What Am I Doing? (Mar 2009)

Freelance

Things are going well with my freelance project. We’re pretty much wrapping up with the foundation of the site, with a few more adjustments and fixes. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, I’ll be able to present it here with some process work.

GTD

I finally had some time to revamp my GTD system, and it seems to be working better than before. I basically digitized my projects list and actions so that they’re easier to look through (and therefore, less intimidating for me to review and organize). There are still parts of the system that I need to streamline, but things are definitely more efficient already.

Twitter

I recently started using a public Twitter account. My username is ivanwlam, and you’re welcome to follow me if you want. So far, some of the “famous” people I’ve followed include David Allen (the GTD Guy), Ze Frank, swissmiss, Armin and Bryony at Under Consideration, and TED.

Cut&Paste

Me. Me. Me. The fact that I forgot to mention that I went to watch my friend Sam Sellers talentedly compete at the SF stop of the Cut&Paste Competition Tour is unacceptable. Long story short, Sam did a great job and was robbed of his first prize. I love the piece he did for the first round, which was (and will be again) my Facebook profile photo.

Motivation

Something happened in the past week that retriggered and intensified my motivation to advance my career and my life as soon as possible. I can’t go into the details, but I now have a stronger desire to be independent and self-sufficient and to take control of my own life. So hopefully, in the coming months, I will have more exciting things to report.

Really Simple Designer Web Comic

Within the past month, I ended one blog and started another. Really Simple Designer Web Comic was an experiment to create a daily web comic starring Point, Line, and Plane. Every start of the day, I take about half an hour coming up with a concept and quickly draw a comic for the next day on my Wacom tablet. The idea of this project was to become more comfortable with my tablet, and I definitely am now. I ended it after two months because it was taking too much time of my day and the creative juices just weren’t flowing as fluidly as I’d like.

One Per Day

One Per Day is a much simpler project. Every day, I post about the day before, using only one word or phrase as the title of the post, and only one sentence describing the day. This keeps my post lengths short and to the point. It’s sort of a practice for me to pack as much content and meaning into one word and one sentence as I could, instead of dragging on and on about an incident (which I tend to do quite often… like right now).

The idea for One Per Day originated from a revisit to Ze Frank’s The Show, which indirectly kept a record of Ze’s personal life and experiences behind the scenes during its running. I have tried to keep a record of my life ever since I could write and had self-awareness. I used to write by hand with special notebooks and special pencils, and then switched to LiveJournals for a while, then to design blogs with monthly reviews (like this one).

But all these posts were taking too much time of my life to sustain, as I write really long posts, usually about now-apparently trivial things, and I wouldn’t want to return to them if I wanted to recall events of my life at the time.

One Per Day reaches a compromise between wanting to document every experience of my life and cutting down the number of words that I would have to read later on. One year from now, the individual events that happen every day will mean very little to me. In the end, a day is just a day, even on special occasions. What’s more important is the overall mood.

I just started blogging on One Per Day on WordPress (my new friend, perhaps my fortune cookie best friend?), and I haven’t gotten to redesigning it. But the presentation is going to be more streamlined and intuitive. Subscribe to the feed, and stay tuned.

Quotes I Go By Lately

“A day is a day. Every event, however trivial, will, by definition, influence and change the rest of my life.”

“Keep it simple (and easy), stupid.”

Flush.

Punished with the Persistent Pusuit of Perfection

I thought of this last night while falling asleep after an all-nighter from my freelance gig: My life is pretty much a punishment of the persistent pursuit of perfection. I’m not necessarily unhappy with that, but there are times when I wish I weren’t being punished. Haha.

(I only mentioned this for the alliteration.)

Flush.

100th Post; Wish-to-Do List

Every night, as I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, a million things speed through my mind. I think about what I’ve completed that day and what I have yet to accomplish the next. It never stops until I am asleep. When I wake up, I already feel behind.

This is a problem. Even though I take pride in being someone who is constantly generating ideas, I inevitably have more ideas than I can execute. Yes, a lot of those ideas are probably not that good and practically trivial, but ideas are ideas, and until they are executed, they all weigh relatively equally as valid solutions.

So, to ease the pressure off my brain just a little bit, and to celebrate the 100^th post of Flush, I would like to share 100 things I have brewing in my head. (I have a lot more, as I’m sure you do as well.) Some are very realistic and executable, while others are more ideal and fantastic.

Site

1. Get all areas of the experiments section opened and working.
2. Have a creative About section.
3. Redesign Flush to fit with transparency theme.
4. Have the entire site be mobile and screen-reader friendly (in other words, accessible).
5. Have the site completely done by sometime next year, before I realize I need a redesign.

   Career

6. Continue with learning ActionScript 3.0.
7. Learn MySQL.
8. Learn Processing, whatever benefit I may get from it.
9. Learn AfterEffects.
10. Learn podcasting.
11. Learn a printing press.
12. Learn to hand-assemble a book.
13. Learn to use a type design program.
14. Learn to write a form that will update an XML file.
15. Finish my print portfolio.
16. Create a multi-functional business card.
17. Design a body font family, including ligatures and special characters.
18. Attend AIGA Design Conference 2009 in Memphis, TN.
19. Be a part of the Olympic branding committee of a Summer Games.
20. Buy a copy of CS4 (unless I wait too long and CS5 comes out).
21. Meet well-known design figures with mutual respect.
22. Design a self-promotional holiday souvenir.
23. Be part of an “awesome” project.
24. Own a copy of Sagmeister’s “Things I Have Learned From My Life So Far”.
25. Volunteer with whatever AIGA SF needs volunteers for.
26. Start a career portfolio archive.

    Experiments

27. Design and screen print shirt graphics with geeky design-related topics.
28. Make a poster/series with writing with light.
29. Make an info-graphic poster of the bodies of the solar system.
30. Print an image on the same sheet multiple times.
31. Print an image on separate transparency sheets and align the images in the light, then photograph it.
32. Create a poster series of the sun’s actual visible electromagnetic spectrum.
33. Design a reusable calendar.
34. Do a time lapse series of one location at the same time each day for a long period of time (e.g. a year).
35. Invert night sky photographs.
36. Overlay a high-resolution photo onto a low resolution version of the same photo.
37. Align panoramic Photomerge photos but don’t blend the edges.
38. Put supposedly-panoramic Photomerge photos in a grid in relation to one another.
39. Create a new typeface by overlapping two typefaces, then take the overlapping areas or dissimilar areas.
40. Use enlarged small type on screen as regular type.
41. Use Flash/ActionScript to write a visualization of two bodies orbiting.
42. Create a motion graphic piece that will show a writing with light, but the light moves with time, so the writing cannot be seen at any one time, but collectively.

    Life

43. Continue with learning either/both French or/and Japanese.
44. Learn Morse code, just because.
45. Learn Braille, just because.
46. Learn American Sign Language, just because.
47. Learn more about astronomy.
48. Learn more about physics.
49. Learn to surf.
50. Learn to ski and/or snowboard.
51. Learn to ballroom dance, for whatever future occasion.
52. Start life blogging again.
53. Get my life completely GTD’d.
54. Pay off my student loans and start being in the black.
55. Get a green job.
56. Live in a studio apartment.
57. Have a road trip of some sort across the country.
58. Go to an amusement park one of these days. It’s been too long.
59. Go mini-golf with friends.
60. Go on a road trip with friends.
61. Go on a cruise with friends.
62. Go to a beach where the water and the weather is not cold.
63. Be part of the excitement in Washington D.C. on January 20, 2009.
64. Attend an American/Western wedding. (I’ve only been to Chinese style weddings).
65. Attend a baseball game.
66. Attend an indoor concert with die-hard fans who sing along to all the songs.
67. Play more Wii.
68. Become a space tourist.
69. Experience Zero G in one of those planes.
70. Fly first class.
71. Ride in a Rock-Star-Style Tour Bus.
72. Spend a week in a cabin with friends.
73. Get into a habit of exercising and eating right (for the most part) for the rest of my life.
74. Return to a routine of swimming.
75. Get shampoo/body wash that takes out the smell of chlorine.
76. Have a crazy adventure night like in the movies, but with no one dying.
77. Buy myself things for the holidays that I’ve been longing for all year but have been really conservative with money. Or when I get a full-time design job.
78. Go on a “vision quest,” whatever that is.
79. Re-watch the Matrix Trilogy.
80. Watch something in IMAX.
81. Re-watch Motorcycle Diaries.
82. Re-watch the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony.
83. Have a movie marathon of Planet Earth.
84. Be an awesome and cool uncle when my niece or nephew is born.
85. Help build houses for families who need and deserve it.
86. Volunteer at a soup kitchen or something similar during Thanksgiving and Christmas.
87. Convince my friends that it’s “should have” and not “should of”, among other things.
88. Build something useful with wood.

    World

89. Visit New York City and live there for a month.
90. Visit Japan and live there for a month.
91. Visit Beijing and the Olympic area.
92. Visit Vancouver during the Olympics in 2010.
93. Visit London during the Olympics in 2012.
94. Volunteer to do something in Africa.
95. Visit Australia.
96. Visit Machu Picchu.
97. Visit France and try to live there for a month.
98. Visit Italy.
99. Visit Dubai and sight-see all the cool architecture.

100. Learn to live, and live to learn.

Let’s see how many of these I can accomplish by the 200^th post. I know I won’t be able to do all of it, but it’s still good to try.

Flush.