Burn bright. Burn hot.

As I write this, I'm coughing, sick, worn down, and recovering from sleep deprivation from the last week of school deadlines. Yet, I'm quite happy with the situation as I've been able to deliver work I'm proud to put my name on. The trade-off between being satisfied with quality and work and my health isn't really a good argument I'm going to justify (because I don't really believe in it, but I do it anyway).

I've never pushed myself this much before but I'm glad I do. It also helps me understand how people who deliver amazing work achieve it. You push yourself to your limit, and then you push yourself some more. It's akin to pain. You push yourself to your pain tolerance threshold, and then you stop. You try again and realize it hurts a lot less and your threshold goes up. I realize this works the same way for success, you push yourself to do the best work possible, until you can't do it anymore, but you keep pushing how far you can go, and you realize you get stronger after every barrier. It all depends on your willingness to break through.

The only difference between success and pain, is the satisfaction of being able to have accomplished something that you have set out to do. The struggle is always worth the glory, well if it wasn't, there would be no glory. The easy things in life have no meaning. So burn bright, and burn hot. Always.

I feel like I've accomplished good work, but any feedback or critique is always appreciated. =)


IAT 337-Representation and Fabrication
Solidworks model of a kitchen object.
The assignment is on-going. About 50% done the second stage of this

Solidworks model of a Bodum Assam Teapot
(Number of actual holes reduced to deal with computer limitations)

IAT334-Interface Design

A revised email interface for a potential branded e-mail client.
Props to my partner Julia for making the Fidomail logo!

Mobile phone app prototype about post wisdom tooth surgery dental care.
This is about 75% done to make a running application. Super props to my partner Xiaojie for all the amazing graphics and sketches!

IAT 344-Moving Images (Film and Video course)
Life's Passion - a movie about a certain skater's drive and passion for the sport and his journey in crossing to a different culture. Majority of the credits have to go to my partner Trevor Komori.
(Just hoping to have the next 2 projects for this course turn out just as well.)

Life's Passion


IAT 380-Sound Design
Inhospitable. Sound design
This was a "musique concréte" piece that will need a pair of actual monitoring headphones to be able to produce some of the sounds. Mixed in ProTools, generated sounds from Logic Pro, and recorded samples using a Zoom H4N Recorder.


  Inhospitable (WAV)

Outside of my school work, I also finally updated the Metronomic widget application. It hasn't been working since the latest OS X update and so I was receiving some emails to fix it. I've given the UI a little bit of a rework.

Metronomic v1.0

Metronomic - Metronome dashboard widget

I'm also starting to plan out the changes for the next version already with requests of adding some type of light visualization, and some other features that allow for more customizability and personalization.

I'm going to go get some sleep now. Or at least try. :o

Difference

When I set out to make a widget last year, I was merely trying to think up of something simple, easy-to-use, and practical. It's a metronome, it keeps time, although not accurate as some would like, but it is a basic tool. It ticks in time. It pulses a beat. It's nothing fancy. I was hoping people would find it a practical tool. And yes, I have received responses to that degree, from musicians who found my widget to be an invaluable tool as an alternative to an actual physical metronome.

I received a letter from someone this morning who actually found another use for it. This person has asthma and does Buteyko breathing exercises to perform timed cycles of breathing. He/she was holding a stopwatch in front of their face to help keep their breathing on track. So, somehow, they managed to stumble onto my widget and thus reducing the strain of having to look at a stopwatch. I never thought this widget would make such an impact in someone else's life. But I thank them for letting me have an insight to how my work has made a difference in the real world.

Popular in absence

I really haven't paying attention to my portfolio site at all. I created it mostly just to display my work and maybe give my resume that needed web edge. A friend of mine just recently talked to me about site traffic and I strolled on over to see how much traffic I was getting.

I haven't done anything on the site in over 3 months. Yet, my traffic keeps increasing on a progressive weekly basis. I'm guessing all the buzz is based on Metronomic, my metronome Os X widget. I also checked my site referrals and I guess it didn't hurt that I got mentioned on a widget watch somewhere: http://www.applelinks.com/index.php/more/widget_watch_friday_february_23_2007/

I'm pretty sure that the majority of the users are still flooding in from the Mac OS X Widget site. But still, it's amazing, I'm getting an average of 1574 UNIQUE visitors each day. That number is accurate as of today. Some other useless statistics that seem pretty silly considering I haven't updated the site, so it's ALL about that widget.

These are UNIQUE, because the TOTAL one includes repeats is actually even higher at (Total Visitors for Year: 361710)
Total Visitors for Year: 212433
Total Visitors for Week: 2522 (more like for today, mon, May 14th + 3 hours tuesday). The actual count for monday is just shy of 2200.

Graph Summary:
Total Bandwidth for Year: 2 008.01 MB
Average Per Day: 14.87 MB

My widget is only 68Kb...