O IT HURTS...

I spent the whole day in agony of pain, or more precisely starting 11:15 AM. First I went to my Orthodontist's to get my arch wire taken out. The procedure took 3 minutes. As the brackets were opened one by one, a sense of relief came gradually, tooth by tooth. I was all at once reminded of a bird freed from the cage, the moment when one of my bridesmaids unzipping my tightly-fitting wedding dress with an even tighter built-in corset in 106-degree heat after a long reception, and the first gentle brush of the cold crisp air when I took off my shoes to air out a blossoming blister on an arduous hike. Such is the feeling of being free. I went around my merry ways, even brushed my teeth again and flossed, enjoying the pure efficiency of speed flossing without an annoying threader--I am so looking forward to this in a year.

It was 11:15 when I stepped in my dentist's office for a scheduled cleaning. I hate dentist's visits, no matter how trivial they are. Every time I lie in the chair, in total horror, and mechanically open and close my mouth at the command of a man whose eyes are the only things that identify him from a sea of other coat-wearing figures moving in and out of my field of vision. I often find myself replaying scenes from Agatha Christie's One Two Buckle My Shoe in which a collaborative murder was carried out in the dentist's office. It is awfully easy to kill someone when he's lying tensely on a dentist's chair, defenseless and ready to do anything the dentist tells him to... For me I might as well be done with via this slow painful death of CLEANING. The dentist used some kind of high-powered water drill to wash each tooth and the gum, followed by rigorous scraping with a sharp hook-tip instrument in a fashion more suitable for scraping burned food off a iron cast wok, and then a "polishing" by a scary-sounding blue instrument that left a minty but at same time nauseating after taste. All of these procedures are painful, now even more so thanks to the extra-sensitive teeth I have as a result of wearing braces. It was the anticipation that is most deadly, waiting in the dark not knowing which scraping or chiseling will bring out the piercing pain of a single weak tooth.

With squeaky clean teeth I went to work trying to get a few hours of work done before heading back to the Orthodontist's to, you guess it, get a thicker wire put in. She first commented on my fast-moving teeth and how nicely they have rotated the way she expected and almost proudly showed me a considerably thicker wire. It was indeed so much thicker that she had a lot of trouble closing the brackets and had to resort to some magical ice spray that bends the wire on contact. With each closing of the clasp, I feel my teeth, even the jaw tighten. By the time she got to the last few clasps on my top middle teeth, the feeling had grown to be so uncomfortable it almost felt like the wires are pulling the teeth out from the gum. There goes dinner tonight, and all solid food for at least a week.

O, the price women pay for beauty...

Books in the recent months

One of my 2007 New Year's resolutions is to place a greater emphasis on reading for my profession and less on leisure. This of course, turns out to be easier said than done. Other than the subject matter being "dull", it takes much much longer to finish a work-related book than one that's completely to one's fancy. That said, I am nonetheless going to push on with this effort. Difficult tasks build character :)

The Elements of Friendly Software Design by Paul Heckle


I am usually turned off by such a book title and a publishing date of 1994. The world has changed over numerous times for the past decade. Had it not for my boss, I would never have picked it up myself, and glad I indeed was... These days people throw UCD-related terms around like they were raisins to top your salad. Paul Heckle instead, focuses on designing software to be a communication craft, much to the same communicative effects of Disney cartoons, movies, architecture and paintings. It gave me a fresh perspective on the the film The Birth of Nation, which I totally dreaded when I was forced to watch it in its entirety and write an essay about its revolutionary techniques. Once again I realized that one cannot see the future if the past is not well understood. The history of the Zoomrack and Apple's HyperCard was fascinating to read and both were excellent, cohesive examples of good use of mental models. Its bibliography was long and eye-opening as I now find the success of my profession has much to do and much to learn from art, architecture and film.

Elements of Style (Illustrated) by William Strunk Jr., E.B. White, and Maira Kalman

What can I say? A classic.

Currently working on:
Visual Function: An Introduction to Information Design by Paul Mijksenaar
Visual Thinking by Rudolf Arnheim
This book is SO dense and so hard to crack. The long-gone syndrome of understanding every word but not the passage often experienced in my school years has now returned.

For Leisure
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond


It's one thing to be bombarded on a daily basis about global warming and other human impact that's increasingly threatening the livelihood of our planet; it's yet another to read grave accounts of six ancient societies that have vanished due to some societal collapse and total eco-meltdown caused primarily by its inhabitants. The chapter on China is especially chilling. I am aware of the looming danger of depletion of natural resources and capitalists' greedy exploitation of people in less developed parts of the world, yet these ideas remain afloat in the back of my mind. I don't have the extensive knowledge and research framework to ground them and have a clear picture of how these phenomena can evolve in the future. Diamond's book, like the missing pieces of a puzzle, connects these dots, traces and extends the complete story of a single, seemingly coincidental occurrence. When I get a chance to visit Northern Europe I'd be sure to stop at one of the Inuit preservation museums to check out the highly advanced (back then) kayak making technologies and artifacts.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Eragon by Christopher Paolini



If I were Christopher Paolini I would be very very angry with the film. Good thing I read the book first.