SUMMARY: Sexy pictures of oatmeal, sexy interval timers, sexy toy cat robots that store data. And, the opening realization that 2010 is going to be all about moving forward because all the visualizing and exploring I've been doing for the past five years seems to have solidified into an actual plan.
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 :-)
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:
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:
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."
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.
Although at this moment I am filled with excitement at again redefining and reframing myself, I have a big project I need to close out, and I'm going to have to refrain from blogging for at least a month. This is a good time to haul out my Pickle Jar, which I think is in the laundry room collecting coins that I find in the washing machine. The Pickle Jar is used for holding ideas that I don't want to lose, a sort of promise to myself to come back to the idea later.
Before I disappear, here's some updates on various initiatives:
I'm still working on that interactive museum project, and we're at the point where development should be hitting "full steam ahead" mode. I'm falling a bit behind on the technology side of things (I'm learning how to program 3D graphics systems) because I'm becoming familiar with the underlying development system. I'm also looking for programmers experienced with XNA on Windows, particularly on the model/shader development/animation side of things, to help out on a module-by-module basis.
One of the people I met at Starbucks teaches piano lessons, so I signed up for one to see if that will help with the Gospel Music experiment I started a while ago.
I've gotten several submissions for the freelance referral building, but I have not yet processed any of this. If there's anything I post about, it will be this.
I have Printable CEO-related updates that I'd like to make, but I don't know when I'll be able to get to them. This also includes several user submissions that I haven't had the time to virus-check, zip, and upload. The challenge with user submitted updates is that I end up having to provide the technical support for the uploads; links to blog posts are much easier to deal with.
Although the writing and blogging are activities that fill me with energy, they take a lot of time and I have to shift that to my paying work for a good chunk of time. At least afterwards, I'll have a whole new body of expertise to write about.
With the advent of Summer, I've been lulled into a feeling of well-being and camaraderie, and I'm feeling so good that I've been feeling like going on a few dates. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that I've been feeling like updating my OKCupid Profile to see what happens. It would be nice to share what I've got going on, such as it is, with someone remarkable.
It took a while to figure out how to approach this, as this is not the kind of writing I usually do. How do you make a positive impression, through text, on a smart and beguiling woman? The odds are stacked against us; I've heard anecdotal reports that women are bombarded with SO MUCH SPAM from ham-handed guys, not to mention the horror stories about outright lies about one's appearance and age that frankly, I don't see why anyone would want to use these sites at all. As a marketing channel, it's full of deception and noise. Still, for a lot of us the promise of real romance is a heady-enough draw that we keep going back to the well. A big online dating site has the appeal of playing the Lottery, with slightly better odds, if you're willing to plunk down your $19.99 a month and spin the wheel.
Here's what I wrote:
I run my design business from home, so a big part of my day is sitting outside at Starbucks every morning. This is important because it makes damn sure that I'm in regular contact with real live people, which I've discovered I can't live without.
Over the course of the last two years I've gotten to know the names of the barristas and other regulars, chatting outside while savoring out minutes together over hideously-overpriced beverages, taking the scenic route to friendship a few minutes at a time. It's amazing what stories you'll hear from your fellow townies, if you just bother to show up at the same time and same place every day.
Here on OKCupid, I don't have the luxury of helping you to form an impression of me over months of casual observation. You won't have seen, for example, that I'm an enthusiastic and warm person that says "thank you" after every transaction. You will not have seen the piles of books, toys, gadgets, fancy pens, and other ephemera I haul in every morning, so you will not have had the thought that I must be possessed of an eclectic and somewhat alarming range of creative interests. Your curiosity will not have been piqued at the sudden outburst of snickering erupting from my table, nor will you have been slightly shocked at the heartfelt-yet-kindly use of cusswords to properly convey the nature of a situation. Therefore, you will not have had your initial impression totally thrown off by the care and intensity with which I counsel my friends through tough times, measured tones punctuated by silent listening. I'm sorry that you weren't part of our committee to roast an entire pig for our first luau; we've got the equipment and costs down, and we just need a place to do it with 40-50 hungry friends. And you missed last week's symposium on how to take over the world, WITHOUT spending a lot of money. Because you're not here in the room with me, I'm just some Asian guy with a couple of lousy photos. You don't know me at all, not one tiny bit. You didn't even get to see my new scooter...it's really cute.
Now, you could take a chance and message me back, but I don't blame you for not wanting to try. There are TONS of guys, some of them pretty good-looking, that are vying for your attention. The preferred strategy, I've been told, is to carpet-bomb every eligible female with compliments and invitations to hook up. And some of you are buying into that, when the photo is hot enough, but I'm not writing to you anyway. Still, I know we all want to feel that tingle of sexual interest as we scan the photo galleries, and there's a good chance that my photos didn't do it for you. It's my fault that you can't imagine us together, and as a designer I should know better. If you've ever compared the photography in, say, "Vogue" with the ads in "Men's Health" or "Maxim", you'll see that Vogue's spreads tell stories about relationships. Men's magazines tell stories about power and utility. My photos are more like the latter: I'm showing you that I'm a pretty average guy, so the best my photos can do is help you rank my desirability based on apparent fitness, fashion, and hair.
Or you could look past that. I clean up pretty good, and I'm getting more toned every day at the gym. What matters is that you and I want the same thing: We want that breezy feeling of possibility, built on a foundation of trust and passion. We want to be free to pursue what we individually hold dear to us, and at the same time be strong "together". We both have a unique blend of skills and experiences, and it's going to take you more than just a bad photo to tell you the shape of our possible future.
I could try to spell it all out, but I'm just going to be straight with ya: I don't know what you're looking for. What I can tell you is that I will not change myself to match what I think your expectations are. That's something we will discover together, over a tasty ethnic dinner in a strange new city, pairing local wines with our favorite artisan blue cheese. We'll find it in the forest, dwarfed by ancient trees, as we hunt for unexpected treasure. It'll come out when you admit to liking something pretty amazingly crappy and embarrassing, and I'm sure you won't be too impressed by what just came out of my mouth either. We might find it inside one of those mini rooms at IKEA, as we try to balance a tricky space constraint against our desire for ergonomic nirvana. And we'll zoom by it on the road, the GPS ticking off the miles, as we search for the only North American distributor of that specialty product you suspect you can not live without. We'll celebrate our experiences with our friends and peers, together dreaming and scheming our way to a shared prosperity. And when we fall asleep each other's arms, groggily looking forward to synthesizing a better tomorrow, we'll know that what we're doing would have remained mere possibility in the hands of another couple, the shadow of a memory of a path not taken.
So why not say hello? It's a small word, easily said, that just may open the way to something grand.
The interesting sensation I had, after polishing up this essay, was that I could feel it because instead of writing what I thought women would respond to, I wrote what I would respond to. It's a narrow filter, I suspect, but I am hopeful that anyone who is so moved will be more likely to be compatible, at least on the level of personality. That's niche marketing, applied at the individual scale. Of course, I'm just a guy that doesn't really understand women, so if any female readers want to set me straight, that would earn you big karma points from me and any other hapless males that stumble upon this page.
After all the brutally excellent commentary in the comments, I shortened the essay and tightened it up. Hopefully, it is now truer to certain aspects of myself while still retaining a core of dreaminess that is important to me. Big lessons learned: anything that is not strong or is self-deprecating is automatically interpreted as weakness, aim to get the introduction, not the relationship, shorter shorter shorter, and have a call to action. I retained some of the verbosity because that is actually something that is part of my personality; perhaps the right woman for me would have the soul of an editor ;-)
Since you're looking at my profile on a computer, you don't have the luxury of forming an impression of me based on chance observation, as local people can when they see me every day at the nearby Starbucks. Therefore, you won't have noted that I say "thank you" after every transaction, nor will you have intuited that I'm an enthusiastic and warm person from the way I smile at the barristas that know my name. Your eyebrow didn't arch skywards when I hauled in that odd collection of books, gadgets, tools, and other surprising ephemera to share with my friends; the passing thought that I must be possessed of an eclectic and somewhat-alarming range of creative interests therefore didn't flit across your mind. And sadly, you missed the opportunity to sit-in on last week's informal symposium on how to take over the world--just enough of it, anyway--so we can fund our own ideas of purpose, fun, and adventure. If I'd caught you looking our way, I would have invited you to come sit with us. And that would have been the beginning of our friendship.
I'm looking for a long-term relationship with a partner who can also be one of my best friends. I realized long ago that trying to define exactly WHO that would be is an absolutely futile exercise because THE SPARK is mysterious and unpredictable. It's something we will discover together, perhaps over a tasty ethnic dinner in a strange new city, pairing local wines with our favorite artisan blue cheese. We'll find bits of it in the forest, our presence dwarfed by the grandeur of ancient trees, as we search for unexpected treasure. It'll start to come out after you admit to liking something pretty amazingly silly, both of us choking on our own laughter when I confess to something even worse. We may find it at 90 miles per hour, GPS ticking off the miles, as we seek out the only North American distributor of that specialty product you suspect you shouldn't live without. And when we fall asleep each other's arms, groggily looking forward to creating our better tomorrow, we'll know that what we're doing now would have remained mere possibility in the hands of another couple, the shadow of a memory of a path not taken.
So why not say hello? It's a small word, easily said, that just may open the way to something grand. I'm very personable. I'll show you my favorite table at Starbucks, and we can take it from there.
The rest of the profile has also been tightened up and is less wishy-washy. I have a tendency to water down the strength of what I believe in certain situations because I worry about sounding pushy. This profile will likely now become the model for updates across other online personal profiles I'm maintaining.
I don't have the energy to write a detailed report on the sessions of the day, though I will say that I did attend the "Textbooks of the Future" and "20 Ways to Woo Your Users". "Textbooks of the future" covered the ongoing efforts made by cnx.org, wikibooks, and the olpc foundation. "20 Ways" marked the return of Kathy Sierra to SXSW, which is gratifying to see after the unfortunate events of 2007. When she took the stage and said she was glad to be back, the entire audience gave her an understanding and enthusiastic cheer. We are glad to have her back; she has been one of the highlights of SXSW for me. Both panels I found inspiring.
A quickie equipment field test report:
I had several great conversations today. Looking forward, sleepily, to tomorrow.
On the flight, I had taken some notes about "who I am" so I could better figure out how to describe myself, and had a slight shift in perspective: my blog tagline isn't really accurate. If you go to the home page and look at the title, you'll see it says David Seah: Design, Productivity, Empowerment, Inspiration. Categorically speaking, these are all topics I write about fairly consistently, but the implication is that this is the "purpose" behind my writing. That and the current structure of the website has me feeling boxed in, until I realized that it wasn't that big a deal and I should just start writing again regardless of my worry of further confusing visitors stumbling across the site. Anyway, here's the shift in perspective I experienced: while I do write about those topics, the purpose of this website all along has been to have conversations. This may have been apparent all along, because the way I write tends to be conversational in the first place. One of the first comments I ever got, back when only a few people knew about my tentative steps onto the web, was from Ged, who I hadn't talked to in years. He said something to the effect that it was fun to follow my ramblings because it was like I was "right there". A few readers who have met me in person have commented (favorably, I think) that the way I write on the blog and the way I am in person are practically the same. At the time I took that as a sign that I had finally gotten comfortable with my writing, but in hindsight it might mean that I just like having conversations with people no matter what the medium.
I've never felt 100% sure about the focus of this blog, but I think I'm on the right track to say that I am pursuing conversations on topics that I find interesting, and it is the conversation itself that I enjoy. This dovetails nicely with the other shifts in perspective I've had lately:
and now:
So I've flipped a few things around for me, and it's starting to feel right. I have no idea how I'm going to boil this down into a 30-second hallway introduction, so I'll probably just go with my strengths: "I'm a productivity tool designer and blogger". Not 100% accurate or comprehensive, but enough to get a conversation rolling.
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Pre-printed Emergent Task Planners Pads now available on Amazon.com
I also have a Affiliate Store that collects things that I think are useful. I get a 4% referral fee.
The blog is now available as a Kindle subscription. Amazon sets the price (99 cents), I get 30 cents :)
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