I was cleaning up a bit on my website and someone asked me why did I choose those particular colors—mostly in grayscale. To be quite honest, I kind of followed the color scheme and layout structure from Wikipedia because I at least figured that almost everyone has already read articles on Wikipedia and I read lots of articles in there. So I thought it’d make the most familiar-looking layout for visitors to read. I also think a lot about psychology because basically, our brains have to interpret what’s there in front of our eyes and rendered by light. Even newspapers are laid out in a similar style with its grid layout, so things don’t really change but onto a new medium. As for the width size of the layout, I sort of followed kottke.org website, which is a popular blog and he posts lots of links. For some reason, I like having both nav bars at the top and bottom as I feel it’s akin to having two columns at both ends of a building, giving it a structured look and a sign that you have reached at the bottom with links you can click on or quickly go somewhere else, which is probably more likely. On related marketing news, checkout this online reputation management tool that can help you build your brand.

So, that’s how my website rolls, although I have plans to revamp the design soon.

in 1985

Future Seoul metro map by 2020

Well, time has arrived. More than 3 years ago, I anticipated that there will be a phone with a video-conferencing capability and would use wifi, which has enough bandwidth to carry out a VC conference. My post on iPhone: future iPhone for deaf people.

Facetime on YouTube:

They showed sign language at the end. Nice!

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The authors’ review of literature in the area provides an intriguing overview of the sorts of experiments that caused the authors to test the Nicaraguan subjects’ abilities in the first place. For example, they mention that cultures that use the cardinal directions (ie, “north of here”) for spatial expressions tend to do poorly if asked to navigate through an artificial system where cardinal directions are modified, but relative directions are maintained.

Yesterday, I made sure I didn’t want to miss this game as I had a feeling that Chicago Blackhawks was going to dominate the game and they didn’t want to let it slip from them. Sure enough, they won it in an overtime. Since I’m over here in Korea, the game started at 9:00 am here and there was no live video stream to be found so I kept checking updates on the www like GameCenter on ESPN and Twitter updates. Once Chicago Blackhawks won the game in the overtime, Patrick Kane was the one who scored the game-winning goal, so naturally, I was curious to see how he scored. Gamecenter said a 30 feet wrist shot from left winger Kane. I thought to myself that it must have been an impressive wrist shot from him and he does have a fast wrist shot. Someone was nice enough to post a clipped video onto YouTube. I looked at the video several times. First all, it was a hell of a shot from Kane to shoot the puck into the net from an almost 180 degree angle and the Flyers goalie thought he had the angle covered but it went past him and caught the long side post. Game was all but over. However, if you looked at the video, the rather most important play wasn’t the Patrick Kane’s sneaky wrist shot but the defenseman, Brian Campell nbr 51, who skated to the board to prevent the puck from going out of the zone and past the blue line and he then passed to Patrick Kane who did all the moves on the poor Flyers player and scored. Patrick also was the one who initially brought the puck into the Flyers zone and initiated the whole play that allowed Chicago Blackhawks to end 49 years drought since their last Stanley Cup.

My office is somewhere in there. Click to see where I circled it.

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The Thrill of Flying the SR-71 Blackbird.

The SR-71 was an expensive aircraft to operate. The most significant cost was tanker support, and in 1990, confronted with budget cutbacks, the Air Force retired the SR-71.The Blackbird had outrun nearly 4,000 missiles, not once taking a scratch from enemy fire.

On her final flight, the Blackbird, destined for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum , sped from Los Angeles to Washington in 64 minutes, averaging 2,145 mph and setting four speed records.

Gotta love how the Blackbird outran attempted missiles.

Viagra could double risk of hearing loss
| Reuters.

A new US study suggests men who take Pfizer’s Viagra (sildenafil) or similar drugs for erectile dysfunction may double their chances of hearing impairment, bolstering a Food and Drug Administration warning from 2007 about this side effect.

Wikipedia

Erikson’s greatest innovation was to postulate not five stages of development, as Sigmund Freud had done with his psychosexual stages, but eight. Erik Erikson believed that every human being goes through a certain number of stages to reach his or her full development, theorizing eight stages, that a human being goes through from birth to death.

What is unique about the stage of Identity is that it is a special sort of synthesis of earlier stages and a special sort of anticipation of later ones. Youth has a certain unique quality in a person’s life; it is a bridge between childhood and adulthood. Youth is a time of radical change—the great body changes accompanying puberty, the ability of the mind to search one’s own intentions and the intentions of others, the suddenly sharpened awareness of the roles society has offered for later life.

Though there are tens of thousands of iPad reviews already, I still feel like writing one and will be brief at that. Well, first all, iPad is unlike anything I’ve used before. Why? simply the hardware form factor of it. Every other device has a keyboard, so my brain was wired to using keyboards and to type in a rapid manner. Not on this iPad, my mind actually slowed down, altered the way I would normally compute. Okay, I just need to touch on the screen, swipe/tap something. Pause, absorb information in (combination of reading and scanning—basically looking for key points in each paragraph, from top to bottom). Then I move on to the next thing, whatever that holds my interests. As a webmaster for Google, I also looked at some of webpages and see how these look on the iPad. They all look clean, structural, thanks to a defined styleguide that we have developed over the years. e.g. https://chrome.google.com/extensions – plenty of whitespace, blue hyperlinks, one clear to action blue button, and page speed.

I had a VC chat with my parents recently and was showing them the iPad. My dad isn’t exactly very technical person but he grasped the concept of it right away. He likes to read comics, so I was showing different comics right on my iPad, also showed USA Today, which my dad subscribes to. Then I showed books and magazines to my mom. All within swipes and taps. The most important part of this is space. There are countless books, magazines around in my parents’ house and we’d have to haul them around, and re-organize again. There is none of that with my iPad.

Now, my mom’s thinking abt getting Kindle (says iPad is a bit too much for her), so she can read all the Danielle Steele’s books. But my dad will keep his USA Today subscriptions.

In this post, I’m going to write a bit of my experience traveling in the SE Asia (Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong). During this trip, I attended the Deaflympics being held in Taiwan for the first time and as a person who has played a lot of sports, I’m familiar with these especially basketball.

Before I start, I wanted to share some facts on the Olympics.  The Deaflympics is the longest running multi-sport event next to the Olympics itself and was the first sporting event for athletes with a disability. It should be pointed out that no hearing aids or cochlear implants can be worn during games as to place everyone on an even field (a bit ironic since players are always looking for an edge against each other, regardlessly). Every player would have to take their aid off before they could play. I thought that was pretty interesting. I should look into what was discussed that led to the policy.

In basketball, the United States team has won the event each time since 1949. So, I was curious about that—why was America able to win every gold medal? I sat myself in the crowded gym, and watched the United States players doing their thing. They all moved beautifully thru their warm-up drills—lay-ups, dunks, passing, and shooting. A-ha, a thought flashed in my mind. Vast majority of the players have played on some collegiate level, division III, and some of them play for Gallaudet University, a member of the Capital Athletic Conference. It’s a competitive league in the DC area and they have played the sport for almost all their life.  By the time they’re on the court against other countries, they collectively must have at least more than 10,000 hours of playing time. So, it’s not hard to see why they’d be dominant and winning games.

One point I wanted to bring up is communication. The first thing that any person with a hearing loss has to overcome is communication. For that, we have sign language. I may be biased but I believe that American Sign Language is a well-established language, capable of expressing abstract thoughts and is easy to understand, (at least to me). So, when I looked at the U.S. basketball team in a huddle, it’s obvious to me that players readily understood their coach, getting constructive feedbacks and strategies on the upcoming plays. They had a plan after they came out of a huddle and then executed the plays. Communication was a factor, I thought. Then, I looked at the other team–Taiwan. There was minimal sign language going on and the coach didn’t know any sign language and was using an interpreter to communicate with their players. Taiwanese players had to look at both the coach and the interpreter at the same time. I didn’t see any play drawn up or discussed. From what I can surmise, the coach was just telling the players to move their feet, guard more closely, watch out for certain players and rebound the ball. That was probably the entire dialogue like what you would try to tell to your J.V. players in the middle school. They got out of the huddle, onto the court, and then got themselves blocked, screened, out-rebounded, and out-executed by the U.S. players. Final score: 82 to 44.

My argument is I think sign language is really important and I can only wish for all other players to have same kind of access that those U.S. basketball players had. There is another problem, though, they’d need to install a basketball rim in their backyard to catch up with the playing time total.

It seems that I’m doing a lot of thinking and reading, so I suppose that’s good. One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is human capital and I believe that is what it’s going to set us apart from others when it comes to hiring and productivity—our levels of human capital.

So I saw this article – California high-speed rail hires CEO for $375,000.

An executive for the company that built France’s bullet trains will lead California’s high-speed rail project for a salary of $375,000, making him one of state government’s highest paid nonuniversity workers.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority board on Thursday unanimously voted to hire Roelof van Ark, 58, of New York as CEO of the $43 billion undertaking being touted as the largest public works project in the nation.

Van Ark will leave his job as president of Alstom Transportation, a role he has held since 2005. Alstom Transportation is the North American subsidiary of the French company Alstom, a corporation with $20 billion in annual sales that built France’s TGV bullet trains and employs 65,000 people.

My first thought was wow, that must be a nice sum of pocket money except the pay is actually low. Van Ark, the CEO, was earning close to a million dollars at his current position. Another thought is that Van Ark only needs to bring himself to the U.S. and his relocation expenses will be covered. How nice is that? Clearly, he’s got the human capital skill that is high in demand and the board is willing to pay him the salary.

That got me thinking and how I can raise my human capital and be more productive.