After spending the last year on SquareSpace, I am finally switching over to WordPress. Spent the last month or so finessing the templates. Not quite 100% satisfied just yet, but the bulk of the design is done - I can continue tweaking for the rest of my life.

Why the switch? I’ve been quite happy with SquareSpaces, they really do have the best user experience of any blog software, with their sleek AJAX’ed admin interface/tools and inline blog entry editing, but in the end it came down to one thing: cash. In order to maintain my own domain name on SquareSpace, it’s $12/mo, or about $120 a year. I pay for maintain a server already, so I couldn’t justify the duplicated costs anymore. Another issue also: after some testing, I found that WordPress hosted on my private server is actually faster serving up the main page than Squarespace.

I am not sure hoq long the old site will remain up, but you can still access it at namho.squarespace.com.

Let me know what you think of the new design.

As a web consultant, I always used to advise clients against using such nebulous terms as “Resources”. This was due to the fact that, to different users, the terms mean different things. There was alway an ongoing debate over which is the best term: Resources, Library, Documents, or Publications. There really is no answer to this riddle. So I became a little agnostic. Call it Resource Library or Documents or whatever… just be consistent what you call it across the site. And maybe give a brief intro to what users may find there. Same thing happens around what to call the news section: Highlights, Spotlight, What’s New, Recent Updates, etc, etc.

So it is with very little hesitation and even less thought that I chose the word “Resources” for my list of links to various sites I find interesting.

Here’s a short introduction to the sites in my list so far:

• Mike Lee Mike’s a personal friend whom I’ve had vibrant lunchtime conversations with while I was in DC. He currently manages web strategy and operations at AARP.
• kottke.org A lot of Jason Kottke’s interests in design, New York and technology and mine overlap. Can’t seem to stop myself from reading his blog everyday.
• Laws of Simplicity John Maeda’s blog is more a journey on the path of simplicity than a prescriptive set of rules.
• TED conference An amazing source for inspiration from the mouths of the inspirational speakers themselves.
• Web 2.0 Asia Chang W. Kim, who is heads TNC, makers of the massively popular Korean blog software TatterTools, provides deep insights into web 2.0 technologies not only in Korea but across Asia.

In Korean:

• Eliot’s Design Knowledge Eliot Bu is a very close friend and CEO at Jina Architects, Korea whom I’ve known since college and spent long nights discussing architecture while at we were attending Columbia. An amazing architect, businessman and thinker.
• UX Factory I had the pleasure of meeting the insightful and energetic Reagan Hwang, one of the founders/contributors of this User Experience blog. He intends this blog to be a place that brings UX professionals in Korea together.
• PRAK’s Blog PRAK, unlike his mysterious photo that make many readers think otherwise, is about my age. He write in-depth commentary on the state of web 2.0 developments in Korea and elsewhere.
• DIGITYPO A colleague at VINYL, Kang Seul-ki writes about interactive design.
• Monoukee Another colleague at VINYL, Han Dong-ho and I have lunch every week and he’s one of few people I can discuss anything and everything about design.

#1 Meet and connect people. I find ideas are always made better when they are shared openly. I’ve tried to invite different people out for lunch each day at work. Folks who know each other, but who under normal circumstances won’t go to lunch with each other. One measure of health is how well the blood circulates. In a company that blood is communication.

My mission isn’t limited to where I work. It extends to outside work. I’ve already met with Reagan Hwang of UXFactory. Interesting things happen when people with passion and ideas meet. Stay tuned.

#2 Read a book a week. This due to a convergence of two facts in my life these days: 1) there are far too many books I have bought that i have never read; 2) My subway ride to work is just over an hour each way.

Mind you I am the slowest reader I know. I typically read about 20-25 pages an hour. Which is fine, since for some strange reason, most books I read seem to have chapters that are about that length.

My pile of unread book fall into roughly 3 categories:

• Architecture theory books from the mid to late ‘90 I bought during my Columbia Master of Architecture days.
• Internet, information architecture books I bought between 2001-2006 during my web consulting years at Forum One.
• Business of design books I bought recently.

So far it has gone pretty well. In the first month of 2008 I have read:

Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, by Manfredo Tafuri. This small but heavy theory book was on the list of required reading for my M.Arch course. I still don’t have enough brains to understand even a fraction of what Mr. Tafuri is on about. But I can now strike that off the list I’ve kept since 1994.

The Ten-Day MBA, by Steven Silbiger. When my wife and I were dating, I had just graduated from my masters in architecture and she was just starting her MBA. The architecture school and the business school were physically separated only by a few yards, but we were a world apart. We, at the architecture school, always had a disdain for the other. Once I lamented to a friend that the MBA students will probably make multiples more money than us, and may even become our clients. His response was, “yeah, but they don’t have any taste.” Being close to the top of an organization, it helps to have some basic business knowledge if not an understanding of the lingo. Maybe I’ll even get a real MBA one day. What a change.

Inside Architecture, by Vittorio Gregotti. I’ve been fluctuating between architecture and business/design every other book. This book I used for a paper in a class entitled, “Global Architecture” given by much personally-admired Prof. Gwendolyn Wright. I recently had dinner with a close friend from Columbia who head Jina, a successful architectural practice in Korea, He told me this book in part forms the basis of his architectural philosophy at his firm. That’s reason enough for a full read.

The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda. I also own the hefty Maeda @ Media, but this book is more readable. Also Simplicity seems to have been a trendy but bloated subject recently. If I am to talk intelligently about simplicity and why it’s not always appropriate, it’s better to keep friends close and enemies closer. Not quite sure if simplicity is my friend or enemy.

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, by David Weinberger. I saw Weinberger give a presentation at the Nonprofit Technology Conference back in April 2007. His book had just come out. I’ve been carrying it with me ever since then on every business trip hoping to crack it open, but always failing. Now I have and I am glad I did. This is by far the best book so far this year. Weinberger does a great job of summarizes the current trend toward the atomization or the “miscellanization” of knowledge and weaves a convincing argument that this mess of miscellany is now more open than ever for each of us to bestow our personal and social meaning upon it, freed from traditional sources of authority. What’s equally impressive is that he mentions the word “Web 2.0″ only once in the whole book, when in fact that is what he is referring to. But he goes beyond mere web as a phenomenon to talk about how it affects the structure and development of knowledge itself. What he provides is a framework for what makes Web 2.0 possible. More about this book later.

Map of my life

Just of fun I took the sketch in my notebook and plotted where I have lived on a world map. The size of the dots represent the total duration of my stay (14 years in Korea was not continuous) and the lines with arrows represent where I moved to and the year.

In my last days at Forum One, I’ve been trying to meet up friends (who were often clients) I’ve become close with during my time here. Mike Lee from AARP stopped by and he took some snapshots of me in my office on his iPhone and he saved me the bother (and embarrassment) of having to set up my own shots of myself in my office. Thanks Mike.

He took a photo from my notebook of all the places I have lived during my lifetime. I was tying to show each line to represent a significant move, and dots and the size of the dots to represent to location and duration of stay.

The most interesting photo he took was of the contents of my pockets. I hate carrying stuff around in my pockets so the first chance I get, I pull them all out. On this day I had a Motorola RAZR, Apple iPod, my wallet, bunch of keys, Moleskine pocket cahier and my cheap plastic I-can’t-live-without Parker Vector fountain pen. I realized that most of these things can be replaced with one iPhone. I know in some parts of the world you can pay for stuff with your cellphone, so I wouldn’t even need my wallet. Do you think they can put my driver’s license on an iPhone?

Call me old-fashioned but I don’t think I can ever replace my notebook with an electronic device. I like doodling in my notebook too much. I like leaving evidence, plus nothing compares to the sensation of flowing ink on paper.