What Am I Doing? (Feb 2008)

The Sims 2 obsession has faded (fortunately), and the words “portfolio,” “site,” and “job” have become the three most used terms in my daily mental query.

Live Site

The most significant thing that I’ve worked on this past month, I believe, was my site. On January 28 or 29, I suddenly had the motivation to start my web site with a “just do it” attitude, constructing it in public and requesting feedback. This process is moving along, and I’m glad I got started, not only because I’ve moved onto the next step, but also because it makes me realize how much work (and time) I need to put in to have a fully functional, content-rich, informative web site about me and my work. Therefore, I’ve decided to not wait anymore for this site to complete and move ahead to search for a side job.

Job and Sagmeister

Yesterday, I ordered a ticket to attend a now soldout lecture featuring Stefan Sagmeister in San Francisco on March 6. For those who don’t know (although I might have mentioned it here on Flush), Sagmeister has sort of been my hero ever since I’ve heard of him last year, when I was researching for my “Why Don’t We Care?” project. In any case, I made my first not-directly-related-to-portfolio,-site,-or-job purchase in a long time, under the condition that I get a job/side job before I go to the lecture. We’ll see how that will turn out.

Portfolio Review and Helvetica

Last Friday, a couple of my design friends and I met up to present and review our portfolios (By the way, Y.I. and T.P., the address to my main site has always been in the About sidebar). It was a very helpful experience for all of us, and I’m glad we did it. Somewhat sticking to the promise to myself, I unwrapped and watched Helvetica with my friends. Maybe it was the mentally highered expectation, but 1) I thought it was supposed to be longer, and 2) it was a different experience watching it with friends. I think caring about what others think of the film (which none of them had seen) distracted me from paying attention to the film. I shall watch it by myself next time, including the bonus material and take names and ideas for future reference.

Words Pondered

Here are a few things that I’ve been thinking about in the past month:

• “Safe is Risky.” —Seth Godin
• “Trying to look good limits my life.”—Stefan Sagmeister, from his Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far Series
• “Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.” —William Shakespeare, from the wrapper of some chocolates my cousin-friend gave me for Christmas.
• “Hope”
• “Change”
• “Honesty”
• “Dreams”

Flush.

Calendar Reform Revisited

So this morning I listened to my morning radio show “Sarah and No Name,” and they had a guest called the Human Calculator. His name is Scott Flansburg, and he had been on the show twice before but I missed it because I was away for college. I was really looking forward to listening to him do this ultra fast calculating thing, being the inner math geek that I am.

After he did the math thing, though, he talked about a thirteen-month calendar that would make every day of the year fall on the same day of the week, which was pretty close to what I was talking about a few weeks ago about changing the calendar and proposing a Leap Week or something.

What I couldn’t resolve was the 365^th day of the year where it would shift the day of the week every year, making the day of the week not align anymore. Then he mentioned making the first day of the year a special off-calendar day that we would celebrate and stuff, and then we go on our 13-months-of-28-days calendar.

I know that he didn’t come up with that idea (which I realized when I looked at a Wikipedia article on Calendar Reform), but that’s such a good solution! My mind was so confined to having to conform and assign each day to a day of the week that I pseudo-literally didn’t think outside the box. Nothing in nature requires a week to be seven days, and nothing in nature requires a day to be outside of a week; only we humans made that up, and we humans can just as simply reason everyone to leave a day out of the week for the greater good of better organization in the calendar for the next millions of years.

So now, we would have New Year’s Day to be out of the week, a day for us to celebrate, blah blah. Then starts January 1, or whatever we decide to call the months if we want to change it (to fix the “September does not associating with 7 and so on” problem), and we move on to a structured calendar where I know the 25^th of every month is a Thursday.

And when leap year comes around, we could just add another off-calendar day, maybe next to New Year’s, or maybe six or seven months into the year to even it out, although that might mess people up when they want to plan something exactly 70 days (10 weeks) from May but there’s an extra day after June or July because of the Leap day, so then putting it next to New Year’s to “get it over with” may actually be a better solution.

As “perfect” as that would work out, here are some reasons that people would oppose to changing the calendar to this system:

1. People with birthdays as well as holidays on the 29^th, 30^th, and 31^st don’t exist anymore and have to reconfigure, as mentioned in my other post.
2. People’s birthdays will fall on the same day of the week every year, which would suck for a majority of the people in the world whose birthdays fall on a weekday, every single year. That might lead to a “birthdays of the week” culture, which may encourage more group/social celebration.
3. The whole world needs to approve and adopt this.
4. Calendar makers won’t support it because they can’t sell new calendars.
5. People scared of the number 13 would hate this, as mentioned in my other post.
6. Having days of the month fall on the same day of the week every month may seem boring to people, and boring is bad, apparently.
7. Oppositely, people don’t enjoy change as much as I do.

Flush.