting.