Some TED presentations are inspiring and challenge you to do something. Others are funny and entertaining… And still others are just beautiful to listen to. This falls into the last category: So take a break. Relax. Just listen.

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the New York Times best seller Eat, Pray, Love talks about how creatives can possibly protect their creativity and themselves.

… one day [Tom Waits] was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles he told me, and this is when it all changed for him. And he’s speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, you know, it’s gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn’t have a piece of paper, he doesn’t have a pencil, he doesn’t have a tape recorder.

So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, “I’m going to lose this thing, and then I’m going to be haunted by this song forever. I’m not good enough, and I can’t do it.” And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, “Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving?” “Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.”

Vuitton. Not

Photo from a recent trip to Hong Kong.

Apple Retail Store in Hanoi

On my latest trip to Hanoi, I discovered the Apple Store here. I can’t image Steve would have come to open this one personally.

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.

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.

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.

Forum One UX Team

The mighty Forum One User Experience and Design Team. From the left: me, Matt Humphrey, Sophie Campagne, Corey Lafferty and Courtney Clark.

More for my benefit, I look back at the last 13 years in the US, and it has been quite a journey.

In 1994, August 16, I came to New York to start the Master of Architecture program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture. After I got my degree, I stayed on to teach Fundamentals of Digital Design at Columbia, and started a full time job at Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects.

In 1999 at the height of the Internet bubble, I jumped on the bandwagon and started at Cybersites, Inc. which built online communities. Cybersites was quite a ride, but it went the way of many startups and in just before 9/11, we moved to metro DC and I started at Forum One Communications based in Alexandria, VA, just outside Washington DC.

The last place I visited in before I left New York City was the Krispy Kreme at the World Trade Center to pick up donuts for my friends who were helping me move. On 9/11 I found myself driving to work on I-395 looking at the smoke rising from the Pentagon, which was a 10 minute drive from my office.

Working at Forum One has been one of the most pleasurable 6 years in my life. Forum One is a small consultancy that develops creative internet strategy for a mostly non-profit clientele. The work was deeply fulfilling and the people amazing to work with. I will miss it very much.

But now it’s time to turn the page. Another job, another continent, another blog.

Let’s see what happens.