Saturday, May 01, 2004
How Steep It Is
In China they have a saying that: “If you don’t make it to the Great Wall, you aren’t really a good man.” I always chuckle when I think of that because I think “wow, women really got it made!” but I have to admit that the intention of the saying is that the Great Wall is not only a great sight that you must see—it is a challenge to overcome.
You have very likely heard many things about the great wall: that it is the only man-and-woman-made thing which can be seen from space (which it isn’t, actually), that David Copperfield walked through it one night (which he obviously couldn’t have really done), and that people periodically try to soar over it in a non-aerial vehicle (sometimes with unfortunate results.)
But one thing that is very difficult to understand, even when you see pictures of the great wall, is just How-Steep-It-Is. When you take the average picture up or down the great wall, you see that it is steep indeed, but you don’t really get the proper feeling of vertigo that you have in real life, as if you’ve come to a great precipice and the wind might just push you to your death at the bottom of the stairs.
This photo tries to capture something of that feeling. It’s about the relationship of the stairs to the mountains and trees behind them. You have to imagine how looking down to the left actually feels more dangerous than peering over that edge at the needle-like trees far below.
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Wonderful Hope
These last few days I caught a bad head cold, which then progressed, for various reasons, into worse things. Of course, when you are sick, you can’t think of many things, and updating a website seems like a monumental task. Yet I’ve seen other websites’ authors deal with sickness bravely, with such words as “sick now… update later,” or “uggh! I hate being sick! can’t think straight…” But somehow I felt that writing such a thing for Brightwind wouldn’t be right. What’s the deeper meaning behind “uggh”? How is it relevant to you, my dear reader, that I am sick, except as an excuse for not updating Brightwind, and perhaps a plea for sympathy?
Anyway, my particular character is not to bother you with some aspect of my life unless it contains some deeper meaning or is particularly relevant to major things going on with my website (such as the recent redesign).
But then, just as I was getting to feel better today, I realized that something rather interesting is going on here. I no longer have a fever, and my thoughts are once again liberated (although still a bit slower than usual). My headache on the other hand, has merely gotten worse. All day now it’s been pounding around in my head.
But I’m happy about it! Relative to yesterday, today is so much better! My appetite has returned, I can walk around short distances without feeling dizzy! I’m getting all excited about little things like drinking a lot of water and juice and eating a lot of fruits.
And most of all, I have this wonderful hope to look forward to, that my health can only get better I go on taking my medicine and resting as much as I can. It’s amazing how great it feels to be pretty sick after having just been really sick. It feels almost like being healthy again, but maybe even better, because I know that real health is on it’s way.
David's Life • Way of Life • Optimism • (36) Trackbacks • Permalink
Monday, April 19, 2004
Glorious Blue
Once again, Brightwind is blessed with a suitable design. I am pleased. I can rest…
But first let me share: one of the things I have learned from designing my own websites is that you have to be very patient with your computer. Sometimes you come up against strange problems, where the code you’ve written works fine in a reasonable web browser, but when you load it up in the browser most people use, then things look inexplicably unlike what you intended.
You could, of course, just write code with only that most popular browser in mind, but then it would look strange in all the other browsers. You have to remember that many people use an alternative operating system, and the most common browser, that is the version with most of the problems, is only available on windows. To compensate for this, most of the alternative systems and browsers try to adhere to a set of web page coding standards, so that people like me just have to write one set of code and can feel relatively confident that most of it will look the same no matter what system someone is using.
Of course, web pages can be extremely complicated, and various systems’ web browsers have bugs, so things don’t always work out like you would have hoped. But the fact that they make a strong effort to adhere to these standards goes a long way to make the web designer’s life easier. Unfortunately, Microsoft has neglected to update their Internet Explorer at the same speed as other systems’ browsers, so the poor program you are most likely to be using has many problems that have been lingering around for years. If you try to design according to these standards I mentioned, Internet Explorer quickly begins to feel like the old, broken-down car you have to take to work everyday. You spend more time fixing problems with it than actually using it. (If you’re using a windows computer, by the way, fear not—other, much better browsers are available to you, and offer you many more interesting features too.)
So anyway, there I am, studying the code for hours, trying to figure out why Internet Explorer doesn’t like it. Finally, at three in the morning, I have to give up for the night and try to sleep even though I have unfinished problems to solve. I hate that feeling—trying to sleep with unfinished creative work to do.
But then in the morning, I look at it again, and new ideas come to me. I see new possibilities that were not there the night before. It seems like just a few little tweaks and the whole thing starts to look okay no matter which browser I use.
So one moral of this story is that more and more people can use better browsers and allow a better experience both for themselves and for web designers.
And the other moral is that being patient and giving yourself all the time you need to work something out is really the fastest way to do it. Banging your head against problems late into the night leaves you with a sore head and the same amount of problems to solve in the morning. Letting it be for a while saves you both the headache and the lack of sleep.
Brightwind News • David's Life • Weblogs • (44) Trackbacks • Permalink
Saturday, April 17, 2004
Working on a Redesign
I have been using a lot of my free time over the last two weeks developing a new design to celebrate Brightwind’s transfer over to a new hosting service and a new weblog publishing system. I struggled for a long time before finally finding something I was happy with. You can see an image of what the design will hopefully look like when it’s finished here.
Right now I’m in the processes of slowly modifying the site piece by piece so that the new design will gradually fall into place. I’ve already made some modifications, such as removing the old image behind the title, and I’ll be putting in the new one soon. Hopefully the new design will be ready in a few days. 
Brightwind News • David's Life • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Friday, April 09, 2004
Excellence
I learned something about myself yesterday, and maybe something about human nature, too: putting your heart into something is what makes it meaningful to you.
As you already know, I have recently become a graduate student at Nanjing Arts Institute, and so far I’m enjoying it tremendously. Whenever I go there, I feel as though I’m soaking in a special kind of air, breathing in creativity along with oxygen, nitrogen and whatever else. It’s a place specially created for developing artistic talent, skill and inspiration—and it does just that.
I found that as I went there to study and absorb all those new experiences more, teaching at my Chinese high school began to seem older and less interesting. When I came back from my most recent trip, teaching English seemed almost unbearable, and I was filled with a desire to quit as soon as possible.
Then I realized that the high school itself hadn’t changed at all; my attitude towards it had. I let myself begin to think of it as an “old” thing and stopped wanting to try hard at it. In fact it was trying hard to be a good teacher all this time which had made it interesting in the first place. If I didn’t put any heart into this or any other part of my life, that part would certainly deteriorate into meaninglessness.
So now the challenge is to look at whatever I do with the knowledge that somehow just doing my best at whatever it is can really give it a life that it would never have had on its own. This website, for example, can only begin to transcend itself and become something more than just kilobytes on a hard drive when its author spends something of his heart on it, and uses some special love in the writing, a magic which belongs to his soul alone.
Perhaps this magic is a natural love of excellence itself. It can make any daily activity we undertake worthwhile and holy to us. Even if something seems to be meaningless at first, the act of doing our best at it can lift it into the realm of sacred work.
With that spirit, I ought to clean my apartment!
Photos • Yunnan • Way of Life • Writing • (45) Trackbacks • Permalink
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