I've decided to post a brief summarized update to what happened to me so you don't need to read my small bursts of tweets for my whereabouts.
A much longer post will be meticulously crafted after my return to home.
I am writing this blog post standing in in the hallway of the New York Presbyterian Hospital, on one of the computer stations that I technically should not use, but since I am not one of the cool folks with an iPhone, I will have to make do, and you will have to make stand.
I have not been feeling all that well since Tuesday last week. I thought that it was just a stomachache and I didn't think much about it. Since I was on a rather time-sensitive project, I didn't want to 'drop the ball' as a certain "K" personality might like to put it, and go for some check-up. This stomachache got a whole bit worse and by the time Friday hits, I could barely walked. I was having diarrhea all day long til eventually I sent a panic email to a very closed friend Gregory Hull (Flickr / SML Wiki) who received my email at on 2007-12-08 10am in the morning in LES and rushed over to my RAMBO (Right After the Manhattan Bridge) residence (see www.seeminglee.com/map for exact location) to help me to the nearest emergency room.
We originally got to a rather shabby hosptial, but upon which I realize that surgery is necessary, I decided to switch to the New York-Presbyterian Hospital, also known as the Weill Cornell Medical College.
I had a CT scan and was determined that I had a ruptured appendicitis. Surgery commenced on Sunday around 1am. Detail on the surgery to follow on a follow up post. But the design of the OR is AMAZING! Looks even better than any movie sets I've seen.
I'm currently staying at
Rm 8-224, 8 Central NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital 525 E. 68th St. New York, NY 10065
My direct line at the hospital is +1 212 585 7433. My cell as you all know is +1 646 373 9008.
SML Thank You I would like to thank the fantastic phonecalls and lots and lots of love from people at IconNicholson, including Susie Rust, Michele Lomas, Scott Heydt, Kip Voytek (via Susie), and the millions of you who are not allowed to call me because of an effective IconSpam halted by Travis Barr of Sunday Morning Mimosa
I would like to thank IconNicholson for the red flower arrangement.
I would like to thank John Frazier for the really gorgeous hand-picked flower arrangement and the oh so lovely darling phone call.
I would like to thank Jingle Blues for tracking me down on my Twitter post and navigitating his way to come see me with books in hand!
I would like to thank Susie Rust for dropping by with the orange rose bouquet last night. They bloomed today and are soooo pretty!
I would like to thank Kip Voytek for the chess strategy book for study.. though my mom accidentally transported it back home today... :(
I would like to thank Yale Alumni Magazine for featuring SML Universe on the November / December 2007 issue. I saw that blurb during my miserable stay at the hospital and it *really* made my day.
I would like to thank my mom for flying over from Hong Kong to see me. My dad is coming on December 18 I think.
I would of course like to thank Gregory Hull and my sister for medical assitance throughout the episode, which is not yet finished!
Lastly I would like to thank all the doctors, nurses and nursing aids who have been supportive and making me feel so at home here (what is particularly crazy about hospitals, as I have learned, is that farting and having gas will get a huge congratulating hug... details to come on next post.. no space no) too much verbal diarrhea here anyhow as I haven't taken any ADD meds for a week -- nor any other food for that matter..
More will be thanked as I gain more consciousness... not much moleskine'ing has been done during my adverse morphine'ing.
Will be pausing here. Look for me again next week!
Fernando Luis Lara is a brazillian artist living and working in the US. He draws the 365 days of the year based on stories submitted by people around the world. Each day will only be drawn once. For $182.50 USD, you get an original drawing (9 x 12 inches = 23 x 31 cm) by mail, and your story and drawing will also be shown on the site. The idea is that over time the site will become a collection of special days around the world, thus serving as a reminder of how special each and every day can be.
It's a genius marketing idea for an artist, and it utilizes the mechanisms of the collaborative theme seen today in the rise of Web 2.0. Very inspiring. Check it out!
If you are one of those people who simply don't see the point of tagging, here's a true story from a friend of mine who has become a recent Flickr-tagging convert.
I recently got Gregory Hull (Blog / Flickr / SML Wiki) into getting his Flickr account, and shortly after I noted that his photos are not tagged. A couple of emails later, he started tagging.
Greg posted this photo on 2007-10-28 onto Flickr and tagged it with dog, halloween, costume, tompkins-square and iPhone.
Two days later, he received an email from a newspaper from Chicago asking to see if they can publish his photograph, and the rest is history.
Now this little known artist from New York, who used to garden for Jasper Johns (Google), went from an unknown to being covered by hundreds of iPhone-related Web site:
The photo was posted 7 days ago, and so far it has already received 3,758 views and 12 favorites. It stunned him and most definitely stunned me! (While I have photos on Flickr that has received 15,000+ views, this photograph's views-accumulation rate is still a record I cannot possibly beat!)
Hopefully this will provide a glimpse into the magic of tagging to the next avid tagger. :)
Last time was awesome, but this time I truly felt it. I still freaked a little when I jumped out of the plane, but it was all exciting shortly after... and for the first time around, I actually did enjoy the view very much.
Skydiving... highly recommended!
SML Skydive video remix
Two months have passed and I still have not had the chance to remix my first video, but with these new footage shot by Laszlo Andacs, I should have enough materials to create my upcoming dance track, Crazy is Good. Stay tuned. For more SML Music, visit smlMusic.com.
SML Thank You
Adam S. Kirschner: I would like to thank Adam S. Kirschner for inviting me to go with him on his first skydive! I love people who can work hard and play hard, and as I mentioned in my previous blog post, those are exactly the kind of quality I seek to work with. I am impressed, and I am really glad that Adam had a great time also. I Love ASK! Kudos!
Beth Schuman: I would like to thank Beth Schuman for jumpsuit wardrobe assistance. Beth had her first skydive the same day and I am very honored to be her witness as she signed away her life to her tandem instructor.
Brad Schwatz: I would like to thank Brad Schwatz for skydiving with us. I am also really glad that I have successfully convinced him to throw close to three hundred bucks to get a video on his first skydive. Brad is a shoe designer, and definitely has an eye for shoes. Fashion fashionistas warning: you have approximately five years to scoop him up before I am ready to build my fashion collection.
Denes Gutai: I would like to thank Denes Gutai for being my T2 skydive instructor. Denes is also the U.S. exclusive distributor for Intrudair, a line of quality jumpsuit products from Hungary. I checked out the site last night and those pants are hot! I also find the logo design of Intrudair to be really inspiring. Go check it out at intrudair.hu!
Jeff Daniels: I would like to thank Jeff Daniels for skydiving with Brad.
Laszlo Andacs: I would like to thank Lazslo Andacs for shooting and editing the wonderful video above. Originally I was expecting this video to be similar to the first one shot by Oren Peri, as such I am very impressed to see the diversity in creativity in not just how the same subject can be explored, but also in terms of style and perspective. Very well done!
If you are interested in freefall videography, digital imaging and computer editing by this professional skydiver stunt cameraman, check out his website at laszloimage.com.
Marcos(SML Data: last name data unavailable): thank you for being Adam's T1 skydive instructor.
I haven't read the book yet, but it looks quite interesting based on the book review on New York Times, where he suggests that the AIDS epidemic is "the price of our permissive attitudes toward monogamy, chastity, and other forms of extreme sexual conservatism."
David Heckerman (Google), a physician as well as a PhD in computer science at Microsoft Research, was doing research on better spam-blocking when he noted that those same technology can be applied to blocking HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS.
From Heckerman’s perspective, HIV is like a cagey spammer. After attacking a cell, it injects its own genetic material and proceeds (much like a spam jockey who has commandeered as an unprotected computer) to manufacture thousands of copies of the virus.
The trouble? Complexity and mutations. HIV-infected cells often wear mutated nameplates that immune systems haven’t learned to read. In this sense, vaccines have been like faulty spam filters, the ones that block e-mails promoting “Viagra” while letter ads for “V1agra” scoot through.
But Heckerman is upbeat. He argues that by revving up the computing power and blending thousands of new variable, researchers are making progress. One key, he says, is to map the patterns of mutation and incorporate them into medicine. These mutations, he says, appear to vary according to a person’s immune system. If researchers can find the patterns, they’ll be closer to making effective vaccines. Yet if they conclude that the mutations are utterly random, then “we’re in big trouble,” says Heckerman.
Project Rebirth is an online chronicle of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site. As immediate and compelling as a physical visit, this project gives people the opportunity to observe and share in the progress of the reconstruction.
Newly released at the time the team was considering technical specifications, this Project Rebirth Web site site uses the FlashMX development environment to full effect. Functioning as a portal to extensive content, the beauty of this Web site lies in its ability to be current and historical. With a visual design that appropriately takes a back seat to the content, it records ideas, images and interviews in their original context while also allowing for their evolution.
Primary content consists of a series of video images (presented in a timeline format) captured by six, 35mm time-lapse cameras positioned by Project Rebirth around the World Trade Center site. They shoot one frame every five minutes—and will continue to do so for ten years. The images enable the viewing of the rebuild as it occurs on any date; in seconds, visitors can see the footage of a single day. There are also interviews with reconstruction overseers, journals by filmmakers and video of major milestones in the redevelopment efforts.
Project Rebirth Web site
The key challenge for the developers was to create an interface that would incorporate what would ultimately be ten years of film footage, that didn’t inundate visitors and yet communicated the passage of substantial amounts of time. Their solution is an interactive, XML-driven timeline that delivers fluid viewing of time-lapse footage. It provides an appropriate time-based metaphor that also does a nice job of integrating video, audio, imagery and text-based content into a single interface. The time-based experience allows access to any moment in time and provides the ability to navigate the Web site by date and/or event. Our one complaint: The link from the home page, to this main feature, looks far too much like header art. We would have liked to see billing more in line with its importance.
This collaborative effort between Project Rebirth and IconNicholson began in the summer of 2003 and the site launched in September 2004. On average, visitors are staying on the site 19 minutes, which is significant in comparison to Internet-wide stays at sites with similar content. Interestingly, international users comprise 30% of all visitors.
Robert Fisher, creative director Claudia Chow, art director See-ming Lee, timeline art director/developer Larry Burks, information architect Miles Kafka, CGI programmer/engineer Tim Murtaugh, HTML developer Leslie Freeman, producer Katharine English, Project Rebirth, general manager Paul Wood, Project Rebirth, technical producer IconNicholson, site design and development
Google Celebrates Diversity As the billions of pages in our index show, Google is a great believer in inclusiveness.
Google aspires to be an organization that reflects the globally diverse audience that our search engine and tools serve. We believe that in addition to hiring the best talent, the diversity of perspectives, ideas, and cultures leads to the creation of better products and services. This diversity of our employees and partners serves as the foundation for us to better serve our diverse customers and stakeholders all over the world.
"Diversity plays a large role in the way we're developing our engineering organization around the world. We're building a large worldwide office presence to establish ample global representation among our engineers, and we're applying that same focus to establish a balanced representation of employees at Google. In the end, these efforts help us more accurately and relevantly represent our users, and our continued success depends on the best minds working from different perspectives and insights." Alan Eustace - Google SVP, Engineering & Research
Google considers diversity a business imperative. We foster diversity through awarding scholarships, outreach in K-12 initiatives, partnerships, and striving to perfect a work environment that is inclusive, supportive, and collaborative.
Recently there has been a lot of talks of unGoogling. The drive to unGoogle oneself is so persistent that:
My classmates from Yale have forced the class secretary for the alumni magazine, to write class notes in hacker alias ID’ing. In ANP hacker notation, my name will be rendered as S33-M1NG L33.
I was threatened advised by many of my friends to mark their photographs private and remove their names from my Flickr stream.
After a bit of digging, it appears that this craziness trace back to some article on the Wall Street Journal: You’re a nobody unless your name Googles well / Page One / 2007-05-27 / WSJ. It mysterfies me why unGoogling has become the number one extreme sports on the web, so I did a little bit of investigation.
Reasons for unGoogling
Some people confide to me that the reason they don’t want to be searchable is because they have been stalked before and wish to be untraceable. A few of the folks I talked to attribute it to the potential for identity theft, but after a few more rounds of questioning in typical SML fashion, it all boils down to their biggest fear that their social activites might harm their job search.
Silly rabbits. I don’t know what kind of employment you are seeking, but if it is a company that you plan to be spending some time with, for your the benefits of your own mental health, it had better be one who allows you to be who you are. If a company cannot accept that life celebrates diversity, then perhaps that company is not a good fit for you. As Steve Jobs once addressed an entire class of Standard graduates, your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life (You’ve got to find what you love / Steve Jobs). In other words, be who you are, and find that company who values you for who you are. I work for the company that I am at now precisely because it recognizes my multiple skills and encourages me to put my entire head into my work.
Some day, when I am ready to start my own company, I will want my employees to be diverse, varied and energetic. I will want them to be individuals with multiple skillsets who have the agility and versatility to take on any types of clients and industries. I will want them to get all adrenaline from their extreme activities to be able to work on their projects better.
If any task requires mono-dimensional 24-7 professional workaholics (SML Dictionary: boring, uncreative and uninspiring individuals), I think that I would prefer bots and spiders instead. Trust me, they are far more efficient and economical than you are.
If you don’t buy my job search advice and are still determined to create a one-dimension personality on the Web, such that you can fulfill your masochistic desire to be in a long-term relationship where your partner appreciates your helpfulness in doing the dishes but criticizes everything else which make you unique, I offer these advice:
How to unGoogle: Noise over signal
The best way to for you to remove your unwanted data from appearing into the public mainstream is to create more data for Google to index.
The best way to be most invisible to prowling eyes is to have the most visibility in the most public places.
You see this in movies all the time: if you need to do any form of "exchanges," you do it out in the open.
Why? It’s all mathematics:
The probability of someone finding something about you over 5 valid hits is very easy.
The probability of someone finging something about you over 50,000 valid hits is fairly hard.
Retrieving signals over noise (data which you cannot readily interpret) is much harder than retrieving signals over signals (data which you can comprehend readily).
How to unGoogle: SEO
Fact: Google’s Page Rank algorithm has largely to do with network theory. It ranks pages based on how times a page is linked to it by other pages, factoring their relevance (AboutUs: Google.com)
In other words, if you can generate enough relevant noise onto your first SERP (Wikipedia: Search Engine Results Page), you are fairly safe from being stalked.
How do you do that? Here’s one way to do it:
Create a fake persona for yourself with the same name with a quirky personality. For example: a 57yo-widow who enjoys knitting, playing with kittens, network-savvy, and reads Daily Candy every day to catchup on the latest fashion advice so she can make more friends at her local community center.
Once you have registered, create profiles resembling your alter-ego and create relevant content and social-network with people that are relevant to your assumed identity.
Get all your profiles on these networks to link to each other so that you create a web of the Web.
Remember to social-network with people similar to your alter-ego so that you remain to be very relevant
Post photographs of cats on your Flickr stream, and link back to your cat blog; post videos of your cats on YouTube and blog about it; furiously digg and bookmark all the cute cats that you like on del.icio.us
In other words, use the knowledge you gained from your SEO (Wikipedia: Search Engine Optimization) research and optimise your alter-ego to be really popular. These should get your real identity way down the SERP. You should be fairly safe now.
You don’t have faith in me? Try it, Google me and tell me who I am. Am I a professional in the field of design, technology and marketing strategy, or am I simply a very well-written artificial intelligence algorithm crafted by my creator, whose true identity is cleverly concealed as you attempt to look for the needle in the haystack?
How not to unGoogle: History removal
Removing history does not work. Public unsearchability creates a false sense of safety. Just because you are not searchable by the public domain does not equate unsearchability.
Put yourself in the shoe of Google: if you just spend a whole lot of resources to dig up all these information, are you really going to disposed them all that easily? Most likely not. If I were Google, I will be happy to remove your result from the public domain to keep peace with you.
Tada! Due to quesiontable actions committed by you to fulfill your very desire to remove data, I have just identified why I get into the search business at the first place: to mine important intelligence data that no one else has a copy of. Thanks to your help, I have just identified what you considered to be most damaging to your credibility. I’m sure that businesses will pay me tons of money just to get their hands onto my treasure chest.
Machine data vs Real intelligence
Google is not the only source of data available. The best data do not come from 1s and 0s mirrored across the universe. The best data (aka secrets) comes from human memory.
I used to work for Rumpus as an information designer when I was in college. For those who are unfamiliar with Rumpus, Rumpus is the oldest college tabloid in the United States. From what I remember, it takes approximately one day for us to make a few phone calls to get the list of tapped members of the tombs, including the list of very-soon-to-be infamous members of societies who were not fortunate to be recruited by those with a tomb. We publish them every year. (In case you are considering sending hate mails to me, I would like to remind you that I am not responsible for those undigging. I was the information designer. I was responsible for creating maps of showing all the numbers of the Blue Phones clearly and legibly over the campus for your daily prank indulgence.)
I also spent a long time in college being the photo editor for The Yale Herald, the weekly college paper with articles that people read and comic strips that are actually good. What I have learned from that experience, aside from the potential danger of caffeine overdose, is that when you are carrying an SLR and a Moleskine, people are more than willing to give you information. Try that yourself at your next Harry Potter launch party.
Conclusion
Once indexed, your data will be there forever. You cannot remove things. You can only add to it. If you wish to remove anything, just make it very difficult to search for. Your best policy, as such, is really very simple:
As long as you don’t do anything that you think is damaging to yourself, there will never be anything there to damage you.
Try to maintain the habit of being responsible for every action you make, every word you say, and every movement your body create.
When you have nothing to hide, you will be fearless.
Content Syndication You may syndicate this content for non-commercial purposes as long as you attribute credits to me. Commercial usage will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Model Credits If you know the models of the photograph, please email me at seeminglee+flickr@gmail.com so I can give them proper credits.
