Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop. - Lewis Carroll
Once upon a time there was a boy who was often bored. Bored because he lived with grown-ups in a grown-up house in a grown-up world. And grown-ups, as you know, are very boring because they are "responsible". They have to be responsible otherwise the "Man" wouldn't let them live in their grown-up house. And being responsible meant having to do a bunch of serious things, .... serious boring things, like pulling weeds, going to work, and paying taxes.
On one particular day one particular grown-up named "Dad," gave this little boy a box of brightly colored brick that had bumps on top and holes on the bottom. This seemed quite out of the ordinary as the boy knew that brightly colored things were not serious things.
Dad called them "Legos"; the boy called it "finger food." After promptly being scolded for attempting to eat a handful of what appeared to be a very tasty snack, Dad told the boy that the bricks weren't meant for eating. "That's silly," the boy thought to himself, as Mom, the other grown-up, has always been feeding him brightly colored things and he concluded long ago that eating brightly colored objects was his responsibility, ridding the house of these thing, because they were neither serious nor responsible. In fact eating colorful paint chips was his speciality.
"Why would Dad give me something that wasn't serious and responsible? What would I do them? What's the point?," the boy thought to himself. He didn't understand what the bricks were for, nor did he understand why Dad gave it to him. Though he heard Dad mention something about becoming an engineer and heard Mom mention something about becoming an artist.
The grown-up, Dad, then sat down beside the boy, and began picking out various bricks of different shapes and sizes. He placed one on top of another, and magically they snapped together. Patiently he fitted some on the top and some he fitted on the bottom. After a while Dad built two things with the Legos and set them side by side. One had a twos door, a few windows, and roof. The other had a two doors, a few windows, and four wheels. The boy stared at the two things intently as they seemed very familiar. Then it clicked. The thing with the roof was like the grown-up house and the other thing with four wheels was like the grown-up car. But they were not exactly like the grown-up car or house, because they were so much smaller.
Promptly the boy picked up the car and rammed it into the house, shattering the house, and flinging Lego debris all across the floor. Dad hung his head in disappointment.
Though the boy did this to prove to Dad how poorly engineered the house was, he discovered that it was very exciting as he found himself in the car driving it furiously into the house. He knew that he couldn't do this with the grown up-car or the grown-up house, but he could do it with this car, because it was HIS car. This is when the boy realized that anything could be his if he could build it. And he wanted the world.
The boy began building things with the Legos. Luckily, he found it more fun than destroying things, though he still did drop his creations off the second story balcony from time to time, supposedly to test their robustness. The boy continued to make great things. Things not even the grown-ups had like robots, spaceships, and ICBMs. He learned that not only could he make things but he could make people. People with feelings, hopes, and stories. As many years passed the boy realized that he was good at making things not just with Legos, but also pencils, paper, paint, clay, words, and even computers. OH MY!
And this leads us to beginning of this great story of me, Ken Leung. :) I am that boy that dreams of doing great things and making a world of even greater things. Though I must pause to say that I wouldn't be here doing my grad studies if it weren't for a number of people who believed in me. So here here's my thank you list:
Thanks to:
my parents for their continued support.
Mike Bailey and Don Laugerberg for their recommendations
My friends at Sygate for giving me my first gig
Mike Steffen for telling me about the program
Scott Fisher and the IMD faculty for accepting me
the "Man" for the Stafford loans and taxes
my Dad, Dr Su, and Dr Hung for getting my health back on track
Scott Fisher and the IMD faculty for accepting me again.
Jen Stein for getting me through the paperwork.
God for letting it all happen
I also want to thank my classmates for making me feel welcomed to be here. I look forward to the good times and great achievements we will all accomplish together. Hopefully we will all discover our fullest potential before we all grow up.
Now that bit of self-aggrandizement is out of the way. I'm really into folksonomy, or anything with tags. Here's a bunch of sites I just wanted to share with the rest of IMD.
Here is my flickr site with a gallery of some of my old art work
flickr
Here is my del.icio.us site that track my bookmarks.
del.icio.us
For anyone who hasn't tried it is a great place to book mark tons of sites and store them on the web. They can be tagged (meaning categorized) and shared with others through RSS. I think this has great potential to acts as pool for links related to IMD, just by tagging links with "IMD."
Like so:
Here 43 things that I'm trying to do
43 things
43 Places I want to go
43 places
And my face book profile
facebook