MISSION STATEMENT

Mission 1: Memory Transfer
Mission 2: Art Showcase
Mission 3: Web Development Project
Mission 4: Data Portal


MISSION HISTORY

     This homepage was created in 1996, as a foray into learning about HTML programming and the internet. The initial purpose to serve as a personal portal to access other websites, as it was not possible to bookmark links at public sites such as at the school library. The first real content came when I balled at a local park for an entire summer with high school friends. I posted up player profiles, game scores, summaries, great plays and boneheaded mistakes. Nowadays when I think back about this, it is really quite embarassing, with tons of unintentional humor.

     My homepage started to take its present form when I studied abroad at the Chinese Universtiy of Hong Kong (CUHK). Often friends in America would ask me, "How's life in Hong Kong?" Rather than giving the same replies over and over, I decided to scan photos, write comments, and then posted them up. This way, all I needed to do was reply with "Look at my homepage." More or less, this was a blog, although at the time, the term was not commonly used. Almost weekly, the homepage would be updated. The amount of content was directly related to the number of photos I took with my Samsung compact camera. By the time my one year of exchange student experience was over, I had taken about seventy rolls of film!

     After returning to America, my homepage stopped being updated regularly. Although I was more busy because of university course work, the root cause was my dislike of photo development quality in America. The high quality places were also too expensive (three times more expensive than Hong Kong). I decided to set all my undeveloped film aside until I could get them developed later as a large batch back in Hong Kong. On one of the trips, I had upgraded my camera to the Canon EOS50, which I would describe as the cheapest SLR that does not look cheap (as opposed to Rebel/Kiss). Eventually I moved to Japan for work, but I still continued to make trips back to Hong Kong every year, carrying from 30 to 60 rolls of film with me. As a result, the homepage updates were infrequent, but extensive each time, since photos were the catalyst for updates.

     In the middle of 2005, I made the switch to digital, by purchasing the Canon 20D. Since then, I have not visited Hong Kong or touched film. However by this time, web technology had drastically improved. Photo album sites and blogs were popping up everywhere. Most people had quick internet connection and so many homepages employed java script. I, on the other hand, felt that my homepage was quite "old school", as my layouts were very simple and all the HTML were coded through Notepad. Yet I could not envision myself using the photo albums because I wanted the freedom to create the layout, and I did not like using thumbnail sized images. Blogs, on the other hand, was more of a journal/diary. However, I could not come up with a good design, leading a long procrastination. For 2007's New Year's Greetings, I summarized all my photos for 2006 and sent them to many friends. I was surprised on how well received this was, and was re-energized in my efforts to update my homepage. Today as I continue to hunt for "a good design", I hope to try out all the latest in web design technology.