#iconstruct

[feeleash]

SHELL // the politics of being (various artists) pt.1 #unknown #destinations #negotiation #ideas #ongoing #flux #iam #iexist #irule #iconstruct #idestroy #human #will #struggle #survival #advancement (at Kypseli, Athens)

[hoonio]

British Business Card

Once again, new version of Hoonio business card with updated contact information. Perhaps, putting up with gloomy weather in London for few months down the road caused me to favor bright colours over simple greyscale. The color choices were indeed outcome of soap selections I made at Lush the other day. I needed three for hair, facial and body; interestingly whenever I look at them while taking a shower, they gave me a strong sense of tropical tone, which I instantly confirmed my next card design. I always wanted to portray the kind of impression, finding an tropical island in the middle of ocean. After removing Japanese letters from the previous design, I was again left with bit of space to fill up; however, this time I decided that keep the contents minimal so I can utilize the extra space for memo's. Lastly, greyscale gradient was applied to the name so that my nickname or alias whatever can be emphasised, while still displaying the full name. I only ordered 200 copies this time, and my stay in London is expected to last at least three years, so sooner or later, I will be announcing another U.K. version to te public.

[hoonio]

Blog categories

Lately I am starting to feel that my lingering days are soon to be ended, and that I should utilize this time to do whatever I needed to put vast amount of time on, which certainly includes website maintenance. Just fixed some search page problems, after updating WHO? and front page. For rest of the week, I plan on applying better looks to FOTO page, and possibly migrate some of attached photo albums to WordPress, so that I can finally detach from using iWeb service and avoid updating every single page when I enumerate the menu bar for more features. In the midst of all that, I realized in the BLOG section, having categories make no use since no one is likely to understand them. So I am gonna let go aristocracy of having menus written in Latin, and choose utility over it by renaming the category items to simple English words. Apparently, the literal meanings have not changed, as the old category names were all written in first person, singular, present tense. Also, as with the boom of "i~ phrases" initiated by Apple, I will put them in a way that they become friendly one word names. So the following are the changes and brief introductions.

canto → iStream music streaming, where visitors can listen to the music files I put up through streaming.

cogito → iThink Pretty much anything that passes my mind, random thoughts on personal matter.

constructum → iConstruct Everything related to site design and development.

disco → iLearn My learning routines and outcomes.

dissero → iDiscuss Another section for my thoughts, mostly reflection or criticism following public news.

doceo → iGuide Helpful tips or guidelines that might help those who seek for such information.

edico → iAnnounce General announcements on personal aspect.

facio → iTravel Travel notes, photos.

pingo → iSway This used to be named pingo, literally "I dance". But as I recognize I am a performer indeed, not a dancer, so I would like to expand this section as which includes anything related to my music performance activities.

a new section added, iConnect Personal encounters and reminiscence; it used to be part of facio, literally meaning "I do", which sounds vague enough to serve no purpose in categorising.

Update 2012.2.12: Due to transition to Blogger system and for sake of simplification, the categories within Hoonio Blog no longer exists.

[hoonio]

Japanese Namecard 名刺

As for next few weeks of planned stay in Tokyo, I figured I would need a new business card since I will be getting a new number with Japanese country code, name need to be written in both kanji(Chinese characters) as well as furikana(phonetics in Japanese kana), and lastly because I hear exchanging business card is a crucial part when you meet someone for the first time. Moreover, attendance to a business party for foreigners is scheduled to take place on the second week upon arrival; therefore, justifies my need to design a new card despite only few weeks of planned stay. Moving onto a talk on design, as compared to the previous design, logo had been updated as in the site, with addition of names written in various languages. As optimization from the previous design, redundancy, such as having site url printed on both sides, and address were removed for simplicity. And after the phone number was replaced with a Japanese one, there still were too much space left to fill. Since I was still not comfortable with Japanese communication skills back then, I decided that I would add few information that represents who I am and what my situation is. So on the front side, three city names were engraved in to show where I came from and where I am about to head to. Whereas, for the backside, somewhat unnoticeable, unless scrutinized closely, icons were added to summarize my profession and expertise. Few flaws observed later include:

As the card maker uses CMYK color codes, using a blue color was a risky decision to make. On the print, the color of aqua bar came out as a dull, sky blue.

QR code was already getting popular in Japan. QR code could have better filled the gap in left margin of back side than those lousy icons.

Quite a number of Japanese people were confused by the presence of the country code. There is no point of putting country code on the name card unless majority of people you meet are foreigners, or more specifically visitors from abroad.

These flaws are to be fixed and integrated on next design output for my contact information in United Kingdom.

[hoonio]

New logo V07

New logo design for 2010.  The new year has come, the new times I am about to face. One of the things I am determined to accomplish before leaving is to re-organize this site fir mobile compatibility, while at the same time provide ubiquitous accessibility. So that, I will be able to publish contents as such onsite and wherever I go, as same for the visitors. As always have been, using top-down approach, reconstruction started off with a new menu layout. Instead of drop-down style, the menu was replaced with simple buttons with reduced five categories. In order to create consistency between brand identity and overall style theme, logo was once again modified, since it was first decided that Hoonio.com be kept in snow-pearl grey tone. Not much difference in terms of shapes, but I gave thicker touch on the letters and re-shaped the letter "N" to circular style to give softer feeling. As this logo is fully integrable with the new menu, I intend to keep this for awhile, and I'm quite satisfied with it.

[hoonio]

Collective Integration

As there had been few complaints regarding difficulties with use of menus, and I have long thought about a way to integrate individual sites into one as this site used to be divided into four separate entities, namely iWeb published pages, WordPress, MediaWiki and Google Apps. I thought first task to be carried out was to have a collective single menu for all pages. In addition, I have integrated the enhanced logo into the menu in order to reduce the load time as well as giving the site a simpler look. Also, now that the menu can seemingly be found and site searching is also enabled, hope the visitors will no longer have hard time browsing through. The next upgrade tasks are planned to involve video contents and I plan on migrating some of the pages to WordPress, so that the blog can be utilized more meaningfully.

[hoonio]

Turning Point #2 Hoonio.com

Has there been an adage that everyday is a practice? Well, the world of life is always comprised of contradictions. and this is no exception. For the extent that no time machine has developed just yet, each day cannot be repeated nor forseen ahead of time, people should rather live each day if it were part of the real performance. Then what to do in order to meet necessary conditions for fabulous performance and practical preparation? Unfortunately, they will just have to be carried out simultaneously. There had been a time when I asked myself a similar question of how to effectively seize both, the solution I came up with was to provide myself a mechanism to record each day and have it readily available to any possible uses.

If ECE was my first turning point, which provided me with confidence that all my goals can be achieved with extra-efforts and a sense of optimism,this site, Hoonio.com gotta be my another turning point which empowers me with refined directives and consistent maintenance. While I view myself in the early stage of career development and self-re-investment, I feel that this phase will las as long as my service with LG Electronics continues, meaning that a transition to another phase would not happen until then. Though it seems that next turning point will involve me learning to give up something valuable fore the greater good, while at this stage, I will continue on building up whatever I can because I believe knowledge and experience are priceless. This happens to be still in on-going process in the present.

The fact that we are now living in the era of high technology, namely internet-based, I decided that a website as a collective management system would be an ideal choice for easy access as well as being a reliable repository. In comparison of human brain to machine capability, while human brain can be superior in subjective decision making, one cannot deny that internet database, with vast amount of memory space, together they will better serve as a place for record retention and also provide faster lookup through well-organized memory structure. So, along with other plausible purposes, personal agenda keeping has contributed to the creation of a multi-functional web space Hoonio.com. Not only it serves as a mechanism for exposition of records retained from the past, it is also the present and the future.

[hoonio]

Lima Tertius

With contents growing in terms of amount and size, and accruing requests for speedy browsing and convenient redirection, another mega-scale renovation was inevitable.  In addition to introduction of major new features including: 1. Integrated drop-down menu 2. In-site search feature 3. Photo pages enumeration There also had been few minor speed-up efforts in order to reduce the user anxiety of waiting for pages to open up, primarily by elimination of iWeb created iframes and extraneous java scripts. Hope all visitors will have pleasant time here, and for purpose of aesthetics and convienience, use of the following browsers is undoubtedly recommended: Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox 

What is still left to do though is that majority of Internet Explorer users, not to mention that they comprise over 70% of browser popularity, is having problems with especially photo pages not opening up in time. Further speed optimization will take place, first by integration of CSS stylesheets, followed by elimination of unnecessary Java script codes.