From the Moon to the Earth

instagram: Koreans Celebrate Chuseok (추석) Want to see more...

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 19:18:59 -0700

instagram.com/p/QNIFmWMQ6_/#rocio_g

instagram.com/p/QKLfHKs7fl/#sophiekim97

instagram.com/p/QM9GWOhOql/#_peony

Koreans Celebrate Chuseok (추석)

Want to see more photos? Visit the hashtags #chuseok and #추석.

Over the weekend, Koreans everywhere celebrated Chuseok (추석). The three-day holiday also known as Korea’s Thanksgiving is held every year around the Autumn Equinox. To honor the harvest, Koreans visit ancestral hometowns and feast on traditional foods like songpyeon and dongdongju.

In modern South Korea, there is a mass exodus on Chuseok as South Koreans return to their hometowns to pay respects to the spirits of their ancestors. People perform worship rituals early in the morning, then visit the tombs of immediate ancestors to clean the area and make offerings of food, drink, and crops.

Happy Korean Thanksgiving!

Swiss

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 22:24:21 -0700

Swiss

aborigine

Thu, 10 May 2012 01:05:00 -0700

aborigine

iPhotography Calendar: 12 Months Captured in 12 Stunning Snapshots [PICS]

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:26:29 -0800

iPhotography Calendar: 12 Months Captured in 12 Stunning Snapshots [PICS]:

A new year doesn’t just bring a new start, it comes heavy with the potential of the next 12 months ahead. With the different seasons and all the associated holidays and events to look forward to, January’s outlook is an exciting one. To celebrate the calendar year, we’ve collated 12 images — …

lovemelikeyou: took this in october,it’s one of the best photos...

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 09:37:49 -0800

lovemelikeyou:

took this in october,
it’s one of the best photos i’ve ever taken.

Memory

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 16:25:08 -0800

Memory

Closing ceremony of NWMUN2011 (Taken with picplz at Crowne Plaza...

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 15:48:44 -0800

Closing ceremony of NWMUN2011 (Taken with picplz at Crowne Plaza Hotel in Seattle, WA.)

#mun 2011NWMUN (Taken with picplz at Crowne Plaza in Seattle,...

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 09:09:41 -0800

#mun 2011NWMUN (Taken with picplz at Crowne Plaza in Seattle, WA.)

monotonousmoron: What does UNHATE mean? UN-hate. Stop hating,...

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 19:46:54 -0800

monotonousmoron:

What does UNHATE mean? UN-hate. Stop hating, if you were hating. Unhate is a message that invites us to consider that hate and love are not as far away from each other as we think. Actually, the two opposing sentiments are often in a delicate and unstable balance. This controversial campaign promotes a shift in the balance: don’t hate, Unhate.

We all together created beautiful movement at TEDxRainier.

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 01:36:00 -0800

We all together created beautiful movement at TEDxRainier.

Photo

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:42:00 -0800

[HuskyTraders]Visiting the SF Fed Seattle Branch on Flickr.

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 23:24:03 -0700

[HuskyTraders]Visiting the SF Fed Seattle Branch on Flickr.

Freakonomics

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 03:39:00 -0700

Freakonomics:

Changing Youth Migration Patterns: So Long New York, Hello… Portland?

A new blog post from William H. Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, takes a look at the migration patterns of American youth, and the cities that attract the “cool” crowd. In the last few years, the rough economy has put the brakes on mobility, which has declined to its lowest levels since World War II. Young adults in particular have stopped moving around. Still, like always, there are those 20 and 30 somethings who remain mobile. But, in recent years their list of destinations has begun to change. Frey writes:

While young people are moving less than before, it is interesting to see where those who did move went. Heading the list are Denver, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, Austin, Washington D.C., and Portland. The top three areas and our nation’s capital, arguably, fared relatively well economically during the recession. But all seven are places where young people can feel connected and have attachments to colleges or universities among highly educated residents.

As illustrated in the chart below (courtesy of Brookings) the “Top Gainers” of young people age 25 – 34, from 2008 – 2010 are: Denver, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, Austin, DC, and Portland. The “Top Losers” are Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Miami, San Diego, and Virginia Beach.

But what are the qualities that make a city attractive to the young people in this survey? The big (obvious) answer is jobs. But beyond that, perhaps affordable housing, a low cost of living, a transportation and bicycle infrastructure, an arts culture, and of course, the prospect of being around other young people. Frey writes:

To the extent they are moving at all, young adults are headed to metro areas which are known to have a certain vibe—college towns, high-tech centers, and so-called “cool cities.”

Last month, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on the “Next Youth Magnet Cities,” and asked six experts (including William Frey) to pick the 10 cities they thought would lead the way in attracting young people. They included big ones like New York, Chicago and Boston, with Seattle tying for first place with D.C. They also included Raleigh, Dallas, and San Jose.

What are some other non-job related factors that make a “cool city?”

————————————————————————————————————-

Perhaps, I should visit Portland before I leave!

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 18:07:00 -0700

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs:

At a memorial service for her brother, Mona Simpson recalled his love of beauty and his family, and his final moments.

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.

We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.

Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.

I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.

Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.

That’s incredibly simple, but true.

He was the opposite of absent-minded.

He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.

When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited.

He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.

Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.

For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.

He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.

His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.

He was willing to be misunderstood.

Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.

Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.

Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”

I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”

When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.

None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.

His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.

Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With just the right, recently snipped, herb.

Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans.

When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”

When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.

They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.

This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there.

And he did.

Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.

Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.

Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?

He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.

With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.

He treasured happiness.

Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.

Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.

Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.

I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.

Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.

“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.

He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.

I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.

Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.

One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.

I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.

He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”

Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.

For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.

By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.

None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.

What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.

Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.

He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”

“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”

When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.

Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.

Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.

His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.

This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.

He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.

Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.

He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.

This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.

He seemed to be climbing.

But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

The Rise and Fall of the G.D.P.

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:12:13 -0700

The Rise and Fall of the G.D.P.:

Economists and even governments now claim there might be better ways to take measure of a country’s wealth and happiness.

"That was one of the things that came out most clearly from this whole experience [with cancer]. I..."

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 01:26:12 -0700

““That was one of the things that came out most clearly from this whole experience [with cancer]. I realized that I love my life. I really do. I’ve got the greatest family in the world, and I’ve got my work. And that’s pretty much all I do. I don’t socialize much or go to conferences. I love my family, and I love running Apple, and I love Pixar. And I get to do that. I’m very lucky.” -Steve Jobs”

- all about Steve Jobs

R.I.P. jmak: Thanks, Steve. Posting designs like this one...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:03:09 -0700

R.I.P.

jmak:

Thanks, Steve.

Posting designs like this one makes me paranoid, because I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not original. I enjoyed the process regardless, but please let me know if somebody else beat me to the idea!

Thoughts?

First meeting of UW-MUN!

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 12:13:00 -0700

As Autumn Quarter begins, Red Square and entire campus is packed by bunch of freshman and huskies. I feel I am alive by taking every class even though it has been hard to catch up. I especially like to take Fundamentals of Business Information Technologies. I can’t wait to learn HTML5! Definitely it will be awesome.

I met UW-Model United Nation club members at Denny Hall. After a brief meeting about this year we went to the front yard to play a game. A very simple but difficult game: First make a circle, second hold your hand with another but now the same person holding your left or right hand, and finally make a circle again while keep holding your friends’ hands.

It was disaster! We crossed each other and were connected with as a whole. To solve the problem we should communicate and cooperate enduring pains. However, we stayed in extremely close and had a chance to talk. Fortunately I can have more conversation as we ate dinner together at a restaurant on the ave. I realized that this is what United Nations does in the real world. Not easy to solve one problem because we have in different position and think myself first.

What a great game! I even want to do that later.

Summer School

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:10:00 -0700

It was my frist official Summer school in University of Washington. Last Summer I took only TOEFL class about 3hours day during the week and two years ago I studied at my highshool to prepare Korea SAT. Definately it is not easy to concentrate on studyding. Since I successfully finished my first term in my university, I lost my interest in study hard. I was just wondering without direction. Now I am fully motivated to acheive my new goal even It will demend huge cost and time. Let’s do it! I can do it. I love to do what I really want to do. GO HYEONSIK!

The similarities of successful entrepreneurs

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 10:57:51 -0700

What Does It Take To Become an Entrepreneur?

To be an entrepreneur you don’t need to be born that way.

Anyone can learn to operate like an entrepreneur!

Traits:

persistence
desire for immediate feedback
inquisitiveness
strong drive to achieve
high energy level
goal oriented behavior
independent
demanding
self-confident
calculated risk taker
creative
vision
commitment
problem solving skills
tolerance for ambiguity
strong integrity
highly reliable
personal initiative
ability to consolidate resources
strong management and organizational skills
competitive
change agent
tolerance for failure
desire to work hard
luck
a role model to influence them early on

For me,

I need to behavior without direction but head to my final goal and I would like calculate risk not just do something spontaneously. To become a highly reliable person, I have to keep my words even it is a tiny stuff. Recently, I faced with unfavorable failures which are not easy to accept. Accept with clear feedback and go forward to my destination.