Viewing Category: Personal
It's 4AM and of course I'm wide awake. My sister and I, along with all of our cousins, arrived in at the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport at around 4:30AM. The 15-hour flight on the EVA Air Boeing 777 wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, because it's relatively easy to sleep for most of it. They also had a video-on-demand system built-into each seat. The seats, which I had been dreading because I remember Taiwanese airlines packing us into tiny spaces, were actually quite comfortable for my American-sized ass. With the privatization of a lot of industries in the 23 years since I actually lived in Taiwan, there has been a general uptick in the quality of services.
Upon arriving at the Airport I was struck by how different the Visa and Customs process was from how it used to be in the 80s and 90s. I remember it being a tedious affair, with a lot of double-checking of documents and searching of suitcases for taxable goods and forbidden media--Taiwan was under martial law at the time. This time, we walked right through the "No Goods to Declare Line", and to my surprise we were already out in the reception area. As a sign of how times have changed, there was a statue of a persimmon-headed "Free WiFi" man checking his email instead of an M16-toting Chinese soldier covering the exits. Our group, consisting of nearly all the US-based cousins, immediately converged upon the statue and started to check our various Internet accounts and busting out the digital SLRs. As I learned at my Grandfather's memorial service 9 years ago, apparently our obsession with gadgets is descended from Grandpa, who had been a leader in adopting new technologies in his Church, such as the use of amplification to extend his voice to large congregations. Grandma's memorial service will provide more insights on Saturday; an English-language program will be broadcast over an FM-radio transmitter for the benefit of the English-speaking grandchildren by one of our older relatives. We are in good company.
The high speed rail system in Taiwan cuts the trip between 208-mile Taipei-Kaohsiung trip from around 5 hours to about 90 minutes for about $15. The trip would be even longer by car. We took the train to Taichung, which is about halfway between, to be met by our Dad. This was the first time I've taken a high-speed train, and it's impressively smooth. The one downside is that they don't serve the boxed lunches based on Japanese BentÅ boxes, but I mentioned this to Dad when we got home and he got some for dinner. Not quite the same, but still part of what I had missed about the place.
There are little things that stand out to me. For one thing, the Taiwanese sense of color feels just a little bit off, slightly tainted by unappetizing hues. For example, the EVA Air uniform is this kind of muddy green color that is supremely unattractive. The plastics in the appliances and daily consumables aren't coordinated in pleasing ways, which was something that I'd noticed as a kid, and still am struck by as an adult. Maybe it has something to do with the awful fluorescent lighting that is in most homes and stores, or people here just don't notice this kind of thing. Every once in a while I'm struck by an exceptional use of color and material, but in the urban neighborhood I'm in right now it is fairly rare. I'll have to ask Dad if this is a typical neighborhood (we didn't grow up here, so it's still pretty new to me). When I overlook the color issue, though, I'm amazed by the vitality of the integration between small shops, services, and homes. There is an amazing variety of freshly-prepared food that's available from a seeming infinite supply of vendors, block after block, and they all seem busy with the daily routine of living. The emphasis of design, uniqueness, and stylistic expression that we have in nominal amounts in the USA is almost completely absent in this part of the island, drowned out by the visual noise of the utilitarian concrete and tiled buildings. All the building here seem to be covered with bathroom tiles, BTW. Every house, however, seems to have a kind of luxury goods shrine where the collection of finer things resides: bottles of expensive liquor, for example. Luxury brand names are well-known here when it comes to buying gifts and showing wealth. When it comes to everyday things, though, brand seems to be less important, but I may be jumping to a premature conclusion.
There are other things. Bath towels here are not as absorbent, perhaps because they contain more synthetic content. Toilet paper is thinner and tends to come in square packages like napkins in the US. Scooters are everywhere, ridden by people of all ages and physical prowess without fear of death as a practical mode of transportation. Appliances are lightly-built and scaled-down compared to what we have in the States. And yet it is all familiar and alive. I think back of our malls and office buildings in suburban America, and it all seems so rigid now. However, there is one import into Taiwan that I've never seen before: massive displays of graffiti and other signs of tagging. I don't ever recall public displays of anarchy before, probably because the former military government's imposition of martial law would have come down harshly on the perpetrators. A more permeable Taiwanese society is apparently allowing world underground culture to seep in.
Tomorrow we'll be taking the car to Tainan, where we'll meet up with the rest of our relatives in preparation for tomorrow's memorial service. For now, I'm going to try to catch some more sleep.
After months of suspending my blogging activity for a year-long project, I'm somewhat at a loss at what to do next. I can think of plenty of things to do, mind you---getting back to work on the various productivity forms updates, for example---but I want to make sure that I'm doing the right things that will point me in a satisfying work-life direction. And so, I find myself at a crossroads. I could continue to pursue interesting interactive design work based on the last gig. I could also define a new type of design boutique based around storytelling, a theme that I've been pursuing for the past several years but haven't yet defined in a market-friendly manner. I also want to figure out how to work as a writer, traveling around and meeting interesting people as a kind of wandering design minstrel, regaling a select audience of people with ballads about people overcoming obstacles through the pursuit of their secret dreams.
As I write this, I realize that it's largely a matter of just starting somewhere and putting together some website material that explains what I'm doing in a cogent manner, taking care to highlight obvious points where I can add to the endeavors of future colleagues. But before that can happen, I will be visiting Taiwan to attend my grandmother's memorial service. I have mixed feelings about this trip because Taiwan has been a place where I have never felt comfortable because of language and cultural barriers. However, I'm optimistic that this trip will provide insight into family and purpose while allowing me to re-engage some of those old ghosts. This trip also gives me an opportunity to test my mobile office configuration, currently consisting of my MacBook Pro, Skype, some Lamy fountain pens, a Cachet 9x12" spiral bound notebook, and plenty of camera gear.
Right now I'm at Gate 123 of the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX, waiting to board a 14 hour flight to Taipei, where we'll be met by one of my uncles to take the high speed rail to Taichung, where Dad will meet my sister and I. It's been 9 years since I've been back to Taiwan, and I'm at that age (40+) where I'm expected to have made something of myself either by career achievement OR by having successfully reproduced. Measuring myself on that scale, my de-facto age is probably more like 28 :-)
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It's Media Sneak Peek Day at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center (IHMEC), an international world-class Holocaust museum located near Chicago in the suburb of Skokie. I've been part of the interactive development team with my buddies at Inquirium, a creative applications and learning sciences design company, for the past two years. Today is the first public look at the work we've done on Take A Stand, an open-play interactive environment that looks something like this:
I wrote about Take A Stand (TAS) when we were first defining our technology approach nearly two years ago. It's part of Youth Education Space The Miller Family Youth Exhibition, which is targeted at children ages 8-11. The overall youth space was designed to present some of the universal lessons imparted to us by Holocaust survivors; what was most important to them was that people learned that what you do now makes a difference. The YES space has multiple signs and interactive touch-screen kiosks that delivers this message. Our piece of it consists of a room that combines a motion-tracking system with a high-end PC running our custom software on a giant screen. The design of the system incorporates the lessons of the survivors with learning theory and open game play design; rather than spoon-feed morality, we've created a multi-player environment where kids can choose to mind their own business, help others, or be a bully. The interactive itself, compelling in its large-scale presentation and purposeful similarity to video games that children are already playing (the engine uses technology designed for XBox 360 indy developers), is designed to allow exploration that leads to reflection about what choices were made during play. Were you a bully? Did you just stand by and let things happen? The entire interactive experience, consisting of 3 minutes of play per cycle, is guided by docents (volunteer museum facilitators) who debrief groups of kids as they go through the game. It's our hope that by providing this kind of guided observation, kids will make the connection between what they choose to do and their developing character.
We learned quite a bit about Microsoft's XNA 2.0 Framework, which we chose for its relative maturity and availability of sample code. The XNA development environment is based on C#, which itself is based on the mature .NET framework. The choice of .NET was particularly important to us for rapid workflow while ensuring that we could keep a lid on the traditional problems with application development: memory management, stability, and ease of debugging. Although using C# and .NET meant that we were paying a penalty in performance, we estimated the loss to be about 10% over the more traditional C++ approach; we figured the peace of mind that we got from using C# was more than worth the slight decrease in speed. We also compensated by using the fastest video game PC we could spec; for an installation like this, we control the hardware platform so we don't have to worry about writing software to work on a wide variety of machines. As a result, we're hitting a solid 60FPS in our interactive, which is just awesome.
I'll be writing more about the design process as I have time. We've got a few more exhibit tweaks to make before the gala opening on April 19, which will be featuring former president Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel as speakers. We'll be manning the Inquirium exhibit well into the night. It's been a real pleasure and honor to be a part of the behind-the-scenes development for this museum, for projects that people really believe in. I must admit, though, that I'm looking forward to taking a rest after this is all over :-)
I've been spending most of my social media time on Twitter, because it offers a good balance of chatter and informal connection during the day. Unlike email, chat, instant messaging or Facebook, Twitter allows me to just skim the surface of what's going on in the world, and I can participate back without having to invest a lot of time writing. The 140-character limit to each "tweet" is also good for me, as I tend to run really long in the prose department.
The idea of the new blog is to have a place to put Twitterverse-related thoughts, to keep from cluttering up this site. It's currently at daveseah.wordpress.com, if you'd like to follow along. This also gives me a chance to see what's new with WordPress, which I still kind of miss since switching to Expression Engine about a year ago.
Although I was born in New Jersey, I spent a formative part of my youth was as a missionary kid overseas. As soon as I got back to The States for college, I stopped going to church because I didn't like the petty political aspects of organized religion. Over the past several years, however, I've been noticing that many of the "good" people I've been coming across are Christian, are not boring, and are not trying to recruit my soul so my body will pad the pews. A few nights ago I had a really excellent time chatting with a Christian friend of mine who is active in several churches, so I thought I'd brush up on my understanding of Christian fundamentals via Wikipedia. Serendipitously, I came across the mention of C.S. "Chronicles of Narnia" Lewis' book The Four Loves, which "explores the nature of love from a Christian perspective".
It wasn't Lewis' opinion that I found interesting; rather it was the Greek source material regarding the nature of love. In today's usage of the word, "love" is used as a kind of catch-all phrase. The Greek philosophers (modern Greek too, for that matter) have more words for it, describing a range of human emotional connections from the superficial to the sublime. Browsing through the concepts of agape, storge, philia and eros was very educational. And I saw answers to one of the current great conundrums of my life: the lack of a romantic partner:
what I believed
Like many single guys, I'm searching for "romantic love", but have of late been rather discouraged at the seeming impossibility of finding that magic combination of attraction, excitement, compatibility, and contentment. Part of this despair, I suspect, has been the worry that I don't really know what romantic love is. At some point I decided, like many people do, to have faith, create situations that I can enjoy and share, and above all trust my gut. However, while the gut may react strongly, it's still up to the brain to figure out what to do about it. On top of that, I think there are at least two components of my gut:
- The emotional gut, which I don't question--I'm either intrigued or I'm not.
- The thoughtful gut, which I think of as intuition. Intuition, however, is a kind of crap shoot based on what we've experienced before (finding patterns) and what our beliefs/expectations of how things "should work". Having browsed through these different love descriptions, I can see the nature of my own limiting beliefs about what "true love" is, and perhaps can now grow beyond them.
I tend to believe in authentic connections between people; a great deal of my design work and emphasis on story-based inquiry is my professional attempt to create them. Naturally, I want my partner and lover to also possess a "true connection" with me, and I very strongly identify such connections with the spirit of friendship. I have fantastic, amazing friends, and I wouldn't be a tenth of the person I am today if we didn't have that critical mutual inspiration, respect, and support. My exploration of the topic of love led me to Aristotle's deconstruction of friendship into three types: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure of company, and friendships of the good. The latter, which is described in English as "true friendship", is friendship that is based on the enjoyment of each other's character. This is really what I look for in people and in myself; everything else that is positive flows from that. As I have been blessed to have many true friends throughout my life, I expect my romantic partner to also be my true friend. Together we will create the story of our life as characters in a book of our own making, testing our mettle against negative forces and overcoming multitudinous obstacles together, secure in our love and affection for each other, and passionately living. This is the baseline of interaction I already have with my best friends; how can I settle for anything less? It seemed like a no-brainer to make friendship a precondition for romance. "It will just happen", I told myself, some 25 years ago, "if I continue to pursue my path. Whatever the hell that is."
As it turns out, there is a love style called Storgic Love that actually describes how I thought I would fall in love. Storgic lovers are "friends first" and hey, THAT'S ME RIGHT?!
I read on with great interest, frowning slightly as I read the final paragraph:
Some advantages of storgic love can be the level of friendship, understanding, and intimacy in the partners, while disadvantages can include potential boredom and lack of passion in some couples.
That boredom part didn't quite fit...I don't want to settle down and live in a cottage for the rest of my life. I want to become something greater! However, because I value friendship so much, I had naturally settled into this pattern and ran into a massive internal conflict: because I value "true friendship"--that is, friendship based on character--I perceived other love styles as a failure of motive .
Let me explain myself: There are a lot of women who I find sexually enticing, cute, and so on, but to me character is everything. I am just not interested until I see the evidence of it. Once glimpsed, it takes time to draw out the subtleties across multiple interactions. Interests, behaviors, and physical appearance are somewhat secondary in importance; and it's the inner beauty and idiosyncrasies of a person's character, as I perceive it, that finally draws me close and captivates my heart. The giant insight is that my romantic interest tends to express itself as explorations of character, and I suppress the other "love styles" to "maintain the purity" of my quest. That tends to exclude such pleasantries such as flirting, winking, swooping in, sweeping away, and so forth. What most people would regard as the fun part of getting to know someone, but in my snobbery I thought EVERYBODY already does that...I'm looking for something more, and I'm doing things my own way! Or so I would tell myself, as I battled myself internally. My logic was that if I liked a girl because she was cute I wasn't living up to my own character values: true connections and good character above all else, because I believe everything is possible through this. It never occurred to me that I could think both. Yes, I'm dumb...blinded by principle, yet again. Maintaining such an attitude, however couched in idealism, is ultimately boring and dispassionate. This can lead to a good friendship, but not romance.
And so I come back to my two guts:
My "emotional gut" is 100% accurate at telling me when I like someone and find them attractive.
My "intuitive gut", however, did not have the breadth of experience and self-knowledge to see me playing out the same pattern over and over again, and instead assumed that "if I thought up the idea, and the idea affects only me, it must be right". Well, no, probably not. The idea in this case was: "true friendship is based on true character, therefore my romantic search will be strictly dictated by the parameters implicit in this directive."
the moral
I still feel kind of dumb right now, but at the same time I feel a sense of relief because I've identified a limited thought pattern. Now that I know it, I can break it and replace it with something less boring.
I know what my real romantic directive is: It's far better to live in character than to merely search for it. This follows naturally from my belief that when you put that energy out there, people can actually tell that you have it. After all, attraction of character needs to work both ways.
The role I want to play in the world is as a connector of true passions, to have the freedom to let allow random aspects of life catch my eye, and create the situations where passion and living can express themselves at a higher level. That's what great design is. That's what productivity is. That is what inspiration and empowerment mean to me. And next time I see these qualities embodied in a pretty girl, I will need to remember that although character is super sexy, it's just as awesome to tell a woman how beautiful she is in a meaningful, creative way. Even if she already knows it.
If you were paying attention, you might have noticed that I said there were TWO great conundrums in my life. The other one is the missing sense of mission, but I think I stumbled upon it while writing the previous paragraph. And I feel that I have to give Christianity some props for that; the entry for Holy Spirit, a concept I used to have difficulty accepting when I thought it meant a literal ghost flying around inhabiting people, had this tidbit (emphasis mine):
The first overt appearance of the Holy Spirit in Christian theology is in the words of Jesus, speaking to his disciples (John 14:15-18) shortly before his death. He characterizes the Holy Spirit to them as the 'Spirit of Truth'.
Further reading leads right back to the notion of agape, which is a kind of love that benefits the world we live in. It starts with you and me, and perhaps it can be expressed through the creation of more awesome design and the telling of each other's stories. Everyone, I believe, has a true way to express this kind of positivity and joy, if they can only find the means through which they can see just how possible it is. The trick is finding it authentically, but that will be a post for another day.
